No merit in delusional approach to M.E.

• Israel may be a part of the problem, but its implacable foes cannot be part of a reasonable solution

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THE report of the Iraq Study Group has excited a lot of attention in the US and across the world. A few months earlier, an article by two academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, excited almost as much attention.

The article asserted that US policy towards the Middle East in general and Israel in particular was primarily run by US domestic politics and especially by the activities of the "Israel lobby".

This lobby, they asserted, had diverted US policy away from US national interest. Because of the Israel lobby, the US "had adopted policies that jeopardised its own security in order to advance the interests of another state".

Predictably, the article provoked a firestorm of charge and counter-charge. Accusations of anti-Semitism were hurled and rejected. Hurt was taken and inflicted. But the interesting thing was that the debate was mostly about whether the Israel lobby was guilty as charged.

The most important part of the article was the assertion that Israel was "a strategic liability" and "a strategic burden" to the US. It argued that Israel "is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states". Indeed, it states that the US "has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around".

Mearsheimer and Walt make no secret of what they think should motivate US foreign policy: "The US national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy." If that is so and they believe Israel is a strategic liability, and is in good part responsible for the terrorist threat to the US, what is the only logical conclusion? To dump Israel.

Mearsheimer and Walt are brave because they must have known the firestorm they would bring down on themselves. But they were not so brave as to follow the inexorable logic to its outcome. Instead, they pay rather lukewarm homage to Israel's right to exist and make even more lukewarm criticism of terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, terrorism that they explicitly say is "not surprising" in the light of Israel's bad behaviour.

So is this just an academic spat, the lions of the punditrocracy roaring at each other across the river?

Not really. Their article is basically saying that Israel is the cause of US troubles in the Middle East and that Israel is just no longer worth it.

These sentiments are spreading. The Iraq Study Group follows this line in much more politic terms. It argues that the US "will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless (it) deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts", including direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel, Lebanon and Syria.

All this seems unexceptionable. Many assert the absolute centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian issue to everything else. Increasingly, it has become routine to blame Israel for failing to achieve a solution.

It is true that Israel is going to have to return to the 1967 borders, remove the outrageous settlements it has established in the West Bank and find a way to live with a viable Palestinian state. It has to stop fiddling at the margins. Israel's failings are important. But they are nothing like as important as this central inescapable fact: the people on the other side of the negotiation have declared again and again that even if Israel accepts the 1967 borders, they will not.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, al-Qa'ida and any number of other terrorist groups have said flatly that they will accept nothing except the disappearance of Israel. To them there is nothing else to negotiate.

Mearsheimer and Walt are naive or dismissive of this inescapable fact. "Some Islamic extremists harbour unrealistic hopes or make outrageous references to erasing Israel from the map of time," they write. Tell that to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who constantly makes such references. Or to the powerful Islamic militias in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and in Iraq.

They don't see this as outrageous or unrealistic. This is their reality, their reason for being. The reason Iran recently hosted a Holocaust denial conference was because, in its view, eliminating the Holocaust as a historical fact undermines a key rationale for Israel's existence.

The Iraq Study Group, for its part, says Israel should hold talks only with those who accept Israel's right to exist. That excludes Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, al-Qai'da and many others.

To deal without them solves nothing because the only deal they will make is one that wipes out Israel.

There is therefore no prospect of a comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue in the foreseeable future that does not involve the eventual disappearance of the state of Israel. No matter how much Mearsheimer and Walt protest, the logic of their position is that this is something that the US should be prepared to accept. The same is true of the Iraq Study Group's analysis.

Now, I don't think the two academics or the members of the Iraq Study Group are in fact advocating such an outcome at all. So, instead of going on and on about what is truly a delusional goal in the short to medium term - a real comprehensive solution to the Israel-Palestine issue - they and we would all be better off working out the answer to a different set of questions.

How can US goals and the goals of free, peaceful, prosperous nations and societies in the Middle East be achieved without a solution to the Palestinian issue?

And if they can't be achieved without such a solution, what do we do to protect our interests and advance peace, prosperity and freedom in the region while we wait for a change of heart on the part of Israel's implacable enemies?

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps deep down people feel that Israel is really just too much trouble for all of us. If that is where we have got to, then the curtain is falling on the courage and values of the West.