American policies in the Middle East fall into three broad categories. The first is support for Israel. Even though an ocean of ink has been spilled trying to show this is a major source of Arab hatred toward America, the results are unconvincing. Few of the real problems that plague the region have anything to do with Israel, and most Arabs know it. From the slaughterhouse of the Iraq/Iran war, to the invasion of Kuwait, to Syria’s continuing subjugation of Lebanon, to the failed experiments in Arab socialism, to the daily crunching of human beings under the heels of tyrants in practically every country of the Arab world — these are Muslim disasters, not Jewish ones. While Israel is certainly a source of irritation and a focus of anger, Bernard Lewis’s theory probably comes closet to the truth:
[Israel] is, so to speak, the licensed grievance — the only one that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger.[ii]
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