This week the Bush Administration legitimized Arab anti-Semitism. In an effort to please the Saudis and their Arab brothers, the Bush administration agreed to physically separate the Jews from the Arabs at the Annapolis conference in a manner that aligns with the apartheid policies of the Arab world which prohibit Israelis from setting foot on Arab soil.

Evident everywhere, the discrimination against Israel received its starkest expression at the main assembly of the Annapolis conference on Tuesday. There, in accordance with Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives from entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs.

At the meeting of foreign ministers on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called her Arab counterparts to task for their discriminatory treatment. "Why doesn't anyone want to shake my hand? Why doesn't anyone want to be seen speaking to me?" she asked pointedly.

Israel's humiliated foreign minister did not receive support from her American counterpart. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent her childhood years in the segregated American South, sided with the Arabs. Although polite enough to note that she doesn't support the slaughter of Israelis, she made no bones about the fact that her true sympathies lie with the racist Arabs.

As she put it, "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness."

Rice's remarks make clear that for the Secretary of State there is no difference between Israelis trying to defend themselves from a jihadist Palestinian society which supports the destruction of the Jewish state and bigoted white Southerners who oppressed African Americans because of the color of their skin. It is true that Israel has security concerns, but as far as Rice is concerned, the Palestinians are the innocent victims. They are the ones who are discriminated against and humiliated, not Livni, who was forced - by Rice - to enter the conference through the service entrance.

The Bush administration's tolerance for discrimination against Israel was not merely ceremonial. Diplomatically, the conference was equally prejudicial. At Annapolis, the US joined the Arabs in placing the lion's share of blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians on Israel. But you wouldn't know that from listening to Olmert, who is working steadily to hide what happened there.

Olmert obfuscates the truth because his political stability rests in the hands of his hawkish coalition partners Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas. Both warned before the summit that if Olmert made any concessions on either Jerusalem or the so-called outpost communities in Judea and Samaria they would bolt his coalition and so spur new elections.

Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the summit. Both Shas leader Eli Yishai and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman dismissed Annapolis as a pathetic joke and claimed that there is no reason for them to resign from the Olmert government. But these assertions are deliberately misleading.

The fact that the Israeli-PLO joint statement made no specific mention of Jerusalem, and that the government didn't announce a timetable for destroying the so-called outpost communities and expelling the hundreds of Israeli families who live in them, doesn't mean that Israel made no concessions on these issues. In fact, the Olmert government made massive concessions on these issues.

The Israel-PLO joint statement at Annapolis contains a joint pledge "to propagate a culture of peace and nonviolence; to confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis."

Although Olmert, Lieberman and Yishai dismiss this Israeli acceptance of moral equivalence with Palestinian jihadists as a meaningless rhetorical concession, the government's move is rife with political and legal implications. US Ambassador Richard Jones's unprecedented meeting this week with Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch made clear that the US demands that Israeli courts interpret Israeli law in a prejudicial manner in order to demonize Israeli opponents of Palestinian statehood and the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Judea and Samaria.

Their meeting also signaled that the US expects Israel to treat lawful building activities by Jews in Judea and Samaria and even in sections of Jerusalem as criminal acts. Since the Olmert government accepts that Israel is morally indistinguishable from the Palestinian Authority, it is hard to foresee it preventing the criminalization of its political opponents. From now on, Israelis who oppose the diplomatic moves of the Olmert government can expect to be treated as the moral equivalents of Palestinian terrorists.

At Annapolis the Americans accepted the role of sole arbiter of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with their commitments to the so-called 'Roadmap' and the peace process. They also committed themselves to reaching a comprehensive peace treaty by the end of 2008. But as former US Middle East mediator during the Clinton administration Dennis Ross has admitted, these goals are contradictory. It is impossible to both ensure Palestinian compliance and the achievement of a peace treaty in that timetable.

Writing in The Washington Post after the Oslo peace process collapsed at Camp David and the Palestinian jihad had begun, Ross explained, "The prudential issues of compliance were neglected and politicized by the Americans in favor of keeping the peace process afloat….Every time there was a behavior, or an incident, or an event that was inconsistent with what the peace process was about, the impulse was to rationalize it, finesse it, find a way around it, and not to allow it to break the process."

"What the peace process was about" for the Clinton administration was signing peace agreements. It was not about ensuring that the Palestinians were actually interested in living at peace with Israel. When Rice stated that "failure is not an option," in the coming peace process, she made clear that the same is the case for the Bush administration today. She wants an agreement. Whether the Palestinians are serious about peace or not is none of her business.