U.S. Veto on Palestine Statehood Returns America-Middle East Relations to the pre-Yom Kippur War Era

On Friday President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority put in an application to statehood at the UN. Normally the Security Council handles requests for membership. Washington has indicated that the U.S. representative will veto the application in the Council if it comes to a vote. The General Assembly can vote to upgrade Palestine's status from observer to non-member state. This would legally have the effect of making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a conflict between two states. On the ground nothing much will change. Israel will still remain the occupier of the West Bank with its checkpoints, by-pass roads and other signs of occupation. Hamas will still remain in charge of Gaza.

What will change is the illusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to be resolved diplomatically anytime soon. This is because in the most blatant fashion Washington has demonstrated that American Middle East policy, or at least the policy regarding Israel and the Palestinians, is a captive of domestic politics. Obama by not engaging the Palestinians to pass a statehood resolution that protected Israel's interests, has left the Palestinians with proof that even a right-wing coalition government like the present Likud-Israel Beitenu government has more clout in Washington than does the Palestinian Authority.

Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri (look up Sat. Sep. 24) refers to this as demonstrating that "Israel-America" is "our new South Africa." Most Arab press tends to be much more based on opinion than fact--prescriptive rather than descriptive. Khouri is trying to demonstrate that Israel and America are one entity when it comes to Middle East policy and that this entity is as diplomatically isolated as Pretoria was in the 1980s under the apartheid regime. While this is demonstrably true of Israel, it is not true of Washington. Jerusalem under the present Likud coalition government has returned Israel to the diplomatic isolation that Israel suffered from before the Oslo era of the 1990s. While Washington is not there yet and probably never will be, Washington could go back to the era of the "Arab cold war" as Arabist Malcolm Kerr dubbed the period from 1964 to 1975. This was the era when the region was bitterly divided on ideological grounds between the pro-Soviet radical military dictatorships like those in Egypt, Iraq, Libya Syria, and the Yemens on one hand and the pro-American monarchies such as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia  on the other. The Palestinians remained in the radical camp until Oslo in 1993. Egypt switched sides under Sadat in 1975. And Lebanon was convulsed by a civil war in 1975 that served as a proxy battleground for the various contenders for power in the region including Israel and lasted for fifteen years.

The Islamists have effectively replaced the fascist pro-Soviet military dictatorships as Washington's main regional opponents. If the Palestinian issue would once more become a rallying cry, as it threatened to do in late 2008 during the Gaza War, we could see proxy wars in either Lebanon or Iraq. This would have the effect of permanently derailing the Arab Spring.

While the Israeli-Palestinian issue is far from being ripe for resolution, it could be handled in such a way that would make it less attractive to would-be arsonists.

Siege Democracies

Israel is a unique type of society.  It is a siege society that is also a democracy--a siege democracy. Siege societies are quite common among autocracies as these usually embody the concentration of power in the hands of a single tribe, ethnic group or religion in a society that unites--at least temporarily--the other elements in that society against it. In the Middle East examples of this type of siege society are found among the various military dictatorships especially the present Ba'athist dictatorship of the Alawites in Syria, the former Ba'athist dictatorship of the Sunni in Iraq, the Ghaddafi clan in Libya, and the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain. But because free elections preclude a minority group from permanently perpetuating itself in power, these societies are rare among democracies. They are only found when a tribe or ethnic or religious group constitutes a majority in a state but a minority in the region--part of the periphery in constant conflict with the regional core.

I can think of only four instances of modern siege democracies in the twentieth century. The first was in South Africa where the white settlers established a herrenvolk (master race) democracy where the franchise was restricted to members of the herren volk, in this case the whites. No doubt many Afrikaners would have opted to restrict the franchise to Afrikaners as was the case in the Boer republics in the previous century. But that had ended in disaster and military conquest at the hands of the British Empire. Until decolonization in the 1960s the British Empire (renamed Commonwealth) was fine with democratic rights being restricted to whites. But when former colonies made up the majority of members of the Commonwealth that all began to change.

The real siege in South Africa began after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960. And it really did not become an effective physical siege until the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire in Southern Africa in 1974-75. Faced with the collapse of white rule in neighboring Rhodesia in December 1979, the ruling National Party began a two-track strategy of offering independence to Namibia and building its own internal settlement there with subordinate ethnic parties. In the mid-1980s the West signalled its impatience with the ruling white minority by voting for largely symbolic trade sanctions in 1985-86 in the U.S. and the EEC. After fifteen years of applying a Total Strategy to cope with the Total Onslaught the securocrats under President P.W. Botha lost power to the traditional conservatives in the National Party. President F.W. de Klerk negotiated an end to white rule from a position of great strength.

The second instance is in Northern Ireland where the Protestant British settlers who had arrived in the early 17th century used gerrymandering and corporate votes to perpetuate their rule over the native Catholic Irish. Under autonomy within the United Kingdom the Protestant unionists ruled for fify years from 1922 to March 1972 when they were forced to finally close down their provincial parliament. From March 1972 until December 1999 they experienced direct rule from London through the Northern Ireland Office. This was a second-best solution that most unionists and nationalists could live with. Irish republicans could not live with it and continued an insurgency until August 1997. There are still small groups of fringe republican extremists that attempt to continue a terrorist campaign against British rule today, but they lack popular support for this.

In 1970 a new multiparty political system was started when a small group of liberal unionists created the Alliance Party in April. This was followed four months later by the Social Democratic and Labour Party, an uneasy alliance of moderate nationalists and Catholic trade unionists to replace the ineffective Nationalist Party. In 1971 the Rev. Ian Paisley, a firebrand Protestant preacher with his own church, the Free Presbyterian Church, created the Democratic Unionist Party. These three parties competed with the former ruling Ulster Unionist Party and with occasional new unionist parties. In 1982 they were joined by Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, as competition for the SDLP. In 1973 the Northern Ireland Office, at the urging of the Alliance Party, changed the franchise system from the first-past-the-post to the Single Transferable Vote (STV), a type of proportional representation, for assembly and local council elections. The DUP and SDLP are in many ways religious parties representing fundamentalist Protestants and the Catholic Church respectively.

The third siege democracy was Maronite Lebanon, which as a democracy controlled by the Maronite Christians lasted from independence in 1943 until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975. The Maronites ruled by a form of consociational democracy in which every important public post as well as the seats in parliament were parcelled out to the various sectarian ethno-religious groups on the basis of the 1932 census. Demographic changes took place in the four decades since the census was conducted, but the Maronites refused to allow a new census to be held out of fear that they would lose power. The result was civil war followed by three decades of Syrian occupation and since then five years of Syrian control through Hezbollah.

The fourth siege democracy is Israel. It has a split personality. It behaves like Northern Ireland internally and like apartheid South Africa externally. Like South Africa, it rules over a foreign territory captured in a defensive war and refuses to give it up. Like South Africa, it had a strategy of alliances with other friendly countries--non-Sunni Arab countries or groups: Turkey, the Shah's Iran, the Kurds in Iraq, the Africans in Southern Sudan, and the Maronites in Lebanon. South Africa had its detente policy under Prime Minister John Vorster in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pretoria made common cause with conservative African leaders like those in Malawi, Gabon, Zaire and with Israel in the Middle East. Like South Africa, it conducted air and ground raids into neighboring countries that allowed Palestinian guerrillas and terrorists to operate from their territory. In fact Israeli generals taught this strategy to South Africa in the 1970s. 

Jerusalem will in the next decade face a fundamental choice of identity. Will it choose the route of negotiated solution like the unionists in Northern Ireland? Or will it choose the route of herrenvolk democracy and minority rule like the whites in South Africa? Maybe the ruling Likud will be able to disguise this like the Maronites in Lebanon by making half-hearted attempts to negotiate. As the siege tightens the choices will grow starker. 

Israel's chief interlocutors with the Palestinians Part I

Ariel "Arik" Sharon's first practical introduction to the Palestinian problem came at the age of 24 when he was picked to lead an elite unit of individualist soldiers, many misfits in the IDF, in implementing Israel's strategy of reprisal raids. Sharon had been raised in a Revisionist Party (forerunner of the Likud) family in a Mapai (forerunner of the Labor Party) settlement in the Plain of Sharon, from which he would later take his name. He joined the prestate Hagana militia at age 15 and was badly wounded at the First Battle of Latrun in May 1948. He had quit the army to become a full time student of Middle Eastern History at the Hebrew University shortly before being picked.

Sharon spent the next three years personally leading raids into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He also was responsible with integrating his commando Unit 101 with a paratroop company to produce Israel's first Paratroop Battalion. On one of the raids in the village of Kibya, Sharon had his men dynamite the homes of the villagers. Although his soldiers called in Arabic for the occupants to come out many remained in hiding out of fear and were killed in the blasts. Some 69 people died and Sharon's reputation was established both within Israel and with the Palestinians.

From May 1948, when the civil war phase of the Israeli War of Independence ended, until June 1967, the Palestinians virtually disappeared as independent actors from international politics. There only collective role was in a series of guerrilla operations from 1953 to 1956 and again from 1965 to 1967. Israel, reacting to a series of Palestinian incursions raided the Gaza Strip in early 1953 and dynamited a police station. The Egyptian government reacted by setting up training camps in Gaza to train Palestinian volunteers in guerrilla warfare. Colonel Nasser used the raids to establish Egypt's position as the leader of the Arab resistance against Israel and within Egypt to outmaneuver General Naguib, the figurehead leader of the Egyptian Revolution. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion used the raids as a middle-finger salute against the international community and to establish a reputation as a protector of Israel's vulnerable immigrant communities and collective settlements that were often the target of the raids.

Sharon, having won the patronage of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, the latter first as chief of staff in the 1950s and then as defense minister a decade later, had risen from major to major general. They had kept others from ejecting him from the army for his recklessness, insubordination, and quarrelsome nature. They saw in him both patriotism and military genius. In 1965, like Erwin Rommel, he transferred from the infantry to armor and became a master of the new (for him) form of warfare. After leading a division in the conquest of the Sinai in June 1967 he became the next head of Southern Command. In this role he had his next encounter with the Palestinians in 1971.

Israel's first political interaction with Palestinians since the mandate came as occupiers in 1967. Yasir Arafat returned to the West Bank in 1967 and for several months tried to set up a guerrilla resistance there while managing to stay one step ahead of the IDF. From 1967 to 1970 most of Israel's military interaction with the Palestinians took place along the Jordan River as the Palestinians had set themselves up along the East Bank as a state within a state. Expelled by King Hussein in September 1970 when they defied his authority, they then moved to southern Lebanon, Fatahland. Gaza was a backwater.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had established a number of cells within the crowded refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. From there they mounted attacks on the small Israeli settlements, populated by Arabic-speaking Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, that surrounded the Strip. Sharon was determined to use whatever methods were necessary to stamp out these attacks. He used rather vigorous interrogation methods and deported the families of those involved in guerrilla activity. Several of his subordinate commanders made their anxieties about his methods known up the chain of command. Gaza was temporarily transferred from the Southern Command to the Central Command. But Sharon had stamped out the insurgency.

In July 1973 Sharon was forced to retire from the IDF after failing to be promoted up the next step. He blamed it on his political sympathies. There is something to this--Ezer Weizman, the former commander of the Israel Air Force, was promoted to deputy chief of staff but was never made chief of staff and quit in frustration. Sharon's failure to win promotion was probably due in equal parts to his personality and politics. In September he had his revenge by forcing four right-of-center parties to combine to form the Likud (union in Hebrew). Sharon joined the Liberal wing of the Likud to avoid competing with Weizman in Herut.

The Israeli Right had foundered for a decade. It consisted mainly of two parties: Herut, successor both to the Revisionist Party of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky and to the Irgun Zvai Leumi underground, representing the nationalist right; and the Liberal Party, successor to Haim Weizmann's General Zionists, representing the small businessmen of the economic right. In 1965 Herut and the Liberals had formed an electoral pact known as Gahal (Herut-Liberal Block in Hebrew).  In 1966 Shmuel Tamir, a former Irgun commander and very successful lawyer was forced out of Herut by Begin for challenging him and formed the Free Center Party. And in 1968 when Rafi combined with Mapai and Ahdut Ha'Avoda on the Left to form the Israel Labor Party, David Ben-Gurion remained outside out of spite and formed the State List. Sharon by combining these four parties made something that was greater than the sum of their parts.

If not two-state then one-state?

The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has for some time been unrealizable because it is blocked on both ends--by the Palestinian power struggle and the collapse of the Left in Israel and the Israeli party system. As a result a growing chorus of Palestinians, Arabs, and anti-Israel activists in the West have been calling for a one-state solution. There are basically three versions of the one-state solution, although its backers only talk about one of these. The first is the Greater Israel version in which Israel rules from "the sea to the river." Palestinians have few rights. This has proven to be unstable and unacceptable to the Arabs.

The second version is one in which all citizens are equal, ethnicity doesn't matter and "the lamb shall lie down with the lion." This is the naive version put forward mainly by the radicals, particularly Jewish radicals, in the West. It is based on a false equation with South Africa. In South Africa the resistance to apartheid was led by a principled Christian leadership composed of figures from the African churches and the African National Congress. The ANC in exile was led by Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela's former law partner who once trained to be an Anglican priest. The ANC had a policy forbidding the attacking of soft targets--terrorism. It only targeted military installations and government offices, with the aim of minimizing the loss of life. This is very different from the "armed struggle" of the PLO or Hamas. Most of the casualties of the liberation struggle in South Africa were black--caused by interorganizational violence in KwaZulu/Natal province where the ANC faced the ethnic Zulu organization Inkatha, which ran the Zulu homeland KwaZulu. The other main source of casualties were suspected informers.

In the Israeli-Palestine conflict while there have been many Palestinian victims of interorganizational violence among Palestinians, both in the 1936-39 Arab Revolt and in the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza, most casualties have been in fighting between Arabs and Israelis or by Palestinian terrorism. The overall number of casualties has also been significant. In this regard the Israeli experience is much more like that of South Africa's neighbor Zimbabwe. The African majority took power in Zimbabwe after a seven-year liberation struggle that cost the lives of between 20,000 and 50,000. Most of the dead were Africans but most white families suffered either death in the family or a severe wound due to the conflict. In South Africa relatively few whites were killed or severely wounded in either the war in Namibia or the ANC's guerrilla campaign. Both sides in Zimbabwe were left embittered by the struggle and half the white population had emigrated within two years of majority rule--although many of these later returned. Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe was embittered by his wartime experiences and the death of his first wife during the war.

The Zimbabwean peace deal was based on temporary guarantees to whites. Once these guarantees expired after seven years Mugabe began freezing whites out of the economy. He made it clear that the deal was that they could remain in the country only if their children emigrated. Many Israeli Jews feel that Arab acceptance of a sovereign Jewish presence will likewise be purely temporary. This is why nearly all Jews in Israel oppose a right of return for Palestinians to Israel. A one-state solution would effectively mean a right of return by incorporating the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza within Israel. It would mean the end of a Jewish majority and Jewish sovereignty.

The Lancaster House deal of December 1979 that ended the war in Zimbabwe was dreaded by most Rhodesian whites because Africa was a region dominated by one-party autocracies, not to mention kleptocracies. They correctly feared the same fate for their own country. For this same reason many Afrikaners (and English-speakers) feared majority rule in South Africa. They negotiated an end to minority rule only once they felt assured by the ANC leadership and that they had no choice in the long run. Israel still is situated in a region with similar characteristics to that of Africa in the 1980s. 

The third version is that of an Arab-dominated state. The Jews would be a tolerated minority as they once were in Arab states throughout the region and as the Copts are in Egypt today. Lebanese Christians have been unwilling to accept a Muslim-dominated state in Lebanon. This has resulted in two civil wars: a brief civil war in 1958 and a long very bloody civil war from 1975 to 1990. The refusal of Hezbollah to disarm or accept accountability for their actions threatens a repeat of the civil war. The fate of a single state ruled by either Jews or Arabs is the same--chronic instability.

Theodor Herzl in 1895 wrote Der Judenstaat (normally rendered in English as The Jewish State but actually meaning The State of the Jews), not The Binational State. Jews emigrated from Europe and the Middle East to Palestine with the dream of having a state of their own, not the nightmare of sharing a binational state with another people.

In Northern Ireland the logic of demography and politics dictated power sharing as the only stable solution to the conflict. It triumphed 33 years years after it was first tried and failed. Third time's the charm as they say. It may take decades before a two-state solution can be realized in the Middle East, but the one-state solution is a chimera, a mirage, not a solution.

Those who have read my early posts will know that I believe that Northern Ireland is much closer to Israel's past and present than South Africa. But South Africa or even Zimbabwe may be in Israel's future if it is not careful. 

The Peace Treaty and Israeli Foreign Behavior

The latest post on Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove (www.realisticdove.com) is a response to complaints elsewhere in the blogosphere that Egypt ending the peace treaty with Israel would be a good thing. The argument made at Mondoweiss and elsewhere is that the peace treaty allowed Israel to deploy its army and air force to make war on the Palestinians and Lebanese because it had a reasonable expectation that Egypt would keep the peace. This is no doubt true, but it is not the whole story.

Because of the lack of trust between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it has decided as a measure of prudence, because its margin of error is relatively low, to only make peace with those neighboring regimes that demonstrate that they will keep the peace. Because the Israeli electorate can only bear the burden of one peace process at a time, this has meant in practice that Israel began with the easiest negotiations i.e. those with the most trustworthy Arab regimes and the least strategic territory and worked its way down. So far it has made peace with two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, whose leaders at the time of the peace treaty had a reputation both within Israel and within the West for moderation and trustworthiness. But even with Egypt, the first peace treaty in 1979, Israel tested Egypt first by concluding two separation-of-forces agreements in January 1974 and September 1975. These allowed Israel to establish that the Sadat regime was trustworthy.

Since the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, Israeli actions have depended upon the nature of the coalition government in power. Three different parties have lead coalitions since 1979: the Likud, Labor, and Kadima. Under the Likud Israel invaded southern Lebanon in March 1978, bombed PLO headquarters in Lebanon in July 1981, bombed an Iraqi reactor in June 1981, and invaded Lebanon in June 1982 and occupied Beirut. Under Labor Israel withdraw from the areas of the Likud's conquest of 1982 in 1984-85, started a peace process with the PLO and Syria in 1992-95, and continued negotiations with Syria and the PLO in 1999-2000 and withdrew completely from Lebanon in July 2000. The Likud then reoccupied the West Bank's main cities in 2002 and withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005.

Kadima, elected to power in March 2006, was involved in two separate wars: in Lebanon in July 2006 and in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. Kadima was supported in these wars by Labor, which also supported Sharon in reoccupying the West Bank in 2002 and withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.

So the lesson one draws from this seems clear--Israeli behavior depends on which parties are in power. The most likely party to go to war is Kadima supported by Labor. The least likely is Labor supported by Meretz. Any Likud government in which Sharon was either defense or prime minister was likely to go to war.

But the Israeli actions also depended on the activity of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah continued to maintain a provocative profile vis a vis Israel despite Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanese territory according to the UN definition. This was because Hezbollah needed a justification for the maintenance of its guns within Lebanese politics. Hamas also maintained a provocative profile vis a vis Israel throughout the 1990s and 2000s in order to distinguish itself from Yasir Arafat's Fatah and other members of the PLO. It wanted to demonstrate that it offered not only Islamic conformism and discipline but also struggle and steadfastness.

The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty allowed doves and pragmatists to argue convincingly to the Israeli electorate that a surrender of conquered territory could be in Israel's national interest in some circumstances. Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat helped to demonstrate to the same electorate that such a surrender was not in Israel's national interest when dealing with the Palestinians or with the Lebanese government. The Israeli electorate is still divided about whether such a surrender of conquered Arab territory is in Israel's national interest when dealing with the Ba'athist regime in Damascus. If Egypt renounces the peace treaty that question will be decisively answered and decided, perhaps permanently.

Egypt, Israel and the Peace Process: Three Scenarios

In the past week there have been a number of articles in the American press on how a change in regime in Egypt would affect the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the overall peace process. Because of the darkness of recent Jewish history, many Israeli and American Jews are quick to imagine the worst possible implications.  In this post I will examine three possible scenarios for the peace treaty and then comment on how they will affect Israel's defense and foreign policies.

I see three possible scenarios coming out of the unrest in Egypt as regards the peace with Egypt: the status quo lite; the frozen peace; and the no peace/cold war scenario. The status quo lite is the scenario that would likely prevail if there is no change in the military regime other than its figurehead--Mubarak. In this case the cold peace with Israel would continue under which there are limitations on Egyptian military deployments in the Sinai, there are full diplomatic relations between the two states, and Israeli tourists are free to visit Egypt but in practice very few ordinary Egyptians visit Israel. The main adjustment is that the regime would refrain from holding joint summits with Israeli leaders at Sharm al-Sheikh or in Washington. There would be no more photo ops. Egyptian diplomats in Tel Aviv would continue to supply Cairo with political and military intelligence on Israel and make critical comments about Israeli policies to the Israeli and foreign press.

This scenario would be designed primarily to protect the military regime's relationship with Washington and the $1.4 billion annually in military and food aid. This aid has been seen by Washington, Cairo and Jerusalem as an American bribe for Egypt to continue to honor the provisions of the 1979 peace treaty. It has worked--although both Presidents Sadat and Mubarak withdrew Egyptian ambassadors from Tel Aviv to show anger at Israeli policies when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 and invaded Lebanon in 1982.

The second scenario is the frozen peace. Under it Cairo withdraws permanently its diplomats from Tel Aviv and ends all "normalization" with Israel but avoids renouncing the peace treaty or its military terms. This is the most likely scenario if there is a change of regime with a new civilian government taking power and the military returning to the barracks. This scenario is designed to distinguish the policy of the new government from that of the military regime, to put Washington and Jerusalem on notice that the relationship has changed, but to avoid a war or even a serious crisis with Israel and to possibly preserve some of the annual American aid to Egypt.

Egypt hasn't fought Israel since 1973 when under very favorable circumstances Egypt pulled out a tie and avoided a serious loss due to superpower diplomatic intervention. Egypt last fought a foreign enemy, Libya, in 1977, and since then has been responsible only for protecting the regime from the people. While Egypt's military is now equipped with modern American weapons like Abrams heavy tanks, M-60 tanks, and F-16 fighter bombers rather than the inferior Soviet weapons that it used in four wars with Israel (in 1956, 1967, 1968-70, 1973), its army and air force are still inferior to the IDF in terms of both combat experience and training. It would risk losing these modern weapons, the toys of the generals, with little prospect of having them replaced by the United States or any European country. Washington would not replace arms and risk another war and Egypt lacks the disposal hard currency to purchase weapons from any European countries including Russia.

The third scenario would have Egypt renouncing the 1979 peace treaty but not being provocative in its military deployments. This is likely to come to fruition only in the Muslim Brotherhood gains control of the new regime. And even then, it is not likely to come about immediately but rather gradually. More likely the first move would be the second scenario, frozen peace, with Egypt then waiting for a reaction from Israel. Egypt could then move to the no peace/cold war stance during a crisis between Israel and one of its other neighbors--the Palestinians, Lebanon, or Syria. Hamas or Hezbollah might even be eager to provoke such a crisis in order to trigger this response. Hezbollah could do so under urging from either Tehran or Damascus or both and Hamas might be willing to do so under pressure from Tehran if the conditions were right. Or Jerusalem, under the present government or another one on the Right, could trigger such a reaction by intemperate rhetoric. Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman aided Ankara in its reorientation away from Israel with his clumsy rhetoric and as an opposition figure he spoke of bombing the Aswan dam. If a new regime comes to power in Cairo, Bibi Netanyahu might very well risk provoking a coalition crisis in order to avoid such a scenario by replacing Leiberman with a safer figure.

Thus, as can be seen there are several steps between cold peace and cold war let alone hot war. 

How will a new regime in Cairo affect the peace process with Israel's neighbors? In reality, it is likely to have very little effect. As the recent Al Jazeera leaks demonstrated, Israel and the Palestinians are presently incapable of making peace even with a more centrist coalition led by Kadima and Labor. Because of the fallout from the leaks the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has denounced the positions portrayed in the leaks and denied that it ever offered them. Until the split between Gaza and the West Bank/Hamas and Fatah is resolved there will be no peace agreement with Israel.

A change in regime will make Jerusalem less likely to engage in serious peace negotiations with Damascus. But such negotiations were not likely in any case because Netanyahu and Obama wanted Damascus to end its close relationship and military alliance with Iran as the price of peace. A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement would be part of a wider package deal with Washington making payoffs in terms of normalizing its relationship with Damascus and granting military and economic aid. The price for this would be the end of the Damascus-Tehran-Gaza axis. Bashar al-Assad has made clear that he is unwilling to pay such a price. And it is not clear that the present coalition under Netanyahu would be willing to pay the price of giving up the Golan. So we are left with no real change there.

The real change will be in Israel's internal politics. Israel could face a situation in which it is faced with hostile regimes along its southern, eastern and northern borders with only Jordan as a friendly neighbor. Egypt under a civilian government, Gaza under Hamas, Lebanon under or heavily influenced by Hezbollah and Damascus under the House of Assad all add up to a siege state for Israel. Israel would be almost back to where it was before 1979. Almost, because it would still have the peace treaty with Jordan (but it had under the table friendly relations with Amman before 1994). This is likely to intensify the rightward shift in Israeli politics since October 2000.

Israeli politics are very sensitive to regional developments. In this respect Israel is similar to the white minority regime in South Africa from 1975 to 1994. South African white politics were influenced heavily by the collapse of South Africa's white buffer to the north in the form of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique in 1974-75, the Smith government in Rhodesia in 1979-80, and finally Namibian independence in 1990. These changes led to a polarization in white politics with many Afrikaners moving to the right to support the Conservative Party in the 1980s and many English-speakers abandoning the me-too United Party in favor of the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party. Unlike Pretoria, Jerusalem has a friend in Washington and is much more powerful militarily. So expect the present trend in Israeli politics to intensify. 

Who is Next?

Now that the pundits have seen the writing on the wall indicating that Mubarak's days are numbered, and we've seen the hundreds of thousands of fingers doing the writing, who will be the next Arab autocrat to go?

To begin to examine that question intelligently, we must first examine the nature of the regimes in the Arab world. Broadly speaking Arab regimes can be divided into two categories--monarchies (kingdoms, emirates) and military dictatorships. The former can then be further divided into the Gulf States with their oil wealth and the monarchies that lack this--Morocco, Jordan and Oman. The military dictatorships can be divided into two groups: the hereditary republics and the ordinary dictatorships. While there is quite a bit of difference between the Gulf States on one hand and the traditional military dictatorships on the other, there is little effective difference between the non-oil monarchies and the hereditary republics. Both types are repressive and both types suffer from serious economic problems. And members of both groups are aligned with Western powers such as France and the United States.

There have been four Arab countries that fit the description of hereditary republic.(North Korea is the only non-Arab country in this category that comes to mind, which should tell everyone something about the Arab world.)  These are/were: Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Only in Syria has the first despot been able to transfer the imaginary crown to the head of his son and heir. This is not because Hafiz al-Assad was necessarily wiser than Kaddafi, Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein, but merely because he died first. None of the others wants to transfer power while they are still capable of ruling. Saddam Hussein and his sons are now dead. The senior dictator sentenced to death and hanged by the Shi'ites that he once persecuted; the dictators apparent, Udai and Qusay, killed by American troops that discovered their safe house. It is now too late for Hosni Mubarak to transfer power to his son Gamal. It is still possible that Muammar Kaddafi might yet transfer power to his son Saif--apparently the sole son who doesn't have a reputation as a playboy.

In the Arab world the secret to remaining in power is to buy off the potential classes that could cause problems, retain the confidence of the military, and either buy off, exile or murder any serious potential threats within the regime. The Gulf States buy off the population and especially the middle class with generous education benefits and make-work jobs. These are funded from oil revenues. The clergy is then bought off by funding Wahhabite missionary activities throughout the region and the Arab diaspora in Europe and the United States. The military dictatorships that are aligned with the U.S. use American aid to subsidize heating oil, food, and other basic staples for the lower classes. Formerly the Soviet Union also provided this function for its regional allies, but it is gone. This has forced Damascus to turn to Tehran for an alliance.

Potentially the two countries most immediately in danger are Yemen, which has already experienced political unrest following the fall of the regime in Tunis, and Syria. Syria has not experienced unrest yet and is trying to preempt it with new reforms that have been announced. Bashar al-Assad feels that unlike Mubarak he can breathe easier as he is on the right side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not having signed a peace treaty with Israel. That is why the hope of getting Assad to switch alliances in order to make peace with Israel is probably a pipe dream--he needs the conflict in order to legitimize his heretical Alawite regime (the Alawis are an offshoot of the Shia).

Jordan is also at risk as well over 60 percent of the country's population is made up of Palestinians--those who fled in 1948 and 1967 and their descendants. Jordan's King Abdullah II inherited from his father, King Hussein, the knowledge of how to periodically change prime ministers while running a show parliament and a facade of democracy. He has just put in place a "new" prime minister--who has ruled before. He, like the king, is a former major general in the army. The security of the regime rests on the army and secret police, which are both manned mostly by Jordanians of Beduin extraction from either Jordan or originally from the Red Sea coast of Arabia. The Hashemite monarchs claim legitimacy as direct descendants of Muhammad. But the king's biggest asset is a light ruling hand and good economic management over the decades that he inherited from his father.

The ruling house in Morocco could also potentially be at risk as there are tensions between the Arabs and Berbers in the country and it is rather poor. Europe is an escape valve for many poor Arabs throughout North Africa. Libya, located between Tunisia and Egypt, is also at risk. Muammar Kaddafi has been in power since 1969--41 years. He should either begin transferring power to his son or be prepared for political unrest.

Lebanon is sui generis. It is neither a monarchy nor a military dictatorship but a collection of mutually hostile sectarian groups of Christians and Muslims. It is sitting on a powder keg because of the UN investigation of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005.  Hezbollah, which maintains a large private militia in defiance of an agreement by all the political parties to disarm following the fifteen-year civil war, has threatened that it will regard anyone who supports the UN tribunal as an enemy. Its enemies usually experience premature deaths. Syria and Iran both back Hezbollah--it served both as a pressure on Israel and a client militia for the former and was trained by the latter. So far Shi'ite Lebanon is the most successful example of the export of Iranian revolution. Its powder keg has a fuse that is independent of the regional unrest, but could be sped up if Syria experiences significant unrest.