The Bush administration has finally been jolted out of its delusion that it could let the Mideast conflict blaze without getting scorched itself.

While Ramallah burned  along with Israeli cafes and tanks  administration officials kept chanting the official mantra: “There’s little we can do until both sides are ready.”

But both sides weren’t, and aren’t, about to reverse their self-destructive policies without U.S. intervention. The Bush team knew that, yet hasn’t wanted a serious distraction from its global campaign against terrorism.

Until now, that is, when reality struck. The Bush team seems to have recognized the risk of watching passively as Israeli and Palestinian casualties soar: Such non-policy undermines the fight against terrorism, and it could facilitate the outbreak of a regional war.

What galvanized the White House last week?

As Vice President Cheney was leaving for the region to drum up support for rolling back Saddam Hussein, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon sent 20,000 troops into West Bank refugee camps and towns. Israel said the invasion was supposed to round up terrorists, but it produced slim pickings. Most armed Palestinians were already in hiding.

Civilian homes were ransacked, however, and ambulances shot up while thousands of ordinary Palestinians were humiliated in ways that are bound to increase their support for terrorist attacks.

Until last week, the administration’s policy was to lean on Yasser Arafat to crack down on terrorism against Israel, and give Sharon a virtual green light for retaliation. There is no question that Palestinian suicide bomb attacks are an abomination, as is Arafat’s failure to stop them.

But, far from stanching the violence, Sharon’s policy is feeding it. Collective punishment only produces more youths willing to take up the gun against Israel. Sharon is clearly more comfortable with military action than with negotiations  he’s told the media he doesn’t want to give Palestinians control over any more land or remove any Jewish settlements from the West Bank.

His policy leads to a dead end: He can’t defeat a nationalist guerrilla war by military means, yet he’s under pressure from diehard hawks to try it. Without a strong Bush administration push, he won’t restart meaningful talks.

Which brings us to the importance of the administration’s Mideast awakening: The escalating violence may finally have alerted the Bush team to the fact that the very concept of peace talks is becoming passe.

Sharon’s isolation of Arafat has not strengthened moderate Palestinian leaders; that endangered species will be totally discredited if Arafat is ousted, because the Oslo process, in which they participated, came to a total dead end.

In fact, Sharon’s policies, along with Arafat’s mistakes, have empowered a younger generation of Palestinian leaders who oppose any negotiations and are committed to ousting Israel by force.

To undercut this young guard, the administration must throw its full weight behind a resumption of negotiations. This week it finally made a start.

U.S. officials pressed Sharon to drop his unachievable precondition to the mere discussion of a cease-fire: seven days of absolute peace and quiet. What a tragedy that the Bush team didn’t take this step weeks ago.

President Bush has sent his envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni back to the area to work for a cease-fire. He also sent Sharon a message  via Secretary of State Colin Powell  to withdraw from all the Palestinian areas that were reoccupied. To renew Palestinian belief in the negotiating process, the United States drafted and helped pass a Security Council resolution which affirmed, for the first time, the “vision” of a Palestinian state.

But, for Zinni to have even a remote chance of success, two additional elements are crucial, one to encourage Palestinian moderates, the other to give Israelis hope.

To renew faith in negotiations among ordinary Palestinians Zinni must work for more than a cease-fire. Palestinians won’t back an end to arms unless they’re sure that it will produce talks. They won’t back talks if they believe Israel will build more settlements while negotiations are ongoing, making it ever more difficult to create a Palestinian state. Zinni should call for a freeze on settlement-building simultaneously with a cease-fire.

To woo ordinary Israelis, the United States should encourage Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to follow through on his proposal to urge all Arab states to endorse “full normalization” with Israel if it returns to pre-1967 borders. If such an endorsement is made at an upcoming Arab League summit in Beirut, it would offer Israelis hope of integration in the region. But there are signs that Prince Abdullah is backing off from the phrase “full normalization and that other Arab states may tack on clauses that rob the concept of any meaning.

A tough Zinni push for a cease-fire plus a settlement freeze might encourage Abdullah to go ahead. The window of opportunity is now. It may not return anytime soon.

 Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.