A HATE-ISRAEL SPRING: RAEL JEAN ISAAC
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9425/pub_detail.asp
ALSO APPEARS IN MAY ISSUE OF OUTPOST, THE PUBLICATION OF AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL
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Only now is it beginning to dawn on some elements in the media (mainly online websites) that the vaunted Arab spring is likely to prove a nuclear winter to Israel and the United States. Yet for those willing to see them, there were plenty of signs from the beginning that Western style liberal democracy was not on the agenda of most of the anti-Mubarak demonstrators in Cairo. The most obvious were quite literally signs—numerous placards in Tahrir Square showing Mubarak with a Magen David etched into his forehead. Palestinian Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports that the Western media also managed to overlook the burning of Israeli and American flags by demonstrators and the slogans against Israel and the U.S. chanted in Tahrir Square.
In the general euphoria, no one asked the simple question that could have served as touchstone to test how “liberal,” “democratic” and “moderate” the Egyptian revolt was: “What is the attitude to Israel?” True, no one could expect the demonstrators, their entire lives indoctrinated in hatred of Israel by Mubarak’s regime, to be champions of Israel. But it should certainly have set off warning bells if the anti-Mubarak movement was more vociferously anti-Israel than the existing leadership—and this hatred was central to their identity.
It was left to people like Barry Rubin on Pajamas Media (March 30) and Stanley Kurtz in National Review (March 7) to dig a little deeper into the roots of the so-called April 6 Youth Movement which brought the first wave of young computer-savvy demonstrators into Tahrir Square. Rubin notes that the Youth Movement began as a Facebook support group for a 2008 workers strike and by the following year had grown into a network linking 70,000 people.
Other than the labor strike, the two issues on which the April 6 Youth Movement was active were support for bloggers being targeted by the government and ending the sanctions on the Gaza Strip. To quote Rubin, “a campaign to end Egyptian sanctions on Gaza was in practice helping to entrench Hamas’s dictatorship and making it possible to smuggle in more arms for use in attacking Israel.” In April 2009 the April 6 Youth Movement participated in creating the umbrella Egyptian Coalition for Change which called for abrogating the peace treaty with Israel–thus putting the Youth Movement on record for advocating this notion of “reform.”
Rubin writes that four other groups took an important role as the movement in Tahrir Square gathered steam. One of these was the Kefaya alliance. Kurtz focuses on Kefaya (meaning “enough,” the protester’s favorite chant), a coalition of Communists, socialists, Islamists and nationalists, which he believes emerged as the most important organization because it dominated the ten member steering committee that served as the protesters’ government-in-waiting. That Kefaya was as central as Kurtz believes can be debated but what is clear is that Kefaya originated as an anti-Israel movement. According to Wikipedia its origins are in the solidarity committees with the Second Intifada of 2000 which spread through Egypt. Kurtz writes that Kefaya was formally created in 2004 “to protect the Arab existence against the Zionist-American projects.” This sounds more like typical Arab paranoia than a manifesto of liberty-loving Egyptians. In 2006 Kefaya became a pioneer in demanding abrogation of the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty. In 2007 its leader became Abdel Wahhab al-Messiri, formerly a Communist and Muslim Brother, who is one of Egypt’s foremost anti-Semites (Wikipedia calls him an “anti-Zionist scholar!”), purveying conspiracy theories based on the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The other three groups active in Tahrir Square cited by Rubin are the Marxist-oriented Tagammu party and two other supposedly liberal groups: the al-Ghad party, led by former opposition presidential candidate Ayman Nour and the National Association for Change led by Muhammad ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nour, despite his vaunted credentials as a reformer and champion of human rights (he spent four years in Mubarak’s jails on trumped up charges after having the temerity to run for President against Mubarak in 2004), has announced that the Camp David era Is “over” and he does not recognize Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. As for El Baradei, who has announced his candidacy for President of Egypt, on April 4 he promised that under his Presidency, should Israeli launch a military strike against Gaza “we would declare war against the Zionist regime.” (Such a strike is virtually inevitable if Hamas reverts, as it has begun to do, to indiscriminate strikes on civilians in southern Israel). In short all four of the groups associated with the April 6 Youth Movement that spearheaded Mubarak’s downfall give high priority to freezing altogether the already cold peace with Israel.
Indeed the only genuine courageous liberal democrat on the Egyptian scene has just been sentenced to three years in prison by an Egyptian military court. His crime? Twenty-five year old Maikel Nabil had run a blog deemed sympathetic to Israel.
The coming elections can only serve to reinforce the “reformist parties” positions on Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood was late to the party in Tahrir Square but stands to reap most of its benefits. For the Egyptian electorate, as all the polls show, is anything but liberal. Douglas Davis, a former editor at The Jerusalem Post, cites a Pew poll published in December 2010, just before the January “revolution.” The Pew poll found that 95% of Egyptian Moslems believed Islam should play a “large role” in politics, 82% supported stoning to death to punish adultery and 84% supported the death penalty for those who leave Islam. When it comes to implementing sharia, the “modernizing” parties cannot compete with the Moslem Brotherhood (or even more Islamically fundamentalist Salafists who recently mobilized 70,000 adherents for a convention at a Cairo mosque), so Israel by default becomes the most inviting target. The Wall Street Journal (April 19) reports that Amr Moussa, the former Secretary General of the Arab League, owes his front-runner status in the coming Egyptian presidential elections to his sharp statements against Israel when he was Egypt’s foreign minister during the 1990s. Other inviting electoral themes are anti-Americanism and populist economics, i.e. repealing the economic reforms of the last Mubarak years in favor of nationalization of industries and other measures that will ineluctably further reduce the standard of living.
The ripening fruits of the revolution so uncritically celebrated by the media and political class are already visible. In April, as Khaled Abu Toameh writes, Egyptian soldiers, assigned to guard the Israeli embassy in Cairo, ran away when hundreds of “pro-democracy” demonstrators attacked the embassy and set fire to an Israeli flag. (The Israelis, to avoid “provoking” the liberal reformers had closed the embassy earlier and even taken down the Israeli flag from the building.) “Liberal reformers” demand the blockade be lifted from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the government has already announced plans to ease restrictions. (Mubarak, unwilling to strengthen Hamas, with its close ties to his chief foe, the Muslim Brotherhood, had cooperated with Israel in isolating Gaza.) The “enlightened” demonstrators of Tahrir Square want Egypt to break the agreements under which it provides Israel with natural gas. They want the Israel embassy closed permanently.
From Israel’s point of view, the key element in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was to transform relations with its most important Arab neighbor. In order to achieve “normal and friendly relations” Israel gave up the Abu Rodeis oil fields, her settlements in the Sinai (including the town of Yamit), the Etzion air base (crucial to her defense), and the spaces of the Sinai that gave her the ability to deploy her aircraft. Ending the teaching of contempt was so important to Israel that it put the promise to abstain from hostile propaganda into the text of the treaty. Fifty side agreements to the treaty were signed, all designed to transform attitudes, from cultural and educational exchanges to joint youth and sport activities.
But the Egyptian government never made any attempt to humanize Jews. Not only did the campaign of vilification continue uninterrupted in flagrant violation of the treaty, it grew worse– under Mubarak, much worse. As David Isaac has pointed out (“Riding the Tiger of Jew Hate” Feb. 10, 2011 www.shmuelkatz.com), Mubarak rode the tiger of “Arab demonology” for decades. He was happy to give the frustrated Egyptian populace a foreign object on which to vent their rage and saw this as a way to rejoin the “Arab family”, incensed that the treaty had ever been signed. In the end the tiger swallowed him. In Tahrir Square, with those placards depicting him with a Magen David etched into his forehead, Mubarak became the Jew, the ultimate villain. Fittingly; he ended his career having himself become an anti-Semitic slur.
All signs point to Iran being the chief beneficiary of the Arab spring. Iran—the one country where a successful revolution would be a hugely positive development—seems to have once again put down anti-regime demonstrators. It now celebrates and eggs on the demonstrators in the Arab world (except when it comes to Syria, where for Israel there would at least be some upside in eliminating the Assad regime).
Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Al Arabi has announced his country is prepared to open “a new page” with Iran (there have been no diplomatic relations since 1980). Embassies will be opened within months. Iran has already taken over Lebanon, where the high hopes aroused by the Cedar Revolution have faded as Iran, via its Hezbollah proxy, has asserted control. Iran hopes to profit from the anti-Western forces competing for control in Yemen and instability in Bahrain (where it has a hand in the Shiite uprising) and possibly down the road turmoil in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia. Once the United States has left Iraq (which, The Wall Street Journal of April 22 reports, is reluctant to accept the continued presence of any significant number of U.S. troops for fear of uprisings on its own streets), Iran is likely to be the chief influence there. Should it become a nuclear power (and U.S. sanctions show no sign of stopping her), there seems little to stand in the way of Iran assuming a dominant role in the Middle East.
Israel and the United States stand to emerge as the big losers.
When a proven antagonist of Israel like long time CIA veteran Michael Scheuer makes more sense regarding Israel’s interests than the panoply of Israel’s neo-conservative supporters, something is badly wrong. Yet Scheuer is right when he says that “the one thing the Arab spring is unquestionably bringing is the destruction of Israel’s physical security.” Scheuer goes after one of his favorite targets, Israel’s neoconservative supporters, but in this case, alas, he has a point: “Perhaps most ironic is that major pro-Israel U.S. pundits—Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Charles Krauthammer, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, for example—have been shaking their pom-poms for the destruction of Arab tyrannies, an aspiration which, if attained, will…put their signatures on Israel’s death warrant.”
Scheuer is wrong (not that he cares, one suspects) in that the old tyrannies were (are) also intent on Israel’s destruction. But surely The Weekly Standard coterie (National Review has shown much more sense) should have seen what was obvious—that the Arab revolution is further radicalizing, not democratizing, the Middle East, dangerously strengthening anti-Israel and anti-Western forces.
It is not a new liberal Middle East that Israel can anticipate, but rather the famous foreboding of Yeats: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Rael Jean Isaac is co-author (with Erich Isaac) of The Coercive Utopians.
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