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Politically Israel is our best friend in the middle east, some see this as a good thing.
We and the Israelis have in the past shared considerably more of common interest than we do today. We need to decouple our foreign policy from reflexively jerking every time the patella tendon that is isreal is whacked with some kind of hammer.
I'm not so sure that an enclave of mostly European Jews in the middle of the Arab world is the best place to search for friends.
The Arabs have never been in the past, are not now, and will never in the future be our friends - we simply do not have that much in common with them other than oil. All we can ever have with that culture or they with us will be some coincidence of interest(s) of a finite duration. We have simply more in common and of mutual interest with Israel - but then they, too, are not ultimately our friends.
While the US will never get along philosophically or in terms of religion with the Arabs I don't see that as a reason not to be able to get along politically.
Lady Thatcher said it best when she said of Gorbachev that he was someone we could deal with on our mutual problems. Politics and statecraft are not about love and kisses, they are about mutual interests.
