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Israelis fear post-Mubarak vacuum in Egypt
Philip Jacobson: 'Orderly transition to democracy’ sounds good to the West, but troubling to Israel
It is often said, only partly in jest, that Israelis examine every event of world significance through the prism of "will this be good or bad for us?" Well, they hardly need the doom-laden headlines in the Israeli press to tell them the continuing crisis on the streets of Cairo is as bad as it gets.
For the past three decades, the Jewish state's Middle East strategy has depended on the stable and, if not overly warm, effective working relationship with Egypt, the most important Arab nation of them all.
As a senior Israeli diplomat observes, ever since the signing of the historic peace treaty in 1979, "for the US, Egypt has been the keystone of its Middle East policy, [but] for us it's the whole arch." Reflecting the importance of this alliance, Israel's right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak more often than any other foreign leader besides Barack Obama.
Apart from key economic factors - Israeli imports almost half of its natural gas from Egypt - this prolonged quiet on the Sinai front has profound military implications.
It is no secret that while the Israeli military periodically stages war games based on what might follow a collapse of the Mubarak regime, that threat has not featured high on the nation's strategic priorities agenda. Yet as documents recently made public by WikiLeaks have made clear, Egypt's sizeable military machine remains geared to an ultimate confrontation with the Israelis.
That helps to explain why Netanyahu, not known for his conciliatory views on Israel's Arab neighbours, now stresses the need to demonstrate "maximum responsibility, restraint and sagacity" in response to the crisis in Egypt.
As for the Obama administration, which inherited the Bush White House's strategy of holding its nose in the face of barbaric human rights abuses under Mubarak, the omens are foreboding.
The US has been pumping $1bn a year into Egypt to shore up the institutionally corrupt regime, yet the street uprising in Egypt's major cities has demonstrated that the most powerful and best organised political force on the scene today is the Muslim Brotherhood - implacably hostile to Israel and a covert supplier of weapons to Hamas fighters in Gaza.
Reports overnight that senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have escaped from jail in Egypt in recent days – with some members of the latter group finding their way back to Gaza through smuggling tunnels – will have caused huge concern for both Netanyahu and Obama.
And while the situation in Egypt remains "fluid" - diplomatic shorthand for no one having a clue what will happen next - no comfort will be taken in Jerusalem or Washington from the words of Eli Shaked, the wise and well-informed former Israeli ambassador to Cairo.
Writing in Israel's best-selling tabloid Yediot Aharonot the other day, he warned that if Mubarak is overthrown, a new militant Islamist regime will come to power, bringing with it a deep and abiding hostility to Israel and the West.
For good measure, he accused the US government, and by more direct implication Secretary of State Hilary Clinton whose vacillations have done nothing to defuse the crisis, of "taking the crucial developments in Egypt in a naïve fashion… expressing opinions that may be right for Western ears."
In short, when Clinton – joined by Obama and David Cameron - calls on Mubarak to allow an "orderly transition" to democracy, it only sets alarm bills ringing in Israel. ·
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When is the world and the entire ME going to stop kowtowing to Israel ?
The point about Mubarak's client kleptocracy is that the inner circle who hold power in the country ARE clients - of the USA, obviously, but as revealed recently, of Israel too (see the reports that if Mubarak wanted anything from the US, he contacted Netanyahu to get it for him). The wealth of this kleptocracy does not derive, primarily, from the Egyptian economy, but from the vast amounts of external funding doled out to it by the US. It does not therefore, in the short run, need to worry about the collapse of the Egyptian economy and infrastructure, because its wealth is imported (and no doubt immediately exported, to various 'offshore' depositories). Thus, while the Egyptian people can be starved out by the current unrest, the kleptocrats can sit the crisis out in their well-defended villas in Sharm-el-Sheik, etc., buoyed up by their extraterritorial wealth. In the meantime, the US and Israel can keep the Egyptian army 'neutrally' maintaining a stalemate until they can come up with a 'user-friendly' alternative government to pass off on an Egyptian people ultimately grateful to see an end to anarchy. The only way the Egyptian people could expedite regime change according to their hearts' desire would be seriously to threaten US and Israeli economic interests: closing the Suez canal, for example, but such moves would require the army to come off the fence and go over to the popular cause. Since the US is also the army's paymaster, this is unlikely to happen. With enough patience, the US, Israel and the Egyptian establishment (Mubarak is expendable, it is not) can sit out the disintegration of the popular revolt, unless the army's lower ranks rebel against the generals and go over to the popular cause. But nobody wants to envisage this scenario, because it would be bloody, brutal, and in no way certain of success.
Israel must be spinning a few missiles in a different direction this week you would of thought?
As long as they can keep Blair away Israel will be OK.
To be fair no one really knows what direction Egypt will go in, but there is are all sorts of reasons why an islamist regime is a relatively low probability outcome: a large middleclass, a plural media and the lack of a focussing figurehead suggest a second Iranian revolution is unlikely. It's precisely the lack of civil control over the executive, and the all encompassing power of said executive that is at the root of much of this protest. I suspect something more akin to Turkey (free democracy with a functioning and relatively integrated Islamic party) is as likely an outcome. That's not to say Israel will find it comfortable. And all bets are off if Mubarak uses the army to crush this.
Irrael have every good reason to fear the future. Look at what has happened when the US interfered with Britain's dissolution of Empire, the formation of Israel and Suez. Had the US left the Middle East to the Brits to sort out today's region would be a different place; indeed the world would have been a safer place. I hope that Egypt fares well in this forthright change, but with Clinton and Obama dabbling anything else is more than possible.
Netanyahu and Israel would have had nothing to fear or worry about if they had treated the Palestinians fairly and decently instead of incarcerating them in a massive concentration camp and depriving them of basic human rights. The war crimes and crimes against humanity have made Israel the most despised nation on earth. Let us pray that once Mubarak has been replaced there will be some hope for the people of Palestine.