The US & Israel
Since the founding of a Jewish homeland in 1948, America's unique friendship with Israel has weathered war and crises. It is now drawing more public scrutiny than it has in a generation.
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After 16 days, the two leaders (at the time called "unguided missiles" by an unnamed State Department official) shook hands on a historic pact. Egypt would get back the Sinai, captured by Israel in 1967, in return for a pledge to normalize Egyptian-Israeli relations.
In a second part of the accords, Israel recognized the "legitimate rights" of the Palestinian people and agreed that the Palestinian problem needed to be solved in all its aspects.
Details of this solution, however, were to come later - and, of course, they did not. Mr. Begin apparently had no intention of letting go of the occupied territories where Palestinians lived, and as Carter's presidency began to sink under the weight of the energy crisis and the American hostages in Iran, US attention drifted elsewhere.
A Camp David agreement that "at first looked like a diplomatic triumph proved short-lived and shortsighted," writes Oxford's Mr. Shlaim.
Since then, the situation on the ground has changed only at the margins. Israel has continued to dot the territories with Jewish settlements, to the chagrin of a series of US presidents. The 1993 Oslo accords gave the Palestinians authority over some areas. But to many in the refugee camps, it has been too little, too late. Now the region is spiraling downward in a renewed cycle of violence.
Many Palestinians of this generation believe Israel will never grant them a full nation - only a half-state, with responsibility for water purification and garbage collection and little else.
Israelis worry that even this might be too much, and that the areas ceded so far could become a launching pad for terrorist and military action aimed at pushing the Jewish state back into the sea.
It is the emotions generated by this long cycle of shuttle diplomacy - of expectations raised and hopes dashed - that ordinary Arabs talk about when they say they understand why Al Qaeda terrorists hate the US. It is a hatred that Osama bin Laden expresses in fierce terms.
His videotaped statement of Oct. 7 ends with these words: "Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine."
Translation: The US will be subject to terrorist attacks as long as it allies itself with Israel. Indeed, the danger might continue as long as Israel exists.
Whether resolving the plight of displaced Palestinians is truly one of bin Laden's main goals is an open question. Furthermore, it is virtually unthinkable that the US would ever sever, or significantly reduce, its ties with Israel, terrorist blackmail or no. Too many cultural and economic links bind the two democracies for that.
Other US allies in the region are authoritarian, or monarchies, or some combination of the two. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family could conceivably be overthrown by extremist religious factions, as happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979. That won't happen in Israel.
"It is the only really reliable regime in the area," says Shaul Gabbay of the Institute for the Study of Israel in the Middle East at the University of Denver.
Still, events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath have focused Americans' attention on their nation's ties with Israel to a degree not seen since the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
"The American public is now waking up to the cost of the relationship with Israel," says Professor Lukacs. "This is a question that has never been addressed in the past."
