For Israel, the long overdue message is that its future in the Middle East does not lie in strategic alliances with the region’s non-Arab powers, but in reconciling itself with the Arab world. In the 1960’s, David Ben-Gurion’s fatalistic pessimism about the possibility of ever reaching a peace settlement with the Arab countries led him to forge an “Alliance of the Periphery” with the non-Arab countries in the outer circle of the Middle East – Iran, Ethiopia, and Turkey (he also dreamed of having Lebanon’s Maronite community as part of that alliance).