ABSTRACT
There is general agreement among Islamists and secularists that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been skewed in favor of Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This chapter analyzes these perceptions and the Islamist response. Islamism is a reaction against disempowerment and what is seen as the irrelevance of the nation-states created in the region as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement constructed during World War I. Islamism is a reaction to what is perceived as the double standard that is used by the West in its foreign policy in the Middle East. Islamist literature depicts the West as dominated by the Zionist lobby. Muslims took note of the fact that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a preemptive war. While the Barack Obama administration changed several George W. Bush policies, it failed to deliver any meaningful results on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the primary source of Muslim rage.
