Marc Lynch believes the Arab Spring has pulled the rug out from under America's Israel strategy:
The United States should support Israel and help it as a real friend. America's ties to Israel are deep, at the societal level as well as at the military and intelligence levels, and for all the turbulence in the relationship friends should not be abandoned lightly. But the relationship will have to change if the U.S. hopes to navigate the new Arab public.
Put bluntly, it has never been more important to America that Israel solve its Palestine problem, but it has never been less likely that Israel will be able or willing to do so. The old dodges and workarounds simply will not work anymore. Decades of American policy have been based on the ability to manage the tension between its alliance with Israel and its alliance with the Arabs through the pretense of a never-ending peace process and a reliance on dictators to crush public opposition. With dictators gone or under pressure, and the peace process dead, such a strategy cannot be sustained.
(Photo: Lebanese and Syrian demonstrators burn Israeli (R) and Iranian flags during a weekly protest against the Syrian regime in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on March 23, 2012. Monitors say more than 9,100 people have been killed in the Syrian unrest that started with peaceful protests in March 2011 before turning into an armed revolt, faced with a brutal crackdown which has cost dozens of lives each day. By STR/AFP/Getty Images.)
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