When President Bush meets with Prime Minister Sharon this week at Washington, the Associated Press is noting, Middle East peacemaking will, for once, be absent from the top of the agenda. Instead, the two leaders are expected to focus on the prospect of war with Iraq and on the Bush administration’s desire that Israel stay on the sidelines, as it did when the president’s father went to war with Iraq more than a decade ago. Prime Minister Shamir, one of the toughest and most admirable premiers in Israel’s history, heeded American advice and held his fire, even after Iraq peppered Israel with Scud missiles. Not that he had a choice. When Israel wanted to go after the sites from which Iraq was launching Scud missiles against it, the Bush administration of the day refused to give it access to the codes its aircraft would need to avoid being downed by the allies own aircraft and other weapons.

There is a school of thought that believes this was one of the worst errors President Bush the elder ever made. Mr. Bush’s motive was clearly to avoid antagonizing the Arabs — Syria, Egypt, the Saudis, among them — who were part of the great coalition Mr. Bush had put together to take the war to the Gulf. Critics of Mr. Bush’s policy reckon that permitting Israel to be ousted from the coalition going up against Iraq was in and of itself a kind of appeasement of the Arab coalition members. It would have been far better, this view held at the time, were a willingness to fight alongside Israel made a precondition of joining the coalition forces at the time. Instead, Israel was asked to stand aside in exchange for the prospect that after the Gulf War a peace process would be undertaken between Israel and her Arab neighbors. And so it was, at Oslo, with the disastrous result that is so apparent today.

A profound understanding of the errors made at that time is what undergirds Mr. Sharon’s refusal to promise to stand down again if his country is attacked during the coming conflict. He also knows that the deep issue, the reluctance to make common cause with the Jewish state, has been an undercurrent of affairs for decades. This goes back to the eve of World War II, when the radical Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky sought to have the Jewish nation declared a member of the alliance that was forming to go to war against Nazi Germany. Today, no one in Israel’s government wants to make things difficult for America or any other ally. But a lot of lessons have been learned in the years since we were last at war in the Gulf. Prime among them is that bending to the biases of our enemies gains nothing. No doubt this is one of the points Messrs. Bush and Sharon will discuss this week.