Regional Outlook: Middle East : Gulf Crisis Forces U.S. and Israel to Re-Evaluate Strategic Ties : Some critics claim new evidence that the Jewish state is now a threat to America’s posture in the Middle East.

WASHINGTON —  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Here is the United States, its forces in the Middle East facing the threat of combat, looking to the Soviet Union for support, while telling its longtime ally Israel to remain on the sidelines.

No wonder the five-week Persian Gulf crisis has raised new questions about the future of the U.S.-Israel “strategic relationship,” which American and Israeli policy-makers once portrayed among other things as a bulwark against Soviet ambitions in the Middle East.

With Moscow no longer perceived as a threat to American interests and with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein trying desperately to use longstanding U.S. ties with Jerusalem as a wedge to sway Arab opinion to his side in the face-off over his takeover of Kuwait, some critics even claim new evidence that Israel has become more of a strategic liability than an asset in the Mideast.

So far, the crisis seems to have goaded officials in both countries to re-evaluate the basis for their relationship, concluding that it is far more important and complex than a simple military alliance. Some say the whole strategic cooperation argument was in some ways a fiction all along and that the current crisis has only exposed that fact. In any case, events in the gulf are bound to have some impact on what has been America’s closest relationship in the region.

The Bush Administration has said repeatedly that U.S. support for Israel is undiminished either by the crisis or by U.S.-Soviet detente.

“The notion that Israel’s non-participation in the gulf disproves the value of strategic cooperation is just silly,” a key State Department official said.

There is substantial evidence that Israel has done everything that was asked of it in the gulf crisis. That the U.S. government’s most important request was for Israel to avoid high-profile action does not diminish the importance of the Israeli role.

U.S. policy-makers believe that the Arab countries currently cooperating with Washington would find it awkward to continue if Israel weighed into the crisis. These officials believe Arab public opinion would not stand for Saudi Arabia and other Arab states cooperating with Israel, even against Iraq’s blatant aggression.

“The Israelis could only complicate our handling of the crisis should they intercede,” said a former U.S. diplomat with broad experience in the Middle East. “It would be very difficult for the Saudis and the gulf states to be linked in the same operation with Israel.”

Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy acknowledged the delicacy of the Israeli position after a recent meeting with Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

“Israel is indeed keeping a low profile, not because of Israel not being an important factor on the scene and not because . . . there is no danger lurking and threatening Israel,” Levy said through an interpreter. “Israel stands firm . . . does fully identify with the U.S.A.”

For his part, Baker said, “The United States government is deeply appreciative of the approach which the government of Israel has taken during this very sensitive and delicate period.”

Martin Indyk, executive director of the staunchly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government demonstrated its support of U.S. objectives by warning Iraq that if it moves troops into Jordan, Israel will respond militarily.

“Israel’s drawing the line in the sand at the Jordan-Iraq border to deter any aggression by Saddam Hussein against Jordan was part of strategic cooperation,” Indyk said. “In this crisis, there has been a strategic role for Israel. But its essential role has been to cooperate (with the United States) by staying out of it.”

According to William B. Quandt, who was the National Security Council’s Middle East expert at the time, the concept of strategic cooperation grew out of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s fear that a Gentile nation like the United States would never come to the assistance of the Jewish state unless it was motivated by self-interest. Begin believed that the only way to be sure of American support was to show Washington that Israel would be an asset in a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Quandt said President Jimmy Carter resisted Begin’s proposal for formal U.S.-Israel strategic ties, but President Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor, embraced the proposal.

Although most of the details of the plan, approved in 1983, have been kept secret, the pact is assumed to have offered Israeli bases, hospitals and other facilities to the United States in the event of U.S.-Soviet hostilities in the Middle East. It also was assumed that Israel would commit its own potent army and air force if the situation warranted. In exchange, the United States pledged to continue its generous economic and military aid and to provide needed political support.

“The strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship has never been based on the strategic alliance,” said Richard W. Murphy, who was assistant secretary of state for the Near East in the Reagan Administration. “That was an embellishment.”

Murphy, now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the relationship has always been based on “shared values with the only democratic state in the region, memories of the (Nazi) Holocaust and American admiration for the establishment of the Israeli state.”

Ever since former President Harry S. Truman extended U.S. recognition to the newly created Israeli state almost four decades ago, U.S. officials have cited reasons similar to those listed by Murphy as the basis for the relationship. In effect, the emerging U.S.-Soviet detente has restored that rationale to the forefront despite Begin’s fear that it was too sentimental to last.

“The end of the Cold War does not change the basic relationship,” Quandt, now a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, said. “Only the rhetoric must change. The so-called strategic asset argument must be changed.”

Quandt said the basis for U.S. support for the Israeli military establishment was always intended to keep Israel strong enough to deter an attack from any Arab enemy and, should deterrents fail, to win the conflict without having to ask for American troops. He said Washington also wants to keep up Israel’s conventional military strength to prevent the Israelis from “overtly displaying their nuclear capability.”

All of those objectives are clearly in the interest of both countries, Quandt said.

Nevertheless, the gulf crisis--even if it ends peacefully--will produce permanent changes in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. The U.S.-Israel relationship cannot escape some impact.

“The days when Americans looked at the Middle East strictly through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict are over,” said Judith Kipper, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

She said the Bush Administration failed to adopt a hard-line policy toward Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait because Hussein seemed to support U.S.-backed efforts to foster an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

“We thought that Iraq was a moderate state because they were going along with (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak’s 10-point plan,” she said. “The Administration was so anxious to get the Israel-Palestinian dialogue going that they winked at all the signs that Iraq was radical and dangerous.”

In the months preceding the crisis, the Administration persisted in its efforts to smooth the relationship with Iraq despite the repeated objections of Israel and its American supporters.

For the immediate future, however, the U.S.-Israel relationship seems to be secure.

“I don’t look for the strategic role of Israel to be weakened at all by this crisis,” said Samuel W. Lewis, former U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv. “We never had only one friend in the Middle East. We have always had important relations with moderate Arab states. That will not change.”