Israel Update for February 2011

David Dolan

As with people everywhere on earth, Israelis watched the dramatic ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11 with rapt attention. This came as anti-government street protests intensified in several other Muslim countries including Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Iran. Despite the regional upheaval, Israeli officials were heartened that the interim military government which is now ruling Egypt has pledged to uphold the country's controversial peace treaty with Israel, at least until promised national elections bring a new government to power later this year.

Trying to forestall unrest on his own streets, the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister dissolved his cabinet during the month and pledged to hold fresh parliamentary and presidential elections. The opposition Hamas movement that violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 denounced the move, saying it would boycott the upcoming vote. This came after Hamas hailed the 'popular revolution' in Egypt, apparently hoping it will ultimately lead to the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement taking over the troubled neighboring country. Meanwhile Israeli leaders expressed concern that Hamas might now gain an even greater ability to smuggle in weapons from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula due to the instability in Cairo and elsewhere.

Israeli officials were also keeping a close watch on developments in Iran, where anti-government protestors took to the streets after being brutally repressed by the regime's security forces two years ago. They also expressed alarm over reports that two Iranian warships were sailing through the Suez Canal on their way to Syria. Some analysts said the ship transits were another indication that the radical Shiite government based in Tehran is stepping up efforts to use the regional turmoil to strengthen Iran's allies and agents operating in the Arab world. Officials expressed particular concern that violent clashes in Bahrain-home base of America's strategic Fifth Fleet-are being egged on by Iran, with evidence suggesting that its surrogate Lebanese Hizbullah force is also involved.

Amid the regional turmoil, Israel's new military chief of staff was sworn in during February as speculation grew that the outgoing chief will enter the political realm. In Europe, politicians in both Greece and Holland expressed solidarity with the Jewish state, as did legislators in the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Meanwhile Israeli officials were gearing up for widespread labour strikes being organized by the Histadrut national workers federation. The potential labour union disruptions are mainly designed to protest the continuing rise in food and fuel costs-one of the core issues that brought demonstrators to the streets of Egypt and elsewhere.

Bye Bye Mubarak

Israeli officials were not exactly thrilled that beleaguered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office in February by huge numbers of street protestors demanding he leave Cairo. Although his relations with the Jewish state were strained at times, Mubarak's overall record of keeping his large nation fairly stable over the past three decades while adhering to the Camp David peace accords was deeply appreciated in Jerusalem. After all, the previous two Egyptian leaders, Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat, had gone to war against Israel, although Sadat subsequently signed the American-mediated peace agreement and was assassinated for that major move (Sadat's Egyptian assassin has a street named after him in Tehran). Likewise Palestinian Authority officials viewed Mubarak's steady administration as beneficial to both the PA and to most of the Egyptian people. Hamas on the other hand had always espoused the anti-Mubarak stand that was the bedrock of its parent Islamic Sunni Arab organization, the Muslim Brotherhood Movement.

Israeli government and security officials enjoyed close working relations with Mubarak and other Egyptian government leaders. While obviously aware that the regime was basically autocratic and hardly resembled the vibrant democratic system thriving in Israel, they pointed out that Mubarak's rule was nevertheless relatively benign, at least in regional Arab-Muslim terms. Certainly his government showed nowhere near the levels of oppression displayed by the Syrian Assad dictatorship, which has slaughtered thousands of its own citizens over the decades, or the demented Iranian clerical regime that likewise uses disproportionate force to quell anti-government demonstrations. Nor was Mubarak considered anywhere nearly as corrupt as the late PA leader Yasser Arafat, Libya's exotic strongman Muammar Gaddafi or Tunisia's exiled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

On top of this, Israeli politicians and pundits pointed out that the people Mubarak was suppressing in his teeming country were mostly Muslim extremists of the Hamas variety. It was army personnel linked to the Muslim Brotherhood that shot dead his predecessor Anwar Sadat in October 1981, meaning these opposition forces had previously demonstrated that they were both capable of, and willing to use murderous violence to promote their extremist goals. Knowing the movement would break all military ties with the United States if it came to power-which would in turn undoubtedly lead to a cutoff of vital military and economic assistance from Washington-Mubarak was actually acting in the best interests of most of his citizens by suppressing the Muslim Brothers, said many commentators. They noted that Palestinians living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have seen unemployment increase and personal religious and political freedoms reduced under radical Islamic rule, with all women once again consigned to the veil. The same would have probably been the case in Egypt if Hosni Mubarak had not run his impoverished country with a bit of an iron fist.

Unhappy With Obama

Some Israeli officials and many regional analysts were quite open in their criticism of how the Obama Administration handled the crisis in Egypt. Similar concerns were more quietly expressed by American-backed Arab governments in several Gulf countries, and in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Israeli analysts opined that while the mass anti-Mubarak street protest were mainly initiated by young people seeking jobs and expanded personal freedoms, including many Coptic Christians who make up nearly 10% of Egypt's mushrooming population, it was quickly dominated by observant Muslims who poured out in droves from thousands of mosques on Friday, January 28 to massively bolster the previous street protests. Most of the Muslims were hardly advocating better access to the internet and the liberalization of society, as portrayed in many sympathetic international media reports. While they did demand more jobs and less police brutality, most have also long wanted to see Western influence over Egypt either reduced or eliminated altogether, not to mention the abrogation of the Camp David accords with Israel, even if this further harmed their struggling economy.

Given the fact that he was one of America's staunchest allies in the Arab world, where anti-Western sentiments are usually a core feature of most Islamic mosques, commentators said the Obama administration's relatively quick abandonment of Mubarak was sure to give sleepless nights to other allies. Many Israeli Middle East analysts noted that the conditions for significant democratic reforms taking hold in most regional countries simply do not exist. Extremists will always cynically use such reforms to further their radical agendas, just as Hamas rode the Palestinian electoral process created by the Oslo peace accords to come to power in 2006. They recalled that US President Jimmy Carter initially encouraged the popular overthrow of another pro-American Muslim ally, the Shah of Iran, only to be met with the fiercely anti-American regime that still rules the Shiite country thirty years later. If the same thing were to happen in heavily-armed Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Osama Bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be much closer to fulfilling their publicly-stated goals of removing Western influence from the region after destroying Israel.

Suspicions in Jerusalem that the despotic Iranian regime and Al Qaida were playing separate, but influential roles in promoting the so-called 'democratic reform revolution' in the region intensified when widespread unrest broke out in both Yemen and Bahrain in the wake of Mubarak's dramatic ouster. Neither country's autocratic leaders are considered terribly repressive of their citizen-opponents, unlike in Egypt, Iran and Syria. Yemen is a known Al Qaida stronghold, with its pro-American Sunni Arab government doing its best to help the United States and its allies suppress the violent Sunni terrorist movement that has declared a war of annihilation against America and Israel. Located further north on the Arabian Peninsula, the small island country of Bahrain is Sunni-ruled, yet a majority of its citizens are Shiite Muslims. They are bolstered by thousands of Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite foreign workers. Many would probably not mind if Iran's militant brand of Islam ended up dominating the region.

Bahrain is also the home of America's Fifth Fleet and other US and British military forces, meaning its strategic value to the West is arguably greater than Egypt's. Israeli officials are therefore hoping that American military leaders will put much stronger pressure on President Obama and his deputies to support the government there while continuing to call for needed reforms. Israeli leaders assess that the loss of US port rights in Bahrain would greatly embolden Iran and increase the chances of a full-scale war erupting with the rogue Muslim country and its anti-Israel allies in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.

Some Relief