After the “Arab Spring will come the turn of the Islamist winter.” This cliché has ended up imposing itself in Israel. For months, political and military officials have been hammering home this seasonal metaphor in order to warn the Western world, but also their own public, against the “illusion” of democratic change in the Arab world. Although, grudgingly, they acknowledge that the Arab revolutions targeted dictatorial and corrupt regimes, their diagnosis is final: power is going to fall into the hands of Islamists, the greatest enemies of freedom, far more formidable than their predecessors and — what counts more — sworn enemies of Israel.
Of course, this catastrophe scenario is not absurd, and the Israelis are certainly not the only ones in the world, nor even in the Arab countries, to worry about such a development. The idea of an Egyptian parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, allies or rivals of Salafists who want outright to impose a theocracy, makes secular circles and the Copts shudder. But for the right in power, it is not one possibility among others: the die is cast, and for a long time.
The politicians
“We told you so,” declares, as it happens, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a Cassandra role consistent with a long tradition of the Israeli right, which has always cultivated the image of an Israel “alone among the Nations,” according to the biblical verse, confronted with an irremediably hostile environment, facing forces that, under the pretext of denouncing its policy, have designs on its very existence, so that it would be vain to make concessions to them.
Had he not been one of the first to worry about the abandonment of Mubarak by the Obama administration and to warn that the popular revolt in Egypt risked leading to a period of “instability and uncertainty for many years” in the region? “There are two worlds, two halves, two visions. That of the free world and that of the radical world. Which will prevail in Egypt? The answer is crucial for the future of Egypt, of the region, and for us here in Israel,” he asks, as early as February 2, from the rostrum of the Knesset.
Subsequently, Israeli leaders go on to brandish the specter of an Iranian-style scenario, even to suspect — which has in no way been proven — the hand of Tehran in the Egyptian revolution. Thus Netanyahu sounds the alarm in April about the risk that “the Arab spring may turn into an Iranian winter” (interview with AFP, 17/04/11). He also declares that he “hopes to see the European spring of 1989” in the Arab countries, in reference to the fall of the totalitarian communist system at the end of the 1980s in Eastern Europe. But he fears above all that the events in the Near and Middle East may be exploited by Tehran and that the Islamic revolution of 1979 may repeat itself.
Today these doubts have turned into certainties. Netanyahu explained himself on the matter again in a speech from the rostrum of the Knesset on November 23. “In February, I was at this rostrum when millions of Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo and my friends in the opposition saw in it the dawn of a new era of liberalism and modernism. When I said that, despite our hopes, it was more probable that it would be the Islamist, anti-American and anti-Israeli wave that would surge, I was accused of frightening people and of not understanding where things were heading. Well, they are heading in a very specific direction: backward and not forward.” The lesson to be drawn from this is that in these uncertain times, Israel, an “island of stability and democracy” in the Near East according to Netanyahu, a “villa in the jungle” according to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, must count only on its own strength to ensure its security.
In other words, there is no guarantee that the peace accords with Egypt, signed with Sadat, will be honored by a new regime. In this sense, the repeated acts of sabotage, in the Egyptian Sinai, of the pipeline conveying natural gas toward Israel and Jordan, without the Egyptian authorities managing to stop them, are cause for concern.
The military
In the same frame of mind, General Eyal Eisenberg, head of the home front defense services, judged on September 5 that a “radical Islamist winter” could succeed the “Arab spring.” “What has been considered the springtime of the Arab peoples may turn into a radical Islamist winter, which increases the probability of a general and total war in the region with a possibility of the use of weapons of mass destruction,” he stated publicly.
The former Labor defense minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, a personal friend of ex-president Mubarak, went so far, for his part, as to predict, in November, an “Israeli-Egyptian confrontation,” calling on Tsahal to prepare for it.
Without subscribing to so dark an analysis, the general staff has already taken precautions. Reinforcements have been deployed along the Egyptian border in the Negev desert, and the construction of a “security fence” has been accelerated, with a view to preventing the infiltration of commandos and terrorist attacks in Israel, whereas this barrier was originally intended above all to close Israel off from the entry of clandestine African migrants.
Nonetheless, the defense officials display the conviction that any government in place in Egypt will respect the peace accords, even if this peace becomes still more “cold” than the state of non-belligerence that has prevailed between the two countries for thirty years. They note that no political force in Egypt liable to exercise responsibilities — including the Muslim Brotherhood — is calling for the outright abolition of the 1979 peace treaty, and they rule out a new power’s risking the introduction of armed forces into the Sinai beyond the authorized quotas, or the closing of navigation to Israeli ships in the Suez Canal or in the Gulf of Aqaba, which would be regarded as so many casus belli.
Anxious to avoid friction with the Egyptian army, considered the last bulwark against the Islamists, they congratulate themselves on the reinforced cooperation on the ground, after deadly incidents at the border, and emphasize the role played by Egypt, in October, in the liberation of the soldier Gilad Shalit, following a prisoner-exchange agreement with Hamas.
More generally, security officials, foremost among them Ehud Barak, consider that Israel can derive benefits from the “Arab spring,” insofar as the revolt would bring down the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
On this subject, the former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, considered an expert on Syria, judges that, contrary to its past policy, Israel now wishes for the revolt in Syria to prevail, independently of the risk of instability and of a seizure of power by Islamist forces in that country. “After learning of the extent of the nuclear cooperation between Syria and North Korea, and given the threats to Israel’s security posed by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza (supported and armed by Damascus and Tehran), Israel has come to the conclusion that Assad’s survival would do us more harm than his departure,” he writes, in an op-ed (International Herald Tribune, November 19-20).
The “Jewish street”
Surprised — like the rest of the world — by the Arab revolutions, disoriented by the declarations of its leaders, Israeli public opinion has oscillated for a year between distrust and hope. But beyond an obvious interest and even a certain admiration for the strength of a social movement — admiration that is in itself a totally new phenomenon in Israel — it is fear that today gains the upper hand.
It is fed by the spectacular electoral successes of the Islamists and by the anti-Israeli demonstrations — small in scale but violent — in Egypt, whereas there had been no question of Israel at the beginning of the movement.
The nuances that specialists can introduce regarding the possibility of a “moderate Islamism,” Turkish- or Moroccan-style, indeed Tunisian-style, have hardly any hold on opinion. In Egypt, have the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently called upon to become the principal political force after years of clandestinity or semi-legality, not always harbored a hatred toward Zionism — come to usurp Palestine, a “Land of Islam” — toward the Jewish State, responsible for the “Nakba,” the catastrophe constituted by the largely forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, if not toward the Jews themselves, if one takes into account their original writings profoundly marked by a religious anti-Judaism… It is hardly surprising if 65% of Israelis (against 11% of the contrary opinion) judged, even before Mubarak’s fall, that his departure would have a negative effect for Israel, 59% expecting the coming to power of an “Islamist regime,” according to a poll published on February 3.
And yet, a few months later, at the height of the “Israeli summer,” the wave of social protest that surged over Israel — with protesters camping in the heart of Tel Aviv — would rename “Tahrir junction” the corner of Rothschild Boulevard, a highly symbolic place where the movement began with a wildcat encampment of hundreds of demonstrators. This would not be the only reference to the “Arab spring.” During the mass demonstrations of unprecedented scale, one would see banners with the inscriptions “Mubarak-Assad-Netanyahu,” associating in the same opprobrium the deposed Egyptian president, the head of the bloodthirsty Syrian regime, and a democratically elected Israeli prime minister.
It is true that slogans as radical as these represented only a minority. If the “Arab spring” had any influence, it is only indirect, or it lies in the feeling that we, Israelis, can do as much as our Arab neighbors. All the more so since, contrary to what was happening in the “Arab street,” these protesters, gathered in the hundreds of thousands around the slogan “the people want social justice,” were not demanding a change of political regime but a radical modification of economic and social policy, in the wake of the “indignados” movement in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Since then, the movement has run out of steam, and even should mass demonstrations resume, it is doubtful that one would find in them the expressions of sympathy for “Tahrir Square” as a symbol against oppression.
In the meantime, the Israeli embassy was stormed and partly ransacked by a frenzied crowd on the night of September 9 to 10, forcing the Israeli ambassador to flee Egypt. And on November 26, a few thousand Islamist demonstrators cried out their hatred of Israel, an event to which the Israeli media devoted a far more important place than to the much more massive demonstration the same day in Tahrir Square against the maintenance of the military regime and police violence.
“The hour of the Last Judgment has struck for Tel Aviv,” ran the headline of the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot, quoting an Islamist slogan. The tone has indeed changed in the press — with the notable exception of the daily Haaretz — since the early reports rather empathetic toward the “Arab spring.” A certain journalist who, at Pesach, was being ironic about the fact that the Jews in Israel, celebrating the “festival of liberation from slavery in Egypt,” had no thought for the modern liberation that the “Arab spring” represents for the Egyptians, now writes that “the time has come to bury our dreams of a new Middle East of which Israel would be a model” (Nahum Barnea, Yediot Aharonot, 25/11).
This is not very different from the official discourse. Except that a Netanyahu — unlike the head of State Shimon Peres — never cherished that dream. For the nationalist right in power, the turn of events is above all a confirmation of its pessimistic conceptions. In this sense, it justifies, in its eyes, its intransigent position for the maintenance of Israeli control over important parts of the West Bank, arguing that one cannot depend, for one’s security, on a written agreement with a Palestinian Authority that risks being overthrown tomorrow by Hamas. Above all, the “Islamist winter” offers a chance to assert once again Israel’s role as a bastion of the West, an outpost of democracy facing, today, the fundamentalist surge.
The problem is that it is not at all certain that this West, and notably the United States, shares this opinion and finds in Israel a dream ally for countering Islamism in its most radical form.
Irony of history: at the very moment when the Israeli government denounces the antidemocratic tendencies in the Arab world, in Israel ultranationalist forces of the governing coalition are campaigning to restrict the very same civic liberties. They have already managed to pass certain laws (a ban on calling for the boycott of settlements or for the commemoration of the Nakba). They fully intend to continue, going after freedom of the press, left-wing NGOs, and the Supreme Court, with a view to establishing what the media, the opposition, and a part of the right denounce as a “dictatorship of the majority.”
What is more, those very people in Israel who stigmatize the Islamist plans to impose sharia (Islamic religious law) in the Arab countries get along very well with a religious camp aspiring to establish halakha, Jewish religious law. As this caricature published on November 29 in Haaretz expresses it: two bearded men side by side, both wearing skullcaps; one, under the label “Jewish spring,” is an ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist Jew, and the other, under the label “Arab spring,” is a Muslim fundamentalist. One has a white beard, the other a black beard. Spot the difference…
But it is only a caricature, if only because the weight of religion is not the same in the two societies. If the fears of the one feed the phobias of the other, in a disturbing play of mirrors between Muslim fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists, other forces may emerge — not necessarily secular but capable of accommodating religious precepts to the demand for democracy.
Thirst for justice, thirst for freedom, thirst for dignity: the same causes that brought millions of Egyptians out onto Tahrir Square and hundreds of thousands of Israelis onto Rothschild Boulevard may bring about new upheavals and tomorrow drive the crowds to turn against the powers in place, insofar as they have been democratically designated. In the Arab countries, short of the establishment of new dictatorships, any regime in place will find itself confronted with economic challenges all the more formidable as it will be the bearer of the population’s hopes. But the reality principle will come into play in Israel itself, the day the majority realizes that there is a price to pay for the country’s growing isolation, or quite simply for the fact that a people that oppresses another cannot be free, even if Israel may long have appeared a counterexample. To be sure, we are not there yet, and this vision may seem too optimistic. But should we bet on the worst?
Jerusalem, December 11, 2011