Thursday, Feb 17, 2011

Gulf News

The US can no longer hide behind Arab leaders like Mubarak, and it will have to learn to answer to the Arab street, adopt a different view of Islamists and loosen its ties with Israel

The peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have transformed the Middle East by giving millions of Arabs across the entire region a new sense of political hope and purpose. It has become clear that if people gather with enough determination, they can change events. Only a month ago, this was impossible to imagine but now it is a new reality and it is something that will not go away.

But this fantastic development is also a huge problem for the United States, which for decades has shaped its Arab policy around making deals with well established leaderships, and largely ignoring its own democratic principles when talking to the Middle East, not to mention continuing to give a blank cheque of approval to the actions of any Israeli government, of whatever its political make up.

The chaos in the State Department and White House was summed up this week by Robert Dreyfuss, contributing editor for The Nation, in the following damning paragraph: “The fact is, American influence in the Middle East is falling apart. Egypt is in revolt, Lebanon is spinning rapidly out of the US orbit, Turkey has established itself as a bulwark of moderate-Islamist anti-Americanism, Iran has defied US threats, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure for years, Iraq is building its own relationship with Iran and Turkey, Afghanistan’s president routinely thumbs his nose at Washington, and Pakistan’s generals stonewall the United States. President Obama’s irrelevance to the unfolding of the Egyptian revolution is just one more piece of that puzzle.”

This new Middle East will worry the Israelis a lot. They see their precious peace treaties with trusted Arab regimes like that of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt becoming increasingly fragile. The Israelis have been able get away with signing peace treaties which gave them a cessation of hostilities but did not require them to change and become a genuine part of the Arab world. Therefore they have been able to continue their aggressive and expansionist policies without consequence, and right across the Arab world the thought of peace with Israel is treated with disgust.

This failure to ignite any popular support for peace is entirely due to Israeli determination to hang on to what they have by force, and refuse to negotiate or seek a genuine peaceful way forward. Israeli society remains convinced that the only security on offer is security enforced by overwhelming military force. The concept of genuine negotiations with respect for both sides is considered so radical in Israel that it is completely marginalised.

Way forward

But the January 25 revolution in Egypt means that any new government in Cairo will change its policies on Israel, to the great discomfort of Netanyahu’s government. The new Egyptian government may not revoke the peace treaty, but it will certainly not be so committed to the Israeli-American view of the Middle East as a whole, and of Islamist parties in particular. Any new Egyptian government will have taken power based on the secular Revolution, which had no reference to Islamist principles.

The Muslim Brotherhood may well be an accepted part of the democratic process, and the new government will not be fearful of Hamas. This means that it will almost certainly ease the Egyptian-Israeli blockade of Gaza, and find a way of working with Hamas rather than blindly following the Israelis and Americans and trying to isolate Hamas.

The new politics of the Middle East will be based far more on ideas, rather then access to the leadership. The new style of political insider will be the person who is in touch with the debate and the ideas floating around, and someone who is able to contribute to the discussions. This will see the slow exclusion of the old style insider, who is someone knows someone who knows someone really important. This old emphasis on access will give way to a new requirement to understand the debates, which is obviously a lot more difficult and challenging.

The Israelis will not be able to flourish in that environment. Pressure will mount on them to start genuine engagement, but that would require such a profound change in Israeli society that they will reject it and retreat even further into its military bunker, desperately trying to build certainties in a Middle East that will become more uncertain as time passes.

If the Egypt process rolls out into the Arab world as a whole, it may well leave Israel as one of the last militaristic regimes in a much more open and transparent Middle East. But even now, Washington faces the difficult challenge of redefining its unquestioning support for Israel, because the new transparency in the Arab world will not allow it to hide behind Arab leaders like Mubarak. Washington now has to answer to the Arab street, who are asking intelligent and demanding questions that the present State Department is unable to answer.

As Michael Brenner of the University of Texas points out, the new situation requires Washington to form a highly differentiated view of Islamist elements in the Middle East; loosen the ties that bind Washington to Tel Aviv; and get used to dealing with uncertainty as a constant. All of which is not easy, but vital for America to maintain a valid presence in the Arab world.

By Francis Matthew?Editor at Large

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