In a US election campaign that is more about foreign policy than any presidential race in decades, one issue is completely off-limits: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. George W. Bush and John Kerry both back Israel one hundred percent, and neither man will offer a single word of criticism about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan, even though it means abandoning the notion of a peace settlement. Once again, the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog.

Last week, Sharon's chief of staff and most trusted adviser, Dov Weisglass, indulged in a carefully calculated indiscretion in an interview with the newspaper Ha'aretz. "The "disengagement" is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." Perfectly true, of course, and yet it was a shocking thing to say out loud.

Sharon was never really going to accept a peace deal with the Palestinians that required giving up most of the illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories conquered by Israel in 1967. (Indeed, he was the man responsible for starting the settlements in the first place.) Yet when he came to power in 2001 he inherited the Oslo peace accords, which imagined an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on two states living side by side -- and the Palestinian state was to be created on exactly those territories.

Sharon had to pretend that he agreed with that goal because the whole international community (including the US) supported the two-state solution. Over the past few years the "Oslo process" mutated into the so-called "roadmap" to peace, but the goal remained the same: Israeli evacuation of the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel. In the past six months, however, Sharon has achieved break-out.

"Disengagement" means that Israel will evacuate its settlements in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where 7,500 Jews live surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians, and four other tiny settlements with only a few hundred people that lie beyond the "security fence" in the northern West Bank. They never made any sense in terms of the cost of protecting them anyway, but by abandoning them Sharon can seem to be making a major concession for peace -- while hanging on to all the other West Bank settlements where the vast majority of the settlers live forever.

Forever is a long time, and Sharon still maintains the pretense that at some future time, when there is a different Palestinian leadership, there might be further negotiations about a Palestinian state. But Dov Weisglass spilled the beans on 6 October, pointing out that he had negotiated an agreement with the Bush administration in late August in which the United States had changed its policy of 37 years and agreed that the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank would eventually become part of Israel. The 190,000 Jewish settlers there, he boasted "will not be moved from their place."

"What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns," said Weisglass, adding that this would stall the peace process indefinitely. "When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda...all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."

Weisglass said what he did to win back the more fundamentalist supporters of Sharon's Likud party, who are threatening to abandon the party on the grounds that God gave Israel the land and it must never yield an inch of it. Bush presumably did what he did in order to retain the votes of the extreme evangelical Protestants, estimated to account for a third of the Republican core vote, who believe that God's plan requires the expansion of Israel and a great war in the Middle East. But why does Kerry go along with it?

If Kerry should win, it means that he, too would be shackled to a policy that makes it impossible for America's European and Arab allies to cooperate in any Middle Eastern initiative he might launch with the goal of extricating American troops from the mess in Iraq.