The truth is, a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must include the security and well-being of the Palestinian people as well as that of the Israelis, not only the one or the other. The U.S. will have to bring a greater degree of fairness to Israeli-Arab conflict diplomacy. Ultimately, U.S. President George Bush’s open bias in favor of Israel, rather than acting as an impartial mediator in the conflict, is not going to bring the end of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, as he predicted during the Annapolis Peace Process. U.S. impartiality will only undermine its own credibility, and thus its power to mediate in conflicts, whether the Israeli-Palestine one or others elsewhere.

Mediators are ineffective unless they are credible. Without that credibility, it has hard to imagine how the U.S. will be able to protect its interests abroad or, even its friends’ interests for that matter. An important element of friendship is the ability to criticize one’s friends when they act in ways that endanger themselves. The U.S. friendship with Israel must include criticizing those Israeli actions that are patently wrong, those that endanger not only others’, but its own, security.

U.S. Senator Barack Obama recently said, quite correctly, that being pro-Israel cannot mean adopting the hard-line policies of the Likud, which the Bush administration appears to have done. But the West must act with the same vigour it did a decade ago to stop Serbia’s excessive revenge attacks against Albanian rebels in Kosovo. Each brutal Israeli military attack, and continuing inaction by the West and especially the U.S., chips away Palestinian confidence in peace negotiations.