Since he first became prime minister in 1996, Bibi Netanyahu has made quite clear he will do practically anything to block fair-minded US-Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy aimed at the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

With this not yet clear, the Clinton Administration tried to work with Netanyahu for several years, with candid senior American peace negotiators since concluding that Bibi was highly deceptive--perhaps even a flat-out liar. Particularly devastating about Netanyahu's behavior back then was that when he first assumed office, there was still reason to hope for a final settlement. Since then, with US support--or Washington essentially looking the other way--Netanyahu's destruction of the peace process at such a decisive and hopeful juncture has led to even more determined Israeli moves aimed at creating facts on the ground that now have made crafting a realistic vision of a genuine Palestinian state near impossible. Israeli settlement expansion has been massive, the network of Israeli "security" roads to settlements (and related checkpoints) has grown steadily, and the ugly separation wall has encroached still further on Palestinian lands. For quite some time now, the Israeli vision of the future of the West Bank has resembled more closely a source of lebensraum for Israeli expansion, not a future Palestinian homeland. And with an outspokenly exclusionist nationalist like Avigdor Lieberman as a key member of Netanyahu's government, it is no surprise that for the current Israeli government peace is a punch line, not a serious aspect of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians.

Yet, Palestinians are blamed by Israel and the US for coming to the UN seeking statehood, as opposed to turning to them for such hope. Israel's increasingly more ideologically harsh stance toward real peace has been blamed on the 2000 Intifada and now a militant Hamas, not extreme Palestinian suffering and dispair--even desperation--stemming from years of Israeli obstructionism and encroachment that increasingly have wiped out so much of that hope. And Washington's reputation as a potential dealmaker has sunk to a new low as successive US goverments all but rubber stamp Israeli excesses, and US domestic politics some time ago reached a point at which no American running for national office possibly could hope to succeed without pledging something akin to unconditional fealty to Israel.

So we witness yet another US Administration blaming the disruption of what may no longer even be a credible peace process on Palestinian disruptiveness and impatience, not the heavy blows dealt the prospect of any real peace between Israel and a coherent Palestinian homeland by a more militant, grasping Israel and an increasingly compliant United States.

The United States’ strategic position in the greater Middle East is disintegrating. The repercussions of the Arab Spring have undercut the tacit alliance among Washington, Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and Jerusalem with auxiliary members in Yemen and Tunisia among other peripheral states. Mubarak is gone while his former military cohorts sap the revolution’s zeal through symbolic acts that include untying the bonds to Israel while cultivating an alliance with Turkey. Both pillars of the regional sub-system are animated by a deepening anti-American feeling that are spreading across the Islamic world. In Ankara, moreover, the Erdogan government now has its own calculated view of a diplomatic field that no longer has the United States as its hub. The House of Saud is so badly rattled that it is turning on Washington as the cause of its new-found sense of vulnerability. Iraq’s sectarian Shi’ite leadership spurns the idea of a special relationship with us while incrementally building structures of cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran will not bend the knee in response our relentless campaigning of shunning and sanctioning it – leaving Washington with the bleak choice of war or an indefinite period of containment – in the absence of any readiness to speak seriously with its leaders about the terms of a modus vivendi.

Farther afield, Afghanistan is an endless slog with the vain hope of turning that ill-starred land into a Western oriented, pro-American country fading like the swirls of smoke from a lost pipe dream. Pakistan is now pronounced our enemy condemned routinely by our belligerent leaders as the source of all that stymies us both places. Levels of anti-Americanism are so high as to leave those with favorable views of America within a statistical margin of error that reaches to 00.0. The country’s political elite is unifying around the hard position of giving a blunt ‘no’ in response to bellicose demands from Washington that it do our bidding. Everywhere we look, never has America’s standing been so weak, its authority so low, it credibility in such tatters, and its judgment so suspect.

Little of this registers in official Washington, or in the ante-chambers of power that is unofficial Washington. We continue to bluster and fume, we issue ukase, make declarations, scold and instruct, cast our failures as incidents in the mythic pageant of illusory triumphs from Baghdad to Kandahar to Somalia. The echo chamber keeps reality at bay. Each of these myriad failures has its own saga of hubris, incompetence, willful ignorance and flawed thinking. Iraq stands out only for the brazen deceit and mindlessness that were its hallmark from the inception.

The kaleidoscope of broken shards that depicts the broken remnants of the American position in the greater Middle East convey incoherence and fragmentation. This is a common element. It is the Israel/Palestine – more specifically, Washington’s progressive subordination of its own interests to the compulsions of Israel’s cynical rulers. It has grown from being a dark shadow that casts suspicions over American actions in the regime to a fatal flaw that has eaten away our authority to act as underwriter, our reputation for integrity and our protestations of concern for the well-being and interests of all peoples. Thus, it aggravates relations, inflames radicalism and sows distrust about Washington’s intentions. Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations last week confirmed the worst fears of doubters and skeptics. America no longer was just Israel’s protector; it was now Israel’s shil. The President of the United States acted as the shameless mouthpiece for an unsavory client. Obama declared before all the world that he placed his personal electoral advantage above the values and interests of the country – still the potentially most influential state on the face of the earth. His abject behavior humiliated the United States in a way that leaves American diplomacy throughout the Islamic world – and beyond – severely compromised.

Predictably, these tragic consequences were little noted nor will they be long remembered among a political class whose insularity from the realities of the world is surpassed only by their insularity from the realities of their own nation.

The chapel light is dim. The script is small. The preacher is blind. The congregants are deaf. And shouts ricochet off the unhearing walls.

"Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice." Frost

No. I say it will end in farce. Israel is a small foreign country far away. It has just a handful of people. It is organized politically as the property of a particular religious group. It has very little in the way of natural resources. It is surrounded by hostile countries. Even those countries that have treaties with Israel do not like the Zionist state. Actually, in those countries, "Zionist!" is a deep insult if used in addressing someone.

Nevertheless, that little country, by the process of relentless "perception management,"and manipulation of our electoral process, has convinced most Americans that it is almost, almost like a part of the US. Oh, yes, there is no treaty of alliance between the two countries.

Most Americans seem to believe that Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas founded "Izrul" as a kind of extension of the US and its values. Palestine, where is that?" would be the thought of many Americans. Oh, you mean those scruffy, trouble making squatters on Israeli land? Who cares about them. A curtain of silence fell over the subject of Palestinian statehood after the speeches on Friday. This reflects the Israeli desire to avoid discussion of a subject deeply unpalatable to them. With their usual short-sightedness, the Israelis just do not want to think or hear of what General Assembly action on behalf of the Palestinians will mean in terms of Israeli vulnerabilities.

What will happen as a result of this crazy weekend at the UN and in the Sunday "newsies?" Well, whatever shreds of street credibility the US might still have in the ME will be gone., but, so what! What was left of our once proud claims to being "honest brokers" was just farce.

What will be the role of the US in the ME? It will be whatever Israel and AIPAC want it to be.

Here’s the strategic bottom line for Israel:

Six million people cannot continue indefinitely to piss off three hundred million without consequences.

Mahmoud Abbas is not Israel’s real problem. The problem is the Arab Spring. Israel has survived for sixty years because of Arab weakness. But Israel’s strategic advantage has been eroding since at least 1982 and will evaporate if the Arab countries ever gets their act even halfway together – which they are finally starting to do. Israel needs to cut a deal with Palestine soon while it’s still in a position to get tolerable terms.

As for our part, the United States needs to stop enabling Israel’s self-destructive intransigence before it’s too late. We should start by not vetoing Palestinian statehood when it comes before the Security Council.

I know the veto’s going to happen. Then everyone can go home and play to domestic audiences: Obama to the Israel lobby in the U.S., Netanyahu to the Israeli right, Abbas to the Palestinian infatuation with futile gestures of defiance. Neither Netanyahu nor Abbas is interested in compromise, and Abbas probably couldn’t deliver anyway. But the current impasse is untenable and, in the long run, profoundly dangerous for Israel.

In recent years, Israel’s policy towards its neighbors has degenerated into what one might call the “drunk jerk doctrine”: “You don’t like us? So what’cha gonna do about it? We can kick all y’all’s asses anyway.” The sheer skill and firepower of the Israeli Defense Force has made this a tenable diplomatic position. But tactical superiority is not a national strategy, not in the long run, not in the face of overwhelming numbers: Just ask Germany in 1945.

For its first thirty years, Israel defended and expanded its territory by repeatedly defeating the armies of the Arab states – to be precise, their poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated conventional armies. Then, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and discovered that Arab guerillas could be much more dangerous, determined, and effective. (The U.S. has learned the same lesson in Iraq since 2003). By 2006, Hezbollah militia were able to stand and fight, not just hit and run, inflicting casualties on the Israeli Defense Force at a far higher rate than regular Arab armies ever had. Meanwhile Palestinians had bogged the Israelis down in irregular warfare during the first and second Intifadas.

Israel’s strategic advantage, like America’s, is eroding because the Arabs are learning – learning not just better tactics but, more important, how to inspire their forces to fight. As long as Arab states were ruled by inept authoritarians, however, they never had either the organizational skill or the political appeal to mobilize their population for military purposes, so they were always going to punch below their weight.

Now the Arab people are mobilizing themselves. The inept authoritarians are falling. What replaces them may or may not be more democratic, but it will have to be more populist. Unfortunately, while it is a proven fact that mature democracies really don’t make war on one another, it’s equally proven that immature democracies go to war a lot – more than stable autocracies, in fact – and because their people are politically mobilized and therefore highly motivated, they tend to fight a lot better.

All of this is bad news for Israel. For now, the anger of the Arab peoples is – for good reason – directed domestically against those who (mis)led them for decades. But they’re not particularly fond of Israel either, as witnessed by mob attacks against the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. If democratization fails in Egypt, then authoritarian leaders will once again find that demonizing Israel is a convenient relief valve for popular discontent. But if democratization succeeds, legitimately elected leaders will find lots of votes for an anti-Israeli policy, too.

Even in the absolute best-case outcome for the Arab Spring – even if vibrant, stable, peace-loving democracies emerge from Morocco to Iraq – any Arab leader with any respect for Arab public opinion is going to do something to help the Palestinians. Hopefully that something won’t be military action but rather diplomatic and economic pressure. But if Israel governments continue to act as if they don’t have to negotiate, if they continue to slow-roll diplomacy while building settlements on disputed land, it becomes more and more probable that their politicians are going to write a check that their troops can’t cash. Then they’ll have the choice of making concessions, going nuclear, or asking the United States to bail them out.

Now we come to America’s role in this decades-long disaster. We’ve bailed the Israelis out before, most dramatically by airlifting military supplies in the 1973 war. But rather like bailing out Wall Street, America’s unconditional support for Israel creates “moral hazard”: Like investment bankers, Israeli politicians can adopt aggressive, high-risk strategies in the knowledge that Uncle Sam will come to the rescue if things go wrong.

What does the United States get from Israel in return? Precious little. On this very blog back in 2009, when I was a moderator, I posed the deliberately leading question, “Is Israel a strategic liability for the United States?” No less a figure than Dov Zakheim, a top Pentagon official under Donald Rumsfeld, acknowledged that, in cold strategic terms, it was. After laying out a long list of advantages of the alliance, Zakheim wrote that

None of the foregoing, however, can fully justify the vast aid that the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis. There is more than a little truth to the fact that America aids Israel for reasons that go beyond purely military and intelligence benefits….On the other hand, that support demonstrates American credibility, and commitment, and a sense that it does stand by the values it constantly trumpets: the primacy of democratic values and the right of small nations to exist in freedom and security.

There’s a lot I agree with here. For both moral and strategic reasons, the United States owes Israel the same support that it owes any other small democracy in a precarious strategic situation – for example, Taiwan. Let me emphasize, however: the same support, no more, no less.

As with Israel, the United States has had an intense strategic and emotional commitment to Taiwan since the late forties. Unlike with Israel, the U.S. has tried since 1972 to balance that commitment to 23 million Taiwanese with our need to have a workable relationship with 1.3 billion mainland Chinese. We’ve done so despite the always difficult, frequently aggressive, and occasionally murderous behavior of the Chinese government. Our arms sales to the island are modest. We have put intense pressure on Taiwan to refrain from even symbolic provocations such as declaring formal independence. We don’t even grant Taiwan formal diplomatic recognition as a country. Yet we remain Taiwan’s staunch ally.

We owe it to the Israeli people, and to ourselves, to defend Israel’s right to exist. We do not owe Israel our unconditional support for every airstrike, for every commando raid, for every settlement, for every indignity inflicted at a border crossing. We do not owe Israel billions of dollars of weaponry a year. And we do not owe Israel our veto in the United Nations.

What we owe Israel is help making peace with its Palestinian neighbors, a peace that three Presidents in a row – Clinton, Bush, and Obama – have all said depends on a Palestinian state. The more we enable Israeli politicians to avoid a compromise, the more we help them dig their country’s grave.

– Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

www.LearningFromVeterans.com