Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

Former president Bill Clinton chose to include in his departure hoopla schedule a stirring exhortation to both Israel and the Palestinians, in which he labeled his bridging proposals "the sole" direction for any future peace.

There is, regrettably, much more reason to believe that by the end of his two terms in office, this "most pro-Israel" of American presidents not only failed to read the true intentions of Israel's enemies as the real underlying failure to attain peace, but in the process also served to weaken Israel's long-term strategic stance vis-à-vis its regional enemies.

Clinton's main failure in regard to Israel was not his inability to achieve peace. That, given the persistence of the Arabs and the Palestinians in their basically hostile positions, was clearly beyond his reach and that of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was even prepared to commit political suicide by offering the Syrians and Palestinians everything short of a mass conversion of Israelis to Islam.

Clinton's more profound failure was in not delivering on his promises to Yitzhak Rabin and then Barak to upgrade the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship to a top-priority alliance, intended to enable Israel to confront the looming nuclear and missile threats from Iran and Iraq. That failure puts into question the basic validity of the assumptions underlying the Oslo process.

One of the most intriguing questions in regard to the past 7-1/2 years is why seemingly hard-nosed military leaders and strategic thinkers like Rabin and Barak — as opposed to that archcynic of "a New Middle East," Shimon Peres — were prepared to put Israel in serious risk in striving for what they knew would not be real peace.

Rabin, who deserved his image as one of Israel's most honest and straight-talking "non-politician" leaders, was ready to go so far as to go back on his express promise not to make any serious territorial concessions on the Golan Heights. Barak outdid him with his readiness for even greater concessions to the Syrians, surrendering land up to a few dozen meters from the shores of Lake Kinneret, virtually all of the West Bank and the strategically crucial Jordan Rift Valley, half of Jerusalem and all of the Temple Mount to the Palestinians.

The argument by many on the right that Rabin and Barak were closet traitors simply will not wash. The real explanation lies in their hard-nosed conclusions that for the past decade, and well into the foreseeable future, the existential threats to Israel would come from the nuclear and ballistic missile developments on the fringes of the region rather than from Israel's immediate neighbors.

They realized that Israel would be hard put to confront those new challenges effectively on its own. What was needed was a strategic upgrading of the alliance with the United States, which was to express itself in a concerted diplomacy, stepped-up financial aid, and access to the most sophisticated American anti-missile technology.

A fake "peace" with the Syrians and Palestinians, accompanied by very real, painful and risky territorial concessions, was to be the price Israel would pay for that strategic upgrading.

None of this materialized during the Clinton years despite his explicit promises to Barak as late as the summer of 1999, when he entered office. The Clinton administration's "double-containment" policy against Iraq and Iran is in a shambles; Clinton failed to make good even on his much more limited commitment of additional aid to cover the costs of the pell-mell Israeli withdrawal from the south Lebanon security zone. And there has been no progress whatsoever on the upgrading of the strategic alliance with the United States (unless one considers America's brutal pressure against Israel's Phalcon plane deal with China, which may even be extended to our defense relations with India).

If Barak deserves to be voted out of office it is not so much for his failure to attain a very iffy, essentially unattainable "peace" with the Syrians and the Palestinians, but for the failure of the entire security rationale of the Oslo process, to which he was devoted.

With a new American administration ensconced in office, and the prospects of a new Israeli government in the offing, the need for that strategic upgrading remains as essential as ever.

What must be done is to repair the very serious damage that has been caused to Israel's basic interests and image by the protracted adherence to the underlying assumptions of Oslo, and to unlink the demand for a strategic upgrading from concessions to the Syrians and Palestinians.