[Debate] Can Tahrir Square Come to Tel Aviv?

[Ran Greenstein]

Can Tahrir Square Come to Tel Aviv?
Daniel Levy
August 24, 2011   |    This article appeared in the September 12, 2011
edition of The Nation.

“The Corner of Rothschild and Tahrir,” reads one of the posters at the
site where Israel’s summer of social protests began—on Rothschild
Boulevard in Tel Aviv, which has become the movement’s tent-city HQ.
Few of the protest leaders would flinch at acknowledging the
inspiration they drew from the Arab Awakening, but it is a new,
challenging and often uncomfortable feeling for many Jewish Israelis
to consider the surrounding Arab world as providing a spark worth
emulating. Now Israel’s governing coalition has to add a domestic
social challenge to the already considerable headache posed by the
regional upheavals of 2011.

After decades of near-hegemonic Israeli strategic supremacy in the
Middle East, the ground is shifting. For Israel’s leaders, the Arab
Awakening and the removal of Mubarak represents the collapse of a key
support structure in the edifice that maintains Israel’s regional
posture. That edifice had been fraying for some time. Yet with Israel
unwilling or unable to relinquish its control over and occupation of
Palestine, it was a system of conflict management that had proven to
be remarkably resilient. Undemocratic Egypt was that system’s
linchpin. In fact, only an undemocratic Egypt could play this role,
indifferent and dismissive as the regime was toward public opinion and
able to pursue policies, both at home and abroad, widely perceived as
being an affront to Egyptian dignity.

Every country needs a strategy for managing its external relations,
especially in the near abroad. Israel’s predicament in this respect is
especially challenging. Born as an unusual movement combining
religious and historical claims to land with modern aspirations of
state-building and communal preservation, Zionism was initially
branded by most in the region as a colonial project, a sense that
Israel has fed with its expansionist and expulsionist approach to the
indigenous population. Unfortunately for Israel, that indigenous
population has ethnic and religious ties to a large population
throughout the surrounding region. Nevertheless, Israel managed to
adapt, pursuing whatever great power or regional alliances were
available, making itself useful to the United States as a cold war
ally.

Long after it became clear that the Oslo peace process would not
deliver Palestinian freedom, rights or sovereignty, the structures
established by it and the opportunities they have forged for Israel
have endured. They were kept afloat by donor assistance, by the
difficulties entailed in dismantling the Palestinian Authority and,
crucially, by the stamp of legitimacy that only Egypt could confer.
The impact of the Arab Awakening on Israel’s leaders must be
understood first and foremost against this backdrop.

A mapping of Israel’s geostrategic priorities cannot be reduced
exclusively to the Palestinian issue, but it is the pre-eminent
feature on that map. The wars of Israel’s founding and early decades
were a function of the Palestinian conflict, including the 1982
Lebanon War and Israel’s prolonged occupation of the south of that
country. Even the separate peace treaty with Egypt signed in 1979 had
to include a “framework” for broader peace, one that provided for
Palestinian self-governance, the withdrawal of Israel’s military
government and recognition of Palestinians’ “legitimate rights.”
Indeed, Israel’s failure to implement those provisions is increasingly
being discussed by Egyptians in the context of their own continued
adherence to the treaty. When Israel has sought to play an open role
in advancing regional alliances opposite Iran, as it did under the
government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, it could do so only in the
context of perceived progress on Palestine. Even the deterioration in
Israel’s relations with a once vital strategic ally, Turkey, can be
traced primarily to developments on the Palestinian issue, most
prominently the Israeli army’s killing last year of nine Turkish
nationals on board a ship seeking to break the Gaza blockade. Quite
simply, Israel cannot have a strategy for managing its regional
posture without having a Palestinian strategy, and today it no longer
has one.

Previously, the absence of representative governance, combined with
the fiction of a peace process, allowed Arab rulers and Israel to
engage in a mutually duplicitous relationship. Arab regimes would
claim loyalty to the Palestinian cause as an article of faith while
making (often discreet) common cause with Israel across a set of
regional issues under the umbrella of a Pax Americana, refraining from
challenging Israel in any meaningful way. Examples include hostility
toward Iran, support for the closure imposed on Gaza (in which
Mubarak’s Egypt was an active partner) and quiescence in the face of
Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006. The conservative regimes would
alternatively chide Israel or appear alongside it (and the
Palestinians) at the various peace-relaunching galas that have
punctuated the “peace-processing” of the past two decades.

For its part, Israel would wear its “only democracy in the Middle
East” badge with pride and bemoan Arab intransigence, while quietly
reaping the rewards that US-aligned Arab autocracies could deliver.
This routine is unlikely to survive the fallout from the Arab
Awakening. Even if the advance of democratic governance is halting and
partial, regimes can be expected to take greater account of public
opinion and to go further in attempting to reclaim legitimacy in the
eyes of their people, on both domestic and foreign policy. To argue
that the Arab or Muslim street is indifferent to the Palestinian issue
is to ignore the overwhelming weight of polling evidence as well as
the historical record.

Given the challenges of delivering on socioeconomic aspirations at
home, scoring public popularity points on Palestine might become a
no-brainer for successor Arab governments. That needn’t translate into
implacable and irreversible hostility toward Israel (in fact, polling
suggests the vast majority of Arabs would accept an Israel that grants
Palestinian freedom), but it is likely to generate more robust
responses to Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians. As for the PLO
leaders, they have no easy path back to the golden cage of the peace
process, which at least in part helps explain the recent twitches of
muscle-flexing on their part—conditioning resumption of negotiations
on a settlement freeze, pursuing recognition at the United Nations and
agreeing to a unity deal with Hamas.

Seen through this lens, it is easier to understand why Israel has been
so wrongheaded in responding to regional developments in recent
months. Its reactions to the demise of the Mubarak regime provide an
interesting case in point. At first, Israel’s leaders appeared to be
in denial, both assuming that Mubarak would tough this one out and
encouraging him to do so. As Mubarak’s departure became inevitable,
Israel’s leaders clung to the hope that their second BFF in Egypt,
Gen. Omar Suleiman (briefly appointed vice president), might yet save
the day. Then a panicked tone set in, with Israel’s elites going into
hunker-down mode and taking a lead in the global scaremongering
campaign over a potential Islamist takeover, an Iran Revolution II
scenario. The tendency across the range of Israeli media was to blame
President Obama for “losing Egypt.” It has now been revealed by a
former government minister that Israel even offered Mubarak asylum.

Israel has had to find a new narrative and a new strategy for the
region. The former was relatively easily accomplished; the latter, not
so much. The new story line is not really so new, focusing as it does
on the threat of Islamists and Iran, and the idea that acceptance of
Israel is a litmus test for any budding democracy. This is a
particularly bizarre notion, given the pace at which the Knesset is
legislating antidemocratic measures, for instance on freedom of
expression and on housing. Coming up with a new policy is proving far
trickier—a difficulty compounded by Israel’s insulation from and
impoverished understanding of its own neighborhood. Israel has erected
a separation barrier between itself and the Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza, is proceeding to do the same on the Egyptian border and
has long had closed and militarily fortified borders with Lebanon and
Syria. Trade with all of its Middle East neighbors, in fact, amounts
to less than 5 percent of its total. Israelis rarely visit even those
Arab countries it is possible to enter, and the Arab community inside
Israel is treated as a fifth column rather than as a bridge to
regional relations. Of course, this is a two-way street. Yet when the
physical barriers are combined with what is often a striking lack of
intellectual, cultural and social curiosity, Israel is in danger of
being fundamentally incapable of interpreting developments in its
immediate surroundings.

Israel was also uncertain in responding to developments in Syria. The
desire to see a member of the resistance axis fall has been tempered
by acknowledgment that the Assad regime has maintained a quiet border
with Israel and hardly constitutes a formidable foe in either the
military or diplomatic arena. Bashar al-Assad and Baath Party rule are
“the devil Israel knows,” and the survival of that regime, especially
with a more diminished stature, thoroughly discredited in and
condemned by the West, could have some advantages for Israel.

Quietly over the past months, Israel’s strategy in the face of the
Arab Awakening seems to have coalesced around a set of positions, none
of which feature on the democracy-promotion end of the policy
spectrum. Israeli leaders have said little in public; partly this is
understandable and wise prudence.

In its immediate vicinity, Israel seems to prefer the status quo ante.
In this respect, it shares an agenda with counterrevolutionary forces
elsewhere in the region, notably in the Gulf. In fact, during the
months of the Arab Awakening, Israel and Saudi Arabia more often than
not found themselves singing from the same hymn sheet. Both have
expressed frustration at the insufficient enthusiasm shown by the
Obama administration for the ancien régimes. Of the neighbors
experiencing some convulsions, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands
out as the country where regime preservation is still considered
possible, and it is also where there has been the most thorough
Israeli alignment with the United States and Gulf states in supporting
this agenda. While relations with King Abdullah remain frosty, Israel
is doing all it can behind the scenes to be supportive.

Israel and the conservative Gulf forces also share common ground on
Egypt. Here the focus is on salvaging what is possible (and much seems
possible) from the old ruling elite structures, which are
Western-oriented and over which Israel may have more leverage.
Maintaining a pre-eminent role for the current ruling authority, the
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, is central to this project. The
armed forces are interested in sustaining their economic privileges
and continued assistance from Washington, again providing Israel with
cards to play.

The other component to Israel’s response strategy, one that is fully
in sync with Europe and Washington, is actively promoting a set of
neoliberal economic policies for the region. This may be more
significant for Israel’s positioning and future plans than is often
appreciated. It is also ironic, given the social convulsions being
felt inside Israel. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Israel
and the West have depicted Egypt’s attempted revolution as the result
of an excess of bureaucracy and insufficient market reforms, rather
than rejection of the economic liberalization that has stoked
inequality and indebtedness, strengthened Egypt’s economic elites and
encouraged a kleptocracy. Continued privatization, deregulation and
opening to foreign investment would benefit Egypt’s narrow business
and military elites, alongside foreign investors, and bind those
ruling interests ever more tightly to the Western states and perhaps
also to financiers from the Gulf Cooperation Council. Policies that
would undermine the possibility of economic democracy would, in turn,
suffocate political democracy and would probably be Israel’s best bet
for a return to something like Mubarakism without Mubarak.

Overall, a more democratic Arab world will have the effect of
narrowing Israel’s room to maneuver for as long as it remains in the
business of denying Palestinian freedom. The problem for Israel was
astutely defined by President Obama in May: “A just and lasting peace
can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders. Going forward,
millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that
peace to be sustained.” This will require a fundamentally different
approach to the Palestinians. Even if a formula is found to resume
negotiations and avoid a September showdown at the UN, turning back
the clock will prove ephemeral. The window of Palestinian
sustainability for old-school peace-processing will be smaller with
every iteration. An image that appeared so natural last September—of
an American president flanked by Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and
Jordanian leaders, again suspending disbelief and lending credence to
thoroughly discredited peace talks—will not be repeated.

In this new regional environment, five challenges stand out for
Israel. First, conditions for Arab cooperation with Israel, including
cooperation by Palestinians, have deteriorated significantly. This
will apply even to issues where there is a degree of overlapping
interest, such as Iran.

Second, it will be more difficult for Israel’s friends to provide
cover for continued Israeli occupation and violations of international
law with regard to Palestinians. If freedom and democracy for Arabs is
the new mantra, then its inapplicability to Palestinians will be
harder to justify. This is relevant for the United States, and
probably more so in the short term for European governments, which are
more likely to be faced with consumer and other protest actions from
their own publics. Jewish communities around the world—already
somewhat internally divided over Israel—will face ever more stressful
and divisive dilemmas.

Third, Israel will have to recalibrate its military posture in the
face of potential new security challenges arising from enhanced
instability and uncertainty on what were previously predictable and
stable borders (notably with Egypt, as witnessed in the mid-August
incident near Eilat and the ensuing tensions between the countries).
This comes at a time of increased budgetary pressure on defense
expenditures in response to the summer’s social protests and growing
inequalities inside Israel.

Fourth, Israel faces the prospect of an invigorated Palestinian turn
in priorities and tactics, including nonviolent popular resistance and
civil disobedience. Mobilization of this nature has been occurring in
West Bank villages for some time and briefly took on a regional
component in May, with marches on Israel’s borders to mark Nakba Day.
A concerted push in this direction is a distinct possibility, and very
much in line with the popular mobilizations of the Arab Awakening. A
sustained, nonviolent Palestinian movement probably has the greatest
potential as a game changer—it keeps Israel’s military planners up at
night.

Finally, the region is likely to witness greater integration of
Islamist movements into mainstream politics at a time when Israeli
politics and discourse are taking on a more discernibly religious,
fundamentalist and even messianic tone.

Israel will need to adjust to these developments, but its changing
politics and demographics would appear to leave it ill equipped to do
so. While the remaining realists in Israel’s establishment seem to
understand that there is a pressing need to reformulate relations with
the region and urgently address Palestinian realities in response to
the Arab Awakening, they carry less weight in policy-making circles
and less traction with the public. Yet even the prescriptions of the
traditional moderate Zionist camp may be insufficient in the face of
these new challenges.

This is where Israel’s summer protest movement may offer a glimpse of
new hope. This would entail successfully drawing the connections in
people’s minds between the costs of occupation, settlements and “no
peace” and the inadequate provision of social goods. It would also
include recognition that the system of social injustice now being
opposed by Israeli Jews is rooted in and fed by the prevailing logic
of ethnic discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and the
occupied territories. That kind of social reset—a twin assault on
neoliberal economics and neoliberal Zionism—does not come easily.

The social protests may be a teachable moment, surfacing some of these
issues, raising doubts, hinting at new coalitions and seeding a new
politics. Perhaps the best indication of the movement’s radical
potential is seen in the anxious response from the settlers, described
by Israel’s leading commentator, Nahum Barnea, as “overt hostility,
almost panic.” Predictably, they have called for massive settlement
construction to solve the housing crisis, and they’re backed by most
ministers in the government.

The most likely, if exasperating, course for the protest movement is
being charted by self-appointed spokespeople of “sensible Zionism” who
have launched scathing attacks on the leftist wing of the movement,
called to replace its leadership and advocated what amounts to a
fortification of Jewish solidarity. That would boil down to a
redistributive tweaking of the pie to accommodate and depoliticize
middle Israel, ensuring that army reservists remain motivated, their
nests refeathered and loyalties girded for future wars. Such a
business-as-usual outcome would represent a wasted opportunity, the
magnitude of which is dramatically compounded by the challenges
induced by the Arab Awakening.

Israel’s last major strategic reorientation was its peace treaty with
Egypt. That required a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines, the removal
and dismantling of all settlements in the Sinai, an agreement on
international arbitration over the small disputed territory of Taba,
and security arrangements that included monitoring and deployment by
international, rather than Israeli, forces. Ironically, it is change
in Egypt that dictates the need to undertake another major strategic
reorientation. Worryingly for Israel, the combination of pugnacious
nationalists and biblically inspired ideologues currently steering the
ship of state seems woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

Daniel Levy
August 24, 2011   |    This article appeared in the September 12, 2011
edition of The Nation.

-- 
Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg, South Africa