The incident didn’t come out of nowhere. On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed on a highway near Eilat by Gazan and Egyptian terrorists who had infiltrated southern Israel by way of the Sinai—Egyptian territory. Israeli forces pursued the terrorists back into Egypt and mistakenly killed five Egyptian soldiers and police officers. The next day, the Egyptian Cabinet called an emergency meeting, where it considered recalling Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv if the Israelis wouldn’t apologize or agree to a joint probe of the officers’ killings. Activists and political parties demanded the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Cairo. Several major activist groups, including the left-leaning April 6 Movement, organized a large protest in front of the Israeli Embassy. It culminated with a 23-year-old carpenter scaling the 13-story building to replace the Israeli flag with an Egyptian one.

Israeli and pro-Israel skeptics of the Egyptian revolution have predicted since the Mubarak government fell that Egypt’s pathologically anti-Israel population could push the country toward a violent confrontation with its northern neighbor. These past weeks have made it painfully clear that at least some of the Egyptian people—at best—refuse to tolerate any Israeli presence in their country.

But the real question is how much popular sentiment against the Jewish state actually matters. On a recent reporting trip I took to Cairo, I found that despite the view from the street, the country’s military and its key political factions have no interest in upending the status quo. The cold peace is colder than ever. But even in the wake of Friday’s violence, it’s proving durable.

***

Ever since Anwar El Sadat signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Egyptian government has combated any sense of national inferiority by propagating an amazingly resilient myth: Egypt won the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the Camp David Treaty represented Israel’s capitulation to a morally and militarily superior enemy. It’s a myth that helped Egypt recuperate some of its national self-esteem in light of its recognition of the Jewish State and subsequent expulsion from the Arab League. Murals of the Egyptian Army crossing the Suez Canal dot the road between the airport and downtown Cairo, and a downtown bridge and a major suburb of Cairo are named after Oct. 6, 1973, the date of Egypt’s assault on Israeli positions in the Sinai. Whenever I asked Egyptians about their country’s attitude toward the 1973 war, the answer came immediately: It was a major victory.

All of this made Egyptians feel better, but the myth also helped bolster the power of Hosni Mubarak, who took over as president after Sadat’s 1981 assassination. The North Korean-built October War Panorama, a multimedia depiction of Egypt’s attack on the Suez Canal located in the Heliopolis district of Cairo, includes a mosaic that places Mubarak in the center of a group of military commanders planning the war’s opening offensive. Similar imagery is on display at the Cairo Citadel’s National Military Museum.

While Mubarak incited hostility toward the Jewish State at home, he successfully convinced Israel and the United States that he could uphold Western interests in the region. Ezzedine Fishere, a former Foreign Ministry official at the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv and the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture, likened Mubarak’s political strategy to riding two horses simultaneously. “You can ride the two horses so long as you’re going straight,” Fishere explained to me. “This is why stability was so important to Mubarak. When there’s instability, the two horses go in opposite directions. Because the public wants you to live up to your commitments, you’ve been feeding this inflammatory discourse about Israel being the source of all evil. … On the other hand, the Israelis are basically your security partners in the region.”

Future Egyptian leaders can’t afford to play this kind of double game, Fishere argues. “The challenge is for the state to face the public and say, ‘We’ve been having very good relations with Israel for 30 years,’ ” he said. “And at the same time, we’ll have to be frank with the Israelis and the Americans and say ‘We can’t be your accomplice.’ ” The Mubarak regime’s system for dealing with Israel won’t work anymore. The question, then, is whether a more aggressive, and possibly outright hostile, dynamic will take its place.

“The majority of people would agree that we shouldn’t get into to a military conflict with Israel,” Gamal Soltan, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told me in his Cairo office in July. “But this doesn’t mean that they will refrain from doing things that would make this more likely.” He believes that a future, representative Egyptian government—parliamentary elections are currently scheduled for October—will have no choice but to respond to the public’s overwhelmingly anti-Israel attitude, which could result in less security cooperation between the two countries.

Soltan added that the new Egyptian government will also have to contend with the long-standing popular sense that the country should reorient its foreign policy. He says that much of the Egyptian street looks to Iran’s open defiance of the West with a certain degree of envy. “We felt inferior vis-a-vis Iran because they did the things we weren’t able to, like supporting the Palestinians, criticizing both Egypt and the United States, and allying with some of the champions of Arab rights, like Hezbollah,” said Soltan. “After the revolution, things might change.”

Like Soltan, Fishere believes that most Egyptians do not want to fight another war with Israel. But he’s more hopeful that democracy will ultimately lead to a less-radicalized discourse on the Jewish State. “We have to make [Egyptian policy toward Israel] more truthful and ultimately more responsible,” Fishere said. “It will be more in the direction of Turkey than in the direction of Iran.” So, Egypt’s strategic posture toward Israel will likely change. That doesn’t mean the peace treaty is going anywhere.

***

Luckily, the most powerful player in Egypt—the military—already understands this.

And the army, which Egyptian intellectual Tarek Heggy called the “the only power in the country,” enjoys deep popular support. According to last month’s Pew poll  of Egyptian political attitudes, 53 percent of Egyptians have a “very good” view of the military, compared to the 29 percent religious leaders enjoy. Field Marshal Mohammad Tantawi, the head of the Military Council, has a 45 percent favorability rating—higher than that of the April 6 Movement (38 percent) and the Muslim Brotherhood (37 percent).

At a major protest in Tahrir Square on July 8, I heard protesters reprising the revolutionary chant that “the army and the people are one hand.” Across Cairo, both Egyptian flags and displays of support for the military (such as fatigue-pattern street art) were ubiquitous. Egyptians still believe that the army is on their side: On Aug. 1, when the military dispersed a three-week tent protest that had shut down Tahrir Square, passersby cheered them on. A Sept. 9 protest against military rule in Tahrir Square was underwhelming. (Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Institute’s Doha branch, called it “the most incoherent, ineffective, anti-strategic protest in recent memory.”)

The military has every reason to preserve Egypt’s treaty with Israel. According to an official familiar with the U.S. government’s operations in Egypt, there are currently “tens of thousands” of American military contractors in Egypt, which still receives over $1.3 billion in annual military aid from the United States. Experts I spoke to in Egypt estimated that the military controls between 20 and 40 percent of the country’s economy. War with Israel serves no obvious strategic purpose for Egypt, and it would probably end American financial assistance, threaten the army’s business holdings, and lead to massive casualties. (Nearly 20,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed in the 1967 and 1973 wars.) Plus, the sectarianism that makes Lebanon and Syria so threatening to Israel is absent in Egypt. There are no religious or ethnic militias that could plausibly challenge the military’s monopoly on force.

Tellingly, even the more extreme elements in Egyptian politics have sought accommodation with the military, rather than pressuring it into a more confrontational stance. Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby, the former editor of the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, told me that he quit the organization partly over its willingness to cooperate with “the Brotherhood’s enemies,” including the ruling military junta.

**

In the hours after Friday’s embassy incident, Egypt’s ruling military council reiterated its commitment to the 1978 Camp David Accords. Egyptian Information Minister Osama Heikal quickly spoke out against the riot, calling it “a gross violation of the law,” adding that “one cannot call the perpetrators … either brave or patriotic.” And Egypt yesterday reinstated some of the emergency measures lifted after Mubarak’s ouster in February, including laws that limit protesters’ ability to gather in public. A spokesperson for the Egyptian Cabinet told Reuters that “returning to normalcy is the objective for both sides” after the Israeli Embassy conflagration.

No doubt this measure will enrage some elements of the protest movement. But this only shows how badly Egypt’s current military rulers want to stabilize the country’s affairs, including its now-strained relationship with Israel. As soon as the military realized that there was a real possibility of foreign diplomats being seriously hurt or even killed on Egyptian soil, they “realized that the external price they would pay [for inaction] is higher than the internal one for stopping the protest,” Sam Tadros, an Egypt expert at the Hudson Institute told me yesterday. David Schenker of the Washington Instutite for Near East Policy agrees that in the aftermath of Friday’s incident, the military’s top priority is bringing some stability back to the country’s internal and foreign affairs. “What happened with the embassy demonstrates not only that the [ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] is the leading supporter of the peace treaty, but I’d say it’s indicative of the ongoing situation in the country,” he says. “They feel that there has to be a red line. There has to be some semblance of order.”

Egyptian attitudes toward Israel aren’t going to improve. And Egyptian voters, through popular protest and, eventually, through the ballot box, are capable of reversing the kind of close official cooperation that Mubarak pursued. But for the time being, at least, it’s the military that matters. And in the months since the revolution, its calculations toward the Jewish state haven’t changed.

For the first time ever, the filmmakers take the audience behind the public veil obscured by a first of its kind White House issued media blackout. Behind the press conferences and into the smoke-filled backroom corridors of power during one of the world’s greatest historical moments—the 1979 Camp David Peace Accord and Treaty between Egypt and Israel. The film features exclusive interviews and major political figures of the time, including Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Anwar El-Sadat, and Wolf Blitzer.

The film is called Back Door Channels, you comedians.

But one question still remains: What were they fighting for?

This weekend, Egypt reopened the Rafah crossing into the Gaza strip, which is perhaps a sign that it is time for a reassessment of Egypt’s recent revolution and the legacy of the man it brought down. Hosni Mubarak was considered a U.S. ally because he shared many of our country’s stated interests, including stopping Hamas, a group despised by Mubarak and his security chief, Omar Suleiman. The two men stood against the armed Palestinian resistance movement because they feared their own Muslim Brotherhood, a like-minded counterpart to Hamas, and Iranian expansion, which they saw as a by-product of Hamas’ power.

But Mubarak’s Egypt is no more—the military still rules as it did behind the veneer of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, but Cairo can no longer afford to be a stable U.S. ally. Mubarak has been charged with the capital crime of killing protesters during the revolution, along with assorted lesser crimes. The question then is whether the reportedly ailing Mubarak will die before the state can execute him—maybe it will be done quietly or perhaps, with a flourish, in the middle of Tahrir Square. Egypt’s rulers will spill the blood of Mubarak and his sons when they have nothing else with which to satisfy the hunger of the revolution—which is happening in the middle of an economic crisis that will make it difficult to feed a country of 83 million people.

Maybe someday there will be an accounting of all the fictions that determined our understanding of the Egyptian revolution as it unfolded. In retrospect, it is strange that an American intellectual and political class proved so credulous during the uprising. The Egyptian media and government officials are well-known for a casual relationship with the truth, as well as a tradition of anti-Semitism in the government-owned and independent presses. It was Egyptian officials who claimed that a shark attack on German tourists in the Sinai was engineered by the Mossad, a fable regarded by the U.S. intelligentsia as darkly humorous evidence of an abnormally thwarted culture incapable of distinguishing between reality and a bogeyman engendered by fearful, childish, systemic anti-Semitism.

And yet the international media took every word that came out of the Egyptian street during the revolution as the absolute truth. For instance, there was the notion that the violence of the revolution resulted from Mubarak’s order for the police to leave their posts and throw open the jails. That such an order would be followed throughout the chain of command would be a remarkable feat in a country not known for its bureaucratic efficiency. It seemed not to occur to reporters and policymakers that in the midst of general chaos—and Egypt is chaotic in its nature—many policemen may have simply left their posts for fear of being overrun by revolutionary mobs.

The people who fought with the police in the streets those first few nights seem to have been the same who later turned to violence against the demonstrators as well as the press. But this, too, was blamed on Mubarak, for these people were assumed to be thugs in his hire, as were the men who rode the horses and camels down from the Pyramids. Maybe, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, it really was pro-Mubarak thugs responsible for the violence against the international press, but there are plenty of other Egyptian outfits hostile to free media, like the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Kristof, however, the Muslim Brotherhood is no worse than the Republican party. Pro-Mubarak thugs were even blamed for the rising tide of violence in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Mubarak was faulted for the anti-Semitism in the Egyptian media and for empowering Islamists while crushing the liberal movement. The facts, sadly, are otherwise. It is true that Mubarak had thrown certain liberals in jail, like the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, but the former president is hardly responsible the absence of a genuine liberal culture in Egypt. Mubarak did not empower Islamists; he fought them tooth and nail for two decades, and they tried to kill him in Sudan. The reason that the Muslim Brotherhood still exists in spite of Mubarak’s ruthlessness is that Islamism is a powerful political current that represents the flower of Arab modernity and will always have a constituency in Muslim-majority countries. Nor is Mubarak responsible for anti-Semitism in the Egyptian press: The unpleasant reality is that the country and the surrounding region would be anti-Semitic if Mubarak had never been born.

None of these facts seemed to matter—not to the revolutionaries, of course, but neither to the U.S. intelligentsia, even as the narrative fit a familiar pattern. During the revolution, Mubarak came to play the role that Israel and the United States typically play in Egypt: He was the source of all evil. It is only now, as dissatisfaction with the army mounts, that the Egyptian revolutionaries are coming to recognize that the army they welcomed in Tahrir as brothers have always held the real power in Cairo.

The strange fact is that Mubarak was a reformer. Or at least he was considered so by the World Bank and the IMF, which gave Egypt high rankings over the last half decade. The army shared a common goal with the revolutionaries in bringing down Mubarak because it, too, did not want the president’s son Gamal to succeed him, lest he take a cut out of their lucrative business enterprises.

Since the country’s 2004 economic reforms, spearheaded by Gamal Mubarak and his band of technocrats, the country’s economy grew at an average of 7 percent annually. While the common charge is that the country’s economic miracle didn’t trickle down to the lower classes, the inequality index held steady. Moreover, it is not the rural or urban poor who engineered the revolution, but rather a large segment of middle-class youth enjoying the economic upturn who took to the streets on behalf, as they claimed, of all Egypt.

It’s fine if we want to chuck out IMF and World Bank benchmarks for reform, but if we are going to judge a country’s political system according to how many people social media networkers can put on the streets then that is going to mean something different for U.S. Middle East policy. In the case of Egypt, it means American taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab for someone else’s street theater.

The $2 billion that Washington has been giving Cairo every year for 30 years is essentially a bribe to convince Egypt not to shoot itself in the head by going to war with Israel. But the problem isn’t just that 1981 money doesn’t cover 2011 bills. Since the revolution, tourism, one of the country’s major sources of revenue, is way down due to the instability and ongoing violence, including several attacks against Coptic Christians, and $13 billion in foreign exchange reserves has fled the country. Egypt is not going to woo back foreign investors at this point, not just because of instability but because the policy is associated with the once-ruling family now on trial for its life.

So, how does Egypt, the world’s largest importer of wheat, feed itself if prices continue to rise because of a severe drought in China, the world’s largest exporter of wheat? Egypt’s new rulers need to show—by opening up Rafah, letting Iranian ships pass through the Suez Canal, brokering a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah—what a new Egypt could look like, one that would threaten to spin dangerously out of the U.S. orbit unless the Americans pay up.

This gambit is nothing new for Egypt, which performed the same ballet under Gamal Nasser during the early years of the Cold War. Nasser used the United States and the USSR against each other to get what he wanted—prestige, power, and American money. It worked even after he concluded the 1955 deal for Czech (i.e., Soviet) arms. Sure, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to fund Nasser’s Aswan Dam project, for which the Soviets eventually footed the bill. But in 1956, Washington still thought highly enough of Nasser to demand that their British, French, and Israeli allies withdraw their invasionary forces from Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Only in the aftermath of the 1973 war with Israel did Egypt, now under Anwar Sadat, ally itself with the United States, a deal that Mubarak kept faithfully for 30 years.

Of course there is no longer a superpower rivalry, which is good for U.S. strategy in the big picture. But Egypt’s brinksmanship will still present plenty of headaches. Iran is not going to give the Egyptians money; and even if the Saudis don’t renege on the $4 billion they’ve promised Cairo, that’s hardly enough. The only place to turn is Washington, but the $1 billion in debt relief and the other billion in investment we’ve promised is evidence we don’t have the cash either.

Without bread, Egypt will turn to spectacles, and so the Mubaraks will probably hang. And after Egypt has purged itself of that evil, it will turn again to the evil that has plagued the Egyptian imagination since 1948: the Zionists and their backer in Washington. Cairo, say Western rationalists in the press and policy circles, knows it would lose any war with Israel and does not want to forfeit that $2 billion a year from the United States. But there are many other factors that will shape the thinking in Cairo in the months and years to come, and there is nothing rational about a society whose authorities believe that the Mossad exerts secret mind-control over sharks.

• The operating manager of Gaza’s only power plant disappeared in Ukraine last month; his relatives allege Mossad has kidnapped him, and there is confirmation he is being held in an Israeli facility. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 32 percent approval rating is a new low, and there are questions about how long he can stay in power. [LAT]

• Meet the Egyptian general who is the main Pentagon liason to the folks running the country. [NYT]

• Sixty prisoners, including two put in jail for helping shoot Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, will be freed. [Ynet]

• The biggest news, of course, is the 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that has hit Japan, along with the tsunami warning for the U.S. West Coast. [NYT]

This improvised civic initiative was quite symbolic of the latent—though still vital—role that nationalism continues to play in Egyptian life. When a 23-year-old protester named Sabrin admitted in an interview in the Jerusalem Post that the recent demonstrations made her “feel like an Egyptian for the first time in my life,” and exclaimed, “I’m so proud to be an Egyptian—I hope today will be a great day in our history,” she may very well have been speaking for millions of Egyptians who interpreted the recent demonstrations as an opportunity to not only secure a better future for their country but also to reconnect with its sacred past.

Although we tend to associate Arab nationalism with some of the worst dictatorial regimes of the 20th century (Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party being the most notorious), in an ironic twist of fate so characteristic of the unpredictable Middle East, it appears that what had once been thought of as part of the problem has now become part of the solution: With the forces of radical Islam lurking in the background and potentially threatening to hijack the revolution, Egyptian nationalism may very well be the primary bulwark that could prevent that from happening.

***

Long before nationalism in its modern 19th-century European guise was introduced into the Middle East, Egyptians already held a pretty good idea of what the term meant. As proud descendants of the ancient lineages of Tutankhamen and Cleopatra, they were able to coalesce around a shared set of myths, traditions, and symbols that have continually supplied them with a basic collective identity—one that miraculously persevered despite recurring foreign conquests by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, and Europeans. United by their primordial attachments to the shared climate, geography, archeology, culture, and history of the Nile river valley, Egyptians were able to establish a palpable though inchoate sense of nationality that no neighboring peoples, with the possible exception of the Jews, were able to sustain over such a long period of time. As the historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot wrote in her seminal account of Egypt: “The native Egyptian, while coping with alien rulers, also clung to the fixed piece of territory that he identified and knew as Egypt. Even before the age of nationalism made people conscious of national affinities Egyptians were conscious of living in a land called Egypt.”

When modernity began to permeate the land of the pharaohs with the arrival of French and British armies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, modern ideas of nationalism quickly followed suit. They found in Egypt fertile ground in which to take root. While still under Ottoman and then de-facto British rule, Egyptians defiantly mobilized and revolted (in 1881 and 1919) in pursuit of national self-determination. Although these nationalist uprisings eventually succeeded in expelling the British and creating an independent state, it was only after the 1952 free officers’ coup put an end to the last Ottoman dynasty in Egypt, which had been founded by the ethnically Albanian general Muhammad Ali, that Egyptians finally had the opportunity to rule themselves.

It was no coincidence that once this happened, the collected identity that Egyptians had gradually constructed since ancient times blossomed into a radical nationalist ideology. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the coup and would eventually also ascend to the presidency, was an astute student of modern European nationalism—a fact accentuated by his ambitious efforts to apply a European-style model to Egypt in the hope that this would allow it to reclaim its long-lost place of honor. Nasser’s own magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Revolution, reads like a standard nationalist manifesto infused with romantic paeans to the beloved motherland. In it, he calls upon Egyptians to take up what Nasser referred to as the “role of the hero” and embrace their destiny to lead the Arab world. “This role, exhausted by its wanderings, has at last settled down, tired and weary, near the borders of our country and is beckoning us to move,” Nasser wrote.

His nearly 15-year presidency and the proceeding four decades of rule by his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were in many ways an attempt to live up to and accomplish Nasser’s grand aspirations for securing Egypt’s place in the world and regenerating its national spirit. With the help of monumental state-sponsored projects like the construction of the Aswan Dam, the creation of the short-lived Egyptian-led United Arab Republic, Egypt’s vocal leadership role in the non-aligned movement during the Cold War (and its outward defiance before both superpowers), and especially its frequent military conflicts with Israel, Nasser and his successors were able to revive and solidify a coherent sense of Egyptian nationalism that proudly took upon itself that exceptional, heroic role Nasser envisioned for it decades earlier. (Egyptians’ conviction in their chosen nation status was reinforced by the international success of Egyptian cultural icons like the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the world-famous singer Umm Kulthum.)

***

One thing conspicuously missing from Egypt’s potent nationalism was a role for Islam. Despite being outwardly pious, Nasser and his successors did not hesitate to subject Islamic political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood to the exclusive authority and institutions of the burgeoning Egyptian nation-state. In the Philosophy of the Revolution Nasser separated Egypt into three hierarchical circles of operation—Arab, African, and Islamic, in that order. The result was that the more nationalist Egypt became, the less tolerant it was toward political Islam (not to be confused with the religion itself). As the modern Egyptian nation-state consolidated in the 1950s and ’60s, its power struggles with the Muslim Brotherhood only intensified (leading to the arrests of thousands of members and to the execution of many, including the radical theologian Sayyid Qutb). “Nasser’s success was in motivating the masses through secular ideology, and it was exactly this very nationalism that was so effective in pushing the Muslim Brotherhood aside by subjugating religion to it and by also harnessing its power for nationalism’s own advantage,” says Shimon Shamir, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo and an Egyptian historian at Tel Aviv University. “You cannot foresee the rise of Islam in Egypt without a commensurate decline in nationalism.”

That the two competing ideologies—political Islam and nationalism—remain in opposition is no surprise. Despite the recent attempts by conspicuously moderate spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood to gloss over the organization’s deep internal divisions and present a unified front that suggests it has reoriented its goals solely toward improving the welfare of Egyptians, the Brotherhood’s ambitions have not always been so modest. On the contrary: Since its founding by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has persistently displayed aims that often transcended the territorial boundaries of Egypt and sought to engage and unite not only Egyptians or even Arabs but the entire Muslim ummah.

Although al-Banna may have been a loyal Egyptian patriot, he was also a devout believer in the universal brotherhood of all Muslims who considered secular nationalism as just another corrupting Western invention. In accordance, many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s early operations and institutions were oriented toward accomplishing both national and international goals. (The organization had a foreign-liaison section, meant to serve as headquarters for a global Islamic movement.) R.P. Mitchell’s classic account of the organization, The Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, aptly described the problematic nature of holding such dual loyalties:

The final and only enduring loyalty possible to a Muslim is to the Islamic nation—every bit of land on which there is a Muslim who says ‘There is only One God and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ … Islamic nationalism transcends geographic boundaries, political division, and the varieties of colors, races, and languages because it is founded on the notion of ‘the unity of humankind.’ Unlike ‘limited nationalism,’ Islamic nationalism is divinely inspired by the triple principles of godliness, humanitarianism, and internationalism. Thus Islamic nationalism is in the service of all humanity.

Although Mitchell’s monumental study was published in 1969, al-Banna’s more recent disciples clearly prove that the Muslim Brotherhood’s universal inclinations are still alive and well. In an interview with the London-based daily newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat in 2005, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood at the time, Muhammad Mahdi Akef, proclaimed that his movement was “the largest organization in the world,” explaining that “a [Muslim] person who is in the global arena and believes in the Muslim Brotherhood’s path is considered part of us and we are part of him.” In 2007, Mohammed Shaker Sanar, at the time one of the handful of Muslim Brotherhood members in the Egyptian parliament, publicly admitted that “the organization was founded in 1928 to reestablish the Caliphate destroyed by Ataturk.” More recently, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief spiritual adviser, the Qatar-based Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi (who was offered the organization’s helm in 2002) advocated the constitution of a “United Muslim Nations” as a modern reincarnation of the original caliphate.

Such persistent transnational aspirations continuously voiced by leading figures within the movement appear to be not only at odds with but completely inimical to Egypt’s national interests. How would a politically integrated Muslim Brotherhood react in the not unlikely scenario that another conflict between Israel and Hamas erupts in Gaza? In the past, Egypt had maintained ostensible neutrality while secretly continuing to cooperate with Israel against Hamas. If, however, the Muslim Brotherhood achieves some measure of political power, it is not too much of a stretch to envision the group as advocating indirect intervention to aid their brothers in Gaza—Hamas is after all the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—or, even worse, actively assisting them militarily. In both cases, the results would indubitably cost Egypt dearly: Not only would it imperil Cairo’s critical strategic relationship with the United States, but it would also risk a devastating all-out war with Israel.

The point of such hypothetical reasoning is not simply to illustrate how incompatible Egypt’s national interests may become with the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational agenda but more broadly to suggest that the two institutions most devoted to preserving Egyptian national interests—the military and state bureaucracy—not to mention most Egyptians themselves, are far too devoted to Egypt to compromise its national security and welfare for the sake of anyone else.

***

The recent collapse of the Mubarak regime has already led some commentators to determine that Egyptian (and Arab) nationalism has entered its last throes. Barry Rubin, an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who has written myriad books about the Middle East, suggests that the recent demise of what he calls the “Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak regime” could be the coup de grace for Arab nationalism. Nevertheless, he still foresees a situation in which Egyptian nationalism perseveres and prevents the radicals from ascending. “The question that needs to be asked is if free elections are eventually held in Egypt, which parties will run against an elBaradei-led presidential campaign backed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rubin tells me. “One could be a nationalist party, possibly led by Amr Moussa. If this does happen, then the prospects are for a president who would counter Islamist elements.” But even then, he warns, the Brotherhood could still remain a force to be reckoned with in Parliament.

While many of the projections regarding the future of Egyptian nationalism are dire, it may very well be that they are too preoccupied with a certain type of nationalism to see the larger—and more promising—picture. Long before culture, ethnicity, and especially language helped construct the “imagined communities” of modern nationalism about which Benedict Anderson has so famously written, there was a short-lived liberal nationalism (also known as civic nationalism) that captivated Europe. More in tune with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s inclusive Social Contract than with the cultural, and eventually racial, exclusivity of German Romantics, it afforded free entry into the national body politic for anyone willing to embrace its democratic values and adhere to the laws that they themselves were required to help legislate.

Since demonstrations in Tahrir Square first erupted, Egyptians have not been able to stop talking about their regenerated national pride. If they can indeed bridge the gap between the traditional nationalism of Nasser and the liberal one of Rousseau and create a pluralist and democratic Egypt, then not only will they be able to restrain the radical Islamists, but they will truly have something to be proud of.

Things have been trending badly for Israel for some time now, but Hosni Mubarak losing control of Egypt makes the Jewish state untenable. That’s right: Israel is no longer feasible. I don’t mean that in the manner the international left usually does—that nationalism is passé and we must move on to higher forms of communal existence. I mean it in the old-fashioned way of nations and peoples who are vanquished when the balance of power tips against them. And I mean it strategically—a tiny country with a Jewish majority of 6 million can’t survive surrounded by enemies and forsaken by its superpower ally.

For several decades American policymakers from both sides of the aisle traveled to the Middle East to explain how much peace there meant to Washington. During the October 1973 war, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s airlifts showed the Arabs that it was futile to make war on Israel while they were backed by an awesome superpower. The Arabs could not hope to beat Israel in war so they would have to petition the Israelis’ U.S. patron if they wanted any concessions. Besides, there were great rewards, such as American military aid, to be had for anyone who would sign a deal—which essentially amounted to a bribe.

Coming to power in Egypt after Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated for signing a treaty with Israel, Mubarak kept the peace and thereby underwrote the integrity of the peace process. Egypt was the trophy that Washington kept on display to show all the other Arab states what they, too, might have should they come to their senses and just sign a deal. But as it turns out, the peace treaty must not have been that important because the man who preserved it for some 30 years in the face of domestic as well as regional opposition—enduring several attempts on his life—was tossed aside by the Obama Administration. In doing so, the United States showed that everything it had ever said about the peace process was total nonsense.

America’s Arab allies were astonished that the White House would treat a close ally like Mubarak as it did; but they were also dumbstruck that the Americans could undermine their own position in the region without a second thought. If binding the region together in a peace process is no longer the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East strategy, what do the Americans have up their sleeve? Washington only has one move, which is to throw Israel under the bus.

Sure, things were bad for Israel even before Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based radical cleric who is the spiritual voice of the Muslim Brotherhood reappeared last week in Cairo to call for the liberation of Jerusalem. But consider the most optimistic scenario for Egypt, in which it follows the Turkish model, once a strategic ally that in the space of just a few years has become moderately hostile. Ankara’s involvement with the Mavi Marmara incident made Turkey part of an international delegitimization campaign against Israel, waged largely in Europe but making inroads now in the United States.

For instance, consider the administration’s bizarre mishandling last week of the Palestinians’ proposed Security Council measure denouncing Israeli settlements. Not only did Washington delay in vetoing a proposed resolution that in the past it would’ve batted down immediately, but the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt compelled to make a statement covering the administration’s flank. The veto, she explained, should “not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity.”

Washington, it seems, is tired of having to stick up for Jerusalem. It’s bad enough that having Israel’s back always sets the United States against the rest of the international community, but in the wake of the Arab uprisings, defending Israel also means that Obama has to cross the Muslim and Arab masses he’s courted ever since his 2009 Cairo speech. But nothing Washington is able to wring out of Israel never seems to satisfy anyone. Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 bought it tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets, while its 2006 war there bought it international opprobrium. The 2005 withdrawal from Gaza that was supposed to burnish Israel’s bona fides with the international community only won it more rockets. And after the war with Hamas in the winter of 2008, Israel got the Goldstone Report.

Now, with the end of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, Washington will have no choice but to move further away from Israel. It’s an understandable move from a superpower whose prestige is waning in the Middle East.

So what of the near future? There will still be a peace process, but it will be rather like a living will, in which the party with power of attorney, Washington, decides when to pull the plug on Israel—and how to dispose of the corpse. Indeed, the Obama Administration still wants talks between Israel and Syria—even though Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has said that a peace deal would cost his regime its life. It is Assad’s resistance to Israel, through his support of Hezbollah and Hamas and Syria’s alliance with Iran, that has endeared him to the Syrian masses. Syria is stable, said Assad, because “you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.”

In other words, the peace treaty with Israel that Egypt signed has now been exposed as a suicide pact. In Assad’s view, the former Egyptian president’s great misstep was diverging from the beliefs of his people, who are anti-Israel. Or, as Syria’s foreign minister put it, “the leaders of regional countries should befriend their peoples. That’s the best choice.”

The notion that the Arab masses hate Israel is difficult for Washington policymakers to swallow. Their working assumption for the last several decades is that Arab rulers were responsible for anti-Israel sentiment by redirecting popular anger at their own regimes onto the tiny Jewish state. But as we’re seeing, the Arab public is more than able to voice its discontent with their rulers while also hating Israel. Whether Washington grasps the fact that Arabs hate Israel is immaterial, for Arab rulers cannot afford to forget it without losing their grip. And the United States will have no choice but to make those rulers happy if it is to pursue its interests in the region. Unfortunately, this means that Israel is no longer viable. By which I don’t mean that 6 million Jews are going to be killed, only that if they want to survive they can’t stay in Israel.

What is Mubarak like?

I don’t know him as a father, grandfather, or husband. But Mubarak the president—this is the man I knew. Mubarak the president, at end of day, for all the time, was a man who radiated a heavy atmosphere, let’s say a tiredness. He creates a certain kind of atmosphere of slowly, slowly, shwayeh shwayeh [Arabic for slow]. He doesn’t speak fast. In all the years I had the chance to sit and hear him, I never once heard him have an original idea, an initiative to offer to advance any issue, be it in the Israeli-Egyptian relationship, or relations with the Palestinians or with the Arab world. He used to repeat slogans.

You told me he has a good sense of humor.

He liked more to hear jokes. He has a rolling laugh. He likes political jokes. All in all, in this aspect, he is a typical Egyptian. He is wide, a bit round. He’s a general, in short. He has the steps and posture and confidence of a general. But I didn’t get the impression that he is the man who can bring to Egypt something like a vision of a rosy future or solutions to the problems of the economy and society. I called him the major general of the status quo. He got some sort of inheritance from President Sadat, and after 30 years he didn’t change a thing.

What are his virtues?

He was loyal to his people, the people around him. Except for one instance: I remember that someone close to him said some unnecessary word and it got out in the press, something that was harmful to the president, and he was sacked. But the people around him, he was responsive to them. He was loyal to them. He wouldn’t kick people, you know, day in day out. He retained people, he knew how to keep them together as a staff.

How did he do it?

I think it’s his military background. He is a team person. Don’t forget, he wasn’t just a military man. He was the commander of the Egyptian Air Force in the Yom Kippur War. I am emphasizing this not because of the Yom Kippur War but because of the Air Force. He’s not just a general like in the artillery or Golani or even tanks, who could have just a high school education. No. A commander in the air force is a person who is educated in university and afterward in a military academy. In his time it was in the Soviet Union. He knows Russian, he studied in the Soviet Union at a military academy in Moscow. Let’s put it this way, it’s a class, it’s aristocracy.

But until today I think if I have to count his achievements, in 30 years I would say he has this issue of keeping Egypt alive over 30 years—this is an achievement. Here in Israel if I would say the fact that the prime minister of Israel manages to maintain us so we can eat pita and onion and fava beans for breakfast and at night cucumber, tomato and garlic, and that this was an achievement, they would kill me. But in Egypt there are 85 million people and more than 40 percent of the population makes less than $2 a day. I point to this as an achievement of Mubarak because somehow he managed to maintain this for 30 years.

The problems that the Egyptians are complaining about—poverty, a lack of employment, corruption—were these also complaints when Mubarak first took power?

The economic problems in Egypt are antique. Very old. Egypt, we know it from the Bible with Joseph, who came to the Pharaoh and told him about seven bad years and seven good years. There are ups and downs, but mainly downs, and if you don’t prepare for the downs you are in deep trouble.

Egypt has been in grave trouble economically and socially for many years. Keeping the Egyptian nose a little bit above sea level and being able to go on breathing is an achievement. There are almost 1.3 to 1.5 million new babies born every year. This means the population growth eats all economic achievements and social achievements. There are not enough schools. The universities are in bad shape. Egypt is not self-sufficient in any kind of foodstuff. Almost everything is imported, and Egypt pays a huge amount of money, especially for flour and grain. More than 70 percent of Egyptian flour is imported, and prices are going up because of the floods in Australia.

In the bottom line, whoever will be the next president from the left or right, whether it is a Muslim or a general, there is no solution in sight for Egypt and nobody is offering any solution. Take a look at the demonstrators, the various factions, the so-called liberals, lefties, Muslims, generals, the old government, the new government—nobody is talking about any solution to bring Egypt into an economic takeoff. A takeoff is an expression that means a trend that could take years, but at least you start the takeoff with a lot of effort in order to one day be able to fly easy.

We are on the verge of replacing one dictatorship, the regime of Mubarak—which is undemocratic—with another dictatorship that will be a theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be much worse, as far as democracy and liberal values in Egypt are concerned, than the rule of Mubarak. No less important, it will be very hostile to the U.S., to the West, and to Israel. What’s the point of replacing one despot with another who is going to be even worse?

Has Mubarak been a good ally to Israel?

We cannot talk about being an ally. Israel and Egypt have complicated relations. They are not simple, and they are not normal. There are components of peace between the two countries. There are diplomatic relations, with embassies in Tel Aviv and Cairo. There are trade relations that have reached over $150 million a year, and there is the academic center in Cairo for Israeli studies and Hebrew studies. There are very good relations on the level of the armies. The two armies have very good channels of dialogue. Whenever there is a problem, they get on the phone, they solve the problems, and they are very efficient on the military level. And many Israelis travel to Egypt as tourists.

What about Mubarak the man? Do you feel like at official meetings he would treat you differently because you were Israeli?

No, with Mubarak there was no problem. Whenever an Israeli official guest, a minister, came on an official visit to Egypt, he was accepted immediately by President Mubarak. Mubarak would see him, even if he was the minister of trade, or a minister from the Shas party.

We used to sit, two people from our side, and the same from the Egyptian side, the president of Egypt leading his small delegation, and the Israeli guest, I as ambassador was on his right. We used to sit and talk and discuss even when there were some tough issues. It was always polite. There was not any anger expressed or anything confrontational or insulting. It was very elegant, very gentlemanly.

And was he warm in these meetings?

There was nothing special on a personal basis. He wanted to listen to his guests’ ideas about the Middle East, about the Israelis and Palestinians. He would inquire of each Israeli minister—from the Labor party, from the Likud, from Shas, and later of course from Kadima—he would inquire about the position of each party regarding the Palestinian issue, the Syrians. He was very curious. He wanted to know, to understand the Israeli political map.

Do you think he did understand it?

I believe so. He wanted to know. Not only did he know that his guest was from a certain party with a particular position, but he knew also that within one party there could be various opinions.

What did the meeting room look like in the presidential palace?

This is a palace from days of the kings in Egypt. Huge, all marble, very elegant and very impressive. There were so many rooms and halls and reception halls. So many. And offices, and chambers and each was done in an oriental decoration style. But very elegant.

What about his house?

His house is not far from the presidential palace, in Heliopolis. It is a private villa. It’s modern, but relatively modest, there was nothing to write about, to report about. It was nice but not something extraordinary. I have seen in Egypt nicer villas that belong to the rich people. From this point of view, he wasn’t part of the nouveau riche.

Is he in touch with the poor?

I cannot tell you. If I had to think about why all this came now, this explosion, one of the reasons for this uprising is that he was disconnected from the people. He didn’t listen to their wishes. For example the fact that the Egyptian in the street did not want, and was very much against, the idea of his son succeeding him. For five or six years, I was following this fiasco of Mubarak preparing his son for the presidency. The people spoke carefully, but I could get their rejection of the idea that Egypt is like Syria and that a son can succeed his father in a republic. And they said in so many words: “We are not Syria.”

How do you feel toward Mubarak now?

I really pity him. It’s pathetic what’s happening, and I’m sorry. The man is very sick, and I really would not want what happened to the president of Tunisia to happen to him. I would want him to get up and abdicate in an elegant way. I don’t want him to be chased out of Egypt, or that people should do something bad to hurt him. He is already badly, badly hurt. He feels betrayed. The man, for 50 years and more, served the Egyptian people and all of the sudden the Egyptian people are tearing him to pieces.

At any rate, it’s pathetic and I pity him. But he’s either stubborn or stupid, and it’s impossible to convince him what to do. And there is also the problem of to whom do you pass the government, what do you do? How do you assure that the leadership will be passed in an orderly fashion? Let’s say to another general? Even among all the millions who are going wild there, they don’t have a leader who will replace Mubarak tomorrow morning.

Who do you think he is turning to?

I don’t know. I think he is sitting there in the palace, and consulting of course. I am not sure he is sleeping at night. He is closed up. The two times he gave a speech it was from the palace. I remember that hall for press conferences he used to hold. He has twice addressed the people in the last few days, and in those two times he didn’t leave the palace. He was in the presidential palace. I know the room.

One is now tempted to scoff at this statement. But it’s not that Mossad analysts, military intelligence, and most academic researchers were entirely blind about Egypt’s problems. They knew all of this very well. But they were focused on the larger picture of global and regional developments, on strategic connections, on the words and acts of the leaders and elites. They ignored the undercurrents and the details of the domestic mosaic and its effect on foreign policy. It’s a problem they’ve encountered before: Israeli intelligence is good at gathering precise information to locate and assassinate terrorists, as they did in the killing of Imad Mughniyeh, the so-called defense minister for Hezbollah, in Damascus in 2008; it is good at sabotaging Iranian nuclear facilities and executing daring operations. But, as the situation in Egypt shows, it often fails to recognize and draw conclusions from political processes.

From 1976 to 1979, Israeli intelligence as well as the CIA and Britain’s MI5 didn’t understand the power of the Iranian masses and the centrality of religion there. In 1987, these same agencies overlooked the daily frustration of the ordinary Palestinian who lived under the Israeli occupation. In 2005, they missed Hamas’ plans to take over Gaza. But this time it has far-reaching consequences for Israeli security.

***

For nearly 40 years, since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egypt has been Israel’s best strategic ally in the region and part of a larger axis consisting of the United States and the so-called “pro-Western moderate regimes”: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Though Mubarak, a former commander of the air force who fought in the wars against Israel, was committed to the peace with Israel signed by his predecessor Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1979, he didn’t allow the relationship between Egypt and Israel to prosper and be extended. Trade between the two countries was limited; cultural ties were restrained; movement and migration were circumscribed. Israel called it the “cold peace.” But Mubarak’s Egypt protected Israel’s southern flank, thus enabling Israel to cut security budgets, to enjoy economic prosperity, and to divert its attention—and occasionally its military might—to the north, where enemies such as Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran posed much graver threats. And on a personal level, Mubarak has maintained close and even sometimes intimate relations with all Israeli prime ministers since Menachem Begin—including with Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert. In the last two years, he had renewed these ties with Netanyahu. To the Israeli leaders, Mubarak was almost like a mature older brother: He advised them; he restrained them; he threatened them; and, above all, he tried to help broker a settlement between them and their longtime partners-in-conflict, the Palestinians.

More recently, diplomatic ties between the two countries were strengthened, and secret intelligence cooperation was flourishing under the guidance of General Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief recently named vice president, who has frequently traveled to Israel for clandestine meetings with the Mossad, military intelligence, and Shabak (the domestic service). Though Israel and Egypt avoid exchanging military attachés and do not engage in joint military exercises, Suleiman made progress on two major developments that cemented common interests: a mutual fear of nuclear Iran, and a deep concern about the emergence of an Islamist entity led by Hamas in Gaza. The two regimes also saw eye-to-eye regarding efforts to uproot Sinai-based cells of al-Qaida, which posed a direct threat to Egypt’s main income from tourism and to Israel’s Red Sea resort in Eilat. The intelligence communities of the two nations also shared and exchanged information on Hamas terrorists and their subversive actions in the tri-border area of Israel-Gaza-Sinai. (It is no wonder that one of the first defiant actions of the Egyptian popular uprising was the escape of a dozen senior Hamas operatives from their prison cells in Sinai via tunnels into Gaza.)

But it seems perhaps that this closeness with Egypt may have come at a price for Israel: Israeli intelligence officials, having locked themselves in a position of over-reliance on Egypt, seem to have donned blinders of denial. They didn’t realize how fragile all that was, and how it revolved around one person: the aging Mubarak.

And now, as a result, Israel has been forced to make potentially dangerous concessions. Despite clear limitations outlined in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, Israel—fearing that the unrest and demonstrations in Cairo will spread to its border—allowed an additional 800 Egyptian soldiers to be deployed this week in Sinai. This marks a significant Israeli compromise, given that the original agreement practically demilitarized the Sinai. Another concern is that Hamas will take advantage of the situation and renew its attacks from Gaza and Sinai against Israel. Monday already witnessed two rocket attacks against Israeli towns in the Negev desert.

The events in Egypt do not mean necessarily that its next government will walk away from the peace with Israel; a lot depends on the specific government that emerges in Cairo. But even if the next government is formed by a leader whose origins, rationality, and ideology are fashioned in Mubarak’s mold, the Israelis will be facing a much more difficult situation to manage.

Yossi Melman is a senior writer on strategic affairs, intelligence, and nuclear issues for Haaretz.

Scheuer was the CIA’s first point man on Bin Laden in the 1990s, and his new biography is based on years of following the Saudi terror mastermind in and outside of the agency. His Bin Laden is a man motivated not by hatred of American values or obsessed with our freedoms, sexual or political, but by deep anger at American policies. It is not about whether we vote or what we wear but about what Bin Laden believes we have done to the Islamic world, the ummah, over the last century. The Crusaders, as Bin Laden calls us, have pillaged the ummah for decades. Above all the other “crimes” Bin Laden rails against is American support for the creation of Israel and for supporting it ever since.

Bergen, who is one of the few Westerners to have met Bin Laden face to face, and who interviewed dozens of his close followers for this book, comes to the same conclusion. Bin Laden grew up in a household where his father, a multibillionaire construction magnate, was in charge of remodeling the three holiest mosques of Islam—in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The family would fly to each to pray at all three in one day sometimes. Defense of Islam was a family duty. For the young Bin Laden, the Palestinian cause was a centerpiece of life from youth. He named one of his daughters Safia, after a girl “who killed a Jewish spy.”

For al-Qaida Israel is the root of all evil, Bergen’s book reports. The Jewish state is the Crusader’s key ally in suppressing the ummah and is used to keep the Muslim world divided and weak. It literally separates the ummah into African and Asian parts. It prevents the Muslim world from developing nuclear weapons by bombing its reactors in Iraq, Syria, and maybe Iran to protect its own monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. The United States provides it with $3 billion in aid each year, the latest high-performance weapons, and diplomatic protection. The answer to the Crusader-Zionist alliance must be jihad until America is driven out of the ummah for good, just as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Then the traitorous regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and elsewhere will be overthrown, and Israel will be driven into the sea and destroyed forever.

Thus Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri started his career in terror with a plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel, Bergen notes. When the two declared war on America in 1998, they set as their top goal to “liberate” Jerusalem from “the petty Jewish state.” The Sept. 11 Commission concluded the mastermind of the attacks, Khaled Shaykh Muhammad, was motivated by “his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” In 2008, Bin Laden made it crystal clear “the Palestine issue is my central issue. It is why the incidents of September 11th took place.” After the failed 2009 Christmas attack on a Detroit-bound plane, Bin Laden said more attacks would come until America stops supporting Israel.

***

Scheuer and Bergen agree that the intellectual mastermind who shaped Bin Laden and al-Qaida’s worldview more than any other was the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam. He was born near the West Bank town of Jenin, and his family fled to the Jordanian town of Zarqa after the 1967 war. Recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood and briefly a fighter with Fatah, Azzam studied in Damascus, Amman, and then at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo. His religious credentials were impeccable. At the start of the war in Afghanistan in 1980 he was teaching in Jidda, in Saudi Arabia, but, outraged by the Soviet invasion, he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and began assisting the mujahedin.

Azzam became increasingly involved in the cause of the Afghan mujahedin, spending time in their camps along the Pakistani border and writing pamphlets urging Muslims from all over the Islamic world, especially his fellow Arabs, to join the jihad. In 1984, he wrote a book crucial to the expansion of jihad, The Defense of Muslim Territories, in which he argued that every Muslim had an obligation to join the Afghan struggle. Afghanistan was the place to defeat the unbeliever and enemies of Islam, Azzam emphasized, not only because the invaders posed the greatest threat to the ummah but also because the pay-off in defeating a superpower would be vastly increased stature for Muslims throughout the world.

Azzam even visited the United States in the 1980s to raise money for the cause. His book became as important to the Afghan jihad as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was to the American Revolution. Azzam followed it with dozens of articles and other books urging support for the jihad. Soon he broke with the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it too timid, and began spending all his time in Peshawar with the mujahedin or traveling around the ummah urging Muslims to join the jihad in South Asia.

To assist jihadis arriving from all points of the ummah, Azzam created the Maktab al Khadamat, or Service Bureau, in Peshawar, to provide them with housing and food. The cofounder of the Service Bureau was Osama Bin Laden, a fabulously rich young Saudi whom Azzam had met in Jidda. Bin Laden had come to Pakistan to join the jihad and brought with him financial support for an army of jihadi volunteers. Initially Azzam and Bin Laden set up hostels for jihadists in Peshawar, then they graduated to training camps where Arabs and others could “learn jihad” and go off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Azzam has rightly been called the father of the modern global jihad by a former chief of the Mossad. He was assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar just as the Soviets were leaving Afghanistan in defeat. By then Bin Laden was launched on his own career in jihad.

***

Both authors credit the George W. Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq with saving al-Qaida. Scheuer calls it “a godsend” for Bin Laden not just because it diverted American attention and resources away from finishing the job in south Asia but also because it validated Bin Laden’s claim to be “an acute analyst of American intentions.” Osama had been saying for years that America intended to invade the Arab Middle East to topple its governments, impose puppets, and force them to accept Israeli dominance. On February 11, 2003, Bin Laden sent a letter to the Iraqi people, broadcast via Al Jazeera, warning them to prepare for the “Crusaders war to occupy one of Islam’s former capitals, loot Muslim riches, and install a stooge regime to follow its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” He advised the Iraqi nation to prepare for a long struggle against the Crusaders and in particular to engage in “urban and street warfare” and to “emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel.” In Iraq all his predictions seemed to come true.

Al-Qaida also found a new hero in Iraq: another Jordanian citizen, also from Zarqa, named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah, better known as Abu Musaib Zarqawi. Zarqa is a tough, mean, and small working-class city close to Amman. It is a city of small industries and manufacturing with little charm. There is a large Palestinian population in the city and a very large Palestinian refugee camp nearby created after the 1967 war when tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians fled the Israeli occupation of their homes into Jordan. The camp is dirty, without adequate sewage or electricity. It is a place where extremism and fanaticism grow.

Zarqawi got in trouble with the law early in life. As with many other inmates in jail, Zarqawi became a more clever and dangerous criminal. He also found Islam and became a convert to extremist jihadism. He spent several years in prison before being released in a general amnesty in 1988. Upon his release, he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin in 1989. He arrived too late to fight the Soviets and instead witnessed the struggle between the various mujahedin factions for control of Kabul.

Zarqawi was a junior partner in an al-Qaida plot in December 2000 to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, and he built his own jihadist training camp in Herat in Afghanistan, where he operated independently of al-Qaida but as a close complement to it. In 2002, he created an infrastructure in Iraq to prepare for the Americans. His network carried out its first operation by killing a USAID officer, Laurence Foley, in Amman on October 28, 2002.

As Bergen relates, Zarqawi then took Iraq to the brink of civil war. He sent dozens of suicide bombers to kill Americans and Iraqis alike and a couple to blow up the Radisson during a wedding celebration in Amman as well. Even the al-Qaida core hiding in Pakistan found him too violent, and his excesses ultimately did in the Iraqi al-Qaida as Iraqis rejected its wanton cruelty. But it kept America bogged down in Iraq long enough for the old core of al-Qaida to regenerate in Pakistan.

These are accounts of a war in progress, and so there is much we still don’t know about both Bin Laden and his organization. We know far too little, for example, about the dynamics of the relationship between Bin Laden and the self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Omar, to whom Bin Laden swears allegiance. Neither Scheuer nor Bergen speculate on what connections Bin Laden had at that time with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which ran the mujahedin war. It is impossible to believe the ISI was not closely monitoring the rich Saudi’s activities in their back yard. This is an area that still cries out for more research and analysis by al-Qaida watchers. Nonetheless, these two books complement each other well and help us better understand our enemy, which is the first key to victory.

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has advised four presidents on the National Security Council staff in the White House. His latest book is Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad.

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

With the exception of a brief suspension during the George W. Bush presidency, the notion of Syrian centrality has dominated U.S. thinking—and often Israeli thinking—about the Middle East, and the Obama Administration is no exception. The idea that it is important to appease Syria at all costs appears to be behind the lack of any notable response to recent reports indicating that Syria may have passed Scud-D ballistic missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This dangerous development comes after a tripartite summit in Damascus between the leaders of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in February at which the Syrian and Iranian presidents openly mocked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her comment about wanting to see Syria distance itself from Iran. Instead, Damascus and Tehran waived visa requirements between their two countries.

The model for what U.S. and Israeli policymakers hope from Syria is the Camp David accord with Egypt, which established what some refer to as the “Pax Americana” in the Middle East. The Egyptian model was and remains the premise behind approaching Syria, as was evident during Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman’s testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia in April, when Rep. Dana Rohrbacher wondered in his remarks what it would take to turn Syria around to becoming a more moderate Arab country “like Jordan or Egypt.”

While Cold War efforts to remove Syria from the Soviet orbit failed, a similar, enduring subplot has emerged regarding its 30-year-old alliance with Iran. The ubiquitous argument was summarized in a 2009 essay by Richard Haass and Martin Indyk in Foreign Affairs:

Syria is the principal conduit for Iran’s influence in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Israeli-Syrian negotiations threaten to sever these ties. Drawing Syria away from Iran would also deprive Tehran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies of a critical ally. Such a strategic realignment would weaken Iran’s influence in the region, reduce external support for both Hamas and Hezbollah, and improve the prospects for stability in Lebanon. A U.S.-brokered peace between Israel and Syria would remove Damascus as an enemy and, in the process, likely cause the breakup of the Iranian-Syrian alliance.

Advocates for pursuing Haass and Indyk’s recommendation include a list of revered former officials, often identified as Realists, such as former Secretary of State James Baker, former national security advisers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a coterie of former ambassadors and peace processors, not to mention a host of policy mavens in the think-tank world.

Their argument rests on a basic linkage theory, which, incidentally, also accepts key aspects of the Syrian official line: The problems in the region are related, and they revolve around the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.

In this conceptual universe, Syria is at the center of the conflict. A weak country, unable to match Israeli power and American penetration of the region, it struck a realist, defensive alliance with Iran as well as with non-state actors Hamas and Hezbollah in order to avoid isolation, but also to gather assets to pressure Israel and the United States to the negotiation table to recover the Golan Heights. In doing so, Syria manages to frustrate any regional deals that ignore its interests. Therefore, any deal in the region has to be “comprehensive,” i.e., involving the Syrians. After all, you cannot make peace without Syria, as the adage has it.

***

Another part of the idea that Syria is the key to regional peace, and can be won over to the West, has to do with the nature of Syria’s rulers. The Assads—who have ruled Syria since 1970—aren’t ideological, like Iran, the theory goes, but are secular and pragmatic horse traders. As former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the ardent supporters of this worldview, put it, “a deal is there to be had.”

Once the Syrians get what they want, Baker and his cohort believe, they will become more cooperative, leading to at least a reformulation of their ties to Iran and allied militant groups. Syria will ultimately embrace the West, they believe, because Iran cannot satisfy Syria’s serious economic woes. Only the West can offer Syria the investments it needs. This gives rise to other convictions about Assad himself, who is portrayed as a secular modernizer who, in the words of Brent Scowcroft, “cannot be comfortable clutched solely in the embrace of Iran.”

Secretary of State Clinton made this premise explicit at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the heels of a trip to Damascus by William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs: “We have laid out for the Syrians the need for a resumption of the Israeli/Syrian track on the peace process, which had been proceeding through the offices of the Turks, and generally to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran, which is so deeply troubling to the region as well as to the United States.”

Assad’s reaction was swift and unambiguous: He hosted a tripartite summit with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah during which Assad and Ahmadinejad specifically ridiculed Clinton’s statement. Assad told reporters he and Ahmadinejad “misunderstood” Clinton’s comments, “maybe because of translation error or limited understanding.” Instead, he said, Syria and Iran signed an agreement canceling visa requirements between their countries. Ahmadinejad piled it on: “Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria. We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies. Our circle of cooperation is expanding day after day.”

Assad’s rhetorical slight was matched by his escalating transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, namely anti-aircraft systems and long-range missiles, culminating in the recent Scud crisis.

Given the conceptual framework within which the Administration is operating, it was unsurprising that the reaction to Assad’s behavior was one of befuddled confusion. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg shrugged off the Damascus summit as “theater.” Optimists even saw it as evidence of Iranian “insecurity” and “nervousness.”

After the reports of Scud missile transfers from Syria to Hezbollah, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman offered the following commentary on the Damascus summit to the Lebanese daily An-Nahar: “First, it seems that there is a pattern, as I mentioned in the [House] hearing, that after every visit [to Syria] by a U.S. or Western official, an Iranian official visits Damascus, or a Syrian official visits Tehran. I don’t know what this pattern means, but it could signify some very important things.”

Feltman had made the same observation during a stormy hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia a few days earlier, in response to a remark by Rep. Dan Burton, who described Assad’s summit with Ahmadinejad as “spit in our face.” Feltman retorted that the pattern suggests that the Iranians are worried or that something was going on behind the scenes. He neglected to mention that this same pattern has been going on for 30 years, without any real impact on the endurance of the Syrian-Iranian alliance, which seems as solid as—if not more solid than—it has ever been.

The fact that the Administration’s hopeful understanding of Syrian motivations fails to make sense of actual Syrian behavior has not been lost on U.S. policymakers, who nevertheless seem stuck in the same old box. As one official told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, “We do not understand Syrian intentions. No one does, and until we get to that question we can never get to the root of the problem. Until then it’s all damage control.” Why Assad behaves the way he does was dubbed “the million-dollar question” by the same official.

***

At the heart of the Administration’s flawed conceptual framework is an acceptance of the idea that Syria’s behavior is ultimately reactive, driven by grievances against Israel and the West, the occupation of the Golan Heights chief among them. By accepting the centrality of the United States and Israel, policymakers miss far more powerful local factors that motivate regime calculations.

What is often referred to as a transient “marriage of convenience” between Syria and Iran is now in its 31st year, having enjoyed its silver anniversary during the Bush Administration. In fact, the relationship between the Assad regime and Ayatollah Khomeini predates the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hafez Assad cultivated ties with the cadres of the Iranian opposition to the shah and even offered to host Khomeini in Damascus when the Iraqi Baath regime expelled him from Najaf in 1978. One figure that played an initial role in the relationship was the Iranian-Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr, who had sided with the Syrians in Lebanon in order to balance Palestinian influence.

Sadr had bestowed a measure of religious legitimacy on Assad’s Alawite sect (deemed heretical by orthodox Islam), declaring Alawites to be Shiite Muslims in 1973. Sadr was also hosting a number of Iranian opposition cadres in Lebanon, where they were able to train and assist the opposition movement to the shah. These figures, who went on to assume leadership positions in Iran’s newly founded revolutionary regime in 1979-1981, would move through Syria and were offered Syrian-issued passports to facilitate their movement. One such activist, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who went on to become Iran’s foreign minister, was given a Syrian passport and cover to work in Paris as a correspondent for the Syrian government paper, al-Thawra.

The Assad court historian, Patrick Seale, reports that on a visit to Tehran in August 1979, then-Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam boasted that Syria had supported the Islamic Revolution “prior to its outbreak, during it and after its triumph.” Well before Jordan’s King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite Crescent,” Seale had already written that Assad pursued a policy “to confront the world of Camp David” through an alliance with revolutionary Iran.

Far from recoiling from a Shiite Islamist “awakening,” Assad welcomed it. The “secular” Assad congratulated Khomeini over the victory of the Islamic Revolution and dispatched his information minister with a present for the new Iranian leader in Qom: an illuminated Quran.

The current effort to lure Syria away from Iran through incentives (political and economic) is hardly the first. For example, in 1986 the Iranians were “nervous” about an attempt at rapprochement with Syria led by Jordan, whose King Hussein also attempted achieving a reconciliation between Assad and Saddam Hussein. Between 1985 and 1988, there was a concerted effort backed by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and even Syria’s Soviet patron to entice Damascus into the so-called “Arab fold.”

Much like today, Syria’s economy was in dire straits, and the country was diplomatically isolated. Western observers figured that Assad’s choice was an easy one to make. And yet to their befuddlement, Assad refused, despite serious Soviet and Saudi pressure. The Syrian-Iranian alliance not only survived, it was consolidated during the subsequent two decades. Clearly, what outside observers have been arguing was Syria’s best interest was not in sync with its leadership’s calculation.

***

There is an immense gap between Syria’s grandiose self-image and the reality of its weakness as a second-tier regional actor. Damascus has always liked to invoke grand memories of its relatively brief imperial moment when it served as the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. This was a historical exception to geographical Syria’s status as a buffer zone and invasion route for larger, neighboring empires. But illusions of grandeur persist. The latest extravagant version of this charade being peddled by Assad is one that paints Syria as the nexus of “a single, large perimeter [with Turkey, Iran and Russia] that combines five seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, Black Sea, the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea,” as the Syrian president grandly proclaimed in a May 24 interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. “We’re talking about the center of the world.”

Continue reading: “a redefining of defeat as victory.” Or view as a single page.

Once, it was almost enough for Jimmy Carter to provide a neutral, secret place for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to meet, at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Today, the Obama administration finds itself playing the strongman, wrestling both sides, grudgingly, into just sitting at the same table. The meeting, which is being held while all three main players are in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly—where, last year, Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres declined to meet—comes at a time when, perhaps, the United States is more interested in reaching peace than are “the parties,” as the two sides are referred to in diplomatic circles. Here, a brief evolution of America’s role in the drive toward peace.

Camp David, September 1978: Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat

The summit that eventually took place in the wooded retreat at Camp David was originally set to happen in Geneva, under the auspices of a peacemaking conference established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That meeting, burdened with Cold War politics, never happened, and it wasn’t until after Sadat—with Israeli assurances—took the unexpected, dramatic step of going to Jerusalem later that year that Carter began his push for U.S.-backed talks.

At Carter’s invitation, Begin and Sadat traveled to Maryland for 12 days of secret negotiations—the first 10 days of which consisted of Carter shuttling among cabins, until Sadat and Begin agreed to meet face-to-face. The result was a U.S.-witnessed agreement that established a lasting peace in the Sinai, and an initial framework for negotiating peace in Gaza and the West Bank.

Oslo Accords, September 1993: Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

The photograph is iconic: Rabin, in his suit, and Arafat, in his keffiyeh and military uniform, shaking hands at the White House, ensconced in Clinton’s wide embrace, immediately after signing their historic peace agreement. But the United States did relatively little to bring about the Oslo deal, which was largely due to the efforts of Terje Rod-Larsen, a Norwegian sociologist who had done work in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin, which was elected in 1992.

Months of meetings between the Israelis and the PLO, held secretly in Norway outside the framework of U.S.- and Soviet-sanctioned negotiations launched at a 1991 conference in Madrid, culminated in an agreement between the two sides to recognize each other as negotiating partners and to reach a permanent peace deal within five years, inked in Oslo in August 1993. Clinton, ever the showman, invited both sides to Washington the following month for a formal signing ceremony that would produce, at the very least, an indelible image of possibility.

Wye River, October 1998: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

Netanyahu is no stranger to negotiations with the Palestinians. The last time he was prime minister, he was meeting with Arafat at the Aspen Institute’s Wye River complex, in Maryland, under the supervision of the Clinton Administration. Netanyahu, much as today, found himself then bound by promises made by others that created political pressures for him in Jerusalem, specifically with regard to withdrawals from settlements—but Clinton used the fifth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, an agreement hallowed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of an Israeli objector, to force both sides back to the negotiating table.

Clinton, who called on King Hussein of Jordan to help grease the negotiations after Carter-style shuttling between the camps failed to produce results, eked out an agreement after a marathon 21-hour negotiating session, commemorated with a solemn indoor signing ceremony. The agreement laid out a timeline for land transfers from the Israelis to the Palestinians, based on security assurances, and set a target date of May 1999 for a final-status agreement.

Camp David Summit, July 2000: Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

After the Wye River timeline fell apart, the Palestinians and the Israelis—led now by Ehud Barak—set out a new timeline at Sharm el-Sheik, in 1999, which called for a final deal by February 2000. That date passed before Clinton, at Barak’s urging, convened a new summit in July of that year at Camp David—this time, with the world watching. Barak, it is widely acknowledged, broke every precedent and appeared to offer the Palestinians sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a Palestinian state on the West Bank. But Arafat said no—a decision that has been analyzed for a decade, but one that was at least in part driven by, ironically, the concern that America’s willingness to usher along an Israeli-led peace effort compromised its role as an honest broker between the two sides.

Aqaba, June 2003: Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

The summit at Aqaba was not an American event—the formal host was Jordan’s King Abdullah, who inherited his father’s role as a facilitator, but it was the moment when George Bush, fresh off the Iraq invasion, stood between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas and declared himself the local sheriff in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “I used the expression ‘ride herd,’” Bush told reporters after the meeting, on the Red Sea. “I don’t know if anybody understood it in the meeting today.”

Rather than playing couples’ therapist, and letting the Israelis and the Palestinians dictate the pace of negotiations, Bush said he would appoint an American team to monitor progress on the “Road Map” plan he originally proposed in 2002, and insisted he would hold both sides accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities under existing agreements. No firm commitments were reached on resuming formal peace talks, but Abbas promised an end to the terrorism of the Second Intifada, and Sharon promised progress toward a Palestinian state.

Rose Garden, November 2007: Ehud Olmert, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

Seven years after the failure of Clinton’s Camp David effort, Bush convened a Middle East conference of 44 nations at Annapolis, where Olmert and Abbas agreed to resume peace talks with the goal of reaching a lasting agreement by the end of Bush’s presidency, in January 2009. In a press conference that recalled the 1993 Oslo signing ceremony, Bush stood between the Israeli and Palestinian leader and pledged the “active engagement” of the United States in the peace process.

Yet Bush said at the time that he had no plans to go back to the Middle East himself to “unstick negotiations”—and he never called a round-the-clock, Camp David-style retreat before he left office, with no final deal signed.

Photos: Camp David, 1978 by Karl Schumacher/AFP/Getty Images; Oslo, 1993 by J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images; Wye River, October 1998 by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images; Camp David, July 200 by Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images; Aqaba, June 2003 by Hussein Malla/AFP/Getty Images; Rose Garden, November 2007 by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

One of my mother’s most vivid early memories is of the Nazis trying to break down her door. She was five, and the door was the big, heavy front one on the house she was born in, a few yards from the Arno in Florence. It was 1944. As she tells it, the Nazis, who were occupying Florence and had ordered the evacuation of her neighborhood, pounded on the door for some time, while she, her mother, and her older sister cowered inside the house. (Her mother was part of the Resistance; her father, a surgeon in the Italian army, had died in Africa two years before.) But the door held, and the Nazis eventually went away.

Things were different for my father. Unlike my mother, he was Jewish, and in 1943, when he was nine, he, his parents, and his older sister left their home in Milan for a mountain village farther west. The village was called Valmosca, meaning Valley of Flies. It was no longer safe to be Jewish in Italy, so with the help of a colleague of my grandfather’s they lived under a fake surname in Valmosca until the end of the war. My father says that, despite frequently going hungry, he basically enjoyed his two years in hiding, because it was the one period in his life when he got to spend a lot of time with his father. (They went blueberry picking together.) One day the Nazis came to their door. His mother let them in, and when they entered the kitchen, his father yelled at them to keep their dirty boots on the rug—couldn’t they see the floor had just been cleaned? The Nazis checked the family’s forged papers, found them to be in order, and moved on.

My parents met in the medical library at the University of Florence when they were students there in the late 1950s. Before they married, my mother converted to Judaism to appease my father’s family. (Her own mother had moved to Los Angeles by then.) In the mid-’60s they moved to New York City, where I was born and raised. We weren’t observant. Growing up, I was as ignorant of the clichés of New York Jewish life as I was of Judaism’s substance, and though my older brother and I were sent for a year to Sunday school at an Upper West Side synagogue, my only memory of it is a day I now know to be November 20, 1977 (I was seven), when a TV was rolled into the basement room where my class was held, and we watched hours-old news footage of Anwar Sadat shaking hands with Menachem Begin on the tarmac in Israel. My father, who was dropping me off, wept.

My brother and I have always been close—we were born just 15 months apart—yet his interest in, or at least awareness of, Judaism has always been keener than mine. When he was in sixth grade and I was in fourth, I read an essay he wrote for school about our father’s father, titled “The Life of an Italian Jew.” The pride that came through in that title and in the essay surprised me; I’d never thought of putting the words Italian and Jew together. When he was 12, my brother told our parents he wanted to be bar mitzvahed at the Wailing Wall, because the bar mitzvahs of his classmates had more to do with materialism than with belief. I respected his reasoning, but as a burgeoning atheist I was baffled: why would he want a bar mitzvah? In Israel, a couple of days after the ceremony, my father and brother went to visit Masada. I’d come down with something, so my mother and I stayed behind in our hotel room with an issue of Newsweek. (I remember reading a profile of Richard Pryor, having to ask what the phrase “pleasures of the flesh” meant.)

When I was 12, I told my parents I didn’t want a bar mitzvah. They suggested that I should, because someday I might regret not having one. I assured them I wouldn’t. (I don’t.) I was in my fourth year at an Upper East Side boys’ school, where we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning and sang Christmas hymns every winter. I had spent six summers at an athletic camp in Maine where all the campers went to church every Sunday; the Catholics were driven to a Catholic church, while the rest of us walked to a Baptist one nearby. The only time I recall my Judaism coming up at camp was when an older camper named David Cleary grinned down at me and said, “Kike.” Like the kid in Salinger’s “Down at the Dinghy,” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was supposed to hurt.

Apparently it wasn’t exposure to conflicting religions that led me to atheism, as that exposure didn’t affect my brother’s beliefs. He didn’t attend the boys’ school I went to, but he was with me all six summers at camp, and he accompanied me to that Baptist church even after his bar mitzvah. (I remember little about my mornings in church, aside from the crushing boredom, but it occurs to me now that I’ve probably spent more hours of my life in churches than in synagogues.) Since then, our respective convictions haven’t wavered: my brother married an observant Jew and sends his daughters to a religious school; I married a Catholic and hope my two-year-old son will make his own religious choices. My parents seem more puzzled by my brother’s path than by mine. But the subject tends to come up only when we’re making plans on a Friday or Saturday.

Recently Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York was quoted in the New York Times as saying, apropos of Bernard Madoff, that “what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else.” That sentiment, with its echoes of Buddha, the Torah, and Christ, is something I can get behind. (Of course, one could substitute “secular humanist” for “religious person” and make the same assertion.) My admiration for so much Jewish thought is wrapped up in my mind with my father’s years in hiding and my mother’s feeling pressured to convert. I’m also reminded of a scene in a horror movie that I watched at far too early an age (11, to be precise). In An American Werewolf in London, the Jewish protagonist has a nightmare in which his home is invaded by Nazi werewolves. Before his eyes they slaughter every member of his family. The night I saw the movie with my parents and my brother, I couldn’t sleep. Back then, I didn’t know why.