The seven-month conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has escalated relentlessly and without mercy. It started with rocks, slingshots and assault rifles, ratcheted up to machine guns, mortars and helicopter gunships and, now, as if to prove there is no threshold of violence too terrible to cross, to bombs – some strapped to teen-agers’ bodies, some dropped from American-made F-16s.

Friday’s suicide bombing at a suburban shopping mall and Saturday’s jet bombing retaliation serve two purposes. First, they refute the wishful thinking that Palestinians and Israelis eventually will become repulsed by the spiral of violence and inevitably will resume peace negotiations. Second, they destroy any illusion that peace will come to the Middle East without direct and coordinated involvement by the United States and such moderate Arab nations as Egypt and Jordan.

The involvement must be more than direct and coordinated, it also must be forceful and unequivocal. Vice President Dick Cheney had it almost right in a Sunday morning TV interview when he called upon Israel to stop using the American-supplied warplanes to demolish entire Palestinian neighborhoods.

He spoiled the effect somewhat by backtracking to the established (and obvious and by now irrelevant) position that both sides must stop the violence, but the underlying point was clear – the United States has no influence among the Palestinians, but it does among the Israelis and it cannot allow one of its most famous and potent pieces of military hardware to be used to slaughter innocent civilians. It is a point Secretary of State Colin Powell can reinforce by tacking a Middle East stop onto a trip to Africa that begins today.

The change in American tone echoes what already is being heard from Egypt and Jordan, which are beginning to concentrate less upon hating Israel and more upon pressuring Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to make good upon his self-proclaimed but undelivered “zero tolerance” for terrorism. Those two countries also have begun calling for the disbanding of independent Palestinian militias and for the prosecution, in real courts with real sentences, of terrorists.

It is increasingly clear that Chairman Arafat is not guiding events but is merely trying to stay ahead of them; peace-seeking Palestinians desperately need the support the relatively stable governments of Egypt and Jordan can provide.

The public release Monday of the report by the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact Finding Committee, headed by former-Sen. George Mitchell back up many of the principles upheld by Egypt and Jordan. In addition to calling upon Chairman Arafat to truly act to end terrorism and to negotiate in good faith, the committee also urges Israel to stop the siege against Palestinian settlements, to phase out random and dehumanizing checkpoints, to immediately end the confiscation of Palestinian property and the demolition of houses and, most importantly, to stop the expansion of Israeli settlements.

The similarities between the Egypt-Jordan positions and the Mitchell committee recommendations provide an opening for the Bush administration to become engaged in a situation from which it so far has stood back. Israel’s use – make that inhumane and unwarranted misuse – of one of this country’s most deadly weapons makes that engagement necessary.