LONDON -- Countries and peoples that make peace after years or even generations of enmity require very strong leaders. Just as it needed a Charles de Gaulle to tell the French to stop fighting the Algerians, a Konrad Adenauer to tell the Germans to love the French, a Harry Truman or a Douglas MacArthur to tell the Americans to embrace postwar Japan, a Winston Churchill to bury British hatred of the Germans, so it will need the wisest and most respected leaders in the Middle East to bring the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs together after decades, indeed centuries, of fighting.

Yet such leadership appears to be completely absent -- at least on the Palestinian side. Far from telling the Arab mobs that they must stop hating and trying to destroy Israel, Yasser Arafat and his advisers seem to be allowing the bitterness to grow. Far from preparing the Palestinian people for the inevitable concessions that any peace or settlement with Israel was bound to involve, Arafat has done nothing to check unyielding extremism or explain that the time has come for talking rather than killing.

This is a terrible betrayal of the Arab people. The concessions from Israel were there for the taking -- not all that the Palestinians wanted, of course, but enormous ones all the same. The Israelis were prepared to lower their outer guard against attack and to permit the gradual emergence of a new Palestinian state.