Misreading the Map

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama, U.S. policymakers are being urged to place the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the back burner and spend their time and energy addressing the true menace supposedly confronting Arabs and Jews in the Middle East -- Iran. Deal with that threat, the sirens sing, and the other pieces of peace in the Holy Land will fall into place.

Netanyahu framed the issue in a speech he made in Washington earlier this month. "There is something happening today in the Middle East, and I can say that for the first time in my lifetime I believe that Arabs and Jews see the common danger," he told supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This wasn't always the case," he added.

Or was it? In fact, there have been many times when key players in Jerusalem and Washington have convinced themselves that focusing on some third party would make Israeli-Palestinian peace possible. But it has not worked in the past, and it won't work now.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Soviet Union provided diplomatic and military support for the new Jewish state. Many Israelis, echoing Soviet propaganda, promoted the idea that the defeat of the imperialist powers in the Middle East and the collapse of their corrupt lackeys in the Arab world -- including in Palestine -- would help usher in a new age of cooperation between progressive Israelis and Palestinians. It didn't happen.

Throughout the Cold War, a mirror-image fantasy popular in Jerusalem and Washington blamed Soviet support for Arab radicals as the driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to this argument, Palestinian nationalism was simply another radical Marxist-oriented movement controlled by Moscow. Seeing the Arab-Israeli confrontation as a minor sideshow to the larger U.S.-Soviet struggle, Washington treated Israel's creeping annexation of the West Bank with benign neglect and gave Israel a yellow light to invade Lebanon in 1982 -- leading to disastrous consequences in both cases.

The George W. Bush administration saw its foray into Iraq as a substitute for a diplomatic strategy to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the notion that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad -- that transforming Iraq into a pro-American liberal democracy and promoting a "freedom agenda" in the Middle East would empower regional forces supporting peace with Israel -- proved to be an illusion. Instead of strengthening the pro-American bloc in the Middle East, weakening the power of radical political Islam, and accelerating the peace process, the Bush administration's policies helped tilt the regional balance of power toward Iran and its satellites, empowering anti-American and anti-Israeli forces in Lebanon and Palestine and generating mistrust and violence in the Holy Land.

Now the message emanating from Israel and some of its supporters in the United States is that the road to Jerusalem leads through Iran. Netanyahu contends that since Iran is permanently hostile to Israel's existence and supports Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the only way to make Israeli-Palestinian peace possible is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability and throw it back on its heels. Since leading Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are also worried about Iran's rising power, the argument continues, Washington might be able to put together a regional consensus aimed at containing Iran -- and possibly even persuade its partners to become more forthcoming in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, "There is a critical struggle under way right now in the Middle East, but it is not between Israelis and Palestinians; it is the people aligned with us -- including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United Arab Emirates -- against Iran, Qatar, Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinian rejectionist groups. Mr. Netanyahu will tell the president this, but no one knows if the president will buy it -- at least until he consults with those Arab leaders and hears the same thing."

It is true that some Sunni Arab governments worry about the rising influence of Iran and its Shiite partners in the region and are concerned about the prospects for a diplomatic détente between Washington and Tehran that could erode their current leverage over U.S. policy. But the fact that they share certain U.S. or Israeli strategic concerns will not create the foundation for long-term strategic alliances (as opposed to ad-hoc tactical arrangements). In the Middle East, as elsewhere, one-night stands do not necessarily lead to marriage.