Washington ? My involvement with the Middle East began 30 Easters ago in Beirut, where Arab leaders have joined Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah in offering Israel “security” in return for land. Back then I would have told Israelis to seize the idea. Today I understand their reluctance to take it seriously.

That is not simply because the Beirut Declaration was overshadowed and undermined by the Passover Massacre in Israel, or because the Arab summit turned into a stunning refutation of the Bush administration’s effort to keep the problem of Iraq separated from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Those developments only add to my sense that the region has reached the deepest impasse it has faced in my experience. And that is the point about the Abdullah vision as expressed in Beirut: It starts from the wrong place and the wrong time. It fixes responsibility for violence only on Israel. It does not provide a single immediate and tangible step that can be taken to break the impasse of today.

The Beirut statement focuses on the long-standing and morally justified Arab grievance over Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli ambitions to convert occupation into ownership of most or all of Biblical Judea and Samaria have long been a danger to regional and world peace.

Saudi leadership for the live-and-let-live ideas voiced in Beirut would have changed the political landscape in the first years of occupation and put pressure on Israel to negotiate rather than create “facts on the ground.” That at least was my view as a correspondent living among the Arabs and traveling to Israel several times a year.

In those days some senior Saudi princes spoke among themselves of the Jews of Israel “as ants on a dung heap.” Whatever its underlying purpose, Abdullah’s offer in Beirut to “accept the right of the Israeli people to live in security” is an outward change of vocabulary and attitude that should be welcomed.

But it should also be put into perspective. The changes within Palestinian and Israeli society in recent months  as well as over three decades  make Abdullah’s proposal an unworkable idea in current conditions. He is offering nothing for something to Israelis who have concluded that only their actions, and not Arab promises, guarantee security in an era of the commercialization and glorification of terrorism among Palestinians.

Israel shares responsibility for the deepening impasse. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not interested in a peace settlement with the Palestinians. His unwillingness to offer even small gestures suggested to him by President Bush has frustrated and stymied Washington.

As a result, the Bush administration has let its Middle East policy become a series of gestures intended to keep relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt from deteriorating more precipitously. The White House praises Abdullah’s proposal for a return to the 1967 lines (including in East Jerusalem) and a qualified right of return for refugees  without ever saying whether it supports the substance of the plan or not. This approach leaves U.S. policy adrift.

What is needed instead is a clear and determined focus on the most urgent and dangerous element of the conflict today: the elevation of the culture of death and suicide into a guiding value in Palestinian society.

The Arab society I originally encountered in Jerusalem and its neighboring territory prided itself on pragmatism and business acumen, developed in a millennium of occupation and dispossession. Survival, not self-destruction, was the ethos.

But today the ease with which young Palestinians are being recruited from Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel to blow themselves up and kill “the Jews” represents a disturbing societal change that must be checked. No peace plan will advance in these circumstances.

Unfortunately, Abdullah offered no criticism of or caution about the suicide bombers in his Beirut speech. Worse, the Saudis and Iraqis provide material incentives to the families of these mass murderers. A recent in-depth report on PBS mentioned  in passing: “Like other families of suicide assailants, Mohammed Badawi’s received approximately $15,000 from Iraq through Hamas. Saudi Arabia granted several dozen relations of suicide attackers a free trip to Mecca.” Few other news organizations have reported even that much in any prominent way.

Discussing and dealing with this spreading cult of death and its causes should get more priority than trumpeting cosmetic peace plans. The Palestinians deserve peace and a return of land. They will not get it this way.

 Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.