Four days ago British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, writing in The Guardian, gave a slap in the face to George W. Bush and to Ehud Olmert, two departing comrades in the Global War on Terror, by saying that the War on Terror was a mistake.

Her Britannic Majesty's chief diplomat didn't mention either by name, of course. But his declaration, along with Barack Obama's arrival in the Oval Office, puts Israel's politicians and their American interference runners such as AIPAC and Jeffrey Goldberg on notice that Israel is being cut loose ideologically by the great powers on whom it has relied so heavily for so long. And not a moment too soon.

Not only is the very concept of a war on terror "misleading and mistaken," Miliband writes, echoing many before him; he also writes that the West cannot "kill its way out" of the threats, least of all through military action that's all-but divorced from other initiatives, as was Israel's horrific venture into Gaza.

Without mentioning that war, Miliband ratifies what the veteran Israeli legislator and Avraham Burg wrote in a Haaretz column which I posted here, and he underscores what the Gaza war itself has just shown: War is no longer quite the option that those who still thrill to it think it is.

There is another message I think Miliband was sending to Vulcan neo-conservatives and other would-be grand strategists in the Bush mold and their tragic followers in Israel. It's a message first sent by one of their least favorite people, the political philosopher and social historian Hannah Arendt.

In 1944, when there was no justice for Jews in the world, and nothing but power politics and armed resistance seemed to hold any hope, Arendt warned that if Zionists "continue to ignore the [forging of partnerships with neighboring] Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big, faraway powers, they will appear only as... the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that... the anti-Semitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers... but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences...

"The big nations that can afford to play the game of power politics have found it easy to forsake King Arthur's Round Table for the poker table; but the small, powerless nations [the Jews in Palestine] that venture their own stakes in that game, and try to mingle with the big, usually end by being sold down the river."

Now they'll have to hear this not from Arendt, but from the U.S. and the U.K., who aren't exactly selling them down the river but are confronting them with a reality the Israelis themselves have done a lot to make.

In the 1980s, Secretary of State George Shultz and his top aide Charles Hill spent a lot of time selling an all-too-receptive Menachem Begin on the virtues of scaling back social democracy and relying more and more on "free markets" (including arms markets) and war. Israelis now insist, with some credibility, on the "existential reality" of having to fight Arabs unrelentingly, but reality did not have to end up this way.

A lot of wrong and fateful strategies and policies were adopted, and now the West has learned what Israel hasn't, but must -- if, indeed, it's not too late: That you can't bludgeon 1.5 million penned-up people into submission without strengthening the worst and most vengeful among them.