The reason: Israel’s overriding concern is the rise of Iran and its nuclear program, especially because Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called often for Israel to be wiped off the map and has dismissed the Holocaust as a myth.  The Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt share Israel’s concern about Shiite Iran and worry about its eventual influence in an Iraq that is spinning out of control. So they have made modest gestures toward Israel and the United States and urged them to move ahead with a Palestinian state. Both countries are listening.  “The Saudis are saying to us, ‘We are afraid of Iran and want to work with you but the Palestinian issue has to be solved,’ ” a senior Israeli official said, insisting on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “To some extent this is an excuse but to some extent it is genuine. This is partly what motivated Olmert’s speech.”  He added that the growing domination of Palestinian politics by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that calls for Israel’s destruction and has received Iranian aid, is a threat to secular Arab rulers just as it is to Israel. So they want to boost the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who favors negotiations with Israel — and that, too, coincides with Israel’s view.  The war last summer between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah falls into a similar category. Hezbollah, which is sponsored and armed by Iran, is seeking to take over the Lebanese government.  The three current or potential civil wars in the Middle East, then — in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian areas — are therefore all interlinked in Israel’s logic, with Iran as the common denominator.  The result is that Israeli leaders, while publicly complaining about Mr. Baker’s linkage of all Middle Eastern problems, are acting as if there is a connection, and seeking common cause with Arab states over Iran and the Palestinian question.  In fact, this is not new. Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian with a book coming out next month on American involvement in the Middle East, said he was at a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 as peace talks with the Palestinians under Yasir Arafat were starting.  “He said to the group, ‘Why am I embarking on this, taking a risk of talking to Arafat?’ ” Mr. Oren recalled. “ ‘The answer is Iran. We have to stabilize our relations with the Arab world in order to deal with the real threat, which is Iran.’ So already then, Israel understood that the peace process with the Palestinians begins with Iran.”  There are two other reasons Mr. Olmert and other Israelis spoke out against the report’s call for linkage: They don’t want others to define linkage for them; they want any linkage to be on their terms, out of their own mouths. And they never liked Mr. Baker, whom they considered hostile when he was secretary of state in the early 1990’s.  That said, most Israelis and many independent analysts see a straight linkage between the Palestinian question and Iraq as something of a mirage. As Daniel Kurtzer, the former American ambassador to Israel and now a professor at Princeton, put it: “If the United States brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, do you think a single Iraqi gunman would put down his weapon? Not a chance.”  And a senior Israeli official made another point. “Why would we want to link our own problem to a nightmare like Iraq? It’s a terrible mess there. We don’t want it to be thought that until it is solved we can’t solve our problem.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page WK5 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Is Not Linked to Iraq, Except That It Is. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Taking from the James A. Baker III Middle East playbook, Ehud Olmert is reaching out to the Palestinians and Iraq’s neighbors as Israel becomes more concerned about Iran.