ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the need to reconstruct US policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian-Iraqi war, upon new and truer perceptions and assumptions about the realities of politics in the Middle East. The essential commonality of interests between the United States and Israel is well known, and the fundamental basis of U.S-Israeli relations is quite sound. The territory most in dispute, and the one for which US policy-makers have had the greatest expectations for Israeli reversal, is of course the West Bank. The towns and settlements surrounding Jerusalem and on the Samarian ridges are natural extensions of the cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. By the end of the 1970s the population of Jordan on the East Bank was nearing the 2 million mark, while the West Bank population was close to what it had been thirty years earlier. No Israeli government can accept either a pure American or a pure European model for Israel and its territories.