Lee Smith writes an important piece on Slate about Arab anti-American sentiment:

Of course, Arab displeasure with U.S. leaders hardly started with the Bush White House. As Noam Chomsky pointed out two years ago—or well before anti-Americanism reached its current heights—President Eisenhower talked about the "hatred against us [in the Arab world]" way back in 1958.

...[I]n 1956 the United States handed Nasser his greatest—indeed only—unqualified triumph at Suez.

After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Israelis, along with the French and British, attacked Egypt. Nasser would have lost the war and almost certainly his life had President Eisenhower not ordered those three American allies to back down. Arranging a victory of that order for Nasser—a victory that made him the Arab world's greatest modern hero—would seem to be about as pro-Arab as you can get, and yet only two years later, Eisenhower was wondering why the Arabs hated us so much. One obvious reason is that by chasing out the two Western powers that had been the region's hate targets for over a century, the United States became a kind of surrogate for anticolonial sentiment, regardless of whether or not it had the same imperial ambitions as France and Britain. In other words, pro-Arab U.S. policies don't seem to put much of a dent in Arab anti-Americanism.

All true. Some more excerpts:

Is Arab anti-Americanism just an irrational phenomenon manufactured by presidents-for-life, kings, and military dictators who rule their countries without legitimate political authority? Yes, but there are also really bad U.S. policies in the Arab world—none of which seem to trouble most Arabs.

...Of course, it is because of Washington's ostensibly unbalanced support of Israel that the United States is genuinely loathed in the region. To be sure, the United States maintains that the state of Israel has a right to exist. At different times, as when the international community recently mourned the deaths of two Hamas leaders whose explicit goal was the destruction of Israel, it is not obvious that the rest of the world believes Israel has a right to exist. Similarly, the Arab and European outrage over President Bush's announcement that Palestinians have no "right of return" suggests that many people outside of Israel and the United States do not really believe in a two-state solution, even if they say they do. When much of the world seems not to mean what it says, U.S. policy cannot help but seem to be totally biased toward Israel.

Read the whole thing, of course.

The last excerpt is especially important: when nothing short of building crematoria in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will establish the U.S.' bona fide "neutrality" in the Arab world regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is it possible for the U.S. to avoid seeming "biased" towards Israel?

Much, much more on the topic later.