THE JANUS-FACED ISLAMIST “ARAB SPRING”—KEEPING ISRAEL SAFE, PUNCTURING TWO-STATE BALLOON?

HOW THE ARAB SPRING KEEPS ISRAEL SAFE
Michael Koplow
National Interest, July 31, 2012

 

As a parade of U.S. officials heads to Jerusalem to confer with Israeli leaders, much of the focus has been on Iran. After all, it is widely assumed that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to head off an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Israel understandably is feeling jittery following the lack of any meaningful progress on the P5+1 negotiations. There is, however, another reason why administration officials—from Tom Donilon, Bill Burns and Hillary Clinton earlier this month to Leon Panetta this week—may be trying to reassure Jerusalem. And it has to do with Israel’s more immediate neighbors.

 

Before the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia set off protests and changes in governments across the region, Israel was surrounded by a set of outwardly unfriendly but decidedly status quo states.… Today, however, Israel looks around the region with great consternation: Egypt has a newly emboldened Muslim Brotherhood president; Jordan increasingly is viewed as unstable in the face of growing protests; Syria is in the midst of a civil war; Bashar al-Assad has threatened to rain missiles down on Tel Aviv should NATO try to dislodge him; and even the Saudis now are dealing with protests in their country’s Eastern Province.…

 

The question is whether this situation more closely resembles 1949 or 1968. In other words, is Israel about to enter an era of constant threats from its neighbours and regional instability, or are the states on Israel’s borders content to let the status quo remain despite the upheaval in their internal politics? For a number of reasons, the answer is the latter. First, Israel’s neighbours no longer have the capability to present a genuine threat to Israel due to internal problems. But the absence of a capable outside power backing them has also shifted the strategic environment in Israel’s favour.

 

Israel’s neighbours are wracked with economic hardships and political infighting.… [B]oth Egypt and Syria are in economic free fall, with foreign reserves plummeting, foreign direct investment nearly nonexistent and enormous budget shortfalls. Jordan also has a large current-account deficit and budgetary pressure (due to subsidies for food and energy) as well as a fuel shortage. None of these countries have the wherewithal to start wars with Israel, and Egypt and Jordan desperately need foreign aid from the United States that would disappear should their peace treaties with Israel be abrogated. Israel’s neighbours cannot afford to take on Israel militarily—even if their armies were up to the task.

 

Furthermore, the Arab Spring actually has benefited Israel by taking it off the table as a primary domestic political concern. In the past, Arab governments were able to alleviate pressure on themselves by bringing up the plight of the Palestinians and redirecting public anger toward Israel, thus papering over the fact that Arab states were failing their people. As Arab publics have gained more of a say in their own political affairs, however, bread-and-butter issues rather than perfidious Zionists have become paramount.…

 

The conventional wisdom is that governments that have to take public preferences into account are going to have to put distance between themselves and Israel, and while this is undoubtedly true, it misses the big picture. Egypt and Jordan may stop coordinating with Israel on a host of issues, but that presents a very different problem than having to be on constant alert for invading ground forces. As for Syria, Assad has his hands full trying to remain in power and has passed the point where launching an attack on Israel will net any domestic political benefits. While Jerusalem is concerned about Assad passing chemical weapons to Hezbollah, the chance that Assad himself will deploy them against Israel is remote, and other groups such as the Kurdish Democratic Union Party don’t even register Israel as a concern.…

 

Weak economies and emerging democratic regimes are not the only factors that make Israel’s situation more secure than might be otherwise thought. During the Cold War, Israel had to contend with surrounding Arab states that were backed by the Soviet Union, which had nearly limitless resources to arm its proxies. In contrast, the only country today that approaches an outside power willing to fund the battle against Israel is Iran, and it is a poor substitute for the Soviets.

 

Not only is Iran’s economy being hammered by Western sanctions, rising inflation and falling oil prices, Tehran also is being snubbed by former friends and newly emergent foes.…Iran…is unlikely to carry much sway with Sunni Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Islamic Action Front in Jordan. And while Syria is still in the fold, Assad is too preoccupied with hanging onto power to launch a war against Israel, and Hezbollah has been discredited through its support for Assad.

 

Israel should not be completely unconcerned. The reduced capacity of the new Egyptian government already has turned lawlessness in Sinai into a real headache for Israel, and Hezbollah’s capacity to bombard northern Israel with rockets has not gone away while the chances of the group obtaining Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal has gone up. Nevertheless, the Arab Spring actually has made Israel’s borders more secure, and the risk of a war with a neighbouring government is perhaps at its lowest point in decades. While Islamist parties coming to power may assault Israel with unpleasant rhetoric, that is the only bombardment that will reach Israel for the foreseeable future.

 

(Michael Koplow is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University, where he works on Middle East politics. He blogs at: ottomansandzionists.wordpress.com)

 

ADIEU, TWO-STATE SOLUTION,
ARAB SPRING PUNCTURES BALLOON

Amir Taheri

New York Post July 25, 2012

 

The Arab Spring has punctured many received ideas about Middle Eastern politics—including the “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The “two-state” formula was always based on two questionable assumptions: 1) that Palestinians regarded themselves as a nation in a world of nation-states and wished to create a state of their own; 2) that creating a Palestinian state was something that Israel acting alone could magically make happen.

 

The Arab Spring has seriously shaken the first assumption by revitalizing two ideologies that had lurked under the surface during decades of despotism. Both ideologies were born in the 19th century, partly as a result of contact with rising European empires.

 

The first is pan-Islamism, with the ultimate goal of restoring the caliphate. The second is modernization—which, in practice, means westernization, albeit with a local cultural veneer (a recipe also adopted by such diverse cultures as India and Japan).

 

As the post-Arab Spring landscape takes shape, the clash between those two ideologies will dominate the politics of the Middle East in the coming decades. The pan-Islamist movement has never been interested in the creation of a Palestinian state. In fact, in 1947-48 pan-Islamists worked hard to prevent that outcome.

 

The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Hussaini, leader of the first Palestinian guerrilla groups, and Ahmad Shukeiri, the founder of Hamas (an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) repeatedly asserted that their goal was not the creation of a Palestinian state, but the liberation of Muslim territory occupied by the “infidel.” In other words, they didn’t want a Palestinian state; they wanted the destruction of the Jewish state.

 

Some secular Palestinians adopted the concept of a Palestinian state but only as tactical ploy en route to the strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map. Last week, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh spelled out the pan-Islamist position at a prayer meeting in the north of Gaza on the eve of the fasting month of Ramadan. He announced he would lead a delegation to Cairo to invite Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Mursi, to give a boost to “the struggle to revive the caliphate.”

 

“The Arab nationalist order ensured failure to return to the Islamic caliphate,” he said. “It also ensured the Muslim ummah remained at the bottom of nations [in the world] and perpetuated American hegemony and the continuation of the Zionist occupation.” Haniyeh added: “The Arab Spring has opened the path to the restoration of the Caliphate after the liberation of Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

 

Meanwhile, the Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian pan-Islamist outfit, has launched a campaign against what it dubs “the two-state conspiracy.” According to Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah, Washington plans to revive the debate as a “diversion “at a time that Muslim masses seek to liberate “all of Islam’s lost lands.”

 

Despite the enthusiasm shown by Hanieyh and Shalah, as a political strategy the revival of the caliphate remains a murky concept.  Many questions remain unanswered. Who could be the next caliph? The Ottoman dynasty that held the caliphate for four centuries withered away without a male heir to the last caliph, Abdul-Majid II. Claims by a range of personalities, including Sharif Hussein (the great grandfather of the present king of Jordan), the Aga Khan and the Egyptian King Farouq never took off.  Efforts by Iran’s “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, to cast himself as a Shiite version of the caliph are seldom taken seriously even by Iranian officials.

 

If finding an acceptable candidate for caliph is difficult, identifying the “lost lands of Islam” that need to be liberated is even more so. Yes, Israel’s tiny chunk of territory, about 20 percent of historic Palestine, is always included. But so are much of northern India and virtually the whole of the Balkan Peninsula.…In short, pan-Islamists have a plateful. They have no time to waste on the mirage of a cat’s-paw of a putative Palestinian state.

 

THE ISLAMIST ASCENDANCY

Charles Krauthammer

Washington Post July 12, 2012

 

Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Yet even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:

 

Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament—enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).

 

As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.

 

What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.  It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era—secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical—ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.

 

Its vehicle was military dictatorship, and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958.…Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists—as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads)—as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.

 

But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.

 

Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naively believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.

 

This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality. “Islam is the answer,” it preached and carried the day.

 

But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?  To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).

 

For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey’s military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.

 

Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.

 

As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran, had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution). Or it might adapt to modernity, accept the alternation of power with secularists and thus achieve by evolution an authentic Arab-Islamic democratic norm.

 

Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.

 

PARALLEL BETRAYALS:
IRANIAN REVOLUTION AND ARAB SPRING

Raymond Ibrahim,

FrontPage Magazine, June 18, 2012

 

Many are the lessons to be learned between the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the current revolutions of the Arab world. Consider the issue of the hijab, the female “veil”—the proliferation of which, according to one former Islamist and associate of al-Qaeda’s Ayman Zawahiri, is associated with a Muslim society’s downward spiral into oppression and terror.

 

Prior to Egypt’s presidential elections, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Muhammad Morsi, assured the nation’s liberals and secularists that, as president, he would certainly not enforce the hijab: “Many people are speaking nonsense, saying that I will impose the hijab against the will of the people; no one is going to force anyone to wear a specific uniform.”

 

These are famous words, spoken almost verbatim some 33 years earlier, in Iran, at the time of the 1979 revolution. In fact, during the early days of the revolution, Ayatollah Mahmud Taleghani, a popular mullah, to reassure the secularists who participated in the overthrow of the Shah that an Islamic government would certainly not interfere with their freedoms, declared in the March 11, 1979 edition of Iran’s newspaper, Ettela’at, that “The hijab will not be a matter of coercion.”

 

The rest is history. Within months of the founding of the Islamic Republic, the 1967 Family Protection Law was repealed, female government workers were made to wear the hijab, women were barred from becoming judges, sex-segregation laws were promulgated, the marriage age for girls was dropped to 13, and married women were barred from attending regular schools. Today, Iranian women are regularly beaten if they are not dressed in an appropriate hijab.

 

The parallels between Iran and Egypt do not end there. While today it is standard to think of the 1979 Iranian revolution as a purely Islamic affair, in fact, many of the revolutionaries were secular, liberal, Marxist, non-Muslim, etc. The one goal that glued them altogether was the desire to overthrow the autocratic Shah. Many of these Iranians did not want an Islamic government, certainly not a theocracy. And indeed, not just the Ayatollah Taleghani, but the Ayatollah Khomeini himself played down Sharia’s draconian role to mobilize all these divergent segments of society—until he was fully entrenched in power, that is.

 

In short, the Iranian Revolution began as a heterodox affair, with different revolutionary factions and different ideological agendas, but it ended with the rise of a totalitarian Islamic republic.

Sound familiar? This is precisely what is happening today in Egypt, where the one unifying goal of the revolution was the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; where many Egyptians are secularist, liberal, Christian, etc., and certainly do not want an Islamic government; and where the Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, are busy reassuring everyone that all their freedoms will be preserved.

 

Based on the Iranian model and the ongoing “Arab Spring,” two lessons emerge as to how Islamists manage to consolidate power: 1) through outright lies and false promises, justified through Islamic doctrines like taqiyya and tawriya; and 2) through gradual implementation. This is how the mullahs achieved power in Iran, and this is how the Muslim Brotherhood—which is on record saying that its gradual, long-term goal is “mastership of the world”—is working to achieve power in Egypt, seen as the first domino on the road to caliphate.

 

Thus history prepares to repeat itself, even as the world prepares to act surprised—all in accord with that age-old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” One may forgive those Iranians and others who fell for the lies of the Islamists during the 1979 revolution: there were no similar large scale precedents to learn from, certainly not from the modern era; the world was just beginning to confront political Islam.

 

Today, however, as Islamists exploit democracy to empower Sharia—and after more than three decades’ worth of Islamist lies, betrayals, and broken promises, all justified by Islamic doctrines—for anyone to still take them at their word, well, that is a big “shame on you.”