The Democratic victories wrestling control of the two houses of the US Congress from the Republican majority may well be the beginning of the downfall of President Bush and his reckless Middle East policies. But it won’t change the biased policies that are driving American foreign policies in the Middle East significantly.

It may cripple the Bush agenda and goals in occupied Iraq, but in reality the Bush agenda was already crippled and even derailed by the tough resistance put up by the Iraqi insurgents themselves against the American occupation.

Where change is really needed is in the continually worsening situation between Palestinians and Israelis. But not even this week’s political tsunami in American politics, driven by American public anger at Bush’s Iraqi policies, can reverse that tragedy.

In truth, Americans are angry with President Bush’s Iraq policy but not because the policy is unfair to Iraqis, but rather because Americans have come to recognize that the price of Bush’s policies has been too costly in terms of American lives.

Worse, the Democrats who now control the House and may well wield control of the Senate are not sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and they do not favor forcing Israel to make the concessions necessary to achieve a genuine and lasting peace based on compromise. Tom Lantos, one of the most fanatic pro-Israel cheerleaders in the House of Representatives, is set to become the chairman of the House International Relations Committee. The man who engineered the selection of congressional candidates who defeated enough Republicans to swing control to the Democratic Party is Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who is a pro-Israel congressman who served as a “volunteer” in the Israeli military.

Emanuel worked on an Israeli military base “repairing” military vehicles during the 1990 Gulf War against Iraq. He has insisted he did not wear an Israeli uniform and has refused to answer questions about whether or not he at one time held both a US and an Israeli passport.

Emanuel would never have slated any candidate in any congressional race who opposed his hard-line support of Israel’s inflexible policies including the building of the Wall of Separation on Palestinian lands, and the expansion of Israeli settlements.

No. This week’s elections are not good news for Palestinians or for Arabs who hoped that a new political force might replace Bush who has single-handedly made a mess out of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Today’s escalating crisis in Palestine began with the Clinton administration. President Clinton, in his final months as president, tried to force a pro-Israel compromise down the throats of Palestinians at Camp David. Although Clinton spent years building up the Arab world’s trust, the failure to achieve a peace accord threatened his post-presidential legacy which would forever define him in history books.

Clinton wanted a Middle East peace accord to be the corner stone of his legacy. Instead, what he caused, was an escalation in tensions. The plan Israel offered through Clinton — and that was never formally written down on paper — would have come very close to setting the stage for a final peace accord, if Clinton only had another year left to his term.

But he didn’t. The deal too quickly backed Palestinians into a corner on Jerusalem and negated the rights of Palestinian refugees without clearly defining what they would get for their dispossession.

That set the stage for hard-liners in Israel to exploit the peace accord failings. By the time Clinton turned over the keys of the White House to President Bush, the region was a rapidly deteriorating state of increasing violence.

What the peace process needed was a new American leader like the early Clinton who could carefully shepherd Palestinian and Israeli negotiators through at least two more years of careful negotiations. What it got, however, was a young and inexperienced president who had no foreign relations experience. His first act as president was to redirect his government away from the escalating Middle East conflict toward domestic American policies.

The attacks of Sept. 11 forced him to refocus on the Middle East. But instead of embracing a strategy to calm Palestinian-Israeli relations, Bush defined the Middle East in the only manner he could understand, by focusing on Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein.

Saddam had insulted his father not only by threatening to have the senior Bush killed, but also by the fact that the senior Bush had been pushed out of office while Saddam remained in power.

The Democratic leadership that is taking some of the reigns of power away from Bush today are not the same Democrats who stood by Clinton during the early days of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Lantos, Emanuel and the soon-to-be-named Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are not Democrats who will easily trade away Israel’s advantages even for a permanent peace accord.

Instead, this new Congress will only toughen its support of Israel, give Israel’s government more leeway to respond with excessive military violence against Palestinian civilians, and continue the Bush policies of undermining any Palestinian government lobbying in the United States.

In these final two years as both the Democratic majority and Bush and his Republican allies prepare for the next presidential election, both sides will battle not to achieve a Middle East peace but to demonstrate who can be more pro-Israel.

— Ray Hanania was named the 2006-2007 Best Ethnic American Columnist by the New America Media Journalism Association. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.