http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/31/us-egypt-israel-usa-idUSTRE70U53720110131
(Reuters) - If Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very
few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will
bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday.
Political commentators
expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European
allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three
decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political
correctness.Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has told ministers of the Jewish state to make no
comment on the political cliffhanger in Cairo, to avoid inflaming an
already explosive situation. But Israel's President Shimon Peres is not a
minister."We always have had and
still have great respect for President Mubarak," he said on Monday. He
then switched to the past tense. "I don't say everything that he did was
right, but he did one thing which all of us are thankful to him for: he
kept the peace in the Middle East."Newspaper columnists were far more blunt.One
comment by Aviad Pohoryles in the daily Maariv was entitled "A Bullet
in the Back from Uncle Sam." It accused Obama and his Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton of pursuing a naive, smug, and insular diplomacy
heedless of the risks.Who is
advising them, he asked, "to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt
and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold
ally of the president ... an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle
East?""The politically correct diplomacy of American presidents throughout the
generations ... is painfully naive."Obama
on Sunday called for an "orderly transition" to democracy in Egypt,
stopping short of calling on Mubarak to step down, but signaling that
his days may be numbered. [nN30161335]"AMERICA HAS LOST IT"Netanyahu
instructed Israeli ambassadors in a dozen key capitals over the weekend
to impress on host governments that Egypt's stability is paramount,
official sources said."Jordan and Saudi Arabia
see the reactions in the West, how everyone is abandoning Mubarak, and
this will have very serious implications," Haaretz daily quoted one
official as saying.Egypt,
Israel's most powerful neighbor, was the first Arab country to make
peace with the Jewish state, in 1979. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat,
who signed the treaty, was assassinated two years later by an Egyptian
fanatic.It took another 13 years
before King Hussein of Jordan broke Arab ranks to made a second peace
with the Israelis. That treaty was signed by Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated one year later, in 1995, by an
Israeli fanatic.There have been
no peace treaties since. Lebanon and Syria are still technically at war
with Israel. Conservative Gulf Arab regimes have failed to advance their
peace ideas. A hostile Iran has greatly increased its influence in the Middle
East conflict.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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