Itamar Rabinovich - Israel and the Arab Turmoil

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISMI AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

ESSAY SERIES: THE GREAT UNRAVELING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Russell A. Berman

Itamar Rabinovich

Samuel Tadros

Fouad Ajami

Charles Hill

Lee Smith

ESSAYS

Joshua Teitelbaum

Habib C. Malik

Nibras Kazimi

Ziad Haider

Marius Deeb

[For a list of books published under the auspices of the WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER, please see page 57.]

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 647

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California, 94305-6010

Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

ITS A MANTRA, but it is also true: the Middle East is being unmade and remade. The autocracies that gave so many of these states the appearance of stability are gone, their dreaded rulers dispatched to prison or exile or cut down by young people who had yearned for the end of the despotisms. These autocracies were large prisons, and in 2011, a storm overtook that stagnant world. The spectacle wasnt pretty, but prison riots never are. In the Fertile Crescent, the work of the colonial cartographersGertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceauare in play as they have never been before. Arab nationalists were given to lamenting that they lived in nation-states invented by Western powers in the aftermath of the Great War. Now, a century later, with the ground burning in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and the religious sects at war, not even the most ardent nationalists can be sure that they can put in place anything better than the old order.

Men get used to the troubles they know, and the Greater Middle East seems fated for grief and breakdown. Outside powers approach it with dread; merciless political contenders have the run of it. There is swagger in Iran and a belief that the radical theocracy can bully its rivals into submission. There was a period when the United States provided a modicum of order in these Middle Eastern lands. But pleading fatigue, and financial scarcity at home, we have all but announced the end of that stewardship. We are poorer for that abdication, and the Middle East is thus left to the mercy of predators of every kind.

We asked a number of authors to give this spectacle of disorder their best try. We imposed no rules on them, as we were sure their essays would take us close to the sources of the malady.

FOUAD AJAMI

CHARLES HILL

ISRAEL LOOKS AT THE ARAB TURMOIL through a fractured lens: that of a powerful but anxious state, an important actor in Middle Eastern politics not fully integrated in the region, at peace with some Arab states and in conflict with other parts of the Arab and Muslim world.

During several decades, Israels leadership, like its predecessors in prestate Israel, saw the Arab world in terms of a zero-sum game. By the late 1930s, it transpired that a military conflict with the Palestinian Arabs was inevitable if a Jewish state was to be established and the Arab states adopted the Palestinian cause as their own and took charge of it. Within a few years, the Arab-Jewish conflict in and over Palestine was transformed by the 1948 war into the Arab-Israel conflict. The failure to end that war with a peace settlement led to the festering of the conflict and to three additional major wars1956, 1967, and 1973.

From this perspective, success and empowerment of the Arab collective was seen as detrimental to Israel. Israel despaired of breaking Arab hostility and therefore focused on seeking the cracks in that wallminorities, rivalriesor on circumventing it by building bridges to the regions peripheryTurkey, Iran, and Ethiopianon-Arab states equally concerned with the power of pan-Arab nationalism in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s.

This perspective began to change in 1979 with the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Having made peace with the most important Arab state, did it make sense for Israel to continue to look for cracks in the wall of hostility or circumvent it, or did it make more sense to expand the opening and seek a comprehensive change in, if not a full transformation of, its relationship with the Arab world?