On June 1, I was standing alongside a highway in northern Lebanon shooting pictures of the ruins of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp; a hundred kilometers to the south, a young man my age approached a narrow checkpoint on the perimeter of the Ain el-Helweh camp. He was wearing a suicide belt, armed with two kilograms of TNT and a kilo of metal. Before he was able to detonate the belt or navigate the checkpoint, he was shot and killed by members of the Lebanese army (LAF). Press reports named him Mahmud Yassin al-Ahmad, a 28-year-old Palestinian resident of the camp.

He was, in fact, not al-Ahmad. Nor was he Palestinian; he was a young Saudi dissident that had come to what is likely the next front of the global jihad. Why the Lebanese are playing down the level of Salafi intrusion in these camps is difficult to understand. Press reports following last summer's battle in Nahr al-Bared — which pitted the LAF against jihadis led by veterans of Iraq insurgency — suggested that 10 of the 27 bodies pulled from the rubble were identified as Saudi. During the battle, a Fatah leader suggested 42 of the combatants were Saudi. Off-the-record talks suggest the number was likely higher, possibly well over a hundred.

In Lebanon, Palestinians have not been allowed to integrate as fluidly as they have elsewhere in the region. Lebanon's unwillingness to allow Palestinians to work as anything other than laborers — even if they have the degrees and training to warrant such occupations — combined with inheritance laws that keep property from passing from one generation to the next, have all but guaranteed the population remains impoverished and confined to the camps. It is a situation Syria long ensured, and independent Lebanon has continued. A dozen camps spread across the country host over 300,000 Palestinians, 40 percent of that population under the age of 15. Simply put, Lebanon faces a choice: address the festering camps, or watch as an entire generation becomes radicalized and turns its anger outwards.

The other day I sat in on a small roundtable discussion with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a former contender for the Palestinian premiership and now a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. He was in Washington, D.C. to update Members of Congress on current developments between Israelis and Palestinians. It was clear from Barghouti's comments, and interviews during his visit, that the Palestinian situation has worsened substantially over Bush's tenure, even since the Annapolis summit last November. According to Barghouti, before the summit there were 521 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank; now there are 607. Palestinians pay at least twice the rate Israeli settlers do for electricity, and an Israeli settler has almost 50 times the water allowance of a Palestinian. Barghouti suggested that Obama's Berlin speech — about not allowing walls to divide us — was given a few hours too late; after he had left Palestine, after he had left the land where a wall twice the height and three times the length of the Berlin Wall keeps a near-apartheid system in place. It's difficult to disagree.

We have to face a difficult truth: that the Palestinian situation, left unattended for nearly a decade now, is near a breaking point. And the Israeli leadership, it seems, has come to quietly hold that Palestine as a sovereign state — which could not be invaded at will — poses a far more potent threat than the current paradigm.

But, Al Qaeda has raised the possibility that Israel will be its next target; it has already made overtures toward the military wing of Hamas, attempting to peal its ranks from civilian leadership that has opted to participate in elections, a process jihadis avow as counter to the tenants of Islam. So far, efforts appear to have failed.

More than the threat of Al Qaeda, Palestine — as evident in slow simmering wars between Salafis and traditional secular militiamen in Lebanese camps, and the split between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza — lacks a clear voice. "There is no PLO; there is no Fatah; there is only Hamas," one ranking member of Hamas told me earlier this summer.

The next president needs to make this issue amongst his top priorities. Engaging Hamas is critical. All factions must be brought together with the help of the international community; it's only with a semblance of Palestinian unity that the process might once again move forward. As we look back at last week's bombings in Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan and India, we might remember that the plight of the Palestinian people remains the premier recreating tool for Al Qaeda and its offshoots — a fact we can't expect to change unless the U.S. takes an attentive, balanced approach to the conflict.

Brian Till can be contacted at brian.m.till@gmail.com. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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