Overcoming Fear and Anxiety in Tel Aviv

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Snapshot

Israel's Neighborhood Watch

Yossi Klein Halevi

With the Muslim Brotherhood poised to gain influence in Egypt, Israel sees itself as almost completely encircled by hostile forces. Is an Egyptian-Iranian alliance a possibility -- and where would this leave the future of a sovereign Palestinian state?

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What to Read on the Middle East Peace Process

Steven A. Cook

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on the Middle East peace process.

The revolt against President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt invokes fear and anxiety among Israelis. Mubarak, Israel’s oldest neighbor, is suddenly moving out, and Israelis are afraid of the consequences: Who will be the new tenants next door? Will they keep the long-standing peace treaty with Israel? Is a new Iran emerging across the border, with the long-forgotten southern front coming back to life? To a nation built around survival, these questions are extremely worrying.

True to form, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has highlighted those fears in public, particularly the threat of Egypt turning into a new Iran. Yet a more optimistic analysis suggests that the Israeli government could leverage the Egyptian crisis to seek new opportunities -- a window to restart the peace process with the Palestinians or Syria, or a chance to support the spread of democracy in the region. Israel's establishment, however, has thus far opted for entrenchment.

For three decades, Mubarak has been a fixture of Israel’s geostrategic landscape. Israel replaced eight prime ministers, fought several wars, and engaged in peace talks with multiple partners, and Mubarak was always there. He personified regional stability.

To be sure, Mubarak has kept his distance from Israel. Unlike his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, who came to Jerusalem to make peace, Mubarak stubbornly refused to pay an official visit to Israel, coming only once to attend Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral and insisting at the time that "this is not a visit." Mubarak’s governments were vocally critical of Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and waged endless diplomatic campaigns against Israel's nuclear program.

But Israeli leaders were willing to accept these minor insults, knowing that Israel had no better ally than Mubarak on big-picture issues. They could go to war in Lebanon and Gaza and expand the West Bank settlements, freed from having to devote a substantial force to the southern front.

Yet as Mubarak grew older, Israel's leaders began worrying about who would succeed him. Given the obvious sensitivities -- Israel could not speculate openly about an ally's coming demise -- the issue was rarely discussed in public or even among diplomatic circles. When asked about it, Israeli officials hinted at Omar Suleiman, intelligence chief (and now Egypt’s vice president), or at Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and heir apparent, as their preferred successors to the aging leader. The alternatives to these comfortable candidates left many Israeli leaders unsettled. They believed that Mubarak and his police state were barriers to chaos that, if removed, would be succeeded by an Iranian-style Islamic Republic--one directly neighboring Israel and armed with state-of-the-art U.S. weaponry.

In the Israeli collective memory, 1979 marks a major strategic turning point. Until then, Iran was Israel's key regional ally and energy supplier, and Egypt its chief adversary. In the span of six weeks that year, however, the Shah's regime in Iran gave way to the rule of the fiercely anti-Israel Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Israel signed its peace treaty with Egypt. Thus, Iran and Egypt switched roles, with the former becoming Israel’s enemy and the latter turning into its strategic ally and energy supplier. "There was a country that we had peace with, an extraordinary de-facto peace," Netanyahu told a gathering of Israel's ambassadors in December 2010. "Meetings between leaders, security and economic cooperation. This country was named Iran. It is still named Iran. And one day, one day, it changed." The same happened with Turkey, added Netanyahu, "not overnight, but it changed very fast due to domestic changes unrelated to us." The lesson, according to Netanyahu, was that all alliances are temporary and might collapse as a result of uncontrollable domestic forces.

Israel's regional ties have always been with the ruling elites, the military commanders, and the intelligence communities. Public opinion in the Arab world has been traditionally hostile to Israel. Civil society groups in Egypt and Jordan, in particular, largely reject their countries’ respective peace treaties with Israel. Israelis, for their part, hardly cared about people-to-people contacts; not many Israeli Jews bother to learn Arabic and immerse themselves in the neighboring culture. Most Israelis viewed the peace process as a means for bettering relations with Europe and the United States and not as a channel to regional acceptance.

It is little wonder, then, that the Israeli political-military establishment has viewed Arab democracy as a dangerous adventure. The mainstream belief is that if allowed to choose, the Egyptian public would bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power -- and throw the peace treaty with Israel to the shredder. Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian election of 2006 and its subsequent takeover of Gaza serve as the most compelling evidence for this mindset. Israeli leaders saw U.S. President George W. Bush’s support for democratization in the Middle East as the ultimate expression of American naiveté.