WASHINGTON, May 31, 2007 (AFP) - The six-day Middle East war fought 40 years ago still haunts US diplomacy, with Washington uneasily navigating between its staunch support for Israel and a desire to build bridges to the Arab world.

Facing above all the need to pacify Iraq, the US government today has been reaching out to regional Arab powers like Egypt, but is constrained by the popular view that it is an unquestioning ally of Israel.

"The (Arab) public still looks at the US and the world largely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli issue," commented Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at Washington's Brookings Institution.

In October 1967, four months after the decisive Israeli victory over the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the US administration of president Lyndon Johnson began a massive program of arms supplies to the Jewish state.

Declared US policy beforehand had been to stay even-handed, with an isolated Israel surrounded by hostile Arab powers and masses of Palestinian refugees clamoring to return to their pre-1948 lands.

The United States had sold a batch of missiles to Israel in 1962 but three years later, deputy defense secretary Peter Solbert wrote: "In no case, however, will the US contribute to providing one state in the area a military advantage against another."

All that changed after the Six-Day War as the United States stepped in to become Israel's leading military supplier in place of France, which as a result of the conflict imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state.

The United States was motivated also by the Cold War need to counter hefty arms supplies by the Soviet Union to Egypt and Syria.

From less than 50 million dollars before 1967, US military aid to Israel now stands at more than three billion dollars a year.

On several occasions, Washington has tried to balance its military support by acting as an "honest broker" in Middle East peace efforts, notably in the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and the Oslo accords of 1993.

But Scott Lasensky, senior researcher at the United States Institute For Peace, said: "In the most recent period, the US has been surprisingly absent from Arab-Israeli peace making.

"It's shocking that 40 years have passed and yet the US and the international community as well has not put forward a specific vision for what a two-state solution could look like," he said.

During the war of June 5-June 10, 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Israel handed Sinai back to Egypt as part of the Camp David peace treaty, but has retained the rest in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution adopted by the United States and other major powers in November 1967.

The celebrated resolution 242 called for Israeli forces to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for Arab non-aggression against the Jewish state as the basis of a lasting peace.

That "land for peace" formula remains the bedrock of peace initiatives today, and still provides an opening if President George W. Bush's administration were serious about mediation, Telhami said.

In polls of Arab public opinion, the desire remains for the United States to take a decisive role in pushing the Palestinians and Israelis to a comprehensive peace deal that would encompass all regional powers.

"You can see that by far the number-one answer is brokering Arab-Israeli peace based on the 1967 borders. By far that is the issue that they see as most important (for US policy)," Telhami said.

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