Every few days, Palestinians remind the world exactly why they can't yet be trusted with their own country. This week, we got two reminders. On Tuesday, a Palestinian blew up a Jerusalem bus, killing 19 civilians. The next day, another terrorist killed six more of the city's innocents. Just imagine what sort of atrocities these people could pull off from behind the borders of a sovereign Palestine. As William Safire wrote in The New York Times on Monday, a Palestinian state would give Yasser Arafat control of an airport. A plane taking off from the West Bank could hit a Tel Aviv skyscraper within minutes of entering Israeli air space.

Palestinian apologists, like McGrath and CarolC, assure us that this would never happen -- because Arab hatred would be extinguished as soon as the West Bank and Gaza were cleansed of Jews. But that's not true. It's not the Israeli presence in the disputed territories that bothers Palestinians, but the very existence of the Jewish state itself.

This was confirmed by a survey of 1,200 Palestinians conducted a month ago by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre. Like previous polls, this one found that more than two-thirds of Palestinians support suicide attacks against Jewish civilians. But more than half of respondents also said the goal of the current uprising is to conquer every inch of Israel -- not just the West Bank and Gaza. Remember this the next time you see a Palestinian talking head tell the world that it is the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza that causes terrorism, not the other way around.

George W. Bush, the U.S. President, should remember that too. For several days now, there have been signals that the President will soon endorse the creation of an interim Palestinian state as a sop to Arab leaders. The latest bombings have caused him to delay his announcement. Asked about the President's new Middle East policy at a press conference on Wednesday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "I think in the immediate aftermath of these attacks, it's obvious that [this] is not the right time."

Indeed it's not. And as we see it, it won't be the right time for a while. Terrorism is not a fringe phenomenon among Palestinians: It is a symptom of a mainstream belief among them that Israel can and should be destroyed by force of arms. So long as this view dominates, they should not have a sovereign platform from which to wage their murderous attacks.