The last time the United States convened Israelis and Palestinians for peace talks, the host was a president near the end of his term, deeply immersed in the complexities of the Middle East and widely respected by leaders on both sides of the conflict. The result was not peace but Intifada – Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up kids at discotheques, pizza parlors and bus stops. The current negotiations in Annapolis are led by a president near the end of his term who has never dealt well with complexity, enjoys limited knowledge of the dispute and has earned little trust from any foreign leader. One can only imagine what will emerge from this parley! Summits, where leaders, elected and otherwise, negotiate in a rarefied atmosphere over concepts, documents, words and commas, are the apex of high politics. However, by divorcing leaders from led, elite action from mass attitudes, national commitments from public will, high politics at the summit can prove irrelevant. In Annapolis, President Bush is repeating an oft-made mistake – attempting to forge peace between leaders without regard to the hearts and minds of the people they represent. We should have learned in Iraq, if nowhere else, that merely hectoring barely legitimate officials into signing statements does little to guarantee results, absent broad-based public support. An effective roadmap to peace in this conflict must chart a course to change Palestinian public opinion. Expertly teaching hate, a music video recently aired on the Palestinian Authority’s television station ran pictures of religious Jews walking in Jerusalem, while a Palestinian crooner belted out the lyrics, “The evil souls/ A thousand evil ones are in my home!” A new 12th-grade language textbook offers this paean to peace: “Palestine’s war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine