The leading figure behind the halakhic ruling is Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi in the northern city of Safed. Eliyahu began agitating against renting to Arabs in Safed in October with a 400-participant conference titled “Quiet War: Combating Assimilation in the Holy City of Safed.”

Since then, Eliyahu has drummed up support among dozens of rabbis across Israel to condemn real estate deals with non-Jews. His ruling cites the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to call on Jews not to sell or rent to gentiles to prevent intermarriage and to protect Jews from “sinful influence.” But Eliyahu’s arguments aren’t all biblical: The edict also notes that “following the sale or rental of one apartment, the price of all the neighboring apartments declines even when the buyers or tenants are nice at first.”

Signatories include the chief rabbis of Eilat, Bat Yam, Holon, Dimona, Ashdod, Maaleh Adumim, and Meitar—a mix of religious and secular cities, and almost a third of Israel’s 126 municipal rabbis, who are appointed by councils made of local rabbis, synagogue leaders, and representatives from the municipal religious council. These rabbis receive their salary from their municipalities, which in turn are funded by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. According to David Rosen, an Israeli rabbi based in Jerusalem who works on interfaith dialogue for the American Jewish Committee, these rabbis supervise kashrut, register marriages, appoint local rabbis, and preside over the local beit din, or religious court.

In an interview Sunday evening with Israel’s Channel 2 News, Eliyahu appeared in a white dress shirt, a wide white yarmulke, and frameless spectacles. Asked about comparisons to the Nuremberg Laws, which included a prohibition against renting to Jews, Eliyahu explained that Israel’s Arabs aim “to flood Israel with Arab refugees.”

“No Jew said he wanted to throw the Germans into the sea,” Eliyahu said. “But the Arabs have been declaring for 70 years that this is their goal.”

Mordechai Negari, the rabbi for the settlement of Maale Adumim, said he signed the letter because Eliyahu “is fighting the holy war on behalf of our daughters.” He continued: “We must keep our Jewish identity. You know the percentage of intermarriage in America? Eighty percent. This is what we need in Israel?”

Eliyahu’s Safed is a mostly Jewish city of 30,000, and it is one of the four holy cities in Israel, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. It is also home to Safed College, where 550 of the 2,600 students are Arab, according to a college spokesman. Those Arab students come from neighboring Druze, Christian, Muslim, and Circassian villages, and those who live far away rent apartments and rooms in Safed. The spokesman said that in response to Eliyahu’s call, Safed College is trying to find space in the dorms, which house 130 students, and that the student union helps Arab students find apartments.

Meanwhile, much of the media attention has been focused on Eli Tzvieli, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who has lived in Safed for 60 years and happens to live next door to Eliyahu. Over the summer, Tzvieli rented rooms in his apartment to three Arab students of the Safed College, which is within walking distance of his home. But Tzvieli soon realized he got more than he bargained for. His neighbor, the rabbi, visited and offered to buy out the students’ lease so they would leave. Tzvieli refused. Tzvieli said he began getting phone calls and even an anonymous threat to burn down his building. Someone posted placards on his door accusing him of “returning the Arabs” to Safed, in reference to the 12,000 Arab residents, including the family of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who left the city in Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.

“I see them as people,” Tzvieli said of his tenants. “They are residents of Israel; they don’t do anything against the state. They are nice boys. If I can help them with their studies, I will.”

Tzvieli is hardly alone in rejecting the edict. In a statement released last week, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum condemned the rabbis’ letter as “a serious blow to the fundamental values of our lives as Jews and people in a democratic state.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also condemned the ruling last week in Jerusalem. “How would we feel if someone would say not to sell an apartment to Jews?” he said. “We would be outraged. These things cannot happen, not to Jews and not to Arabs.”

Two prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis who Rosen termed “the nonagenarian chief honchos of ultra-Orthodoxy,” are also rumored to be against the edict. Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, a leading ultra-Orthodox posek, or arbiter of Jewish law, reportedly said of Eliyahu and his supporters, “There are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them.” Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, another prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi, also did not sign the letter, and as a result, some of the signatories are backpedaling. At the same time, hundreds of other rabbis are also signing on. In a similar spirit, Lehava, an anti-assimilation organization, set up a hotline last week for callers to snitch on people who rent or sell property to Arabs, so that their names can be made public.

Eliyahu is unapologetic. “The rabbi will continue to serve his loyal public and to help the people of Israel, wherever they may be, to continue to help in the process of returning to Zion,” Eliyahu’s aide, Mor Dahan, said. “The base of the state of Israel is to build a Jewish house for the people of Israel in the land of Israel.”

The edict is a small part of a larger widening gulf between Israel’s 20-percent Arab population and its Jews, highlighted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to redraw the borders of Israel around an exchange of Jewish settlements in the West Bank for major Arab cities like Umm el Fahem. The increasing tension was highlighted last May when Haneen Zoabi, a member of the Arab Balad party, joined the Mavi Marmara, which was bound for Gaza despite an Israeli blockade.

In Safed, Arab students say it has gotten more difficult to find apartments since Eliyahu began his campaign. Mohamed Ganaim, a 22-year-old law student from the nearby Arab town of Sakhnin, said religious Israeli students at Safed College began demonstrating after Eliyahu announced his edict.

“They said ‘death to the Arabs’ and started throwing stones at the Arab students’ houses,” Ganaim said.

Ganaim moved to Safed last year and said he never used to have a problem with his Jewish neighbors. In fact, he said, religious Jews often asked Arab neighbors to turn their lights on and off on the Sabbath, when it is forbidden for Jews to work.

Tzvieli said he will continue to rent to Arabs above the protests of his vocal neighbor. “This is already a matter of principle,” he said. “I think it is forbidden for us to create a rift between ourselves and the Arab population. It’s not human, and it isn’t appropriate to Judaism at all.”

Daniella Cheslow is a freelance writer and photographer based in Jerusalem.

First up: Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Abdel-Fattah, a young Australian author of Palestinian-Egyptian heritage. (Full disclosure: Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz helped fact-check the book, which his wife, an executive editor at Scholastic, published. I didn’t know this when I ordered it.) It’s the story of 13-year-old Haayat, growing up in Bethlehem in 2004—her family moved there after their farm in Beit Sahour was leveled for a new settler road. After losing his farm, her Baba changed. “The evidence of his demolition doesn’t show,” she says. “The rubble and ruins are inside him.” Haayat’s wounds are right on the surface—her face is badly scarred. Why? How? We don’t find out until late in the book.

Haayat’s beloved grandmother, Sitti Zeynab, has suffered as well. For generations, her family lived in what is now West Jerusalem; they fled from the Israeli army in the war of 1948. Refugees, they lived in exile until after 1967’s Six-Day War. Upon their return, they found a Jewish family living in their house. The Jewish woman lost everything—her mother, her father, her twin sister—in a concentration camp. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family and your people,” Sitti Zeynab told her. “But why must we be punished?“ The woman’s husband replied, “Go to Egypt or Jordan or Syria. You have many countries from which to choose.” Haayat’s uncle cried, “But this is our homeland! Would you ask an Englishman to move to America or Australia because they speak English in those countries too? Palestine is our home, not Egypt or Syria!”

When Sitti Zeynab takes ill, Haayat is determined to save her by letting her touch the earth of her village once more. So, Haayat and her best pal, Samy, a soccer-loving Christian hooligan who has emotional scars of his own, take an empty hummus jar on a Quixotic quest: to get some Jerusalem dirt. Jerusalem is only six miles from Bethlehem, but it might as well be a world away. What follows is a picaresque adventure of checkpoints and curfews, of buses, taxis, hiking, and wall-climbing. Our young heroes meet a variety of types—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian—and learn more about the fractured land they inhabit.

The book has a lot of humor (farts abound, which will delight the target audience—and, OK, me too) to leaven the upsetting stuff. And not all Israelis are depicted as evil. But too many of the book’s characters are merely sketches, and Haayat’s voice is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it’s over-the-top lyrical, as when she’s describing the beauty of the land and its people. Sometimes it’s so literal and unimaginative, she seems like a dimwit. When Sitti Zeynab compares her sense of loss to “heartburn after a big meal,” which “burns inside and nothing you do takes the sensation away,” Haayat suggests drinking a glass of milk. This is the same kid who describes “the ubiquitous Wall, twisting and turning, devouring the landscape”? For some reason, florid, self-conscious prose seems to afflict many books about growing up in the West Bank. Abdel-Fattah’s earlier young-adult novel, about a girl in suburban Melbourne, Australia, who suddenly chooses to wear hijab to high school, has no such problem. (It also has the awesome title Does My Head Look Big in This?)

If Where the Streets Had a Name is a good choice for a middle-grade-to-young-adult audience (and it is), Sharing Our Homeland: Palestinian and Jewish Children at Summer Peace Camp is a good one for younger kids. It’s an extended photo essay (the pictures are by Cindy Karp; the words are by Trish Marx) about a summer camp for Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian kids. Givat Haviva, an Israeli nonprofit peace organization, runs the two-week camp. Every summer 200 kids come together to learn about each other’s culture, practice respectful dialogue, and do the fun stuff of camp—crafts, swimming, sports, and song. Like Where the Streets Had a Name, Sharing Our Homeland doesn’t offer any easy answers, just reflections on the importance of trying to see the Other as a fellow human being.

For older teenage and younger 20-something readers, there’s How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, cartoonist Sarah Glidden’s graphic memoir of a Birthright Israel tour. Glidden approaches the all-expenses-paid trip with the attitude of a somewhat entitled young lefty American—she cynically expects a nonstop barrage of pro-Israel propaganda. She’s surprised to find that Birthright offers her a nuanced portrait of a complicated country. She meets people on the left and on the right; she also works hard to learn the region’s history. Glidden is as tough on herself as she is on anyone else—she makes a snotty remark about pushy Russians to an Israeli who turns out to be a recent Russian immigrant; she realizes she’s misjudged some of her tripmates. She’s clear-eyed about her own neuroses and moral failings, and she’s a very thoughtful and endearing—and often funny—tour guide. The panels of the book are awash in pretty watercolors. I even learned something new about the Masada story! (I didn’t know the role of Shmarya Guttman, a young Zionist who in 1933 figured out how to market the destination to the Jewish National Committee as part of a stirring identity narrative.) Glidden doesn’t come to any sweeping conclusions about the tense reality in Israel, referred to as the Matsav (sense a theme here?), but she stops being so quick to judge Israel and find it wanting.

What all three books have in common is the insistence that we not lump an entire people into one undifferentiated mass we label the Enemy. This may seem like a naïve answer to a complex set of questions. But the ability to empathize goes a long way. “Although the fundamental political issues can only be resolved by the parties to the conflict, widespread efforts to promote pluralism and tolerance will begin to lay the groundwork for a future generation that can come to the negotiating table with open hands instead of clenched fists,” the author Robert A. Friedman recently wrote in Foreign Policy Digest. “Groups such as Seeds of Peace, which empowers young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence, are needed more than ever. When mutual trust and respect are established at an early age, these bonds can last a lifetime.”

Too bad so few adults have gotten the memo. Queen Rania of Jordan (whose parents were from the West Bank) recently co-authored a picture book called The Sandwich Swap, about two little girls who fight over the perceived yuckiness of their respective lunches (hummus vs. PBJ). The book preaches multiculturalism and open-mindedness and was launched with a reading at the United Nations. But the queen has turned down several offers to publish a Hebrew version. She might have taken a page from Sitti Zeynab: “Nobody has realized that laughter sounds the same,” she tells Haayat, “whether it shakes its way out of an Israeli or a Palestinian.”

But there is an Arab lobby in the United States—one as old as, if not older than, the Israel lobby, and it has helped to shape U.S. foreign policy and economic life since the end of World War II. Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East describes how this Arab lobby—from U.S. foreign service officers, oil companies, Christian anti-Zionists, and Ivy League universities to Gulf Arab states, Arab-American activists and Islamist ideologues—exercises its influence in U.S. politics. The book is already being dismissed by critics as a slapdash attempt by a former AIPAC employee to answer Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, The Israel Lobby. But those who actually read the new book will find a serious and timely look at a powerful and remarkably under-studied influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Unlike Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I don’t think it’s illegitimate to lobby for one’s interests,” Bard told me on the phone last week. The executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Bard wrote his dissertation at UCLA on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. “I’ve been writing for more than 20 years about this issue,” he said. “The point of my book is to inform the American public that an Arab lobby exists despite the claims of others that it does not and to explain what its interests are.”

In describing AIPAC’s Arab cousin, Bard draws some useful comparisons between the two lobbies, which are not as similar as one might imagine from his book’s title. AIPAC is a grassroots organization funded by U.S. citizens that represents the broad sentiment of Christians and Jews who are interested in one issue—protecting and promoting the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Arab lobby, by comparison, has little organic U.S. backing and divides its efforts between two causes—oil and Palestine. The former is managed in Washington by what Bard calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” of former U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, politicians, and defense executives. Funded by oil companies, the weapons industry, and Arab energy producers, mainly Saudi Arabia, it enjoys virtually unlimited financial resources. For instance, AIPAC’s annual operating budget is $60 million a year—pocket change to a Saudi prince, like Alwaleed Bin Talal, who in 2005 gave $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard.

The Palestinian issue is paramount to the Arab-American sector of the Arab lobby. However, just as the Palestinians are divided against themselves—between Hamas and Fatah, among contending Fatah factions, as well as among competing clans—it is not the Palestinian cause that unites the Arabs or Arab-Americans but anti-Israel sentiment. The same goes for many of the Arab lobby’s domestic anti-Zionist partners, some of whom are motivated by religious conviction, especially the Presbyterians, and others by political ideology, but all of whom can agree on disliking first the idea and then the reality of a Jewish state.

The Arab lobby’s Palestine agenda, then, tends to be negative and, as Bard writes, “aimed at undermining the US-Israel relationship,” only rarely promoting a positive vision of a Palestinian state as a regional beacon of social justice or economic development, or defending the rights of Palestinian journalists, Christians, or other endangered social groups against the threats of the Palestinian political leadership. This part of the Arab lobby, writes Bard, “is small and mostly impotent.”

The real power is in the hands of the Arab lobby’s oil sector, the role of which is to keep the Arab oil producers happy by ensuring that Americans stay addicted to oil, that the defense industry keeps its production lines open, and that the image of Arab states stays polished, even for state sponsors of terror, like Saudi Arabia, and states whose rule is founded on flagrant social inequalities, the torture of dissidents and unbelievers, and other practices that most Americans rightly find abhorrent.

Surely the most depressing aspect of Bard’s book is his depiction of the craven subservience of so many U.S. diplomats and officials to the Saudi royal family. “Even when the Saudis had no money, and they only started to pump oil,” Bard told me, “a fear permeated the State Department that if we didn’t give in to them, we would lose our interest there. And the Saudis were clever about exploiting our fear. First they said they’d go with the British instead of us, then they threatened that they’d go with the Soviet Union, even as they portrayed themselves as anti-Communist and said they needed U.S. weapons to defend themselves against Moscow.”

Bard says that the Saudis are using the Iran threat now in similar ways. “The U.S. knows that in the end we have to defend the royal family,” he said. “The Saudis just want the latest toys and act like petulant children until they get them. Then the U.S. tells the Israelis not to worry when they sell the Saudis weapons because they can’t use them, but we go to Congress and say Riyadh needs these arms for their defense.”

With all the demands for U.S. presidents to pressure Israel, it’s worth noting that U.S. officials have rarely done anything but accommodate the Saudis. The one striking exception, as Bard notes, was John F. Kennedy’s demand that Saudi Arabia abolish slavery. Typically, U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted in the dark, a trend that started in July 1945, when President Harry Truman approved construction of the Dhahran air base using existing War Department funds to evade congressional oversight. This became a precedent for keeping most of the U.S.-Saudi relationship secret, or at least beyond public scrutiny. For years, the U.S. government acceded to the wishes of the Saudis and other Gulf states to conceal information about Arab investments in the United States, and even U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia were classified between 1950 and 1972.

Today the unspoken issue is Saudi support for terror. Were U.S. officials to complain about how the kingdom funds jihad against the United States and its allies, “there’s a fear,” says Bard, “that the Saudis may punish us by withdrawing some of their billions of dollars in investments, cut U.S. companies out of deals to explore for gas or oil, or take other measures to damage our interests.”

Nor are the Saudis shy about promising to unleash jihad against those who cross their path, as when they threatened the British government when it was investigating the unsavory details of a Saudi arms purchase from a British weapons maker.

Given the nature of the Saudi regime, it is little wonder that the oil lobby prefers to work in the shadows. As one publicist explained in laying out his PR strategy for Riyadh: “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”

“This is a fairly smart lobbying tactic,” Bard told me. “It is very difficult to take a democratic approach, when most people don’t take your position.”

The story of the Arab lobby is also a story about Washington, more specifically an influential segment of the U.S. political elite that has contempt for the rubes who don’t understand that it is in the U.S. national interest to lean on the Zionists in order to make the Middle East’s Muslim Arab majority happy.

Bard believes that the Arabs and their Washington handlers were spitting in the wind of a post-World War II history that had turned in favor of the Jews. The Arabs, Bard writes, were “convinced that the United States supported the Zionists because of their propaganda. … Consequently, [the Arabs] never understood the depth of Americans’ feeling for the justness of the Zionist cause.”

Perhaps that is true, but it’s worth remembering that at the same time the Zionists succeeded in lobbying the Truman Administration to support a Jewish state, there was still widespread anti-Semitism throughout America, even as the horrors of the Final Solution were becoming known to the general public. It is comforting to believe that the 63 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, who side with Israel rather than the Palestinians are now and will always be stalwart friends of the Jews. But in the end all we know for certain about Americans is that they can smell what stinks. The Saudi lobby pays Washington power-brokers to talk over the heads of ordinary Americans because the latter have enough horse sense to know that a regime that withholds the rights of women as well as those of its Shia minority, outlaws the practice of Christianity and Judaism, and promotes anti-American causes is not in any meaningful sense of the term a U.S. ally.

As Bard’s book documents, the Saudis’ well-paid American agents have been making the same arguments for 60 years. The reason their message is not getting through is not that Americans are stupid and susceptible to Zionist propaganda or that the Jews who “control” Congress and the media are blocking access to the truth. The majority of Americans haven’t yet joined in the chorus led by Walt, Mearsheimer, and their cohort because Americans simply do not like to be threatened by extortionists who warn that if you don’t do what we say we will turn off your lights and shut down your car engines, and if you don’t change your position on Israel, we will kill you.

It is hardly surprising, then, that commanders of U.S. armed forces who during the last decade have spent more time on the ground among Arab and Muslim populations than American diplomats also subscribe to the concept of linkage and have even made it into a tenet of U.S. military strategy. For instance, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus explained that, “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in the region.

Petraeus’s comments were used by some to advance the linkage-based argument that Israeli actions were endangering U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus himself has clarified his remarks, and last week Defense Secretary Robert Gates jumped into the fray to explain that, “Petraeus did not say that the lack of progress in the peace process is costing American lives.” According to Gates, the issue is that:

The lack of progress in the peace process has provided political ammunition to our adversaries in the Middle East and in the region, and that progress in this arena will enable us not only to perhaps get others to support the peace process, but also support us in our efforts to try and impose effective sanctions against Iran.

Gates and Petraeus, then, are adherents of what might be called “soft” linkage. This is the idea that since, in Petraeus’s words, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” it’s the work of U.S. policymakers to keep working on the peace process that will lead to a Palestinian state in order to show U.S. good faith to the Arabs. The soft linkers don’t believe that all the regional problems will melt away with a resolution to the conflict, but progress on the peace process will render regional U.S. allies more willing to cooperate on matters of U.S. national interest. Robert Malley is a soft linker, so are Aaron David Miller and Dennis Ross and almost everyone else who has ever worked on the peace process in a U.S. presidential administration.

And then there are the apostles of “hard” linkage, most of whom do not like Israel and believe, like John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that popular anger over the Palestinian issue actually motivates the policymaking decisions of Arab rulers. As preposterous as it may seem—that hard security regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt really care that much about popular opinion—there are plenty of moderate Arab leaders who keep feeding ammunition to the hard linkers. For instance, King Abdullah of Jordan is the latest in a long line of Hashemite leaders who warns that failure to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis endangers moderate rulers like himself. The difference between Abdullah and the hard linkers of the U.S. policy establishment is that the latter want Washington to sever its relationship with Jerusalem, while the Jordanian king knows quite well that a weakened Israel, less capable of stopping Palestinian militants on his border, could bring his regime down.

Having written a book that describes the Middle East in terms of a clash of Arab civilizations, I give no credence to the notion that the Arab-Israeli arena is the region’s defining issue. Rather, it is one among many conflicts that plague this conflict-prone area, and so I see the Arabic-speaking regions in terms of intra-Arab clashes, or an Arab cold war, where regional actors—not just nation states, but also regimes and their domestic rivals, in addition to competing sectarian groups—are warring with each other at varying levels of intensity. There is the Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah that has cooled for the time being; in Lebanon, Hezbollah has routed the pro-democracy March 14 forces; the Houthi rebellion taking place on the Saudi-Yemen border is effectively a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians; in Syria, the ruling Alawite minority simultaneously fears the country’s Sunni majority even as it uses Sunni militants to advance its interests in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories; and in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia seem to be poised for a continuation of the civil war that will ensue after the U.S. withdrawal. That’s the real Middle East, where the Arabs’ fight for power among themselves takes priority over whether or not Washington negotiators have the percentages right in proffered land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, I can hardly help but recognize the central role that U.S. Middle East policy has given to the belief that, from the Persian Gulf all the way to Western North Africa, a region encompassing many thousands of tribes and clans, dozens of languages and dialects, ethnicities and religious confessions, the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness of over 300 million Arabs and an additional 1.3 billion Muslims outside of the Arabic-speaking regions. Where does such an extraordinary idea come from? The answer is the Arabs—who might be expected, in the U.S. view of the world, to give us an honest account of what is bothering them. However, this would ignore the fact that interested parties do not always disclose the entire truth of their situation, especially when they have a stake in doing otherwise.

In all relations, intimate as well as international, the goal is to convince the other side to see the world in the way that you have chosen for them to see it. As Zionist immigration started to pick up in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the United States was even a factor in the Middle East, Arab rulers explained to the British that the creation of a Jewish state would cause deep anger among the Islamic umma, or community. The notion that all Muslims could feel strongly about one particular issue that did not touch on them directly was not necessarily false, but neither was it invariably true. Religious affiliation is only one form of identity in the region, where tribal and clan loyalty often trump everything else: It tests credulity that, say, the Saud clan of the Nejd on the Arabian peninsula was more concerned with protecting wealthy Jerusalem families than with defeating its own local adversaries, such as the Hashemites.

Linkage is the narrative the Arab rulers—specially Ibn Saud, the Hashemites who ruled Iraq and Transjordan, and the Egyptian monarchy—used to compete with each other to represent the Palestinian file to the British, a privilege that would enhance the winner’s power and prestige at the expense of his rivals. If the Saudis, say, owned the right to speak for the Arabs of the Palestinian mandate, then the British would have to go through the Saudi king to win concessions, a path that the British would need to pave with gold and concessions of their own to the Saudis. The competition for the role was stiff.

In the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, many of the British Foreign Office’s bureaucrats were, following in the footsteps of T.E. Lawrence, obsessed with the notion of a great and unified Arab nation. But even as the Foreign Office’s advice to Whitehall was largely based on sentimental, or irrational, grounds, London was not entirely foggy-headed. Recognizing that war with Germany was on the horizon, the Brits did not wish to risk their position in the Levant or energy sources in the Gulf by pushing the Arabs over to the Nazis. After the war, with the Brits losing their holdings and discovering that they were incapable of continuing to balance the Jews and the Arabs, the American moment in the Middle East began in earnest. The U.S. Department of State inherited the Foreign Office’s Arab nationalist inclinations and with it the idea of linkage. President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall was the first in a long line of American military men reaching up to the present who subscribed to the idea that U.S. support for the Zionist state would antagonize the world’s Muslim population. Marshall was a proponent of hard linkage who not only warned the president against recognizing Israel, but also threatened to vote against him if he did so.

So, how did Washington manage to navigate these dangerous shoals, balancing not only the Arabs and Israel, but also a large segment of its own foreign-policy establishment that was suspicious, if not downright hostile, to the Jewish state? An even neater stunt than convincing the other side to accept your perspective is to turn their idols upside down—that is, to take their worldview and use it against them. This is exactly the trick that Washington accomplished in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the energy crisis. Henry Kissinger’s State Department began exploiting the Arab narrative for the United States’ own benefit: The United States told the Arabs that it, too, believed in linkage, and that if they wanted anything from Israel, they’d have to come through the United States to get it. The Arabs were happy to go along for the ride, especially the Saudis, who wanted to avoid a repeat of the oil embargo that OPEC imposed on the United States for siding with Israel.

Those who say they see through the myth of linkage note that the Palestinian issue can’t be that important because in fact the Arabs don’t really care about the Palestinians and just use them as a political football for their own benefit. That’s both true and not true, but what’s more instructive is that the Palestinians have caused a lot of trouble in the region for their Arab brethren. Palestinian refugees started civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon and sided with Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. If, like me, you see the region in terms of an Arab civil war, then these Palestinian uprisings are simply evidence of how one group has fought its rivals for power. But if you see the Middle East in terms of linkage, you would argue this proves your circular logic: If the Palestinian issue was resolved these wars never would have happened in the first place.

The myth of linkage owes its power in part in part to the nature of the Middle East, where American policy walks a fine line between reason and faith. For instance, the United States supports Israel because Israel is a strategic ally with whom the United States shares liberal democratic values—and because Israel is the national homeland of a people whose line of prophets culminates with the Christian messiah who was resurrected three days after his death. Similarly, the United States dares not dismiss the Arabs’ claim to Jerusalem, a city revered as the third-holiest city in all of (Sunni) Islam because the prophet of Islam’s flying horse touched down there during his night journey to heaven.

As the origins of any myth fade into the past, the myth, paradoxically, becomes more and more powerful, sometimes even taking on the appearance of truth. Two generations removed from the American policymakers who turned linkage to the advantage of U.S. regional interests, a dangerous stage begins in the history of a myth invented by one Arab tribe to gain the support of the British in their battle with another Arab tribe and that Washington turned around to make itself the power center of the Middle East.

Consider this statement taken from Petraeus’s Senate testimony: “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [Area of Responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” This is boilerplate material that could have been written for any U.S. official over the last 40 years, and it’s totally uncontroversial, except for the fact that it’s not true and has never been true. Moderate Arab regimes do not enjoy political legitimacy as liberal democracies do; rather, their legitimacy is proportionate to the capacity of their security services to repress domestic opposition, especially of the Islamist variety, and deter intra-Arab enemies. Their legitimacy depends only on their ability to stay in power. Washington’s regional partnerships—with Arab regimes and not with Arab peoples—are to ensure that these regimes do stay at the helm. For example, $2 billion annually of the U.S. taxpayers’ money helps Egypt’s military and security chiefs stay loyal to President Hosni Mubarak, while the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet makes sure that oil receipts fill the coffers of the Saudi royal family and the Gulf Arab emirates. In other words, Washington’s Arab allies are not willing to commit suicide over the Palestinian question by telling Washington to stop supporting them.

Indeed, the American position in the Middle East is founded on the idea that Arab regimes are incapable of defending themselves against anyone. Washington made sure these regimes can’t defeat Israel; the United States protected the Saudis from the Soviets and then from Saddam, when the American presence in the desert made the Saudis vulnerable to their own domestic opposition in the form of Osama Bin Laden. What the Saudis want now is to be protected against the Islamic Republic of Iran, but they can’t say that publicly any more than they can explain that the myth of linkage was always more about intra-Arab politics than it was about the fate of the Palestinians.

Nor apparently can the Americans admit that linkage was just a strategic instrument that leveraged the Arab narrative to the advantage of the United States. The further U.S. policymaking gets from the origins of the myth, the more magical and enticing it has become. The myth of linkage has grown to such legendary proportions at this point that it is the extent of the current White House’s Middle East policy. We have no other strategy to stop the Iranian nuclear program but linkage. Movement on the peace process, the Obama Administration believes, will get the Arab regimes to help us with Iran. The problem is that the Arabs will not help us with Iran. They want us to deal with Iran ourselves, but if we keep forcing the issue of linkage they have no choice but to go along with the ruse that everything is linked to the Arab-Israeli crisis. After all, it’s their narrative, and they can’t disown it now.

In reality, the reason the Obama Administration, Gates, and Petraeus are pushing linkage into overdrive is that there is no Iran strategy, and nothing—not even linkage—is going to stop the Iranians. They are telling the Arabs that they are going to do what they can about the Palestinian question, because they are not going to do anything about Iran. That’s the Arabs’ consolation prize for being an American ally. What a cruel joke fate has played at the expense of Arabs, who have been talking out of both sides of their mouth about the Palestinians and linkage for almost a century, a myth that came to link the fate of the Americans to that of the Arabs, and theirs to ours. Since we have no other policy than a magic trick, the Arabs have no choice but to pretend to believe it’s real.