Anyone who has watched the development of the Palestinian crisis over time must wonder why it is that Yasser Arafat and a variety of Israeli Prime Ministers seem to attend peace conference after peace conference, sign documents, shake hands, grin from ear to ear, go home and start fighting again.

Not even the North Vietnamese, who one felt at the end of the war in Vietnam must have been the most indefatigable peace negotiators ever, behaved in this intractable way.

What is it the Palestinians want that they're not being offered? Read enough about it, and you will be pushed towards some sobering conclusions.

First, although the Palestinians are the frontline troops in this particular struggle, the real fight is much broader than that, and predates the creation of the state of Israel. This is not a struggle between Israeli and Palestinian, but between Arab and Jew.

Second, there is nothing that can be offered up by Israel or the US that will end the conflict, because the Arab aim is the destruction of the Israeli state.

Third, greasing the wheels of this struggle is an anti-Semitism so strong and so pervasive that sometimes, reading accounts of it, you wonder if you might not have stumbled onto the pages of some dark, satirical comic book, sold only in plain brown wrappers.

Bernard Lewis, who I have mentioned before as the West's leading authority on Islam, wrote: "The demonisation of Jews goes further than it has ever done in Western literature, with the exception of Germany during the period of Nazi rule. In most Western countries, anti-Semitic divagations on Jewish history, religion and literature are more than offset by a great body of genuine scholarship... In modern Arabic writing, there are few such countervailing elements."

He wrote those sentences as part of an article published in 1986. I imagine that he might be tempted to put it even more strongly today. Let me try to give you a little of the flavour of what Professor Lewis calls 'demonisation' by dipping into articles printed in Middle Eastern newspapers and magazines in the last few weeks. Most are culled from the website of the independent Middle East Media Research Institute (www.memri.org).

Writing in the Saudi Government Daily Al-Riyadh, columnist Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University wrote about the Jewish holiday of Purim, which occurs in March.

During the holiday, he said, the Jews prepare pastries that must be made with the blood of a mature adolescent non-Jew, that is, a Christian or a Muslim.

"Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled," Dr. Al Jalahma wrote. "For this, a needle-studded barrel is used... these needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment - torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend."

The official Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, like others all over the Middle East, constantly refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, documents detailing Jewish aspirations to control the world that long ago were exposed as a Second World War Nazi propaganda forgery.

In a column written a few days ago for the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Yasser Arafat's aide Bassam Abu Sharif accused Israel of shooting at the statue of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.

"This, of course, was a failed attempt to murder peace, love and tolerance," he wrote, "just as their forefathers tried to murder the prophetic message when they hammered their nails and iron stakes through the body of Jesus into the wooden cross."

Another columnist for the same newspaper, Abdallah Bajbir, wrote a piece recently quoting US founding father Benjamin Franklin as having said this:

"I agree completely with General (later President George) Washington that we must protect this young country from the Jews' influence... if you do not expel them today, they will come in vast numbers like locusts, and will take over our country."

Mr. Bajbir commented: "What this pre-eminent man said, and what America did not heed, came true there, to the last detail, and then came true again in Palestine. The Jewish gangs took over the sacred land. Palestine is only the beginning. The locusts will spread throughout the Arab world."

This Benjamin Franklin/George Washington story is, of course, another of those the Nazis fabricated in order to justify their Second World War anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews. But despite ample scholarship on the subject, it is repeated as if it were historical fact.

Newspapers all over the Middle East have begun to claim not only that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with it, but that there were no Arabs at all involved in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

They have suggested a number of alternate culprits, including opponents of globalisation (in the Palestinian Authority-sponsored Al-Ayyam); opponents of the US missile defence shield, including China, Russia and several European states (in the Saudi-owned London daily Al-Sharq Al-Aswat); Japan, in retaliation for US atomic-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in the Syrian Government daily Teshreen); President George Bush himself (Al-Sharq Al-Aswat again); the CIA and the FBI (in the Jerusalem Arabic weekly Al-Manar); and suicide-bent religious groups in the US (in the Jordanian Government daily Al-Dustour).

The most popular view, though, is that the attacks were carried out by Israel, or by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, or by the world Zionist movement, or, simply, by Jews.

The Middle Eastern press and large numbers of prominent politicians and religious leaders seem to have embraced this notion.

They have claimed there is evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cancelled a planned trip to the US because he knew the attacks were going to occur; they have claimed that many... some say 1,400, some say 4,000, some say 5,000... Jews employed at the World Trade Center did not go to work on September 11; that Jews made huge profits by selling stockholdings in American companies two days before the attack; that a number of Jews were arrested by the American police after the incident, either with incriminating evidence on them, or when they behaved in an incriminating fashion, but the arrests have been hushed up.

During the ceremony of Friday prayers at the University of Tehran on April 5, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah 'Ali Khamenei compared President Bush to Hitler, and said this, among other quite astonishing things:

"There is only one logical solution... All the Palestinian refugees should return from Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and the other Arab countries to their motherland, Palestine... we are not referring to the people who were brought here from afar. The people who were in Palestine prior to 1948 are the Palestinian nation - the Muslims, the Christians, and the Jews. They should choose the nature of their desired political system... This is democracy!"

In other words, his logical solution is to dismantle the state of Israel. That seems to have been an unspoken aim of the Arab world for some time. Recently, it has become acceptable to give it public voice. Although it hasn't reached a bargaining table yet, it is suddenly an idea being talked about all over the Arab world.

One of the seven Pulitzer Prizes won by the New York Times last week was given to columnist Thomas L Friedman. He won for his coverage of the Palestinian problem. Early in March, he published a column entitled "A Foul Wind" that was widely admired. Let me end by quoting his first two paragraphs:

"There is something about this new, intensely violent, stage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is starting to feel like the fuse for a much larger war of civilisations. You can smell it in the incredibly foul wind blowing through the Arab-Muslim world these days. It is a wind that is fed by many sources: the (one-sided) Arab TV images of Israelis brutalising Palestinians, the Arab resentment of American's support for Israel and its threat against Iraq, the frustrations of young Arabs with their own lack of freedom and jobs. But once these forces are all bundled together, they express themselves in the most heated anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiments that I've ever felt.

"This is dangerous. The notion is taking hold - it started with Osama bin Laden, was refined by Palestinian suicide bombers and is cheered on by Hezbollah, Iran and other radicals - that with a combination of demographics (a baby boom) and terrorism, the Arabs can actually destroy Israel. Some radicals even fantasise that they can undermine America."