WASHINGTON, 14 May — “People are angry; the rage is on,” King Abdallah of Jordan said yesterday, commenting on the decision by Israel’s hard-line Likud Party, which defied its leader, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, yesterday and said it would never accept a Palestinian state.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the King made it clear he is in Washington to try to help the Bush administration understand the dire situation on the ground in the Middle East.

“Although there seems to be a relative calm now, it is only temporary… If we don’t articulate a vision in the next couple of weeks, that rage is going to come back, and it’s going to be twice as strong.

Asked if he thought Osama Bin Laden was winning the public relations war, King Abdallah said: “In the past three or four weeks, since the start of the Israeli incursions into the West Bank, definitely, if he is alive, his position would be stronger.”

He said he was extremely worried about the fact that 75 percent of the Arab population is under the age of 30.

“It’s a very young generation that has to have a chance to move forward,” he said.

Pressed to say what side he would choose in the event of a new US attack of Iraq, King Abdallah said: “The danger is, when you get into an armed conflict, especially with the Iraqi scenario, where you really don’t know how you’re going to come out of it, I’m very worried that you could spill the regional or the Iraqi problem into a regional confrontation.”

He added that Jordan would “continue to advocate dialogue” rather than military action.

(King Abdallah’s late father, King Hussein, refused to join the US coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, which caused a serous rift between Jordan and the United States at that time.)

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat told CNN the Likud’s party vote was “a real slap in the face” for President Bush, who has spoken out on the need for a Palestinian state. The Bush administration has made no immediate response to the tough Likud decision.

“I think the Likud vote just made explicit what was, in fact, the operative policy of the Israeli government for many years, even when there has been rhetorical acceptance of the Palestinian right to a state,” said Stephen Shalom, professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey and author of Imperial Alibis, a book about US foreign policy after the Cold War.

“In practice, this has meant a state so constrained and so hobbled that it was never going to really address the Palestinian desire for self-determination,” said Shalom.

Regarding the position of the US administration in the Middle East, Sharon said President Bush is under tremendous pressure to “give a total blank check to the Sharon government.

”But there are some countervailing pressures as well,” said Shalom: “One source are the Arab governments, and the second is that public opinion polls in the United States — despite what we hear from Congress — that the American people do not want their government to totally back Israel.”