• The United States, Canada, and Britain imposed further sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy industries yesterday, though they stopped short of completely isolating its crucial central bank. [NYT]

• Israel is still freezing the transfer of Palestinian Authority tax revenue in protest of the UNESCO membership. [Haaretz]

• In visiting the West Bank, Jordan’s King Abdullah meant to demonstrate that President Abbas is still the top Palestinian and that the Palestinians’ homeland is not Jordan. [NYT]

• Upholding a promise, Vice President Biden met with a handful of Jewish leaders, who lobbied him—almost certainly unsuccessfully—to lobby the president to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Much of the West Bank and Gaza is without cell phone and Internet access following what is said to have been an organized hack. [WP Blog Post]

After this punt return last night, many wondered if the New England Patriots’ Julian Edelman is Jewish. He is not. Great play, though.

• The explosion at the weapons depot/secret missile base outside Tehran has drawn the curtain back on Iran’s missile program. [NYT]

• King Abdullah’s hold over Jordan is shaky and getting shakier. [NYRB]

• Bernie Fine has denied the charges. [ESPN]

• Toward the end, Libyans accused Muammar Qaddafi of being a Jew, because it’s Libya. [Forward]

• A disabled Jewish Venezuelan marathoner drew the ire of anti-Semites, because it’s Venezuela. [Time Global Spin]

• New Bravo reality show Shahs of of Sunset is exactly what you think it is. [Hollywood Reporter]

• It would certainly be funny if intelligence was withheld from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. [AP/FP]

• The Chicago Bears placed rookie right tackle Gabe Carimi on injured reserved, ending his season. You’ll get ‘em next year! [ESPN]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Shalom Auslander has a new Showtime comedy coming out you should watch. [Deadline]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Etgar Keret has this contest you should do. [Something Out of Something]

• Macaro/oo/nis: a user’s guide. [Slate]

• The Quandt family, which owns BMW, has pledged $7 million to memorialize forced laborers who worked at the Quandt patriarch’s Nazi factory. [JTA]

Happy pre-Thanksgiving weekend!

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords appeared for an ABC News interview last night and is recovering remarkably. [Huff Post]

• Jordan’s King Abdullah is the first Arab leader to state publicly what many privately believe: that it’s time for Syria’s President Assad to go. [WSJ]

• The son of a conservative Iranian politician with alleged ties to the 1994 Jewish Community Center bombing in Buenos Aires was found dead in a Dubai hotel room. It was nominally suicide; some are suspicious. Oh boy. [LAT]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy sent Prime Minister Netanyahu a letter pledging friendship after he was caught on a hot mic saying that Bibi is a “liar.” [JTA]

• Jeff Goldberg suggests President Obama needs to do something similar—for the sake of U.S. and Israeli security. [Bloomberg View]

Yet most signs point to its going forward. Israel is readying for General Assembly approval—they know there’s no way for them stop it—anticipating potential challenges both legal and physical. Indeed, in addition to West Bank reinforcements, the IDF is actually training settler security teams. That said, it should be noted that the P.A. strategy is to refrain from violence. Here’s hoping.

One gets the sickening sense that, for two years or so, Palestinian statehood at the U.N. was a bluff: not a bad one, but one that has been called; and now it is in no one’s interests more than the bluffer’s to fold.

Jordan Urges Abbas to Rethink U.N. Bid [YNet]
Are Palestinians Walking Into a Trap at the U.N.? [+972]
The Day After Palestine [Ynet]
Israel Braces for Palestinian Statehood at the U.N. [WP]
Israel Intensifies Training of Settler Security Teams [NYT]
Earlier: Is the P.A. Statehood Drive Good for the P.A.?

Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst and regional expert, argues that Saudi Arabia senses opportunity to reassert Sunni dominance against Shiite Iran and its Shiite proxies in that corner of the region, the Syrian regime and Hezbollah. (Syria has long been ruled by Alawites, members of an eccentric Shiite sect.) Assad’s regime, Riedel notes, is a crucial connector between Hezbollah, the group that essentially controls Lebanon, and its sponsor in Tehran; likely orchestrated the 2005 assassination of the pro-Saudi Lebanese prime minister; and has (foolishly) been seen “wrapping itself in the flag of Hezbollah,” to quote one Saudi paper, during its brutal crackdown on popular protests. In other words, this is all part of King Abdullah’s plan to cut off the head of the snake. Reports Riedel:

Riyadh worries that Assad will be replaced by chaos, but it has now come to the conclusion the risk is worth the price. If the Assad regime is destroyed, so too will Syrian support for Hezbollah be destroyed. If a new regime emerges that reflects the will of Syria’s majority-Sunni population, it can become a base for destabilizing the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut. The power balance in the Levant could be tilted decisively against Hezbollah and undercut Iranian regional influence.

This is why, say, you have four Sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, enthusiastically backing the referral of Syria to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The weakening of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah hegemon would also, of course, represent good news for Israel, which went to war with Hezbollah in 2006, is no friend of Syria’s, and considers Iran its prime national security threat. Indeed, for more than two months Israel has repudiated the notion that it prefers the cold stability of the current regime and has explicitly hoped for Assad’s ouster (“Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region,” Ambassador Michael Oren has argued. “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.”) It’s all another reminder that Israel’s interests are frequently aligned with its Sunni neighbors’ against Iran and its proxies.

Engagement With Syria: Time For Reassessment? [Washington Jewish Week]
Saudi Arabia Moves to Take Down Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah [The National Interest]
Israel Prefers the End of the Assad Regime to Its Continuance [WSJ]
Arab Countries Back Emergency U.N. Session on Syria [JPost]
Related: Storm Over Syria [NYRB]
Earlier: Reform Is Not a Watchword in This Administration
U.S. Re-Upping Syrian Ambassador
Iran Is Better Armed Than We Thought
Cut Off the Head of the Snake!

An example: Last week, the New York Times reported that a Palestinian woman named Jawaher Abu Rahmah had died from inhaling tear gas after participating in a demonstration against the separation barrier. In response, Israeli military officials, along with a group of pro-Israel bloggers, challenged the Palestinian account, and claimed they had evidence that she died from complications due to the medication she was taking for cancer. Among other tell-tale signs that something was amiss with the Palestinian version, there was the curiously worded cause of death: “Inhaling gas of an Israeli solider according to the family.”

The pessimists who think Israel’s case is hopeless have a point. It’s not clear why both the Times reporter, Isabel Kershner, and her editors at the foreign desk failed to treat the story with more circumspection: If the chances of dying from inhaling tear gas in an open space were not infinitesimal, wrongful-death suits would prevent police forces from using it as it they do throughout the United States and Europe to disperse riotous crowds.

If journalists won’t run narratives like the death-by-tear-gas tale through the most rudimentary BS-detector, it makes it harder not to conclude that they are willing to believe the worst about Israel. At the least, this is evidence of a lazy press corps that ought to take its work a little more seriously; at worst, it means that the Western media knowingly participates in a campaign to slander and libel a U.N. member state.

Outside of the Palestinian fable, floated in the late 1990s, about the Zionist chewing gum that made Palestinian women both sexually intemperate and sterile, it’s hard to think of a whopper that the Western media has not swallowed whole. Among other exaggerations and outright fabrications was the so-called “massacre” at the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. The Western press dutifully followed the lead of the Palestinian news agency, Wafa, and reported that thousands, or hundreds, of Palestinian civilians were killed. Even as subsequent reports, including a U.N. investigation, revealed the truth of the matter—56 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them armed combatants—the narrative describing Israeli soldiers as war criminals and wanton murderers stuck.

Even more impressive is when images are attached to the narrative, like when a Palestinian cameraman in 2006 caught pictures of a young girl distraught on the same Gaza beach where, he reported, seven members of a her family had been killed by an Israeli Air Force onslaught. However, it seems now that a Hamas mine was likely responsible for the tragic deaths.

Most famous is the story of Mohamed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy believed to have been killed by Israeli gunfire on the Gaza Strip in September 2000. His last moments were recorded and flashed across the world, turning the boy into an international icon of Palestinian suffering and Israeli brutality. However, the Israelis didn’t kill Dura, and it’s not clear if he was killed instead by Palestinian gunfire or if the entire episode was staged by a French-Israeli journalist named Charles Enderlin and his Palestinian cameraman. Richard Landes, a Boston University history professor who has done extensive work on the Dura case, coined the term Pallywood to describe the “media manipulation, distortion and outright fraud by the Palestinians (and other Arabs, such as the Reuters photographer caught faking photos during the Second Lebanon War), designed to win the public-relations war against Israel.”

***

But this anti-Israeli misinformation is in fact part of a larger phenomenon. The Arabic word taqqiya is frequently used to denote the kind of dissimulation practiced by Muslims in the Middle East. Westerners tend to abuse the term, as if any Muslim who lies, for instance, about a car robbery, was practicing taqqiya, when he’s just trying to avoid arrest as any other suspect would. Taqqiya is a doctrine particular to the Shia, a Muslim minority who, because they have had much to fear over the last millennium from their more numerous Sunni neighbors, are permitted to lie under duress about their real religious sentiments. The concept, however, is a useful reminder that this is a part of the world where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can be costly.

Nonetheless, Westerners are very sensitive to the idea that some cultures do not value truth-telling in the same way that we do. For reporters it can be embarrassing if your beat is to cover, say, the Palestinian Authority, since the bulk of your work is taking dictation from frequently malevolent fabulists and having to pass it off as though you were interviewing someone actually worth speaking to. But the convention of our press corps is to treat the utterances of Muamar Qaddafi with the same respect due the prime minister of Canada. To fact-check an entire political culture is beyond the pale of Western journalism, so instead we pretend that Arab societies respect the truth as much as we do, for to say otherwise is to sit in judgment over another culture.

Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that societies where the truth is just one among many possible narratives are going to fare worse than societies where truth is valued. In Western culture, truth has been virtually deified since the Enlightenment. Beginning in the early 19th century, Middle East reformers have rightly feared that a similar enlightenment in their society, a regime of Arab or Muslim reason, would threaten the entire ruling order, including God’s place in it. If reason is supreme, and everything must fall under the scope of the empirical method, then there is nothing to protect the supernatural or divine from the same rigorous investigation. The Muslim reformers looked at the West and saw a civilization to be admired for its scientific and technological progress and pitied for its spiritual malaise. Thankfully for us, even as the crisis of faith must inevitably follow enlightenment, it is only reason that guarantees technological progress.

Arab educators and other liberal intellectuals regularly decry the lack of critical thinking in Arab education, and yet the problem is not the ability to think critically but what it is possible to think critically about. You can’t speak critically of political authorities in the Arabic-speaking Middle East or security services will break your limbs and crack your skull, as they did this week in Tunisia. Obviously, religious topics are off-limits in a region where cartoons of a prophet can touch off widespread riots. Once you have circumscribed any limits to critical thought, you have inscribed red lines throughout your society. The reason the Arab countries do not lead the world in any field is not because they are any more violent or stupid or lazy than anyone else; rather, it is because the culture is set against the very principles of reason that make success possible. It is no mystery why Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah must come to New York for medical treatment—even though his country is more than wealthy enough to build first-rate medical facilities. The culture of the kingdom rewards students for memorizing the Quran, not for scientific explorations or pushing cultural boundaries; half of the country’s population is not even allowed to drive a car.

***

Western cyber-optimists argue that information technology like satellite television and the Internet will so inundate the Arabic-speaking Middle East with images and information that it will entirely reconfigure Arab societies. But this has it exactly wrong: Culture is more powerful than technology, and how a society uses any given technology is determined by its culture. This is why no one wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to have a nuclear bomb, but no one has a problem with France’s weapons program. This is also why the Internet is not going to open the eyes of those Arabs who are instead more inclined to use it to spread disinformation. Pallywood is nothing more than the nexus where an Arab culture of lies meets Western technology.

That is to say, the Arabs are not winning an information war against Israel, nor anything else for that matter. Rather, the stories and lies they tell to delegitimize the Jewish state are part and parcel of the war that they have been waging against themselves, and with stunning success. The tragedy is that everyone knows where the Arabs are heading, because the signs of failure and self-destructiveness couldn’t be clearer—poverty, violence, despotism, illiteracy, mistreatment of women, and the persecution of confessional minorities, like Egypt’s Coptic Christian population. The Western journalists and NGOs who repeat and credential these lies are doing no honor to either the values of their own society or those of the Arabs; they’re merely helping a culture kill itself.

Yet Western observers who are used to seeing Israel and Jordan as bound by common interests are missing a new reality that has overtaken the cooperative relationships of the past: The common fear of being overwhelmed by Palestinian demography is now driving the two countries apart. As Jordan’s position on Palestinian refugees is becoming one of the more strident in the Arab world, the two countries now hold diametrically opposing views on an issue that both sides regard as truly existential, touching the raw nerves of their collective beings and promising future discord: Jordan wants large-scale repatriation; while Israel rejects the so-called right of return.

The roots of the current Jordanian view lie in the country’s domestic demographic and political situation. Palestinians and their descendants probably form a majority of the Jordanian population but are barred from meaningful political power—a situation that in turn has roots in Jordan’s own historically ambiguous relationship to Palestine. After occupying the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan formally annexed the territory, with Israeli acquiescence, in April 1950. Despite Israel’s entreaties to Jordan to refrain from intervening in the June War of 1967, the Jordanians, following their own domestic and pan-Arab calculations, decided to join Nasser’s anti-Israeli alliance but then lost the West Bank in the fighting that ensued.

Jordan’s loss of the West Bank was a historical watershed for the Hashemite kingdom and for Israel. Jordan’s manipulative control of what remained of Arab Palestine took a back seat to the PLO’s homegrown version of Palestinian nationalism. It was the PLO’s war against Israel, waged from Jordanian territory, that kept Palestinian hopes alive against the background of the humiliating 1967 defeat of the Arab states. In the process, the PLO gradually built a Palestinian state within a state in Jordan, challenged Jordanian sovereignty, and called the very existence of the Hashemite kingdom into question.

Matters came to a head in September 1970 when the Jordanians mobilized their military power to crush PLO forces in Jordan within what became known as “Black September.” Israel played a critical role in the September events by conducting military maneuvers designed to pressure the Syrians to withdraw the force they had sent to Jordan in support of the PLO. Beaten in the battlefield by the Jordanians, and deterred by the Israelis from escalating their involvement, the Syrians pulled back. By July 1971, all PLO forces were expelled from Jordan, never to return.

The Jordanian struggle with the Palestinians was a traumatic event for the Jordanian people and their collective identity. It accelerated the evolution of a much more conscious sense of Jordanianness, defined against the Palestinian “other.” The Palestinians threatened to deny the Jordanians their political patrimony, not in the West Bank but in Jordan itself. A process of Jordanization, or ardanna, was set in motion in Jordan in the early 1970s, culminating in the almost total exclusion of Palestinians from positions of influence in the country’s political elite and the military and domestic security establishments. A functional cleavage came into being in Jordan whereby original Jordanians governed and were the unchallenged masters of all spheres of political influence, while the Palestinians in the kingdom, about half of the population, maybe more, dominated the economy and the private sector.

Over the years a militant and influential ultra-nationalist Jordanian trend has emerged devoted to the eradication of Palestinian influence and, in the long run, to the return of as many Palestinians as possible from Jordan to a future state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and to Israel proper. Simultaneously with these developments in Jordan, though unrelated to them, Israel’s politics have shifted to the right. The first Likud government came to power in Israel in 1977, and governments of the right have been in power either on their own or together with Labor for much of Israel’s history since. In the past, prominent spokespersons of the Likud did not hide their conviction that Jordan—which was originally part of the British Mandate for Palestine and where people of Palestinian origin are such a large part of the population—ought to become the real Palestinian homeland. From the Jordanian point of view, such talk had the makings of an existential threat.

In response to internal demographics and their understanding of the Israeli political debate, Jordanians have steadily developed an obsessive fear of the “alternative homeland conspiracy,” or mu’amarat al-watan al-badil, and a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. In their analysis, if no Palestinian state comes into being in the West Bank and Gaza, an eventual confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians will culminate in the massive migration or expulsion of Palestinians eastward across the river to Jordan. Such “demographic aggression” would, by the sheer weight of numbers, transform Jordan into a Palestinian state. In this nightmare scenario, the Jordanians, not the Israelis nor the Palestinians, would end up as the great historical losers.

The peace treaty signed between Jordan and Israel under the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin in October 1994 drew a sigh of relief from Jordanians. The nightmare of the “Jordan is Palestine” or “alternative homeland” theory was gone forever, so they believed. Israel had recognized Jordan’s boundaries and was on the way to the formation of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, in accordance with the Oslo accords signed a year before. Henceforth it would be clear that Palestine was Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan was Jordan on the other side of the river. Moreover, peace with Israel would bring prosperity to Jordan and long-term stability to the region.

Jordan’s expectations, however, remained unfulfilled. The peace with Israel could not have been and was not a panacea for Jordan’s structural economic difficulties. Even more disturbing for the Jordanians, Israel and the Palestinians failed in their endeavor to transform the Oslo accords into a final agreement. Worse still, the Israeli-Palestinian track now seems to have reached a dead end.

After the failure of the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 and the outbreak of the second Intifada, Jordan’s nightmare scenario resurfaced as if the peace treaty with Israel had never been signed. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the consequent perennial threat of Iraqi disintegration, coupled with growing Iranian influence in Iraq and in the region as a whole, severely compounded the Jordanians’ sense of strategic suffocation. The Jordanians now found themselves sandwiched between two poles of regional instability, with the chaos of Iraq to the east and the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum to the west. This was the kind of regional predicament that they had certainly not bargained for after making peace with Israel.

Israel drew its own conclusions from the failure of Oslo. They were, primarily, that the Palestinians were not ready for an end-of-conflict agreement that did not encroach upon Israel proper. The issue with the Palestinians went beyond the occupied territories, particularly because of the Palestinian demand for the right of return for the 1948 refugees. The Israelis countered with a demand of their own, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people as a guarantee against substantive, as opposed to symbolic, refugee return. This demand was initially made by the government of Ariel Sharon in 2003 and has been repeated by all Israeli governments since. The Benjamin Netanyahu government has upped the ante by demanding such recognition as a precondition for Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state.

This new Israeli position has been stridently condemned by the Jordanians, who again see the looming specter of final refugee resettlement in Jordan as the forerunner to the “alternative homeland” scenario. Not only is the Israeli position an obstacle to an agreement with Palestinians, they believe, but it threatens to permanently saddle Jordan with a huge Palestinian population.

King Abdullah speaks often of the great urgency of a two-state solution, blaming Israel for the impasse. Jordanian ultra-nationalists, in their fear of Israeli intentions and of the Palestinian presence, go even further, emphasizing the need not only for two states but for refugee return, totally rejecting the notion of long-term resettlement in Jordan. It is they and the Lebanese who were responsible for adding to the Arab Peace Initiative, in 2002 and again in 2007, the absolute “rejection of all forms of [refugee] resettlement” (tawtin in Arabic), which made the initiative virtually impossible for Israel to accept.

For many years Jordan sought the succor of a U.S.-Israeli protective umbrella, but today King Abdullah speaks bitterly of the chilly and deteriorating relationship with Israel. And where Abdullah defiantly warned against the emergent “Shiite crescent” as late as 2004, the Jordanians now appear to be sheepishly going out of their way to pronounce their fealty to Iran, as exemplified most recently by the king’s acceptance of an official invitation to visit Tehran. Is this public eating of crow just a tactical feint of the kind that Jordan has made on countless occasions in the past, or does it portend a more significant shift toward the radical camp? The fact that the question arises at all is a measure of the change that has already taken place.

Asher Susser, a senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, is a visiting professor on modern Israel at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Cut off the head of the snake. Oh hell yeah.

Over various email chains—I am told that Tablet Magazine contributor Judith Miller first seized upon the phrase—”cut off the head of the snake” became Cut Off The Head of the Snake (what a band name!) became COTHS and became, in my hands, #COTHS.

And so, to ask the same question we asked on Twitter (you don’t follow us on Twitter? for shame): What would you #COTHS?

U.S. Embassy Cables: Saudi King Urges U.S. Strike on Iran [Guardian]
Earlier: For Bibi and Israel, Vindication

• British Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza “a prison camp” and advocated an end to the blockade while addressing a group of Turkish businessmen. [Haaretz]

• Six Israeli and one Romanian solder died in a helicopter crash in central Romania, where they were participating in joint military drills. [JTA]

• Oliver Stone apologized for his remarks yesterday about Jewish control of the media and clarified that the Holocaust was—indeed—“an atrocity.” [NYT]

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of Nextbook Press’ Betraying Spinoza) has a great essay on the brothers Singer (yup, there was another!). [The Book]

• Ian Buruma accuses Israel’s critics of holding it to a double standard. [Project Syndicate]

Nice song for a summer day:

• Turkey says it won’t appoint a new Israeli ambassador until Israel apologizes for the nine civilian deaths aboard the flotilla. [WP]

• When asked at her confirmation hearing where she was on Christmas Day (when a man tried to bomb an airplane), Elena Kagan replied: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” [JPost]

• President Obama and Saudi King Abdullah met at the White House. The topic of Israel was broached, though there were no breakthroughs. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman praises the West Bank state-building led by Prime Minister Fayyad and suggests that, when they meet next week, Obama urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to cede certain cities to the P.A. [NYT]

• Following hard upon his 25th anniversary on the show, Larry King is closing up Larry King Live, whose ratings have been in decline. He will remain a CNN contributor. [NYT]

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.

The Saudi-American relationship has traditionally been managed from the Saudi embassy, especially during the heyday of U.S.-Saudi comity presided over by Prince Bandar, a high-spirited Dallas Cowboys fan affectionately known to members of two recent administrations as Bandar Bush. “Bandar used to have strong ties with everyone in town,” explained Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Washington-based journalist with Kuwait’s Al-Rai newspaper. The prince, who once bought a Jaguar for the wife of his long-time tennis partner, Colin Powell, and was shown war plans for Iraq, was far and away Washington’s preeminent diplomat. “The new Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir,” said Hussein, “is just not as influential.” While Bandar was famous for visiting presidents at their homes and smoking cigars on the Truman Balcony, al-Jubeir has apparently visited the White House only once during the first year of the Obama presidency—as one of some 50 Muslim guests invited for Iftar, the evening meal during Ramadan.

Riyadh is in special need of a capable point man in Washington, one who can prevent Saudi Arabia’s contradictory signals from confusing the Americans. This is no mean feat, for it often seems there are as many Saudi policies and agendas as there are Saudi royals with private treasure chests. Princes like Al-Waleed Bin Talal donate hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities, such as Georgetown, to promote a positive view of Islam, while other Saudis distribute still greater sums to disseminate Wahhabism, an austere version of Islam that provides the ideological bedrock for al-Qaida.

Yet relations between states are never a one-way street, and they’re rarely the product of personal chemistry—or a lack thereof. Knowledgeable observers point to a sea change in American behavior towards the Saudis since Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush and began paying less attention to what the Saudis want. “We’re the ones who’ve changed,” said a former senior official in the Bush administration who worked closely enough with the Saudis to learn that it’s a very high-maintenance relationship. “Look around. Sure, the Saudis have a new U.S. ambassador, and Yemen is heating up, but what’s really changed for them? Nothing. The trouble in the relationship is from our side.”

We were having lunch in a noisy cafeteria close to Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. It’s the kind of place where people out of power like to have lunch. “The Saudis need to have their hands held all the time,” the former official said. “They had it for 20 years with Bandar, and their ambassadors are accustomed to access straight to the Oval. It seems that no one is caring for the Saudi account.”

Whatever side of the political divide you are on, it seems clear that Obama’s June 2009 trip to Riyadh was a disaster. After pushing the Israelis on settlements, Obama counted on securing some minor confidence-building measures from the Arabs and instead wound up with an earful from the 85-year-old Saudi king. The administration had not done its homework.

“People at the upper echelons do not seem to understand the complexity of Saudi Arabia,” the former official said. “If you come at it blindly and conventionally, then you assume that their main concern is the peace process: ‘It is a huge issue for all Arabs, so the Saudis must care.’ The Palestinian-Israeli issue was not the highest priority with the last administration, and we found that if you don’t bring it up, the Saudis won’t bring it up either. But if you do bring it up, they feel they have to talk about it, or else they will be shamed—the Saudis can’t be less pro-Palestinian than the Americans. The Obama people didn’t know this or care, and they didn’t seem to know or care what the Saudis were really concerned about. The number one issue in Riyadh is Iran.”

In addition to projecting power through their ambassador in Washington, Saudis have gilded a number of think tanks and analysts, like Chas Freeman, who in March 2009 withdrew his nomination to head the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council, citing a smear campaign by the Israel lobby. Freeman often stated that the Middle East’s single most important issue is the Arab-Israeli conflict—and yet the Saudis themselves tell anyone who will listen that their major concern is not in achieving a just resolution for the Palestinians but in countering the Iranian threat the the kingdom.

In the Middle East, Saudi policy is similarly incoherent, except for its consistent efforts to push back against what it perceives as a Shia crescent rising out of Tehran. In Yemen, the Saudis are fighting a proxy war on their Southern border against the Iranians. Yemen’s president has accused Tehran of supporting the Houthis, a band of Zaidi Shia rebels with some similarities to Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shia militia. Lebanon, too, was once a vital interest for the Saudis, and Riyadh closely worked with the Bush administration to counter Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian sponsors. Recently, however, the Saudis have jumped ship to get closer to Damascus in the conviction that this would weaken Syria’s alliance with Iran. Nothing of the sort has happened. Instead Syria and Iran have helped Hezbollah strengthen its grip over Lebanon.

It is possible to argue that abandoning the Saudis isn’t such a bad thing. It’s not clear, after all, why the United States should desire an alliance with a country that executes “witches” and lashes adulterers. Women are treated as second-class citizens, as are members of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, who happen to inhabit the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Yet even after the Sept. 11 attacks and the revelation that 15 of the hijackers carried Saudi passports, the Saudis, like the Israelis, enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Bush White House. According to one Riyadh-watcher, Vice President Dick Cheney, who managed the Saudi file, rarely returned from any trip abroad without a stopover in the Kingdom to consult with and calm the King’s executive office, the Royal Diwan. There the Americans learned to defer to their hosts—and to eat quickly, for once King Abdullah had picked at the food during his one circumambulation of the buffet table, it was time to get down to business.

Obama, despite his famous bow to Abdullah, has hardly shown much deference to the Saudis. That raises the interesting possibility that the Obama administration has decided to reevaluate Washington’s regional commitments on a grander scale than has previously been imagined. Most observers have focused on Obama’s Israel policy, a strategy premised on the State Department’s conventional approach to the Arab-Israeli issue—to get tough with Jerusalem on settlements and punish right-wingers like Netanyahu. Perhaps Obama is freezing out Riyadh, too.

A Saudi freeze-out might be welcome in some quarters, especially among those who have moral qualms about America’s other “special relationship” in the Middle East. Yet it carries some of the same risks as Obama’s failed “get-tough” policy with Netanyahu—a situation in which American influence is reduced and the threat of independent action by American allies is increased. “The Saudi line,” the former official said, “was this: ‘Americans, are you going to do anything about our number one issue? If not, we will go our own road.’”

Wherever there’s an American vacuum, the Saudis are apt to stumble into trouble. Now that American troops are scheduled to withdraw from Iraq, Riyadh and Syria share an interest in bringing down Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, whose Interior Ministry has named both countries as suspected supporters of recent attacks. “This is what happens,” says Tony Badran, a Middle East analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, “when the Americans leave the Saudis out on their own.”

Distance between Washington and the Saudi Kingdom allows Riyadh to pursue policies that are dangerous to U.S. interests and deadly to American citizens. “For the Saudis,” the former official said, “going their own road could mean making a deal with the Iranians, getting their own nuclear deterrent, or backing Sunni fighters such as al-Qaida. Or it could mean doing all of those things.”

Riyadh’s need to be protected from Iran is one way to understand the recent uptick in al-Qaida activities coming out of Yemen, where the Saudis are really fighting on two fronts. One front is a conventional counterinsurgency waged by the hapless Saudi military against the Houthi rebels. The other is a campaign to combat Iranian influence by dumping cash into al-Qaida bank accounts, and there is evidence that some of the Saudi money flowing into Yemen is not being used for its intended purposes. In October 2009, for instance, an al-Qaida operative tried to kill a Saudi counterterrorism official with explosives hidden in his underwear.

Al-Qaida picks up when and where Saudi money is dispensed. When the cash flow is curtailed, the jihadi handout lines move elsewhere. If you handhold the Saudis, they can be helpful partners. Let them wander off on their own, however, and you pay in blood.

Lee Smith is the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.

But it’s worth noting that the J Street crowd has, this week, appeared wholly uninterested in the minutiae and insider baseball that animates the Hill. At last night’s big $250-a-plate gala dinner, the 800-plus attendees cheered when recognizable members of Congress in attendance were named—Barney Frank, Keith Ellison—but kept up their chatter as lesser pols were thanked. And few people in the room seemed to notice when speaker Steve Clemons—who directs the foreign-policy program at the New America Foundation, a progressive think tank—let slip that Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican who gave the evening’s keynote address, had been tapped to co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board. (Though in fairness, they may not have been paying attention in part because Clemons walked onstage wearing a paper mask of Vice President Joe Biden’s face, in a Beltway Halloween joke that went over like a lead weight).

Attendees did, however, sit rapt as King Abdullah of Jordan congratulated their efforts via a video link. And the audience whooped and cheered later in the evening when one of J Street’s initial funders, New York attorney Victor Kovner, accepted the organization’s inaugural “Pursuer of Peace” award. Kovner, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, was introduced with a video tribute that included photographs of Kovner standing with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (not both in the same photograph, though). In his acceptance, he invoked both the U.S. Constitution and the prophet Isaiah as he talked about making sure that the state of Israel lives up to Jewish values, rather than just being a state full of Jews. “What we American Jews owe to Israel, what we owe to our friends and family in Israel, is our best advice,” he said, to loud applause. And then he wound up with a finale worthy of Elie Wiesel, repeatedly intoning “never again” as he said that, thanks to J Street’s existence, members of Congress would be free of fear when taking positions in favor of Palestinian rights, and the president would have the room to maneuver in order to strike a peace deal. Now that the conference is over, of course, the big question facing the organization is this: what next?

Hagel to Lead Obama’s Intelligence Oversight Panel [The Cable]