America's roller-coaster Mideast policy

In his book The Audacity of Hope, US President Barack Obama argued that the fundamental task of politics was to reflect common good. He seems audacious enough to apply the same principle to the US peace-making endeavour in the Middle East.

In his much anticipated speech from Cairo on June 4, Obama plans to send the same message as a basis for building relationships with the Muslim world, promoting peace in the region, and achieving a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Adopting policies that reflect the common good has not been an obvious feature of US Middle East policy.

Shortly after the Second World War, Washington's main foreign policy preoccupation was to contain the Soviet Union in its new borders and prevent it from exporting communism.

There was another consideration that greatly influenced US foreign policy, particularly regarding the Palestine question: the already influential American Jewish organisations.

When Washington was preparing to vote for the United Nations resolution recommending the partition of Palestine in 1947, a group of American ambassadors serving in the Middle East tried to dissuade president Harry Truman from supporting partition; they argued that it would infuriate the Arab world and harm US interests in the region. Truman responded: "Gentlemen, I have hundreds of thousands of Jewish constituents to worry about."

This feature of US domestic politics remained constant to the present day.

President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles' Manichean view of the world coloured his approach to the Middle East. He tried to persuade Arab regimes to fear the Soviet Union and join the Baghdad Pact for collective self-defence against the perceived Soviet threat.

Egyptian president Jamal Abdul Nasser opposed the Baghdad Pact and promoted non-alignment; he famously exposed the false choices presented by Dulles: he rhetorically asked how he could worry about the Soviet Union thousands of miles away when Israel was in his backyard holding a gun at his head.

England and France secretly colluded with Israel - probably with Washington's knowledge - to remove Nasser. The three countries attacked Egypt in 1956. But the international outcry and especially the Soviet Union's vigorous protest led Eisenhower to pressure the three countries into withdrawing.

President John F. Kennedy started a series of correspondence with Nasser and seemed prepared to build a relationship with the Arab world based on mutual respect; but fate intervened and robbed him of his life.

Under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Washington became the principal military and economic backer of Israel, replacing France, whose president Charles De Gaulle had imposed a military embargo on Israel after it attacked Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967.

Washington saw Israel as the region's Sparta, imposing stability by force and acting as the guardian of American interests in the region.

UN Security Council Resolution 242 marked Arab acceptance of Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories.

The 1969 Rogers Plan marked American involvement in peacemaking in the region. Nasser accepted the plan but Israel did not. The plan was eventually torpedoed by Rogers' arch-rival in the White House - Henry Kissinger - president Richard Nixon's security council adviser.

Kissinger was content with the status quo until the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched an offensive against the Israeli occupying forces in 1973 with surprising initial success.

The Ronald Reagan years were characterised by a closer alliance with Israel, support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a marked disinterest in peace making and astonishing ignorance on Reagan's part about the region.

President George Bush and his secretary of state James Baker promised a comprehensive approach to the conflict in return for Arab support in ejecting Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991. After the war they threatened to withhold credit unless Israel came to an international conference. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir had to be dragged to the Madrid peace conference.

President Bill Clinton hosted Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the signing of the Oslo Agreement in 1993. But he failed to follow it up and it eventually died.

George W. Bush recognised the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own, but he allowed the Israelis to continue to build colonies, and gradually turn the future Palestinian state into a distant and unrealisable vision.

Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have pointedly told the Israelis what Bush failed to say: that Washington wants all colony-building stopped, and is firmly committed to the two-state solution.

Washington even voted for a UN Security Council Resolution sponsored by Russia that went beyond Resolution 242 and reaffirmed the backing of the international community for the two-state solution.

Remarkably, US officials have even said that Washington would like Israel to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - a move The New York Times described as "unthinkable a year ago".

- Adel Safty's new book 'Might Over Right: How the Zionists Took Over Palestine', is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, and published by Garnet, England, 2009.