WHEN the “Arab Spring” unexpectedly broke out late last year,
Natan Sharansky waxed optimistic. Writing in the Washington
Post in March, the former Soviet refusenik who ranks as
Israel’s best known pro-democracy activist argued that the
grassroots revolts that unseated Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abedine
Ben Ali and Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak marked the start of a
democratic tsunami that could soon engulf the region. Regional
conditions, he counseled, were ripe for just this sort of radical
surgery.
These days, however, Israelis who share this hopeful outlook are
exceedingly hard to find. A recent visit found policymakers and
academics of all political stripes deeply apprehensive of the
tectonic shifts that have taken place in their region this
year. They have good reason to be. Israel’s security
environment, never favorable, has taken a dramatic turn for the
worse.
The problems begin on Israel’s southern border. The ouster of
the Mubarak regime in Egypt this February upended the longstanding
status quo between Cairo and Jerusalem, in which successive Israeli
governments could depend on a bilateral relationship that, if not
warm, was at least predictable.
The groundwork for that “cold peace” had been laid at Camp
David, Maryland, in 1978, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat
formally agreed to normalize relations with the Jewish state.
Sadat’s decision was deeply controversial — and dangerous. (Sadat
himself paid the ultimate price for it three years later, dying at
the hands of militants from Egypt’s most extreme Islamist group,
the Gama’a Islamiya.) It did, however, turn out to be
durable; Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, understood theneed for
good working ties with Israel — and helped erect the military,
economic, and security mechanisms needed to preserve stability
between the two countries.
Now, Egypt’s revolution has called those arrangements into
question. Politically, Mubarak’s ouster has paved the way for the
ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s powerful and
previously outlawed Islamist movement, which now stands poised to
dominate upcoming parliamentary elections (currently scheduled for
November). Even ahead of them, however, Cairo’s caretaker
government has made some disturbing changes in strategic direction,
resuming long-stalled diplomatic relations with onetime regional
rival Iran and softening its attitudes toward the Palestinian
Authority’s main Islamist movement, Hamas.
Attitudes toward Israel are also shifting. An April poll
conducted by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of
Egyptians believe the Camp David Accords—and by extension
normalized relations with Israel—should be annulled. That, too, is
the preference of the Muslim Brotherhood. If it does win big in
this fall’s elections, there are fears in Israel that the
security arrangements carefully erected with Cairo over the past
three decades could fall by the wayside, as the two countries enter
a new cycle of conflict.
But the most immediate concern relates to security. In the midst
of Egypt’s ferment last spring, the country’s military redeployed
to the Sinai, spurred by fears that the desert region’s indigenous
tribes could become an additional source of instability for
Mubarak’s embattled regime. His subsequent fall, however, prompted
a retraction of Egyptian forces, leaving the area largely
ungoverned — and making it an inviting geostrategic prize.
Islamic militants have wasted no time filling the resulting
void. As of late May, more than 400 members of al Qaeda were
believed to have made their way to the Sinai, exploiting the
region’s rising criminality and lawlessness to gain a foothold. The
Egyptian government, meanwhile, appears unable to secure the area,
unwilling to do so, or both. The mid-August attack outside the
Israeli resort city of Eilat by terrorists who had infiltrated via
the Sinai only confirmed these suspicions — and precipitated an
unprecedented crisis in Israeli-Egyptian relations.
TO ISRAEL’S NORTH, a different sort of problem is unfolding. In
Syria, resilient grassroots protests against the regime of Bashar
al-Assad have raged for months, notwithstanding the government’s
increasingly brutal response. The consensus in Israeli policy
circles is that the Assad regime’s days are numbered. But opinions
among experts in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as to when exactly that
will happen, and what sort of regime will arise in Assad’s wake,
are far less unified.
For Israel, the answers matter a great deal. Syria has
historically styled itself as Israel’s mortal enemy, and in that
role supported and sustained terrorist groups (Palestinian and
otherwise) targeting the Jewish state. Over the past two decades,
it also has forged a strong partnership with the Islamic Republic
of Iran, colluding to arm the Shi’ite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon
and closely coordinating anti-Israeli and anti-Western activities
with the ayatollahs in Tehran. As such, Assad’s potential demise
holds out the tantalizing promise of a less antagonistic regional
neighbor, greater security on Israel’s northern front, and a major
strategic blow to the Iranian regime.
For the time being, though, Syria’s contortions are generating
no shortage of instability for Israel. That much was demonstrated
in dramatic fashion in May and June, when the Assad regime, seeking
to divert attention from its internal rebellion, allowed
Palestinian protesters to attempt to breach the country’s common
border with Israel, leading to armed clashes with the Israeli
military. And as Syria’s disorder deepens, Israelis fear that such
provocations could become more frequent — and more
destabilizing.
THEN THERE ARE the Palestinians. While the West Bank and Gaza
Strip so far have proved largely immune from the ferment taking
place elsewhere in the Arab world, the activism that has
accompanied the “Arab Spring” has turned out to be infectious.
The first signs of real change in the traditionally stagnant
politics of the Palestinian Authority came in April, when the
government of Mahmoud Abbas unexpectedly announced a merger with
its main Islamist opposition, Hamas. Such a marriage of convenience
might be good for the Palestinian polity— which has been bitterly
divided since Hamas’s hostile takeover of the Gaza Strip in early
2007 — but its effects on relations with Israel would be
ruinous. With Hamas committed to creating a Palestine that
stretches, in the words of its covenant, “from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean Sea,” normal relations between a hybrid
Palestinian government and Israel are difficult to imagine. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much in his May address
to Congress, when he asserted that his government “will not
negotiate with a Palestinian government backed by the Palestinian
version of al Qaeda.”
Fortunately, cementing a lasting union has turned out to be far
more difficult than either Hamas or Fatah initially thought.
Divisions over everything from representation in government to the
future role of current PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (whom Hamas
hates) have kept the two sides from reaching any consensus.
Discussions regarding “reconciliation” have been officially tabled
until later this year.
But if a unity government isn’t imminent, an even more
potentially dangerous development is. In recent months, Abbas and
company have stepped up their plans to abandon bilateral
negotiations with Israel and unilaterally declare statehood through
the United Nations. The strategy is a bold one. By scrapping the
peace process begun in Oslo, Norway, in 1993 in favor of
international recognition via UN vote, Abbas clearly hopes to
generate new pressure on Israel to concede on a range of issues
(including final borders, sovereignty of Jerusalem, and the
Palestinian “right of return”) that were supposed to be bilaterally
agreed-upon. But his efforts have set the stage for a new crisis,
since there is no framework governing relations between Israel and
the new state of “Palestine” — and tensions could easily escalate
if the Palestinian government proves that it cannot, or will not,
ensure Israel’s security.
As if all this weren’t enough, Israel is now weathering its own
version of the Arab Spring — albeit in rather more civilized
fashion than is visible elsewhere in the region. Since July,
hundreds of thousands of Israelis, discontented over everything
from the high price of cottage cheese to prohibitive housing costs
in the country’s desirable metropolitan areas, have staged peaceful
marches, sit-ins, and protests. The movement, which some pundits
have taken to calling the “Israeli summer,” has presented a costly
domestic distraction to Netanyahu’s coalition government, now
grappling with new and vexing national security headaches.
YET ALL OF THESE CHALLENGES, while difficult, might be
manageable, if only Israel’s relationship with its most important
strategic partner, the United States, were stable. But the past two
years have seen a distinct chill creep into the political dialogue
between Washington and Jerusalem. To be sure, bilateral cooperation
can still be said to be flourishing on a range of issues —
counterterrorism, military training, and missile defense, to name
just a few. Yet the Obama administration’s heavy-handed pressure on
Israel to conclude a peace deal with the Palestinians, and its
abandonment of the appearance of being an impartial broker in that
process, has injected considerable friction into the “special
relationship.” So has the White House’s meandering regional
policy, with its dithering on Syria and halfhearted approach to
countering Iran’s nuclear program. Cumulatively, these dynamics
have brought the strategic partnership that serves as a key
guarantor of Israel’s security to what is arguably its lowest ebb
since it was codified in the early 1980s.
The resulting view now held by Israeli policymakers was neatly
encapsulated not long ago by Moshe Arens, a former minister of
defense and of foreign affairs. “You would expect Israel, a
democracy, to welcome the downfall of dictatorships in neighboring
countries, and see the Arab Spring bring freedom to the Arab
World,” Arens wrote in an August op-ed in the liberal daily
Ha’aretz. “But in recent months we have learned to our dismay that
the downfall of Arab dictators may bring in its wake chaos and
anarchy.”
The result is a more cautious and conservative Israeli polity.
More than at any time in recent memory, policymakers in Jerusalem
are disinclined to take risks for peace, or to seek compromise in
the service of regional acceptance. Rather, Israel is now animated
by the notion that, as Arens has put it, “it is a time for watching
and waiting to see how things are going to turn out.”
Even Sharansky, for all his optimism about Arab democracy, is
likely to approve of such an approach.
