he was in Cairo.
Tahrir Square burst with enthusiasm and resilience on February 8. The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. Joe Biden called Suleiman and told him to make “immediate, irreversible progress.” The US and Israel wanted Suleiman to take the reins at least four years ago. The protests simply hastened the script. The people of Egypt wanted to write a new play. But Suleiman was not to their taste. He had to be jettisoned. It was Suleiman who announced that Mubarak was to leave, and as Vice President he hoped to step into his shoes, to be Mubarak II. It was not to happen. The next day, the Armed Forces Supreme Council, led by General Tantawi, took over. Suleiman was not a member. He had to retire.
Matters were not so easily left to chance. In late February, much to the consternation of the Israelis, General Tantawi’s military council allowed an Iranian frigate, the Alvand, to use the Suez Canal for the first time since 1979. More surprises were to follow. Tantawi chose as foreign minister a very conventional figure, Nabil Elaraby, who has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the 1970s (he was ambassador to India in the 1980s). In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David (1978) and to the Taba Conference (1985–89) to settle the terms of the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Nonetheless, right after the February ouster of Mubarak and the entry of Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian-Palestinian relations. Some of this was driven by the role of Kefaya, one of the core organizations of the Tahrir protests whose own roots are in the Palestinian solidarity work during the second intifada of 2000. One outcome of the talks was the freeing up of restrictions on the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and Gaza on May 28. There is pressure on the parties that are now part of the political class to revoke the peace agreement and to pressure Israel to forge a lasting peace with those whom they should really be talking to, the Palestinians. Absent a genuine dialogue, the Egyptian people released their frustrations with the 1979 treaty on the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September 2011. Such a move is obviously detrimental to peace, and a violation of the sanctity of diplomacy. Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated by the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the 1979 peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September.
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.
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