The old adage about my enemy’s enemy being my friend may be true, but it may be equally true to say that my enemy’s friend is my enemy. And this will explain the overwhelming support in the Arab media last week for the combined Sunni-Shiite uprising in Iraq, and the call by Arab editorialists across the board for the withdrawal of American forces from the country.

Arab public opinion, or the “Arab street,” as it has come to be known, does not trust the United States. Why? Simply because of its unstinting, almost fanatical, support of Israel — Israel right or wrong.

How the good will that the US earned from Europeans after Sept. 11 has dissolved, only to be replaced by hostility, clearly has nothing to do with Israel, although heaven knows Europeans have long since chafed at being told to step aside when it came to the Middle East. Europeans’ anti-Americanism, rather, derives from unease at American unilateralism and umbrage at Washington’s dismissal of its allies when they disagreed with it.

They resent the idea of the US operating under the delusion that the more powerful America is, and the more uncompromising its leadership in going it alone, the more readily the rest of the world will get in line.

This swagger may have been seen by neoconservatives, who today dominate the administration, as a demonstration of resolve, but to Europeans it smacked of arrogance.

The wide rift that has divided America from much of the Arab world, indeed much of the Muslim world, however, has its roots in how the Zionist entity in Palestine has had its ambitions pampered and its every wish accommodated, while Washington, like a bird lover throwing bread crumbs at pigeons, talked of road maps that it had neither the spine nor the intention to implement.

Last week, as a case in point, during hearings by the Appropriations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell told legislators that Israel “had every right to protect itself” when asked about that infamous wall of hate the Zionist entity is building around, and in places well into, the West Bank.

America’s policy of pre-emption and pre-eminence invited resentment in Europe, but in our part of the world its way out-of-line Palestine policy has invited enmity.

On Thursday this week, President Bush meets Ariel Sharon, an unrelenting thug, a war criminal and a colonialist bully, who has had consistent political cover for his apartheid policies, assassination of political leaders, and expansionist drive in Palestine. As an example consider how there was nary a word of criticism by the administration of the killing of Sheikh Yassin, though the murder had been deliberately timed by Sharon to sabotage any possibility of a peace offer from the Arab summit in Tunis in March.

Had America shown even-handedness in Palestine all these years, and adhered to the common rules of mediation, it would’ve leveled the playing field of the Arab street and augmented confidence in the purpose and benign nature of American power. It opted not to. All the pity, for by not doping so, the US is undermining its efforts to rebuild Iraq, a worthy project indeed, since where Americans succeed there, Iraqis succeed too.

The spectacle of Ariel Sharon at the White House this week, reportedly to get a written US pledge that in exchange for a Gaza pullout, Israel will be able to keep large chunks of the West Bank, will only reinforce the sentiment of Arabs that American forces are not in Iraq to help Iraqis, but that they were sent to pursue the neoconservatives’ goal of getting a foothold from there as a lever to foster broader political change throughout the Middle East, leading ultimately to a modus vivendi with the Zionist entity in Palestine.

A conspiratorial posture? Hardly. It is hardly possible, in other words, to see how Arabs could step back from the obviousness of their focus on the friend of their enemy being engaged in some kind of subtle larcenies in their world.