The arabs weren't part of the Warsaw Pact and could've been detached from the USSR had the US made significant concessions, like forcing Israel out of the occupied territories and offering to provide replacement arms. Essentially this is what happened in the years after '73.
I apologize if I somehow implied that Arabs were in the Warsaw Pact; obviously they weren't but most were Soviet aligned.
And after 1973, there was all of
one Arab country that turned to the US - Egypt. And they did that in the context of the peace treaty with Israel. (and massive arms bribes, as you say)
Syria remained steadfastly Soviet-aligned, though Iraq did pussy-foot a little bit, but that was with the US fully backing Israel. So we're left with Syria, but considering Iraq and Egypt, it's hard for me to believe that Israel would be their main blocking point.
And even without US support for Israel (which, we'll recall, comes 10-20 years
after everyone but Jordan is Soviet-aligned), all of the Arab republics have ideological reasons to go East in the first place, in the form of hating the Western system as their previous colonial oppressors.
It's also very odd to invoke the US forcing Israel out of the occupied territories as any kind of argument. None of the other Arab countries cared at all about the Occupied Territories. Jordan and Egypt both refused them when offered back!
You are right that dumping Israel is necessary to get the Arabs to defect, but it's far from sufficient.
But it would've been wise to keep the Soviets from maintaining a foothold or two in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt may not have been militarily very efficacious but at least it was usable. Israel may have been strong but it was a pariah unable to help police the region. When Bush assembled a coalition to drive Saddam from Kuwait Egypt and Syria could send troops but not Israel, no way.
This is anachronistic. By the time Bush invaded Iraq, the two-world system had fallen.
The problem is that keeping the buffer would've meant constant and ever escalating war. Israel had a much harder time when it held the Sinai--1967-73--than when it proceeded to give it back, and none--at least with Egypt--in the many years since full return in '82.
Btw holding the Sinai buffer wasn't entirely advantageous militarily. As Ismail noted prior to the '73 war, it meant longer lines of communication for Israel, giving an Egyptian crossing more time to become established and ready.
I have absolutely no idea where you're getting this. The period of time when Israel held the Sinai was not all that much worse than before. Yes, there was the War of Attrition, but that was fading off by 1970, and you're forgetting the near constant fedayeen raids out of Gaza OTL until 1967. I'm also not sure that Egypt would ever have signed the peace treaty if Israel hadn't taken the Sinai in the first place, but that's pure speculation.
Would U.S. Jews have enough influence in this TL to actually have the U.S. government support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, though? After all, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine is certainly going to piss off a lot of Arabs and Muslims!
I don't understand how this is any different from OTL at all.
Jewish support was sort of secondary to the US supporting the creating of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The idea had been formally floated at Versailles and everyone sort of agreed that it was a good idea without doing anything about it. The '48 partition was a result of Britain wanting nothing more to do with a small, problematic colony and withdrawing. They wanted to hand the Mandate over to the US, the US said, no, let's hand it to the UN. The UN was trying to be nice and set a good precedent for national conflicts (and maybe, just maybe, feeling a little bad about the Holocaust, especially the million or so Jewish citizens that France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc. didn't want to let back into their countries). Jewish support inside the US had almost nothing to do with it.
Basically, if people such as George Marshall win this debate in the U.S. in a no-Holocaust/much-smaller-Holocaust scenario, Israel might have some serious problems. After all, if Israel's existence won't be recognized by the international community and won't have a major power supporting it (if the U.S. is hostile to Israel, France might likewise be hostile to Israel; after all, AFAIK France only agreed to vote for the 1947 UN Palestine Partition Plan after significant U.S. pressure), then Israel might end up losing a future war to Arab countries even if it still wins its war of independence in the late 1940s (due to the inability of various Arab armies to cooperate and coordinate their moves, et cetera).
I still argue that Partition Plan and Israel becoming a country have very little to do with each other, but I've already said why in earlier posts in this thread.