The former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, must have realized his error in telling the New Haven Register the other day that President Bush should get tough with Israel. The Register reported on April 16 that Mr. Cuomo said in a phone interview that Mr. Bush should to go to Israeli officials and tell them: “Up until now it was just you and the Palestinians killing one another — now you are killing us.”

Mr. Cuomo, according to the paper, “said everything is different since 9/11 and the Iraq war.”

“Now there are people out there who are taking Israel as the provocation to terrorize us all over the globe — in the United States and elsewhere,” the former governor is reported to have said.

Mr. Cuomo later clarified his remarks in a follow-up call to the New Haven newspaper, saying, “We have to be more assertive as to both sides, to force them together, not just the Israelis.”

Mr. Cuomo has a history of missteps on the Middle East — in 1990, as governor, he suggested that President George H.W. Bush negotiate his way out of the last Gulf crisis by striking a deal with Saddam Hussein to give Iraq “a little bit” of Kuwait.

But the error he made — linking violence against Americans to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian Arabs — is one that is all too common these days.

A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter Russell Mead, put it just slightly differently the other day in the New York Times, when he wrote,”the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people.”

Senator Schumer’s trade guru, Paul Craig Roberts, writes, “On the heels of his betrayal of Palestinians, Bush condoned the assassination of Hamas leader al-Rantisi by Israeli terrorists. Such provocative actions are fuel thrown on the flames of the uprisings in Iraq against the American occupation. US Marines and National Guardsmen will pay with their lives for Bush’s follies.”

And here’s Patrick Buchanan: “The great Zionist land thief has gotten America’s blessing to keep his stolen goods. George Bush has out-sourced his Mideast policy to Tel Aviv. The custodian of our reputation for decency and honor in an Arab world of 22 nations is now Sharon.…Can anyone in the White House believe that Bush’s capitulation is anything but a formula for endless war and enduring hatred of an America that cannot say no to Ariel Sharon?”

But as the great historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, points out in his book “The Crisis of Islam,”the roots of Islamic terrorism against Americans run much deeper. Mr. Lewis writes that “the true predecessors” of today’s terrorists were members of the Muslim sect known as the Assassins, “active in Iran and then in Syria from the eleventh to the thirteenth century.” The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.

Lewis also points out that Osama bin Laden’s stated grievances against America include not only its support for Israel against the Palestinian Arabs, but also for “the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens, and the Manila government against the Muslims in the Southern Philippines.” And that, as Mr. Lewis quotes Mr. bin Laden as saying in a letter to America,”You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your creator.”

Yet somehow, you never much hear the blame-Israel-first crowd — Messrs. Cuomo, Mead, Roberts, Buchanan — complaining about American support for the Indians in Kashmir or the Russians against the Chechens. Or suggesting that America should deal with the terrorist threat by capitulating and changing our Constitution to reflect the Islamic law of Allah, as interpreted by the fundamentalists. All of which provides a reason to treat with more than a healthy dose of skepticism the efforts to blame Israel for the deaths of Americans. Our own view is that they represent something quite apart from a logical response to those deaths.