Earlier terrorist attacks aimed at derailing the Israel-Palestinian peace process failed because both sides were determined to show their approach could succeed. Now, that determination is eroding as both Israelis and Palestinians find their fears and humiliations best mirrored by the lunatic fringe. PNS contributor Rami Khouri, former editor of the Jordan Times, is an author and radio talk show host in Amman.

AMMAN, JORDAN -- Sunday's bomb attacks in Jerusalem come at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is more vulnerable than it has been in months.

Earlier terrorist attacks failed to derail the peace process in large part because both sides were determined to show that their approach could succeed. That determination is eroding rapidly.

With Israeli elections scheduled for May 28, Sunday's attacks have the capacity to swing Israeli public opinion away from the pro-peace Labor government and towards the hard line Likud. Already polls show a precipitous drop in support for Shimon Peres from just last week. The danger in this hardening of public attitude is not that it could reverse the peace process -- the gains of the last three years are too solid to be reversed -- but that it could permanently stall it, leading to a cold and incomplete peace.

While the vast majority of Palestinians and Arabs don't support planting bombs and killing civilians, most of them do share concerns about the basic fairness and potential results of the current peace process. The terrorists of Hamas can no longer be isolated as fringe elements only loosely connected to the discontents of the larger Palestinian society, anymore than killers like Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir can be separated from the angers and fears of Israeli society.

A stalemated peace process will only confirm the suspicions of a majority of Palestinians, as well as Jordanians and Egyptians, that Israel is neither willing nor capable of achieving a peace that is fair to them. Most Palestinians already view the Oslo accords as inherently imbalanced in favor of Israel and therefore a source of chronic humiliation for them.

While the pragmatic Palestinian majority mutters and sputters their resentments and gets on with day-to-day life, the small minority of disgruntled partisans and zealots quietly loads, aims and fires. The new danger now is that the frustrations of the pragmatic majority will be aggravated by the realization that the most tangible benefits of the peace process will be merely episodic emotional highs every time some symbolic political act occurs -- such as the initial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, or the Palestinian elections.

If these heavily symbolic gains are neutralized by a stalemate in the final status talks, then the doubters will be proven right and the idealists will be proven wrong. In such a worst case scenario, the pragmatic Palestinian majority will not just sit around and complain in letters to editors.

Until now, the majority of Palestinians have supported or tacitly accepted Yassir Arafat's approach to peace mainly because they had no other option, and partly because they anticipated that the process would result in some justice for them. Today, they are more convinced than ever of their lack of other options, and they are more concerned than ever that their expectation of justice is illusory. That sense of betrayal and despair will be aggravated by Israel's repeated closure of the Occupied/Autonomous territories, even if that closure is the result of hundreds of Israelis killed or injured by Palestinian bombers.

The result could be the continuation of the core Palestinian-Israeli war within the enveloping, outer protective shell of Arab-Israeli peace. Ironically, Syrian-Lebanese-Israeli peace could make this situation even worse.

The situation is more precarious now than at any earlier point in recent years as the actions of each side fuel the fears and hatreds of the other. Thus Hamas announced it carried out Sunday's bombings in retaliation for previous killings of Palestinians by Israelis. The end result could be not peace but institutionalized warfare between two peoples who, for all their fears and misgivings, ardently desire peace with one other.