NEW YORK -- Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani refused to accept a $10-million check Thursday from a nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd for a World Trade Center relief fund after the prince urged the U.S. government to "adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause."

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal toured the ruins with the mayor. But he later issued a written statement that angered Giuliani.

"Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of the Israelis while the world turns the other cheek," Alwaleed said. "At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to the criminal attack."

No, your highness, not yet. We're not ready to hear that. Not ready to hear anything that could be construed as, "America deserved this," or even, "You wouldn't be in this mess if you weren't so blind about Israel."

I'm also tempted to respond to the prince, "Sure, we'll look into our Israel policy, and meanwhile you look into why your country's officially sanctioned religious education and social order produced -- what was it, six of the 19? -- murderous fanatics who wrought this havoc you see." Those weren't dispossessed Palestinians or starved Iraqis slitting throats and incinerating women and children; they were for the most part pampered rich-kid students from the oil states.

OK, but what about Israel, then? It must frustrate the Arab nations to see Americans so deliberately blind to an awful lot of Israeli aggression. To them, Israel is the swaggering well-armed bully; to us, it's the plucky underdog, and we love nothing like a plucky underdog.

It goes deeper, though. Defending Israel is the one cause that most clearly unites the "left" and the "right" in American politics, the secular and the evangelical strains, but they both come at it with gobs of irrationality. The Xtians, for instance, see the creation of that state in that place as a startling step toward the fulfillment of their "End Time Prophecies." It's macabre; they long for the in-gathering of all the Jews in the promised land -- so that the Anti-Christ can kill them all there (well, except for the 144,000 who will convert to Xtianity).

Then on the other side of the scale, liberal Americans see the Jews as a helpless people who were victims of every horror our ancestors (in Europe) could visit on them, and whose culminating passion in the gas chambers was ignored by America. Our culture did that to them; our government turned them away. In short, we owe them, big time.

It does not occur to us that abused people often turn abusers when they have the opportunity, or that the way to make atonement to a victim is not to set him up in his parents' old home, evicting whoever lives there now. The ghettos of the 21st century are inhabited by Palestinians, not Jews.

It is possible to be an anti-Zionist and not be a Jew-baiter. Yet that happens so rarely. And every time public voices from the Arab world repeat the stupidity about Sept. 11 being a Mossad plot, or the mythical 4,000 Jews who walked out of the WTC moments before the attack, Americans will find it still harder to separate "anti-Israel" politics from the Third Reich. And every image of blown-up buses and discos in Tel Aviv, sidewalks strewn with body parts of young girls still in the shreds of their party clothes, is going to lance that much deeper for Americans as long as these Sept. 11 horrors are fresh within us.