The upcoming U.S.-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis has been widely dismissed as a meaningless encounter between a corrupt Israeli prime minister with single-digit public support and the bumbling leader of a kleptocratic gang who can barely control the three square miles around his office.

Yet the political framework in which the Annapolis meeting will take place is dramatically different from previous American attempts at mediation, in a way that is likely to have an important effect on Israeli security and on the chances for a lasting peace in the Middle East. It also underlines the extent to which the Bush administration’s failed Palestine policy has become the mirror image of the administration’s dismal failure in Iraq.

The question of how and when the expectation of a peaceful Palestinian state existing alongside a secure Israel died is likely to remain a matter of historical dispute. The majority opinion in the United States and Israel holds that Arafat killed the Oslo Process by rejecting Bill Clinton’s outline for an agreement at Camp David in 2000. There are those on the left who blame the settlers, and those on the right who argue that Arafat was an unreconstructed terrorist who used the peace process as a means to further his long-term goal of destroying Israel.

Yet it would also be wrong to ignore the historical weakness of the Zionist movement, which inspired Arafat and many of his cronies, as well as the leaders of Hizbullah and its patrons in Iran, to believe that victory was within their reach. While insistence on territorial compromise in response to terrorist attacks may seem like "moral strength" to post-national sophisticates in Europe and the U.S., it is read in the less-evolved parts of the world as an invitation to pounce on weakened prey.

Of course, every failure of leadership is relative, and things can almost always be worse, as can be clearly seen by looking at the bloated, decaying corpse of the Palestinian national movement. It is no secret that, absent the American advisers who train and equip Abbas’s Presidential Guard and hand out bags of cash to buy the loyalty of local clans, and the Israeli troops who mount nightly raids on Fatah’s political opponents, the secular Palestinian leadership would flee overnight to Amman, where their families and bank accounts long ago took up residence.

The decade and a half-long failure of Fatah to govern anything or lead its fractured society toward any positive goal means that any further push to Palestinian statehood can only ensure the political dominance of even more radical and hostile elements who will accept whatever they are given not in the spirit of peace but as an appetizer before the main course.

It is paradoxical, then, that where previous American presidents have framed America’s interests in terms of promoting a general Arab-Israeli peace – or, more narrowly, helping to facilitate the interactions of Israel and specific Arab negotiating partners – George W. Bush has insisted that establishing a Palestinian state is a primary goal of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Given the failure of the American democracy initiatives in the region and the urgency of America’s need to placate the Arabs as part of its withdrawal from Iraq, the goal of creating an instant Palestinian state now balances and in some ways supersedes America’s historical commitment to Israeli security.

The importance of the American commitment to create a Palestinian state, which began as a quid pro quo for Arafat’s agreeing to share power with Abbas in 2003, was at first obscured by Bush’s personal disdain for Arafat and his close public relationship with Ariel Sharon. America’s adoption of the Palestinian national cause was further obscured by the results of President Bush’s horrible political miscalculations in the Middle East – most notably the collapse of the American political and security architecture for Iraq in 2005 and 2006 and the ill-conceived push for the 2006 Palestinian elections that were won by Hamas.

The Annapolis meeting is important because it will be the first-ever peace conference premised on America’s unconditional support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Those inclined to parse the recent remarks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will look in vain for the familiar language in which the Palestinian desire for a state is to be weighed against Israel’s need for security.

It is difficult to imagine that America’s newly limber devotion to a future Palestinian state is going to convince Arab listeners of anything other than the fact that America is feeling afraid and alone. Yet by loudly insisting that the creation of a Palestinian state is a central goal of American policy, Bush and Rice have laid down a marker that the next American president will be forced to pay off. Assurances that Israel’s security will somehow be assured before the final ribbon-cutting ceremony in Ramallah do little to disguise the fact that America has established itself – and not Israel – as the final arbiter of whether Israeli security worries are valid.

It seems fair to guess that the rise of a violent, chaotic, Hamas-led territory in the West Bank will do little more to promote peace in the Middle East than it already has in Gaza. Still, from the administration’s perspective, the great virtue of Bush’s Palestinian strategy is that it establishes a clear goal that can be realized through the unilateral action of the president of the United States and his proxies in the Israeli government, no matter what the actual situation on the ground might be.

In this way, and in others, Bush’s Palestine strategy is nearly identical to the failed American strategy in Iraq where the insistence on holding snap elections instead of the slow process of building a functioning society was backed by the dubious belief that democracy is the natural end-point of all human historical evolution. But the Wilsonian gospel that sounds so natural to American ears flies in the face of actual historical experience, which often ends badly.

The American push for snap elections in the Palestinian territories and Iraq backfired by deepening existing social divisions and legitimizing anti-American elements whose true interest lies in building a Muslim theocracy that will undo the crimes of the failed Western-style governments of the past. The political leaders the U.S. chose to back in these fragmented societies were not clever and ruthless men but the kinds of people who are attracted to Western-style proceduralism in Wild West-style circumstances – middle-managers whose main purpose was to put a bland face on the often spectacular corruption of their colleagues. In both Iraq and Palestine, the United States has stuck with its failed policies long after the evidence of failure was plain.

Obscuring the parallels between Iraq and the Palestinian territories is the fact that world opinion opposes the American military adventure in Iraq while it has long supported the Palestinian cause and accused George W. Bush of being hopelessly biased in favor of Israel. Similarly, the widespread belief that a coterie of (Jewish) neo-cons has been running U.S. foreign policy for the past seven years has obscured a startling change in the situation of American Jewry. The American Jewish community has been reluctantly jolted out of the historical idyll of the 1990’s – in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed like it might be amenable to healing by American-sponsored summer camps, and the American Jewish community with its glittering array of billionaires and senators and Nobel laureates established itself as a byword for success among eager immigrants from Lahore to Nairobi.

Today, the self-infatuated sense of security and global acceptance that American Jews enjoyed in the 1990’s has been replaced by a dawning horror at the worldwide legitimization of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence that is often more suggestive of the world of our grandparents.

Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports, I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S. president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the Middle East.

Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized file of stories they would rather not tell the children.

There is the story of the gunman who walked into a Jewish community center in Seattle last year and murdered one community worker and wounded five others. The silence of the mainstream American Jewish leadership in this country was met by widespread silence in the press.

Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign lobbyist in Washington – and every working journalist – is guilty. Again, the American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.

Last week I logged onto the New York Times website and read excerpts from a speech by Senator Joe Lieberman condemning the extremist fringe of the Democratic Party. The comments section – moderated by the Times – began with an attack on Lieberman as the "Senator from Tel Aviv" and went downhill from there, in language that ten years ago would have been confined to white supremacist compounds in Idaho and Washington State.

The fantasy of perfect acceptance and integration, and of a lasting Palestinian-Israeli peace, has led the American Jewish leadership to adopt a supine and shameful position of official silence in the face of unprecedented demonization of Jews as individuals, as political actors and as a people – demonization that began in Europe and the Middle East and is now officially alive and well in America.

In private, I hear it is simply too painful and depressing to contemplate the idea that there will be no easy peace between Israel and the Palestinians, that American Jews have become scapegoats for popular unease about terrorism, that political anti-Semitism has become normative thought among large sectors of the global intelligentsia, or that the tension between Israel and the United States will continue to grow as a future administration seeks a way out of the present morass in Iraq and comes to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran.

The combination of military defeat, social dislocation and economic decline is the kind of climate in which anti-Semitism has classically flourished.

I leave it to my readers to imagine how the evil decree may yet be averted. At the same time, I believe it is no accident that in the last four years, the two leading American Jewish novelists of their respective generations both authored fictions in which the American Jewish paradise of the 20^th century came to an end or was never born.

In The Plot Against America, published in 2004, Philip Roth imagined a country in which the isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR and cut a deal with the Nazis, and the Jews of Newark were sent to re-education camps in the heartland. While critics praised Roth’s re-imagining of 1940’s Newark, they tended to see his book as a conventional warning against American-style fascism, along the lines of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.

What the reviewers missed was that Roth’s Plot Against America also contained a less conventional effort to come to terms with the rising tide of anti-Semitic agitation that accompanied the Second Intifada, 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War. Roth was speaking in code to like-minded readers, reminding them of the links between isolationism and anti-Semitism without stepping over the lines that might render him obnoxious to the NPR-listening public.

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, published this year, imagines an alternative Jewish homeland in Alaska and was clearly written for two audiences at once – a popular audience of literary hipsters and the Jewish audience to which Chabon has been addressing himself with greater intensity since the publication in 2000 of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is founded on the premise that Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, was able to stave off the full horrors of the Holocaust by allowing mass Jewish immigration to Alaska. Arguably in keeping with the realities of American life in the late 30’s and early 1940’s, however, the Jews are not allowed into America proper, but sequestered in a frozen ghetto that resembles an Alaskan version of Warsaw or Lublin. The Jews who lived in Israel in 1948 are massacred by their Arab neighbors and thrown into the sea – a reminder that the practical alternative to creating the State of Israel was not creating the State of Israel.

Below the makeshift Jewish reservation that Chabon lovingly imagines is a grim, straight-laced, overtly Christian America. The book ends when a fundamentalist U.S. president creates a Jewish state in the Middle East as a thorn in the side of its Arab neighbors, and as a future landing strip for Jesus.

Chabon’s political argument is a canny and powerful one, and can be summarized as follows:

1. The existence of a Jewish state has made full Jewish citizenship in the U.S. possible, which has made America a better place, too.

2. Jews are that social element that will not allow itself to be assimilated into its surroundings, in Alaska or anywhere else, a posture that will always create tension and resentment.

3. If the State of Israel didn’t exist, American Christians would have invented it anyway, for both Christian and American reasons.

As a guide to understanding the next five or ten years of Jewish life in America, the leadership of the American Jewish community could do worse than read Philip Roth and Michael Chabon. Sometimes it is necessary to imagine that things might be radically different than they are.