IT IS STILL TOO EARLY TO SAY whether history will rank the most recent turning point in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with the cataclysmic transformation of Palestine of 1948 or with the dislocations of 1967 and 1982. But something quite profound happened in March and April 2002, and it marks at least the beginning of a new phase.

RASHID KHALIDI is president of the American Committee on Jerusalem, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago, and editor of JPS. This essay is a revised version of a talk given in Arabic to a public Bir Zeit University conference in memory of Ibrahim Abu Lughod in Ramallah on 19 May 2002.