Jerusalem is everywhere. No matter where you are, Jerusalem is. The power of that holy city intrudes into the strangest and most profane of places. I remember once driving to the Hustler Casino in Los Angeles, draped in the paper they give you at In-N-Out Burger, the kind that covers your whole lap while you gorge and drive, and I turned on the radio to hear a local Christian preacher’s extensive, in-depth analysis of Israel’s latest settlement policies and their relation to the Book of Acts. For some reason, it made me think of “Pearl,” a religious allegory written seven centuries ago, the subject of which is also Jerusalem. The Middle East has always been a place for Anglo-Saxons to project their various fantasies onto, no matter how far away, no matter how dim the dreamers’ grasp of its reality. And yet, after Iraq and Afghanistan, America and the West in general already have been disengaging from the Middle East intellectually as well as militarily. That blessed time when we don’t care anymore can’t come soon enough.

Because what is there really to talk about anymore? The issues that originated the obsession with the region have all been either solved or stalemated. North American energy independence is within reach. The hope for a blossoming Arab democratic movement leading to stability and prosperity has withered to ashes. American political and military involvement do not seem to decrease the chance of terrorism at home or abroad. As for whether America will go to war on humanitarian grounds, Syria has put that question to the ultimate test, and the answer so far has been a resolute no. Israel has made it clear that it will deal with a nuclear Iran itself, and frankly, when all is said and done, Israel probably knows best. Its existence is at stake. As for the notion of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, there is no hope and therefore no pressing reason for intervention. So why bother? Why talk about it?

And yet the obsession continues — and not merely for the religious. Israel as a symbol transferred into the realm of secular politics during the rise of political correctness in the 1980s. For the Left, distancing itself from Israel is a way of working through issues of colonialism in a safely remote space. Israeli Apartheid Week is now a fixture on American campuses, even though any historical comparison between South Africa and Israel cannot survive even the slightest scrutiny. Support for Israel can often be equally dubious: born of apocalyptic fantasies borrowed from Revelation or the Book of Mormon, a counterreaction to liberal elitism, or a way to be on the side of the powerful. Israel has no shortage of enemies, and with friends like these…

Peter Beinart’s recent book, The Crisis of Zionism, argues that young American Jews are falling out of love with Israel, which may well be true, but their newfound indifference doesn’t particularly matter one way or the other. The political choice faced by American voters is between a party that is really quite pro-Israel indeed and another that is so pro-Israel it hurts. The influence of the Israeli lobby on Democrats and of the evangelical lobby on Republicans are nearly total; they can’t grow any greater and show no sign of abating. The foreign-policy debate surrounding the Middle East is increasingly a phantom one politically. Try explaining that to the preacher on the radio.

Scott Anderson’s new book, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, renders painfully clear how deeply the political structure of the Middle East has been born of eccentric fantasies. Those can include Lawrence’s irresponsible self-deification and Gertrude Bell’s drawing of the borders of Iraq: The Middle East has always been a moving token in a game of transcendence.

The time has come to step away from this game altogether. This summer, John Kerry will do what American secretaries of state have wasted fifty years doing: try to fix the Israeli situation. In the spring, the poor man went four separate times to Israel, each a special mission, a “historic opportunity” to make peace. President Obama, during his first campaign, defined political insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. America’s Middle East policy is the comical extreme of this description, a zombie exercise undertaken in the name of hope for its own sake.

The obsession has gone on long enough. Journalists traditionally do not report suicides, even though it’s perfectly legal for them to do so, because of what is known as the Werther Effect. If you report suicides, more people take their own lives. The world’s obsession with Israel and Palestine has had a similar effect. Israelis and Palestinians believe they are iconic of something global, something larger than their own limited, momentary concerns. They reason that peace, when it comes, will be imposed by some distant, deferred force beyond their borders. Therefore the important thing is to win the war of global symbolism. That war, because it is ethereal, ghostly, can never be won, and because it can never be won, it will never end.

Standard foreign-policy wisdom holds that Israel is the key, that once the crisis there is solved, everything else in the whole of the Muslim world will improve. The terrorists will no longer have the necessary symbolism for recruitment. But the only thing that would satisfy the terrorists is Israel’s ceasing to exist, and Israel, rather gauchely, insists on existing. The symbolism cannot be solved; only its power can be diminished. The real historic opportunity at the moment is for the secretary of state to stop going to Israel, and for everybody else to stop talking about what there’s no point discussing.