Acid foreign policy test

The struggle in Afghanistan and Pakistan ("AfPak") is President Obama's most urgent foreign policy and national security priority.

Taliban insurgents, with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s slung over their shoulders walk the streets of Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, unchallenged by police or army. The pro al Qaeda Taliban insurgency in Pakistan proper spread to within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital of one of the world's eight nuclear powers. Pakistani helicopter gunships are now in action against homegrown guerrillas.

In the panoply of urgent crises, Iran ranks second and could displace AfPak before year's end. Several diplomatic hurdles - six-power talks with Iran and the U.S. at the same table for the first time in 30 years; then, if Tehran doesn't abandon its nuclear ambitions, tougher sanctions that won't be followed by either Russia or China - before Iran moves to the front burner.

But the Middle East remains President Obama's magnificent obsession. He believes a Palestinian state is something he can make happen in his first year in office. Jordan's King Abdullah II was the first visitor from the region as an official White House guest at Blair House across the street from the White House.

For the Jordanian monarch, a two-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis became increasingly urgent since Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel April 1. King Abdullah has long known that Israel's hard-liners dream of turning Jordan into a Palestinian state (where the population is already 65 percent Palestinian) and keeping the West Bank as a buffer state with the Jordan River as the final frontier.

For Mr. Netanyahu, nothing is less urgent than a Palestinian state. He also knows that as long as Israel remains in Iran's nuclear cross hairs, Mr. Obama is not about to make aid to Israel conditional on the acceptance of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

Even if conditional aid to Israel were politically possible in the United States, which it most certainly is not, Jewish settlements in the West Bank - now some 300,000 Jews in 140 settlements - that straddle the region's water aquifer have made it physically impossible to establish a "viable and contiguous" Palestinian state.

George Mitchell, who is Mr. Obama's special envoy for a Middle East settlement, will continue to spin his wheels following a road map for a road no longer on the map. Israel's new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a bull who carries his own china shop, agrees with Mr. Netanyahu that any commitment for a Palestinian state made by previous Israeli governments is null and void.

The next Middle East leader in Washington for a tete-a-tete with Mr. Obama will be Hosni Mubarak, 80, who has led Egypt since President Anwar Sadat's assassination three decades ago. But poverty (per capital income $1,250) coupled with demography (81 million, up from 3 million when Napoleon invaded in 1798) and the need to create almost 1 million new jobs a year have made Mr. Mubarak's succession one of the least desirable positions in the Middle East.

Undeterred by the renewed radical vigor of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Mubarak's son Gamal, 39, is grooming himself for his father's succession. He has painstakingly collected powerful new friends on both sides of the Atlantic.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate whose West Bank fiefdom is losing ground daily to the radicals and extremists of Hamas, has little credibility left. As Mr. Obama, like his predecessors since the Camp David accords, concludes that his vision of a Palestinian state in the West Bank is more mirage than reality, he will have to focus on the next big challenge in the region - Iran's nuclear facilities and the determination of the Netanyahu-Lieberman tandem to bomb them into postponing any plans the mullahs have for a nuclear capability.

For Israel's new hard-line government, Iran's theocracy is Nazi Germany redux. As long as that existential threat to Jews hangs over the region, there is no reason Israel should make concessions to the Palestinians, now increasingly influenced by Hamas, one of Iran's surrogates, along with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iranian television news was not reassuring. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are shown disassembling and reassembling G3 infantry rifles - with their feet, blindfolded, in 20 seconds (according to the reporter). And a bellicose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a U.N. conference designed to combat racism, called Israel "a cruel and repressive racist regime," provoking a mass exit of diplomats from the 23 European nations attending the conference. The United States and half a dozen other European nations had already boycotted the Iranian firebrand's talk.

Palestinian and other Middle Eastern movers and shakers behind the scenes have been saying the two-state solution effectively consigns Palestinians to perpetual neocolonial poverty. And the movement for a one-state solution for Palestine has been gathering momentum behind the scenes.

"One-staters" now argue it is better for Palestinians to be poor, marginalized and discriminated against citizens of a post-industrialized, wealthy, democratic state (Israel), with the possibility of advancement within a democracy, than being the stalemated citizens of an undeveloped Third World state led by a tyrannical elite (the Palestine Liberation Organization).

Lama Abu Odeh, a Palestinian-American professor and author teaching at Georgetown University, says: "The demand for citizenship in the state of Israel provides a golden opportunity for Palestinians to make the PLO/PA historically redundant, and through the discourse of citizenship lay claim directly to the wealth they produce for the Israeli state."

There is nothing more disarming of Israel, writes Mr. Abu Odeh, "than the Palestinians who scream, 'We want to be citizens of the state that governs our lives, taxes our wealth, and annexes our land and gives nothing in return.' " The legions of experts who have staked their careers on a two-state solution cannot suddenly switch gears. But it would behoove them to pay close attention to the one-state advocates now postulating below the radar.