Some interesting reading on the latest events in Egypt, and their ramifications.
Israel shocked by Obama’s “betrayal” of Mubarak
If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and U.S. President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday.
Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told ministers of the Jewish state to make no comment on the political cliffhanger in Cairo, to avoid inflaming an already explosive situation. But Israel’s President Shimon Peres is not a minister.
“We always have had and still have great respect for President Mubarak,” he said on Monday. He then switched to the past tense. “I don’t say everything that he did was right, but he did one thing which all of us are thankful to him for: he kept the peace in the Middle East.”
Newspaper columnists were far more blunt.
One comment by Aviad Pohoryles in the daily Maariv was entitled “A Bullet in the Back from Uncle Sam.” It accused Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pursuing a naive, smug, and insular diplomacy heedless of the risks.
Who is advising them, he asked, “to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president … an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?”
“The politically correct diplomacy of American presidents throughout the generations … is painfully naive.”
It doesn’t look good for us and for moderate Arab states. From now on, any development won’t be good for our peace with Egypt and for regional stability.
The assumption at this time is that Mubarak’s regime is living on borrowed time of a few months, with a transition government to be established until new elections are held. Should these elections be held the way America wants, most chances are that the Muslim Brothers will win a majority and constitute the dominant element in the next regime.
Hence, it is only a question of time – a short time – before our peace with Egypt pays the price.
This is an extreme scenario, but a realistic one. The only people in Egypt committed to the peace treaty are members of Mubarak’s narrow camp, and should the next president not be a member of this camp, we can expect trouble. Even if the next president is Mohamed ElBaradei, it won’t be the same Egypt and it won’t be the same peace.
Radical political religion will soon shape the Mideast
When the time comes for genuine elections in Egypt, the country’s future will be determined not by university graduates in Cairo but by 70 million villagers. And also, for example, by the one million people living in the City of the Dead, the cemetery in northern Cairo. They will vote for the Muslim Brotherhood because no liberal party can give them the rapid change desperately longed for by the masses, who suffer from shortages of flour, clean drinking water, jobs and housing.
The parties will be myriad and fragmented, colorless and disappointing, left-wing and right-wing – and all of them hostile to Israel, of course. An unstable, rudderless transition period, a parliamentary democracy in the Turkish model, if not the Iranian, will give rise to a religious regime that within a few years will presumably be in control of the best-trained and best-equipped army in the Middle East.
Jay Nordlinger, on National Review Online:
The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty has been in place since 1979. Since that time, only one other nation has made peace with Israel: Jordan (in 1994). Those are the only two Arab nations to have entered into treaties with Israel: Egypt and Jordan. There have been only two leaders in Egypt since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty: Sadat (assassinated in 1981) and Mubarak. (For that matter, there have been only two leaders in Jordan — Hussein and his son Abdullah.)
Question: Will the government that replaces Mubarak abide by the treaty? Or renounce it? In renouncing the treaty, the next government might say, “It was always a mistake to make peace with the Zionists. It was even a shame and a crime, a mark on our national honor. We will now remove that mark. We are rejoining the Arab fold, assuming our natural leadership role in the fight against the alien entity in our midst.”
Remember, there was an unholy furor over Sadat’s signing of the treaty. The Arab League expelled Egypt, and moved League headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. (Egypt was readmitted ten years later, and the League returned to Cairo.) The peace between Egypt and Israel has sometimes been very cold. For example, the Egyptians have withheld an ambassador from Israel. But it has stuck. That treaty has stuck. And that has been hugely important in the Middle East.
Treaties are not forever, as we know. De Gaulle said they were like girls: They come and go. (Sorry to introduce a flippancy into a grave discussion.)
