On the morning of the Annapolis summit, theTrumpet.com posted a story about how the growing divide between the United States and Israel was of greater geopolitical significance than any of the topics discussed at the conference that day. “Whatever the outcome of Annapolis,” we wrote, “the months prior to the conference have already revealed a dangerous erosion of U.S. support for Israel.” In the week and a half since the conference, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been further pounded by a combination of two deadly blows.

First, there is the sell-out of Lebanon. Contrary to what Israel might have thought going into Annapolis, Syria did not show up in hopes of laying the groundwork for retrieving the Golan Heights. We now know that its participation was contingent upon the U.S. allowing Damascus to handpick Lebanon’s president.

Over the last three years, there has been a violent power struggle in Lebanon between pro-Western and pro-Syrian forces. In early 2005, a pro-Syrian suicide bomber assassinated Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who had been calling for Syrian troops to withdraw from Lebanon. The murder triggered an onslaught of anger, both in Lebanon and around the world—virtually all the wrath pointed directly at Syria. Facing enormous pressure from the West, Syria agreed to withdraw its 15,000 troops from Lebanon, allowing the Lebanese to form a new government.

Since that time, Damascus has been feverishly working to undermine the ruling March 14 movement (named after the date of Lebanon’s 2005 “Cedar Revolution”). The coalition has seen its majority rule in parliament dwindle to a slim 68 out of the 128 seats. Six parliamentarians in the coalition have been assassinated in the last two and a half years. Syrian operatives have simply been murdering the opposition in order to obtain a majority rule.

In an October visit to Washington, Saad Hariri, head of the March 14 alliance and son of the slain former prime minister, pleaded for President Bush and Congressional leaders to support anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon. Hariri’s coalition wanted an anti-Syrian to be installed as president and for Damascus to face the consequences for sabotaging the Lebanese political process with state-sponsored assassinations.

According to the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith, after his White House visit, Hariri told reporters, “There is a killing machine in Syria. We came to Washington to say, ‘If you are going to do something about it, let us know. If you are not going to do anything about it, let us know. But no matter what, we’re not going to give in’” (emphasis mine throughout).

Soon after Hariri left Washington, U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) introduced a House resolution condemning Iran and Syria for their murderous campaign to overthrow the Lebanese government. Syria and Iran “have clearly violated numerous UN Security Council resolutions protective of Lebanon. They are the puppet masters pulling on the strings of Hezbollah, Amal and Aoun,” Ackerman said. They “are attacking Lebanon’s sovereignty no less than if they sent a fleet of bombers, or a wave of tanks, or a swarm of infantry,” he added.

The resolution passed by a vote of 375 to 5.

In early November, six March 14 members, including Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt, followed up Hariri’s visit with another appeal to Washington for help. In a letter addressed to Representative Ackerman, the parliamentarians wrote, “What is left of the majority (March 14) pledge to elect a president who puts Lebanon on top.”

Less than three weeks later, Jumblatt’s pledge and Hariri’s vow to not give in to Syria both vanished like Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

On Wednesday, November 28, the day after Annapolis, the March 14 bloc reluctantly dropped its opposition to support Lebanon’s army chief, Gen. Michel Suleiman, a pro-Syrian military man with close ties to Hezbollah. In order to lure Syria to Annapolis, Washington forced the March 14 coalition to go along with Syria’s choice for president. Without regard to Lebanon’s fledgling democracy or the security of Israel’s northern border, Washington handed Lebanon to Hezbollah in hopes of driving a wedge between two terrorist-sponsoring nations—Syria and Iran.

The National Intelligence Estimate

Within days of Hezbollah’s political victory in Beirut, the United States dumped another diplomatic bombshell on Israel. In a move intended to spark another line of dialogue with a state sponsor of terror, the United States extended an olive branch to the one nation it had worked so hard to alienate just one week earlier—the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This stunning reversal came in the form of a politically driven policy report masquerading as an intelligence analysis.

In the story posted on the day of the summit, theTrumpet.com wrote, “Besides an Iranian bomb, the greatest threat to Israel’s existence is diminished support from its long-time ally, the United States.” What astonishes me about the National Intelligence Estimate the United States declassified on Monday is that while shamefully denying the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, Washington simultaneously managed to nuke what remained of its strategic alliance with Israel.

Could it possibly get any worse for the Jewish state?

As recently as October 17, President Bush warned, “We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. … [I]f you’re interested in avoiding World War iii, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

But with the release of Monday’s report, everyone from the Bush administration to the New York Times editorial board to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad all breathed a collective sigh of relief—even if for different reasons.

Israel, though, is not relieved. It is deeply concerned—and now, very alone. Israel’s top officials were quick to reject the nie assessment, albeit as tactfully as possible to avoid adding further strain on an already dead relationship. On Tuesday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel’s Army Radio that while Iran may have momentarily stopped its nuclear weapons program, it has since been revived. When asked if America’s new assessment, which directly contradicted its own 2005 estimate, now diminishes the chances of a U.S. pre-emptive strike against Iran’s weapons facilities, Barak admitted that that was possible. But “we cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend,” Barak said with false optimism.

Other Israeli sources, according to Haaretz, assessed the situation more bluntly, saying “the Bush administration appears to have lost its sense of urgency regarding Iran’s nuclear program, making a military strike in 2008 increasingly unlikely.”

Ron Prosor, Israel’s new ambassador to Britain and one of Prime Minister Olmert’s leading experts on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, said this in an interview with London’s Daily Telegraphyesterday:

At the current rate of progress Iran will reach the technical threshold for producing fissile material by 2009.This is a global threat and it requires a global response. It should be made clear that if Iran does not cooperate then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either cooperation or confrontation.

While that may still be true, the transformative event from this past week now means Israel stands alone in using force to confront the Iranian threat. And if the United States is no longer justified in preemptively striking Iran, what do you suppose world opinion would be after an Israeli strike? If American intelligence thinks Iran froze its nuclear program, a former Israeli military intelligence official told the New York Times, “that makes it harder for Israel to go against it.”

Describing Israel’s lonely position in a Haaretz column on Wednesday, Amos Harel wrote, “Over the last year, a certain hope has developed in Israel that the U.S. would do our dirty work for us …. Yesterday, from talking to a number of senior officials in the defense establishment, you could sense this hope had been buried in the wake of the report.”

The sad truth is that while purporting to prove that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, in actual fact, Monday’s National Intelligence Estimate proves America has abandoned Israel. As Clare Lopez noted in a column for Middle East Times,

The U.S. administration, in effect, has just thrown in the towel over Iran’s geostrategic ambitions in the Middle East. Coming hard on the heels of the Annapolis charades, the nie makes clear that the lame duck George W. Bush team has lost the will to defend either the existence of its ally Israel or even its own national security interests.

To understand more about the broken U.S.-Israeli alliance and how it will factor into future events within the geopolitical arena, read The United States and Britain in Prophecy.