It is evident that American ties to Israel have not kept most Arab states from tightening their ties to the United States in the Iraq crisis. These include the military ties which, in the conventional wisdom, no Arab government could accept lest it be instantly struck down by an enraged Arab public.
Any Arab military ties with Israel and certainly any Arab strategic reliance on Israel are commonly regarded as unthinkable, a fatal confession of the Arab order's inability to manage its sovereign affairs. Still, it is plain that if things came to a certain pass, Israel would join the battle against Iraq. While it would be acting for its own goals, it would also be reducing a gross threat to the Arab establishment - a threat that Arabs were unable to reduce by themselves. Arabs would storm, and privately be relieved, as they were when Israel took out the reactor that otherwise might already have put nuclear weapons in Saddam Hussein's hands.Political discretion obscures but does not erase strategic truths. The Israelis have no formal relationship of strategic cooperation with the Arabs as they do with the Americans, but they have an informal one of greater ultimate value to the two sides. Inherently their military forces are linked: Arabs constitute the first regional line of defense against Iraq, Israelis the last.
The statesman's problem becomes how to use the strategic reality to shape a new political reality between Israel and the Arabs. Already, the two sides share a common dedication to stability in the area, a common fear of radical regimes, a common reach for association with the industrialized democracies. This adds up to a basis for cooperation far sturdier than what is available to most sets of nations. What they lack are only political and economic relations - the ties of daily life.
In his suspect fashion, Saddam has already weighed in - with a proposal that Israel withdraw from Arab lands at once and without political recompense to initiate a comprehensive settlement of regional disputes. His proposal is a non-starter, but deeper currents are flowing. In many minds the view flourishes that, however the different Middle East occupations came to be, they should all be terminated. A rough symmetry fairly inclines moderate Arabs to expect American cooperation in ending Israeli occupation of the West Bank in order to balance off their cooperation in ending Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.
Here one needs to get past debating points. The West Bank occupation is different. It came about not by unprovoked aggression as in Kuwait but by Israeli response to a gratuitous attack by Jordan's King Hussein in 1967. The implication, however, is not that West Bank occupation is legitimate and should be extended but that it should be ended in its own way. Iraq's occupation should end by withdrawal; nobody owes Baghdad anything. Israel's occupation should end by negotiation; Arabs owe Israel peace.
What sort of negotiation? I think serious people now have to acknowledge that the Iraqi aggression - the whole Iraqi phenomenon - lends great force to the Israeli insistence that peace requires not just an Israeli-Palestinian settlement but the commitment of the Arab hinterland states to normal relations with Israel.