Yesterday's funeral for Yassir Arafat was sobering in several ways.

I stared for more than an hour at the scene of Palestinian uniformed guards not only unable to control the crowd, but participating in leading the furor. Waving their arms; shouting along with the crowd, and shooting in the air from weapons they seemed to understand only imperfectly. It was not clear if they were shooting in the air in an effort to move the crowd away from the helicopters, the casket, and the dignitaries, or if they were shooting out of the same passions that motivated the crowd and thus encouraging the crowd to more. One picture was of a chubby young man with a boy's thin mustache having trouble clearing his jammed weapon so he could fire yet another volley into the air; another was of a soldier trying to force a clip of fresh bullets backward into his gun.

I shifted between Israeli television and CNN. CNN's coverage was sycophantic in the extreme. It viewed chaos as an outpouring of emotion. The Palestinians interviewed had nothing but praise for Arafat and condemnation of Sharon. Christiane Amanpour, reporting on events in Ramallah from Cairo, praised Arafat for having appropriate goals even while she said that his choice of means were not always appropriate. No question, in her view, about the justice of a Palestinian state.

The mob scene she was describing took place less than 10 miles from here. The borders of the state Christiane Amanpour was endorsing would pass a hundred meters or so from here. In the view of many, the Sharkanskys and other Israelis would find themselves living in Palestine if we did not move quickly.

The George Bush-Tony Blair press conference came soon after. Blair seemed inclined to press Bush to force a shortcut to a Palestinian state onto his Israeli friends. It would appease some of the British and Europeans demanding compensation for American-British atrocities in Iraq. Bush responded by saying that democracy is a precondition for Palestinian statehood. That sounded all right to Israeli ears. But when he said that he would work to achieve Palestinian democracy and statehood in his second term, the head that held those ears began to wonder just what kind of a dreamer was living in the White House. Better than Kerry, no doubt, who might already be sending Jimmy Carter to make peace in the Middle East.

Bush said that in his experience a non-democratic state could not be counted on to preserve peace. Okay. But little in my experience tells me that the crowd we saw in Ramallah was the stuff of democracy. Would you give those people the vote? We should never say never, but it will be a tough haul for George Bush, Abu Mazan (Mahmoud Abbas), and Abu Alla (Ahmed Qurei).

So far Ariel Sharon has been more realistic than George Bush. He is putting the emphasis on the new Palestinian leadership stopping the violence and the incitement to violence as preconditions for negotiations about the future. Those are more achievable goals than democracy. And more subject to verification. American and British observers can fudge their standards of democracy (the election was reasonable within the expectations), but it will be harder to overlook the bodies created by the next suicide attack, or alter the expressions found in media controlled by Palestinian politicians. Israelis and Americans should not care too much how the Palestinians choose their leaders, as long as their leaders work hard to control the raw emotions likely to be part of their culture for the foreseeable future (and most probably long after that).

Incitement by itself is a difficult target. All the Palestinians I have heard on western media are saying it is up to Israel to make a Palestinian state possible. What about the violence? I heard no Arab say that serious efforts by Palestinians at ending the violence (I'll admit that not even Jordanian, Egyptian, or American security forces can eliminate violence in their societies completely) would be reasonable preconditions for accommodations. Arafat's personal physician is asserting that Israelis poisoned Arafat. Palestinian physicians and other elites will have to do better than that iin order to reduce the fever of their people.