New Republic
The End of the Forty-Year Peace
Between Israel and Arab States
* _
Robert Satloff
_
(http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/110652/the-end-the-forty-year-peace-between-israel-and-arab-states#)
December 4, 2012
Even before Gaza fell silent the other week, the blogosphere was full of
lists of “winners and losers” of the mini-war that helpfully came to a halt
before ruining Thanksgiving dinner. In one article after another, the big
winner was Egypt’s President Muhammad Morsi, followed by the leaders of
Hamas, and maybe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the big loser was
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, followed by Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and maybe Netanyahu.
Titillating though it may be, this focus on personality politics missed the
larger significance of the Gaza conflict as the beginning of a new era in
the Middle East—one defined by the end of the region’s forty-year peace.
Don’t blame yourself if you didn’t realize that the Middle East has
enjoyed four decades of peace. But that is precisely what has transpired
between
Israel and Arab states since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In its first
twenty-five years of independence, Israel was characterized by multi-state war
with intermittent bouts of unsuccessful diplomacy. Six Arab armies invaded
Israel in 1948; Israel fought four Arab armies in June 1967; twelve Arab
armies participated in the 1973 war. In the forty years since, Israel has
fought no wars against an Arab state, and its history has been characterized
by
frequently successful diplomacy with intermittent bouts of terrorism and
asymmetric war against non-state actors.
The difference between these two realities may not be great to the grieving
mother, the widowed wife, or the orphaned child, but the difference is
profound in strategic terms. For the past forty years, Israel knew no active
state-to-state attack on any of its borders; its main local threats came
from a guerilla organization, Hezbollah, and from the intra-state challenge of
rebellion, terrorism and insurrection known as the first and second
uprisings (popularly known as “intifadas”).
Further afield, of course, Israel was a target for Saddam Hussein’s
long-range missiles and the two ends of the Iran’s threat spectrum: terrorism
and
nuclear ambitions. But there is a profound difference between the urgency
and reality of regional war and the challenges Israel has faced over the
past forty years. Indeed, it is this difference that gave Israel the freedom
and latitude to develop from a broken, near-bankrupt, third-world economy to
a first-world economic and technological power and, along the way, to
emerge as an important strategic asset to the United States.
With Hamas’s strong political backing from regional states, future
historians might very well view the Gaza conflict as the first episode of a
new era
of renewed inter-state competition and, potentially, inter-state conflict
in the Arab-Israeli arena. This is not to suggest that full-scale
Arab-Israeli war is in the offing. Israel’s potential adversaries, such as
Islamist-led Egypt and an Islamist-led post-Assad Syria, may quite likely be
consumed with other priorities, such as sorting out internal socio-economic
problems or resolving domestic ethnic disputes, for years or even decades to
come. This focus on problems at home may, for a long time, mask the strategic
shift now underway—a shift in which countries that used to share strategic
interests in preventing direct state-to-state conflict may find tactical
ways to postpone conflict to another day. But that doesn’t make the shift any
less real or menacing, either for Israeli or American interests.
What makes this development particularly worrisome for friends of Israel is
that it puts the Jewish state at the heart of two mega-trends that are
defining what can be termed the “new new Middle East.” The “old new Middle
East” was a region of peace, trade, and regional cooperation about which
visionaries, like Shimon Peres, waxed poetic. This Middle East reached its
heyday in the mid-’90s, when Israelis were welcome everywhere from Rabat to
Muscat. The “new new Middle East” is the region defined by the twin threats
of Iranian hegemonic ambitions and the spread of radical Sunni extremism, a
vast area where Israelis are not only unwelcome but where they are building
fences along their borders to separate themselves from the
Gog-versus-Magog fight around them.
In some parts of the region, such as Syria and Bahrain, these two trends
are fighting each other, whether directly or via proxies. But in the
Arab-Israel arena, these two trends have found a way to join forces, as seen
in the
division of labor between Iran’s provision of rockets and weapons to Hamas
and the growing Sunni (Egyptian-Qatari-Tunisian-Turkish) provision of
political support to Hamas. That these two trends, which battle each other
ferociously elsewhere in the Middle East, can find common ground in their
battle against Israel does not augur well for Israel’s strategic situation in
the future.
All is not lost. Despite this strategic shift, there is much the United
States can do, individually and with partners, to postpone the return to
inter-state Arab-Israeli conflict. Such a strategy begins with strengthening
American-Israeli cooperation and includes such initiatives as preventing Hamas
from winning a political victory over the moribund Palestinian Authority,
incentivizing moderate behavior from the calculating Islamist leaders of
Egypt, speeding the demise of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and
preventing the collapse of a wobbly Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. These are the
five
most urgent policy priorities in the Arab-Israeli arena. They don’t
address the broader challenges of Iran’s hegemonic ambitions and the spread of
radical Sunni extremism, but they may, at least, limit the drift to renewed
Middle East war.
Admittedly, this is not a happy agenda, full of peace conferences and White
House signing ceremonies. That era has passed; it was lovely while it
lasted. But its passing does not lessen the centrality of the Middle East to
U.S. strategic interests. Despite all the talk about multi-polarity, energy
independence, American decline, and the urgency of a pivot toward Asia, two
facts remain undisputed: the Middle East remains a region of vital
importance to the U.S., and there is no outside power that comes close to
America
in its ability to influence the region. If anyone is going to bear the heavy
lifting in preventing a descent to full-scale regional war, it is going to
be us. Again.
Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy.
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