In present form, it looks as if Israel might need another six decades to grasp that Middle East security is indivisible — in other words, that its own security cannot be won at the cost of the insecurity of its neighbors.

For all its achievements over the past six decades, Israel has failed one crucial test: integration into and peaceful co-existence with the Arab world around it. Although it claims to want security above all else, it has refused to take the steps necessary to ensure it. How can this puzzle be explained?

Israel has managed to sign peace treaties with two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, and has shadowy relations with one or two others, but it has not made peace with the Arab peoples. On the contrary, for much of Arab and Muslim opinion, Israel remains an object of hate, a pariah state whose legitimacy is more than ever contested.

There seem to be at least three main reasons for this unhappy state of affairs: Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians; its insistence on military dominance over the whole Middle East; and its close alliance with a belligerent America.

As is well known, Israel’s birth in 1947-48 was accompanied by the forced expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The massacres and other crimes committed then — the massive seizure of land and property, the destruction of a whole society — might have been forgiven, and a reconciliation effected, had Israel recognized its responsibility for creating the refugee problem, and had it sought to compensate the refugees, and allow some of them back to their homes.

Instead — and especially since 1967, when it occupied the remaining parts of Arab Palestine — Israel has sought to wipe Arab Palestine off the map altogether. It has settled, and continues to settle, hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, thereby ruling out any realistic possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its relentless land hunger has been accompanied by a shocking indifference to Arab life. Not content with 78 per cent of historic Palestine, Israel seems determined to seize more, and still more, land.

Israel has, in fact, behaved as if it believed that its own state-building enterprise would risk being undercut and de-legitimized by any concession to Palestinian rights or Palestinian nationalism.

The result of this stubborn intransigence and cruel oppression — in blatant violation of international law — has been to radicalize the Palestinians, their despair finding expression in the first and second intifadas, in suicide bombings, in Qassam rockets, and in the emergence in Gaza of an armed Islamic movement, HAMAS — not unlike Hizbullah, its sister movement in Lebanon, itself the product of Israel’s invasion and long occupation of the south of that country.

Far from achieving peace and security, Israel finds itself confronted on its immediate borders by two well-implanted resistance movements, determined to force it to accept a degree of mutual deterrence — indeed, even the tentative beginnings of a balance of power, such as the Arab countries, for all their wealth and weight of population, have never managed to achieve with the Jewish state.

From its very beginnings, Israel has sought to dominate the region by force of arms. This was the principle on which David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, built the state. Under his leadership, the Jewish community in Palestine, numbering in 1947-48 a mere 630,000 people — largely the remnants of European Jewry — managed to transform themselves into the most powerful military force in the Middle East. They smashed the Palestinians, and defeated the weak, divided and disorganized Arab world.

The idea took root among Israel’s leaders that for their country to be strong, the Arabs had to be weak. Accordingly, Israel has sought to undermine, contain and destabilize its neighbors, whenever and wherever it could.

The Zionists enjoyed complicit relations with the Emir Abdallah of Transjordan from as far back as 1921, a relationship that Israel was able to continue with Abdallah’s successors in Amman.

Israel sought alliances with Turkey, the Shah’s Iran, and Ethiopia against the Arabs — the so-called “periphery theory.” It backed the Kurds against Baghdad, and the southern Sudanese against Khartoum. It managed to remove Egypt from the Arab military line-up by a separate peace. It sought, with repeated wars, to bring Lebanon into its orbit in order to checkmate Syria. It secretly armed Iran against Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Its biggest triumph has been not just to forge a close relationship with the United States — a relationship in which American Jews play a crucial role — but to influence American Middle East policy to the extent that the Israeli tail has often seemed to wag the American dog.

It is doubtful that the United States would have attacked Iraq had it not been for relentless pressure from pro-Israeli neo-cons, anxious to remove any potential threat to Israel from the east — the very same people who are today urging America to attack Iran, on the pretext that Iran’s nuclear program poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.

It would take a miracle — and a radical change of policy — for Israel to live at peace in the region. It would require it to withdraw from Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territory; to accept a balance of power with its neighbors, rather than always seeking supremacy over them; and, to stop inciting the United States, and indeed the whole of the Western world, against the Arabs and Islam.

In present form, it looks as if Israel might need another six decades to grasp that Middle East security is indivisible — in other words, that its own security cannot be won at the cost of the insecurity of its neighbors.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.  Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale