Palestinians have been strongly urging US President George W. Bush to take a more active role in settling their conflict with Israel. The administration recently responded to the call but paradoxically not in a manner the Palestinians anticipated or agree with.

They are not at all satisfied with the CIA-inspired (alias US-brokered) cease-fire for it appears to have adopted wholesale Israel’s version of what constitutes a cease-fire as recommended by the Mitchell report. The Tenet truce is demanding the Palestinian Authority to end incitement in its media and confiscate mortars and other arms. It is also reportedly in agreement with Israel that these actions should precede any lifting of Israel’s blockades on the occupied territories or return of its forces to positions held on Sept. 28.

Another Palestinian reservation concerns preservation of the so-called security zones Israel has created during the intifada to separate Palestinian communities and Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. A major sticking point is the interpretation of the Mitchell’s report on a freeze of settlement building. The dispute is over the timing: Would a settlement freeze occur later, as a confidence-building stage, or immediately, as part of the package deal on which the Palestinians insist?

Lastly — and most controversially — the insistence that the PA immediately arrest some 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists from a list supplied by Israel.

The US will not be doing any good to the cause of peace in the region if its role is confined to reproducing Israeli proposals and presenting them to Arab parties as American ones. As the Palestinian-Israeli cease-fire precariously holds, there is very little disagreement and considerable consensus on what needs to be done if this truce is to become a permanent fixture. It is found in the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement of last October, in the Egyptian-Jordanian peace initiative and in the Mitchell report. What is surprising is that if there is consensus why can’t there be actual immediate implementation?

Because the real problem is how to sell the cease-fire to the Palestinians. The greatest challenge is Palestinian public opinion, starkly revealed in a poll released last week by Birzeit University. The poll found that 78 percent support continuing the intifada, 71 percent are against any end to the uprising in return for Mitchell’s recommendation that Israel freeze all settlement construction and 74 percent support suicide operations. It also found that Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement had slumped to a popularity rating of 23 percent while the combined popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad had grown to 24 percent.

For now, Arafat hopes to insert the EU and the UN into the Mitchell process. The most overt case of this is through the covert distribution of a handful of EU security personnel at such flash points as Rafah in Gaza and Beit Jala in the West Bank. This is not, as Israel alleges, simply a means to create an international force to monitor who is observing the cease-fire and who is not. As importantly, it is to rally international opinion behind the Palestinian interpretation of Mitchell as opposed to the Israeli interpretation.

It could be argued that the Palestinians should welcome a cease-fire that would bring to a halt more Palestinian deaths. But for it to hold, it should be a truce accepted by all sides which is not the case. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, the two activist organizations that have taken responsibility for most of the attacks against Israel in recent months, have rejected the American-backed cease-fire and Hamas has vowed to continue the uprising.

A problem just as serious is whether Arafat should embark on a road chartered for him by the CIA. For he must explain how the terms of a CIA cease-fire square with the national aspirations of his people and the death, in more than eight months of resistance, of 500 of them.