The military campaign in Afghanistan, warned President Bush at its outset almost four weeks ago, will be “long and difficult.’’ So far yielding mixed results, with no discernible big successes on the ground, it has proven to be just that.

What has proven equally long and difficult is the foredoomed debate between American Muslims and Jews in the US, which began soon after Sept. 11 in several cities around the country, over the nature of terrorism and the role played by Israeli policies in generating resentment throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds against the United States. It did not take long for the hidden fraternity of mutual loathing between the two groups to show itself as deeper than the outward show of civilized discourse that characterized the initial encounters.

We find it, in the claim presented with varying degrees of disingenuousness by the Jewish side, that American Muslims condone “suicide bombing attacks against Israel while condemning the attacks against the US” while the Muslim side has accused American Jews of using the attacks as an excuse to put the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation on a par with that of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby defaming what in essence is a legitimate cause, with its own moral imperatives, that should command the immediate concern and sympathy of the American public.

The talks, predictably, have collapsed.

To be sure, soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was a sense of common cause — short-lived though it was — in the encounters, on the issue of civil liberties, after Arabs and Muslims became the target of discrimination in the country.

It did not take long, however, for a wide and increasingly bitter gulf to open between the two sides, characterized by suspicion and mistrust, when it came to the question of Palestine.

American Jews, you see, will not brook any criticism of Israel. Here’s a patronizing statement from Malcolm Hoenlin of New York, the executive vice chairman of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, who complained to the New York Times that “Jewish groups need to carefully scrutinize which groups they join with, in order not to support those that are anti-Israel.”

That’s what they call reducing community dialogue to its minimalist form: We’ll talk only to those docile Muslims who agree with us.

Thanks, but no thanks. American Muslims find it easy to engage in debate with Americans of other faiths (Islam, after all, recognizes and honors the prophets and the patriarchs of the other two great religions), but they will not bend their ideals in order to curry favor with anyone. They don’t need to. With six million adherents in the US, Islam is the nation’s fastest growing religion. This growth is not only fueled by immigration and a high birth rate, but by conversion as well. It is estimated that in America 25,000 people a year become Muslims.

The vast majority of converts are African-American, who make up today a third of all Muslims in the United States. Those who convert, black or white, do so for their own reasons. Some convert because they had gone through a crisis in their lives and find in Islam a healing faith they can turn to. Others convert because they want to marry a Muslim. Others still, like those highly educated individuals who had studied the Qur’an and found themselves lapsing from their own religion, take up Islam because they see in it a fresh and egalitarian view of the world. But the majority of coverts are, well, called.

How can American Jews be so naive as to imagine that they can carry on a dialogue only with American Muslims who are not “anti-Israel”? Can one, Muslim or otherwise, embark on a meaningful discussion of the Palestine conflict as if Israeli excesses over the last half-century had not existed? As if no challenges had been issued by the international community to Israel’s authority to rule over the lives of others? Is it possible, in 2001, to dismiss Israel’s occupation, robbery and settlement of Palestinian land, its blowing up of homes, its killing of children, in a curt aside, and demand absurdly that the debate between Arab and Jew in the US continue on a different tack — only with individuals or groups who are not “anti-Israel”?

American Jews have to come to grips with one brutal reality: three generations of Israelis in Palestine, that is, in that part of it they call “Israel,” have come of age in a miasma of lies and hatreds archetypally carried over from Europe. Socialized under the pressure of fanciful potions about “Eretz Israel”, of history re-written, as it were, Israelis have developed a peculiar kind of nationalistic jargon and vituperative jingoism, namely, that Jews have merely “returned to their ancient homeland,” and those Palestinians who had lived there all along were squatters whose expulsion or subjugation is perfectly acceptable.

The world has a problem with that. It is called the Palestine problem. And there are grim facts that define this problem that Jews — American or Israeli — have to face. If American Jews want to broach these facts in dialogue with American Muslims, the latter will be happy to sit down and talk. Otherwise, there is no point in carrying on a dialogue with those who seek a total avoidance of human commitment to truth and an abdication from the claims and realities of history.

Meanwhile, one wishes these Jewish groups the best of luck in their search for Muslims who are not “anti-Israel” to talk to.

They should call now, operators are standing by.