ABSTRACT
The Arab–Israeli conflict has preoccupied all American presidents and administrations since the 1960s out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance and this will be true, in all probability, in the years to come. The reasons are far from obvious for the region is of no particular strategic or economic importance. As far as the number of victims is concerned, the conflict ranges quite low on the list of external and internal wars in recent decades. Hundreds of thousands Muslims were killed in the Algerian civil war, the war between Iran and Iraq, many more in Darfur, Somalia, the Philippines, Chechnya, Pakistan, Yemen, the Lebanon civil war and so on. The number of Israeli Jews killed during the last thirty years was also quite small. But isn’t it true that Palestine and Jerusalem are of central religious importance for Muslims and Jews alike, hence the depth of the emotions, it is the perception which counts, not the number of victims. However, Jerusalem (or to be precise, one specific place in Jerusalem-al Aqsa) appears only once in the Koran and in any case the conflict predated the upsurge of Muslim fundamentalism. When Hafez el Assad suppressed a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1983 many more people were killed than in all the intifadas, the recent Lebanon wars and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
