I don't even know where to start. My guess is that you are young - 30's at the most. Based on this and previous posts of yours, you are well meaning.

"In a sense, the countries that Israel defeated in 1967 and 1973 have won the larger war."

I don't think you correctly understand how the countries Israel defeated define 'the larger war'. They define it as the extermination of Israel.

I have no time to provide a complete history - and I doubt Joerg has the bandwidth - but I think you may benefit by paying attention to the dogs that are not barking. Keep in mind that Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian dogs - apologies for the insult to our canine buddies.

- Nasrallah (leader of Hezbollah in Syria)has said they're going to sit this one out.

- There is a curious silence out of Damascus. Although this latest tiff resulted in the breaddown of negotiations between Israel and Syria, the Chinless Opthamologist remembers what Papa Assad did to the Muslim Brotherhood when they tried their jihad against him. It's called the Hama Massacre. It took weeks but he killed every last one of them he could get his hands on, women and children included. Thomas Friedman wrote about trying to find Hama. He asked a local. The local said "It's here." Friedman didn't see anything. "Right here", the local said. "You're standing on it.".

The place had been paved over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre

- Why won't Egypt open the Rafah border? Why have the Iranian mullahs organized demonstrations at the Egyptian, Jordanian and Turkish embassies?

I could go on with that meme, but I think you are resourceful enough to come up with your own examples/ideas about this. Trust me on this: the mullahs in Iran are not sleeping well.

As for turning the U.S. and Israel in pariahs - exactly how long have you been paying attention to this? The U.S. has been a pariah in Europe since before our revolution. James W. Ceaser is(was?) a professor of political science at U. Va. when he wrote "Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought". Great book, you should read it. The article "A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism" is a precis of the book. Here:

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A6C56CF6-4E0D-4CEA-B9A1-F7B0ED2BECF1

A snippet from the article:

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Max Gallo, in the weekly magazine Le Point, drew the typical conclusion about American arrogance and ignorance: "The Americans, carried away by the hubris of their military power, seemed to have forgotten that not everything can be handled by the force of arms ... that peoples have a history, a religion, a country."

Time will tell, of course, if Gallo was even near correct in his doubts about U.S. policy. But the haste with which he arrived at such sweeping conclusions leads one to suspect that they were based far more on a pre-existing view of America than on an analysis of the situation at hand. Indeed, they were an expression of one of the most powerful modes of thought in the world today: anti-Americanism. According to the French analyst Jean François Revel, "If you remove anti-Americanism, nothing remains of French political thought today, either on the Left or on the Right." Revel might just as well have said the same thing about German political thought or the thought of almost any Western European country, where anti-Americanism reigns as the lingua franca of the intellectual class.

The Symbolic America

Anti-Americanism rests on the singular idea that something associated with the United States, something at the core of American life, is deeply wrong and threatening to the rest of the world. This idea is certainly nothing new. Over a half-century ago, the novelist Henry de Montherlant put the following statement in the mouth of one of his characters (a journalist): "One nation that manages to lower intelligence, morality, human quality on nearly all the surface of the earth, such a thing has never been seen before in the existence of the planet. I accuse the United States of being in a permanent state of crime against humankind." America, from this point of view, is a symbol for all that is grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, and rootless.

It is tempting to call anti-Americanism a stereotype or a prejudice, but it is much more than that. A prejudice, at least an ordinary one, is a shortcut usually having some basis in experience that people use to try to grasp reality's complexities. Although often highly erroneous, prejudices have the merit that those holding them will generally revisit and revise their views when confronted with contrary facts. Anti-Americanism, while having some elements of prejudice, has been mostly a creation of "high" thought and philosophy. Some of the greatest European minds of the past two centuries have contributed to its making. The concept of America was built in such a way as to make it almost impervious to refutation by mere facts.
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As for Israel - at its very roots 'anti-Zionist' from the Arabs is anti-semitism - and that is exemplified by The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini aka Hitler's Mufti.

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_grand_mufti.php

I believe it was either his cousin or his neice who was Yassir Arafat's mother. 'Yassir Arafat' of course is not his real name. I've forgotten his first name but his family name was indeed Husseini. 'Yassir', I believe is sort of an Arabic diminutive that evokes a sweet, lazy kid who is quite happy to spend his time kicking a can down the road.

And there is something else you should give some thought to.

In most of the world, throughout most of history, gov'ts have been authortarian. It is still true today (Russia, China, Venezuela, blah blah blah) - and I have long been on record of putting the EU in the same box. Why should anything they say or do be a barometer for what should be done?

Ok, I'll shut up now.

For awhile.