Money and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi’s head. The direction of the Egyptian revolution in the future will have to settle this central question of the core pillar of Atlantic stability in the region, Israel.
The character of the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat. If it is to be a Jewish State and yet not make a comprehensive and real deal toward the creation of a Palestinian State, it is fated to be mired in a fatal demographic contradiction: by 1976, in the Koenig Memorandum, it was clear that there was going to be an increase in the Arab population (now about 20%) and a flattening or even decrease in the Jewish population (hence the insistence on bringing into Israel the Russian Jewish migrants and others from the Diaspora). The only way to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state. But that is not going to happen unless Israel concedes certain fundamental demands, namely questions of security for the new Palestinian State and reasonable borders. Unless Israel is willing to allow certain demands for the creation of Palestine, it is going to run up against a serious threat to the character of Israel as a Jewish State, as the Koenig Memo made clear. Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction. Its elites are in denial. They think that the security (or military) solution is going to be adequate to preserve their hopes. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again.
The Arab Spring has provoked three new elements in the Palestinian struggle: first, a surface political unity between Hamas and Fatah; second, the nonviolent protests on the Israeli-Syrian border; third, the push by the Palestinians to go to the United Nations General Assembly and ask for a formal declaration of statehood. The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel. In February 2010, Israel’s military chief Amos Gilad told the US embassy in Tel Aviv, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.” If more peaceful protests continue, the Israeli Defense Force warned that they would turn to harsher techniques (given the IDF’s track record, one wonders what would be harsher than firing into crowds). It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration of a state of Palestine based on the 1967 border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense of security. Obama wanted to make a few modest concessions to circumvent the Palestinian positive dynamic (it would look appalling in the context of the Arab Spring for the US to have to wield its veto against the Palestinians in the Security Council). Netanyahu had none of this. He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar of the old order in the West Asia and North Africa. He was not wrong. The US has a hard time pulling itself away from the most outrageous positions taken by Israel in its dealings with its neighbors, and with the Palestinians. If these three new elements (the unity of the political forces, the nonviolent protests, and the move to the UN) continue, it is going to make things very difficult for the Israelis and for the US—they have gotten used to Hamas’ rockets, which are easy to manipulate. It is much harder to legitimize what Baruch Kimmerling calls the “politicide” of the Palestinians because of peace marches toward the Israeli line of control.
Over the question of the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars of stability rub against each other. The United States fought off a bid by the Palestinians to make their case before the UN Security Council. The Israelis won that gambit. UNESCO accepted the Palestinian Authority as a full member, and the United States declined to honor its fiscal contributions to the cultural agency. To rebuke the Palestinian state rebukes the Arab Spring. To do so also threatens the viability of the other pillars of stability, such as the Saudi monarchy. Hence, in the tumult over the UN vote, Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote in the New York Times (September 12), if the US did not support the Palestinians it would lose Saudi Arabia. “With most of the Arab world in upheaval,” he wrote, “the ‘special relationship’ between Saudi Arabia and the United States would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.” If Saudi Arabia remained a pillar of stability, it would lose its own people. If the United States abandoned Israel, it would gain Saudi friendship and it would have an opportunity to “contain Iran and prevent it from destabilizing the region.” This is a dilemma: it gave the White House sleepless nights.
By August 2011, Israel was in ferment. The pathways along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv were packed with Israelis furious at their government for its refusal to engage with their real lives. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives of Israelis, and following the example of Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent. Netanyahu had bragged during the high point of the Arab Spring that such events could not take place in Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Musician Noy Alooshe’s video took that line about the world shaking and remixed it with images of crowds in Tel Aviv shouting with the spirit of the Spanish indignados, “The People Want Social Justice.” Shake Bibi Shake, goes the video, a sort of Ibiza on the Rothschild Blvd. There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state. There was no open frustration with a government that is keen to bash Palestinians on the head and call that governance. If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-colonial situation, this pillar of stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors.
Encircle Iran.
Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values of human dignity. Political scientists whose writings are legible to Washington bureaucrats have long divided the Middle East along a simple cardinal line: the status quo powers and the revisionist powers. The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests of the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests.
From 1952 to 1979, the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion of Progress against the revisionism of the Arab renaissance, under the star of Nasser. Nasser’s Free Officers coup of 1952 sent a tremor through the Arab world. The creation of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) in February 1958 pushed Lebanon into almost terminal civil chaos in May, and in July the Iraqi Free Officers overthrew their feeble king. Inside the palaces of Saudi Arabia, the Free Princes formed a battalion to diminish the autocracy of King Saud. The fusion of Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself. It was done, largely, to eliminate the dynamic Communist Party and the pro-Communist General Afif al-Bizri. The anti-Communism of Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. They despised his anti-imperialism, and later, his unrelenting position on Israel. To be a status quo power, then, was to be a defender of the interests of Washington and London (with Paris in tow) and to be an ally of Israel’s erratic strategy for its singular objective. The Shah of Iran stood fast against Nasserism.
A geo-political earthquake tore open the foundation of this map. The first event took place in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War turned out to be a fiasco for the Arab states. Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in 1971; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Now, Sadat turned tail for Camp David in March 1979, where he accepted an annual American bribe for a peace treaty with Israel. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar of the new dispensation. A few months before Sadat went to Camp David, his friend Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, arrived at Assuan, Egypt to begin his long exile around the world before he returned to Egypt’s Al-Rifa’i mosque to be buried. The Shah’s departure from Iran and Sadat’s return from Camp David set in motion the new alliances. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. The bulwark for the United States and Israel was now Sadat’s Egypt and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which was hastily sent off with a pot of money to begin hostilities against Iran (the war lasted from 1980 to 1988, with little territorial gain but a massive loss of life and treasure).
Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was of course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates. The Saudis’ deal with the US goes back to the 1950s, when the steady stream of oil from the Gulf lanes to the gas stations of the heartland was guaranteed as long as the US pledged to protect the shaky monarchies from their hostile neighborhood, and their often hostile populations (by the Saudi Arabian National