Because the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by a group of anti-Saudi Royal Family and anti-Mubarak terrorists, we felt like having any kind of introspection about the shortcomings of those regimes, or our relationships with them, would be tantamount to appeasing terrorists and rewarding al-Qaeda for their terrorism.
But the truth is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are basically on “our team” (along with Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and the non-Shiite population of Lebanon) in a battle against Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the more virulent forms of political Islam. To see how weak and compromised our position has become, all we have to do is look at how difficult it is for anyone in Washington to defend Mubarak now that his regime is under pressure from people seeking democracy and basic human rights.
To be clear, it’s not that we’re on the wrong side and that our opponents are virtuous. But our policy has put us on the wrong side of history. The events of 9/11 could have served as a useful warning, like a canary in a coal mine. But we took what I think is the exact wrong lesson. We decided that “we are all Israelis now,” and that we must go fight terrorism wherever it exists and make no concessions to anyone. We should have realized that the Palestinian question had become so cancerous that it was forcing us to coddle dictators and oppose democracy in the region so that those dictators would continue to look the other way at the settlement activity in the Occupied Territories.
Israel has had its head in the sand, and we’ve been no better. Consider this piece from yesterday’s Haaretz.
Around the same time [1979], Egypt and Israel broke their cycle of conflict by signing a peace agreement. Egypt positioned itself on the side of Saudi Arabia, as head of the pro-American camp.
Mubarak inherited the peace agreement after President Anwar Sadat’s assassination. Mubarak was cold in his public relations with Israel, refusing to visit the country except for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, which decelerated normalization between the countries.
Relations between the Israel Defense Forces and the Egyptian army were conducted on a low level, with no joint exercises. Egyptian public opinion was openly hostile towards Israel and anti-Semitic terminaology was common. Civil relations between the countries were carried out by a handful of government workers and businessmen.
Despite all of this, the “cold peace” with Egypt was the most important strategic alliance Israel had in the Middle East. The security provided by the alliance gave Israel the chance to concentrate its forces on the northern front and around the settlements. Starting in 1985, peace with Egypt allowed for Israel to cut its defense budget, which greatly benefited the economy…
Mubarak became president while Israel was governed by Menachim Begin, and has worked with eight different Israeli leaders since then. He had close relations with Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the last two years, despite a stagnation in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and worsening relations between Netanyahu and the Arab world, Mubarak has hosted the prime minister both in Cairo and in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The friendship between Mubarak and Netanyahu is based on a mutual fear over Iran’s strengthening and the rising power of Islamists, as well as over the weakening and distancing of the U.S. government with Barack Obama at its head.
Now, with Mubarak struggling over the survival of his government, Israel is left with two strategic allies in the region: Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. These two allies promise to strengthen Israel’s Eastern battlefront and are also working to stop terror attacks and slow down Hamas.
But Israel’s relationship with these two allies is complicated. Joint security exercises are modest and the relationship between the leaders is poor. Jordan’s King Abdullah refuses to meet Netanyahu, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is waging a diplomatic struggle against Israel’s right-wing government. It’s hard to tell how Jordan and the PA could fill the role that Egypt has played for Israel.
In this situation, Israel will be forced to seek out new allies. The natural candidates include Syria, which is striving to exploit Egypt’s weakness to claim a place among the key nations in the region.
The images from Cairo and Tunisia surely send chills down the backs of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his cronies, despite the achievement they achieved with the new Hezbollah-backed Lebanon government. As long as the Arab world is flooded with waves of angry anti-government protests, Assad and Netanyahu will be left to safeguard the old order of the Middle East.
Consider the irony. If Israel loses Mubarak, one of their two remaining allies in the region will be the Palestinian Authority!! How bad can things get? How bad do things have to get before they make the hard decision to abandon their experiment in occupation? Running to Bashar Assad for help seems like an almost delusional proposition. If the old order is collapsing, why try to shore it up? Why not get ahead of history?
All I know is that if Israel wakes up one day and finds that it no longer has a peace agreement with Egypt (and perhaps Jordan), they will know that they squandered the opportunity represented by the Camp David Accords. And we let them squander that opportunity. I really blame Reagan for that. Poppy Bush (or Mondale) probably would not have let the settlement ball get rolling. But it doesn’t matter now who was at fault.
Our immediate problem is that it’s poor form to throw someone on your own team under a bus the moment they run into some trouble. If we tell Mubarak to step down, we might as well do the same for the rest of our team: the King of Jordan, the House of Saud, various emirs…
But, if we do not tell him to step down, we may just compound our humiliation by being on the wrong side of a wave of democratic revolution.
The 9/11 attacks made us stupid, but it’s not so easy to be smart.
I’m glad I am not president.
