PERSPECTIVE ON THE PERSIAN GULF : Strategic Ally, Strategic Myth : Preserving Israel is worth our support, but the Likud government is a costly drag on our current policy needs.

Some politicians in Israel have been reported as crowing at the sight of Arab confronting Arab in the Persian Gulf. They are shortsighted to do so. For the current crisis has revealed as false not only the myth of Arab unity, but also a myth from which Israel’s present Likud Party leaders have profited hugely over the past decade: that Israel is a net provider of strategic benefits to the United States.

In the Reagan years, this myth crowded out the more “moral” kinds of reasoning, about a commitment to shared democratic values and so on, that traditionally underlay American generosity to Israel. Most members of Congress routinely give the “strategic ally” myth strong vocal support--particularly at election time. But now, as Saddam Hussein’s aggression presents the industrialized world with its most crucial challenge in recent years, it is clear that the strategic ties with Israel that were tightened into a knot under President Reagan have proven at best irrelevant to the American campaign in the gulf, and at worst, seriously detrimental to it.

In the campaign to reverse Iraq’s aggression, Arab allies old and new have far more of value to offer than Israel. True, in doing so, these states’ leaders are pursuing their own interests. But their readiness to join the campaign is also in our interest. We cannot confront Hussein without Arab allies.

But the Arabs’ readiness to join us is directly undercut by Iraq’s ability to point to the United States as closely tied to Israel. For if, as Clausewitz said, war is an extension of politics by other means, then the obverse is also true. Saddam Hussein can undermine our position in the Middle East far more effectively through the political means of appealing to anti-American sentiment than he ever could through a traditional military engagement.

The unfortunate strength of anti-American feeling in the Arab world stems principally from the unswerving financial and political support our government has given Israel in recent years. That support might not have rankled too much if American envoys could have said that it led to Israeli flexibility in the Arab-Israeli peace process. They could not. American aid to Israel--far higher, on a per capita basis, than that to any other country--was met with a strengthening of Likud’s nyet on all aspects of the peace process. Yet Israel managed to fend off any linkage between American aid and the Likud government’s responsiveness to our government’s concerns about the peace process.

How did Likud achieve such a remarkable political feat? Precisely by exploiting the myth that Israel contributed more to the United States through the strategic relationship than itreceived in return. The Likud argument, which too many in the Reagan Administration bought, thus held that downgrading the relationship in any way would hurt Washington more than it hurt Jerusalem. What baloney.

As we face the challenge in the gulf, the hollowness of Likud’s “strategic ally” myth is clearer than ever before. The most we can demand of the Israelis now, and we certainly should insist on this, is that they keep out of the present conflict and allow those who are able--Egypt, Syria and the rest--to get on with the job of reversing Iraq’s aggression.

The ending of the “strategic ally” myth does not mean that, in the future, American commitment to Israel’s existence as a democratic state at peace with its neighbors should be any weaker. But the moral core of that commitment needs to be restated, as does our country’s determination to reforge the link that Reagan broke, between the level of our support for Israel and Israel’s policies toward its neighbors.

It is a pity that 10 years of American timidity in Arab-Israeli peacemaking have given Saddam Hussein such a powerful political weapon to wield against us in the Arab world. His attempts to portray himself as the defender of Arab interests against Israel should be rejected as cheap demagoguery. But as we send American troops into the Arabian desert, we need to define our core national interests in the Middle East. Supporting the economy of the Western world, including the stability of its oil supplies, is one of them. So is support for a democratic Israel. But support for Likud’s expansionist vision of Israel is not an American goal. In the ongoing diplomacy of the crisis, that will need to be restated.