A recent photograph of pre-teen boys preparing to throw stones at a tank resembled a scene from the West Bank. But it was snapped in Falluja, Iraq.

The image reminds us how America’s “war on terror” has come to resemble Israel’s and how difficult the task remains. In both cases, the occupying forces started with apparently clear and moral purposes.

Israel was going to hold land it won in 1967 only as long as it took to negotiate peace with the Arabs who had started the war. America was going to be in Iraq only long enough to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein, remove weapons of mass destruction and establish a civilian government.

But as troops remained, the civilian populations came to doubt the occupiers’ motives. Many Iraqis think America is there because it wants oil and business opportunities or a war against Islam.

The Palestinians, their Arab allies and significant populations elsewhere see the growth of Jewish settlements, seizure of land for a security barrier along a line Israel dictates, harassment at checkpoints, raids against terrorists that end with the deaths of innocent civilians as proof that Israel doesn’t want a viable Palestinian state.

President George W. Bush promises America will “stay the course” in Iraq. But Saddam loyalists and would-be Muslim theocrats know America may tire of its troops being killed while Iraq appears stuck in a social-economic morass requiring billions in American grant dollars. They have incentive to continue making trouble, as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades do in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says that until terror stops, he won’t negotiate with the Palestinian Authority and its president, Yasser Arafat. But only Arafat controls the security forces that might be able to control the terrorists. Sharon’s formulation — however correct it seems to most Israelis and their American allies — looks to many Palestinians like another pretext for denying them a state.

America still has a chance to prove its intent in Iraq. It may have to cede control and may have to admit that its claims about Hussein’s weapons were wrong. It is not clear that Bush and his advisers would be willing to do this.

The Israeli-Palestinian standoff also cannot be resolved without dramatic gestures. Sharon will have to set aside his skepticism and take a first step.

If he could arrange, for example, to curb expansion of some settlements or to pause in constructing the least important parts of the barrier, he might give Palestinian moderates a face-saving “victory” that could be parlayed into efforts to restrain their terrorists.

Of course Hussein was a monster and Arafat remains a terrorist. But in the end, it will be up to the men who put the tanks on the streets to show the boys in Falluja and Jenin that it is okay to drop the stones and go home.