It would be difficult to
exaggerate Israel’s successes over the past three decades. But it would also be
a colossal mistake to underestimate the challenges it is now facing.
اضافة اعلان
The key successes are strategic.
Israel managed to navigate the past two decades, during which its immediate
neighborhood of the Eastern Mediterranean witnessed acute troubles, without
experiencing any serious disruptions to its political or economic life. On the
contrary, it succeeded in using the situations to upgrade its cooperation with
important world powers with influence in the region, most notably Russia.
Israel has become a major
military power with a formidable reputation in the world of intelligence, and a
large number of countries in the wider Middle East and beyond seek its
expertise and buy its resources and products. This gives it prestige as well
as, more importantly, access and knowledge.
Israel was one of the first
countries to understand not just the implications of the rise of China, but
also the fast pace of that rise and to act on that understanding. Israel
actively sought to cultivate relationships with important nodes in the Chinese
power structure, going way beyond the layers of the Chinese Communist Party, to
major players in the communications, technology, and industrial sectors. The
result is that Israel has highly developed technological and economic
cooperation relationships with the rising global power. These will yield
valuable dividends in the coming years.
These new relationships have not
lessened Israel’s special relationship with the US. Despite opposing turns in
US policy in and toward the Middle East and major changes within US domestic
politics, Israel has navigated its multi-faceted interactions with the US and
managed to remain its most trusted and closest ally in the region.
Israel is also benefitting from
the gradual disengagement of the US from the Middle East. Its strategic
successes, as well as its advances in the military and intelligence domains,
have made it an attractive partner for regional powers in need of new security
arrangements, especially in the Gulf. Israel’s successes in several
technological and economic sectors have been registered by the sharp antennas
of many merchant families in the Gulf that are deeply entrenched in the
region’s political-economic fabric.
The new Israeli partnerships with
the Gulf have encouraged others. Sudan knocked at the US door through an
Israeli route, for example, and Morocco is enhancing and deepening its decades-long
cooperation with Israel. The result is that in a vastly changing Middle East,
Gulf, and North Africa, Israel has emerged as a political, security, and
economic centre with strong connections to almost all the corners of this large
region.
However, from within these
successes challenges emerge.
Israel has secured a newly
prominent place in the wider Middle East while also increasingly becoming a
Middle Eastern country.
Politically, religion is now one
of the strongest currents in the Israeli parliament and thus in government formation
in Israel. This flies in the face of the secularism that characterized the
Zionist movement before and after the creation of the state of Israel and that
the country’s founding fathers envisaged as a pillar of the state’s governing
structure and one of its main social features.
Socially, Israel increasingly
also looks divided into distinct constituencies. Around a fifth of Israelis are
conservatives if not literalists in religion. They live, work, and socialize
far from the fifth of Israelis who are highly secular and liberal. And the
majority of both of these two-fifths live away from the roughly fifth of the
population that are Arab Israelis. This separateness dilutes social cohesion
and engenders opposing understandings of Israeli identity.
There is also notable social
inequality in Israel, and while this is not different from the inequalities in
almost all Western (and of course also Arab) societies, inequality in Israel is
another acute diversion from the socialist vision upon which the country was
founded and which inspired its growth from the late 1940s to the late 1980s.
Strategically, the most serious
challenges confronting Israel also arise from its successes.
As the US gradually dilutes its
presence in the Middle East, it will rely more on Israel to secure key Western
interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. These include vital infrastructure,
including in gas and renewable energy. On the one hand, this reliance will be
an asset on Israel’s strategic balance sheet. But on the other, it is a new
situation because the founding of Israel coincided with the US entrance into
the Middle East, inheriting Britain’s role in the region, and so the country
has always operated in its neighborhood with the US in the background. Now that
the US is withdrawing from the region, Israel is undertaking a responsibility
it has never experienced before.
This responsibility gives rise to
economic challenges. Certain sectors in Israel, such as technology,
communications, and pharmaceuticals, have achieved phenomenal success over the
past two decades. This has been anchored in human capital, investment flows,
and research and innovation circuits closely enmeshed in international
networks.
But it was not a coincidence that
these talents and capital coalesced in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and other places
that are the most detached from the turmoil of the Eastern Mediterranean. Now
that Israel is taking on greater security responsibilities to compensate for
the US absence, it will need to return to the mobilization and militarization
of decades past, disrupting the milieu in which its greatest economic successes
have been achieved.
Then there is Iran, whose
successes brought it to the Eastern Mediterranean armored with a conviction
that it has established a balance of deterrence with Israel through force of
arms and particularly through the arsenal of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
This Iranian presence presents
Israel with an acute dilemma for three reasons. The first is that Israel’s
security doctrine since its foundation has been anchored in its superior
military capabilities relative to any and all the powers it considers to be its
enemies. The current situation negates this Israeli doctrine.
The second is that Iran has
succeeded in turning its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean into a
semi-circle around Israel, with Hezbollah in the north, Syria in the east, and
the Palestinian group Hamas in the south. This means that in any serious
military confrontation between Iran and Israel, the latter must take into
consideration the possibility of engaging in three different theatres of war at
the same time, something it has always striven to avoid.
The third is that the Islamic
Republic in Iran has become an idea, and for many in Israel’s immediate neighborhood
also an ideal. As a result, unlike in Israel’s wars with almost all the Arab
regimes over the past 70 years, a confrontation with Iran would entail fighting
ideologically hardened and devoted groups. Such wars always result in heavy
casualties, because the opponent is willing to fight to the death.
This points to another challenge
facing Israel. Like all societies that have achieved high levels of economic
success, wealth brings with it comfort, a high standard of living, and often
self-indulgence. These things are assets in dealing with Silicon Valley
billionaires, but self-indulgence could well be a liability in a serious fight.
The Iran-Israel confrontation
will likely alternate between cold and hot wars. It has already brought about
major changes in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it will certainly further
impact the region from the Gulf to North Africa. This confrontation is also now
entering a delicate phase as the Arab world emerges from almost four decades of
lethargy and from a disorienting decade since the 2011 uprisings.
The writer is an Egyptian author, commentator, TV presenter and documentary producer who specializes in regional politics and political economy affairs.
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