This may not be going anywhere.

Ranking Palestinians have pooh poohed Ariel Sharon's comment to a Likud meeting: that the Palestinians must stop incitement against Israel in the Palestinian media and schools before serious talks can begin. He said that his earlier initial demands, for disarming the population and halting violence, would be too difficult to do quickly, but stopping the incitement could be done as a first step.

It is not helpful to parse every word coming out of ranking Palestinians or Israelis. There has been a lot of noise from both sides since Arafat's death, and there will be a lot more. But this particular interchange suggests that the Palestinians are digging in, and remain on the far side of the moon.

Along with refusing to stop the incitement, they said that Israel has to take the first steps.

"(The Israelis) should begin by abandoning their policy of setting conditions and stop their incitement (against the Palestinians)," Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters. According to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazzan), tipped to become president of the Palestine National Authority in its democratic election, "Maybe we have issues of this kind, but they (the Israelis) have them to a greater extent."

These guys are acting as if they won the intifada. Don't they recognize rubble when they see it?

My guess is that incitement is important to the Israeli public. Jews of left and right are tired of the hatred sown in Palestinian media and schools. We poisoned Arafat? Just like the Jews poisoned the wells and caused the black plague. Palestinians promised to stop incitement as part of Oslo, and Israeli authorities overlooked their lack of compliance. After four years of violence and considerable popular support for Sharon, I doubt that he will be as forgiving.

Sure there is the issue of Arab pride. They must act as if they won even if they lost. They will not come on their knees asking Israel to make peace.

The future will depend on how unrealistic they remain.

If the Palestinian politicians are just making a statement for the masses, okay. Negotiations, if they start, may be accompanied by theatrical gestures. But if these statements genuinely reflect the thinking of Erekat and Abbas, the post-Arafat opportunity may have been born dead.

No doubt they will get words of encouragement from the Europeans, and certainly from ranking officials of the United Nations.

Will George W. Bush waffle in order to claim some kind of victory in the war against terror and for democracy? Can he remain committed to an anti-terror track and tolerate a Palestinian leadership that will neither stop incitement nor disarm its radical groups?

Things are not likely to move quickly. If at all.