Why Israel Fears a Democratic Egypt

One thing Hosni Mubarak did accomplish was to relieve Israel of the need to honestly and fairly negotiate a settlement to the Palestinian statehood dilemma.  So long as Egypt was tamed there was no viable military threat to Israel and, ergo, no compelling reason to halt the encroachment of settlements into the West Bank and the takeover of East Jerusalem.   For successive Israeli governments it was time to make hay while the sun shines.

In the West, Mubarak is sometimes praised for being an intermediary between the Israelis and Palestinians.   Judging by the "Palestine Papers" released by al Jazeera, that claim is at least questionable.

An op-ed piece from Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic, from today's New York Times,

...The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur.
Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts — from the first Lebanon war in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 — have been asymmetrical confrontations against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the Arab world.

For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt — for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a land-for-peace agreement. 

...the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.


Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.


Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism. 

What Halevi conveniently overlooks is that much of the Islamists' hatred of Israel is founded on its decades long occupation of Palestine and often brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people.   It lies within Israel's grasp to disarm this hostility by restoring its 1967 borders.  Israel, however, is not ready to travel that road to peace.


America has urged, cajoled even threatened Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank, all to no end.  Israel has repeatedly and persistently shown itself utterly intransigent on the Palestine problem.  It can't go on indefinitely and some solution must be found.   An independent, democratic Egypt may just help Israel see that light.

Tom Friedman's column in The New York Times makes essentially the same point.   Israel has arrived at its last, best chance to make peace with the Palestinians.  Friedman writes that the Egyptian uprisings have given birth to a new paradigm - B.E., Before Egypt, and A.E., After Egypt.

I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.” 

...To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.