‘Arab Spring’ a boon for Israel?

It is generally believed that the political shape shifting throughout swathes of the Arab world constitutes bad news for Israel. That argument does hold some water. For instance, Egypt’s caretaker Cabinet has succeeded in bringing Fatah and Hamas together to form a unity government and has announced plans to reopen the Rafah crossing to Gaza.

Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces Gen. Sami Anan says, “Israel has no right to intervene in the decision about the Rafah border. It is an Egyptian-Palestinian matter.”

It’s also possible that Egyptian parliamentary and presidential election scheduled for the autumn will result in a government keen to renegotiate the Camp David peace treaty to allow for an expanded Egyptian military and an end to the supply of gas from Egypt to Israel at a knock-down price. If the parties fail to agree, Camp David could be binned.

It’s worth noting that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has formed a political party and intends to target 50 percent of all parliamentary seats. Should the Brotherhood decide to align itself with other Islamist parties, the Egyptian government may no longer be secular. That would not only ignite an Islamist-Copt/Islamist-Secularist tinderbox, it would also demolish the icy peace between Cairo and Tel Aviv.

More crucially, Egypt has opened the Suez Canal to Iranian warships and has announced its intention of establishing diplomatic ties with Iran, which is making the White House and certain Gulf states nervous.

That said, you’re probably wondering how the Arab world’s changing face could benefit Israel. In fact, it already has. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long been squirming under pressure from the US, the EU and the Quartet to quit expanding Jewish colonies on the West Bank and to get serious about the two-state solution.

However, subsequent to the Hamas-Fatah détente he has threatened that such Palestinian unity government will not be recognized by Israel and will put the kybosh on future peace talks. And in the event a Fatah-Hamas joint leadership manifests, he has asked a visiting US congressional delegation to advocate an end to US economic aid to the Palestinians and to launch a campaign to ensure the UN Security Council rejects the unilateral Palestinian declaration of a state, scheduled for September.

Netanyahu has been handed ammunition to counter Palestinian ambitions and to get the international community off his back. And with Egypt looking distinctly unfriendly and getting cosy with his country’s sworn enemy, who would dare criticize him now for putting “Israel’s security” first? In reality, as long as Israel has the superpower and most of Europe in its camp, not to mention over 200 nuclear warheads, its endless play of the security card is disingenuous. There’s more. The shuffling of the Arab deckchairs at the top and disunity within the Arab League could fit right in with Israel’s geopolitical strategy. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us (Israel) . . .” Those words were written by Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist connected to Israel’s Ministry of Information, in a 1982 paper titled, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen-eighties.”

Yinon’s wish list was long beginning with the break-up of Iraq into three, which could yet happen after the last US troops head home. He describes Sudan as “the most torn apart state in the Arab Muslim world” and, indeed, it has recently been broken into two.

“Syria is fundamentally no different from Lebanon except in the strong military regime which rules it,” he writes, adding, “but the real civil war taking place nowadays between the Sunni majority and the Shiite Alawi ruling minority testifies to the severity of the domestic trouble.” That was downright prophetic!

He believed that Israel’s “peace” policy and the return of territories were detrimental. “Regaining the Sinai Peninsula with its present and potential (oil and gas) resources is “a political priority which is obstructed by Camp David,” he writes. He hopes that Egypt “will provide Israel with the excuse” to take Sinai back before admitting that the “the vision of a Christian Coptic state in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states . . . is the key to (Israel’s) historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement.”

Most importantly he eschews exchanging land occupied by Israel for peace, which appears to be Netanyahu’s core philosophy. “The solution of the indigenous Arabs will come only when they recognize the existence of Israel in secure borders up to the Jordan River and beyond it, as our existential need . . .” wrote Yinon.

“A sad and very stormy situation surrounds Israel and creates challenges for it, problems, and risks but also far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967,” Yinon wrote. The question is this: Could those words penned 20 years ago be as true today as they were then?

For millions of oppressed peoples, the “Arab Spring” equates to personal liberty and political self-determination. But if it ultimately results in the carving-up of states or the destabilization of others Israel is the winner. Lastly, whoever’s in charge of Egypt must ensure that his people’s new nationalistic fervor doesn’t walk the country into a potential long-laid Israeli trap. It may be that Camp David has outlived its usefulness for gas-and-oil-starved, land-grabbing Israel too.

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.