Implications Of The Upheaval In The Middle East

Ehud Ya’ari is Israel’s most authoritative and influential foreign affairs analyst and commentator, having reported on the politics of The Middle East, particularly Palestinian affairs, since the 1970s. He now reports regularly for Israel’s Channel Two Television Network and is an Associate Editor and Columnist for The Jerusalem Report newsmagazine. Ehud Ya’ari has written eight books dealing with various aspects of the Arab-Israel conflict and is an Associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. On a visit to Sydney, Ehud Ya’ari addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 27 February 2014, and gave a compelling update on politics in the Middle East today. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the address.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE UPHEAVAL IN THE MIDDLE EAST

EHUD YAARI

it’s a pleasure being again at The Sydney Institute. I will try to offer you an appraisal of the situation now in the Middle East – the muddle east, as I’m fond of calling it. It is an appraisal which will be honest and, unfortunately, blunt. I’ll begin by describing what I think is the main feature of the situation in the Middle East. This is not much reported by the media. That fact is that we are witnessing a resurgence of Al-Qaeda in unprecedented proportions.

President Barack Obama may be right in saying that the United States, with its drones and so forth, was able to decapitate much of the leadership of Al-Qaeda Central in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Bin Laden himself. This does not mean that the branches and other wings of Al-Qaeda are not prospering. They are.

Picture in your mind the Middle East with a line from the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, on the Tigris River, going 500 miles west and north all the way upstream to the Euphrates River and then extending on to Aleppo, the biggest city of Syria. This whole stretch, of mainly arid land, is controlled today by two rival wings of Al-Qaeda. That’s a huge black hole in the centre of the Middle East and nobody is there to fight them.

Fallujah, east of Baghdad, used to have 300,000 people. It is now totally controlled by Al-Qaeda. There are two Iraqi regular army divisions at the gates of the city, Number 2 and Number 7. They have also brought in the Golden Division, the best elite special forces unit of the Iraqi Army and trained by the Americans. Do they push into the city? Absolutely not. Is there anywhere else along this 500 miles strip where anybody is doing battle with the Al-Qaeda forces? The answer at this moment is no.

I would suggest to you that the number of people under arms today for Al-Qaeda – both of the rival wings – is no less than 50,000 people. There are rival wings, including Jabhat al Nusra, the Nusra Front, the ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. What remains of the Syrian Army, fighting for President Assad, is no more than 70,000 and there are many other rebel factions with armed personnel.

In Iraq, the newly resurgent Al-Qaeda, who are the successors of the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, easily number between 30-40,000. We are talking big numbers, a serious threat. And they have extended their presence to places like the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, which is three times bigger than Israel. Here ISIS, one of these Al-Qaeda wings, has a very serious presence, with thousands of terrorists. If you go to Libya, now liberated, in southern Libya the province of Fezzan is already fully integrated into the Al-Qaeda led terrorist system, which goes all the way from southern Libya into the Sahel, Mauritania, Mali and beyond. As you know, the French army has intervened in Mali only to save half of Mali, no more than that. The people in the Sinai, for example, are closely linked to what is called AQAP, Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula which is based in Yemen. They exist in different shapes, what they call Islamic Emirates and impose Sharia Islamic rule, whether the people or the inhabitants like it or not.

This is the main feature of what is called – wrongly so, of course – the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring, according to the best estimates, cost the Arab world and especially the countries that experienced the Arab Spring no less than $800 billion over three years. And we are talking about countries in the region which are – to some extent – failed states. Here, central authority has been dramatically weakened. These are states which are, at all times and at any given moment, on the verge of bankruptcy. Egypt, the single most important country of the region and with 85 million people on the Nile now has a policeman where you have a lamppost. That’s not the Egypt I lived in for years; that’s not Egypt that I knew.

Egypt is the only place in the world where the army made a loan of $4 billion to the treasury. Egypt survives because the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have deposited $14 billion into the Egyptian central bank. And Al-Qaeda is blossoming, all over the place. Every terrorist attack in mainland Egypt – the Delta, Cairo – in the past few months has been initiated by Al-Qaeda terrorists. And the Egyptians know it.

The Arab Spring, at the end of the day was about three developments. Firstly, Arabs for the first time in their history were transformed from subjects to citizens. This is big news. But the problem is they have no experience or tradition of acting and behaving as citizens. Arabs never were citizens, recognised citizens. Whichever government, comes to power treats its citizens no different from subjects.

Secondly, the security services which were the main tool of governance all over our region – except for Israel – have collapsed. It varies only in degree. But combine Arab subjects becoming citizens with the security services losing their grip over the population and people take to the square. Whenever, wherever they feel like it. Sometimes it’s Muslim Brothers, sometimes it’s the young, secular liberals. But they’re always in the square. And the media has stopped reporting it because it’s routine, it happens every day. It doesn’t make a headline. But it’s there. And it’s the new system of governance.

From an Israeli perspective, there are now three immediate issues. One is the retreat of the United States from the region. We are being told there is a pivot to Asia. I fail to see it. But that’s my own personal observation. The other two main issues, from the Israeli point of view, is the civil war in Syria and the situation in Egypt.

Syria first. I’ll give you a brief assessment of where it is. One hundred and eighty thousand people killed; that’s an estimate since nobody has counted. There are a least 9 million Syrian refugees out of a population of 23 million. Whole cities and neighbourhoods are totally devastated, destroyed. Helicopters have been dropping barrels, laden with half a ton of explosives, on civilian neighbourhoods with no guidance systems or targeting. They are just dropped.

President Assad cannot win this war. His army – what remains of his army – is overstretched and exhausted. The casualty rate is very high. The loss of equipment, tanks and artillery cannot be compensated by the airlift that the Iranians and the Russians are deploying. The Syrian army is not capable any more of mounting a counter offensive against the rebels – certainly not a significant one. They are mainly busy maintaining a fragile control over the spinal cord of Syria, which is highway M5 that runs all the way through central Syria from the south and the Jordanian border, through Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Homs, Aleppo to the north where the main battle is.

Assad’s forces are maintaining a fragile control over the M5 highway – this is the whole story of the civil war. Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy, has committed 6000 fighters –everything they have – in the battle to save Assad. They understand that if Assad is toppled, Hezbollah is locked in an enclave in southern Lebanon. The problem from Israel’s point of view is that there is such a huge Al-Qaeda presence in northern Syria, controlling some of the more important suburbs of Aleppo, which is Syria’s commercial capital; it’s the Sydney of Syria.

The possibility that Al-Qaeda will leak down to the south, and entrench themselves close to Israel’s border and the Syrian-Jordanian border, is of great concern. So there is a new chess game in the region. We have Israeli-Jordanian cooperation and coordination to fortify and strengthen the local militias in the villages and towns of southern Syria, south of the capital, Damascus, because they also fear Al-Qaeda will invade them.

As you know from the media, Israel has so far treated over 700 injured rebels, and sick mothers giving birth in Israeli hospitals. Israel has established a special military field hospital close to the border with Syria to treat people, the lighter cases. We are providing food medication, heaters, blankets, fuel, whatever you can think of to the rebel militias in the south. And that is only what is reported. In Syria there are 1000 different rebel brigades, under a single command. The Jordanians are working in a similar fashion.

Fifteen per cent of the population of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan today is made up of Syrian refugees. The big Syrian refugee camp in Zaatari, in north Jordan, is the fourth largest city of the kingdom. Here refugees are selling their daughters to rich Arabs, mainly from the Gulf, for what is called in Arabic the Muta’h marriage. Muta’h is a pleasure marriage, which is allowed. Muta’h marriage can last an hour, a week, two years, six years, as agreed upon in a contract. In my view, the only reason we did not see the Arab Spring spread to Jordan is because the Jordanians – including those who hate the King and his Palestinian wife – is that the Jordanians see what is happening to the Syrians and they realise maybe it’s not such a good idea to take to the streets.

The other front is the Sinai. In the Sinai, between Israel and Egypt, unreported developments are taking place. The main one is that Egypt’s General el-Sisi and his regime have reached a tacit understanding with Israel to effectively modify the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries. The military annex of the peace treaty of 1979, concluded between the late President Sadat and late Prime Minister Begin, prohibited the Egyptians from maintaining any military presence in most parts of the Sinai Peninsula. That was part of the deal. Today there is a renewed terrorist threat from the Sinai. This comes mainly from Bedouins who are Muslims but never really practise Islam but many of them converted to fundamentalist, radical, Salafi-jihadist forms of Islam. These terrorist have been attacking Israel. Israel and Egypt reached an agreement by which Israel has given its consent to the deployment of eleven battalions.

Eleven battalions is something like a mechanised division including two commando battalions and one tank battalion, Apache helicopters, etc. This assists the Egyptian army in a campaign against the terrorists and will possibly become a permanent feature. Effectively, the peace treaty has been modified in a very significant manner without touching the text itself, which is an impossible task because if you take one brick from the wall, it collapses. And, in Egypt, for decades there was criticism that the peace treaty with Israel restricted Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai. General el-Sisi, who will be campaigning to become the first president in April, will now be able to say that’s over and that’s fine with us.

Never before has Israel had such a close collaboration and coordination with the Egyptians as we have now. In addition, there is the Egyptian blockade of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They’ve closed some 95 per cent of the tunnels. President Mubarak used to tell us how complicated it was. In fact, it was quite easy. All the Egyptians needed to do was command the tunnel contractors on their side to stop and they did. They have insulated Egypt from Gaza.

All this is also in Egypt’s interests. Hamas is involved in the jihadist terrorist activity in the Sinai. A year ago, Hamas wanted to test new missiles, long range missiles that can hit Tel Aviv, Jerusalem whatever. They fired the missiles into the Sinai, not paying attention to Egyptian sovereignty. The Muslim Brotherhood government did not protest. The new government is very different. Now Egypt, like Israel, wants to take steps to further weaken Hamas’ grip on the Gaza Strip. It is not to be a military action – there are other ways.

This is a bizarre situation in which Israel is reluctant. There is no love for Hamas, but what comes next? Probably it will be anarchy and chaos and Israel would not want this half a kilometre away from Israeli towns. So it’s a bizarre situation where the Arabs are pushing Israel – Egyptians in this case – to tighten the blockade of Gaza, and to make life more difficult for people there. In other words, this would provoke an uprising against Hamas. These are the main two fault lines. Hezbollah is contained because they are committed to Lebanon and to Syria and Hamas is contained and deterred to the point that Egypt employs special forces to prevent factions in Gaza from lobbing missiles into Israel.

Finally, two issues briefly – one is Iran one is the Palestinian arena. Iran; there are shortcomings in the joint plan of action from the Geneva deal over Iran’s nuclear development. It allows the Iranians to keep their research and development, to keep running the centrifuges, and to continue building the plutonium reactor. But one element is important – apart from the shortcomings of the deal. The Iranian nuclear problem, at least its non-military part, is now within a glass box. There is better inspection, daily inspections, and more monitoring – if they go for a breakout you will get ample warning. They will have to dismantle the cameras, they will have to stop visits by the inspectors from Vienna, etc. That’s important.

My impression is that the Iranians are not in a hurry for a bomb. One major reason is that when they have a bomb the Saudis will get one too, from Pakistan. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has just visited Islamabad to conclude a strategic defensive alliance. Of course, they are not telling us what the nuclear aspect of the relations is., Between his previous tenure as prime minister and his current tenure, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, was in political exile in Saudi Arabia, in a very nice palace. I think the Iranians are going to spend quite a few years under a cloud of uncertainty about where they are going, or not going. There is currently no dash for the bomb. They will wait for some major international crisis – in the Korean peninsula, South China Sea, wherever.

The other point I’ll make is about the Palestinians. US Secretary John Kerry, operating through a Sydney-born American diplomat, Martin Indyk, is probably going to clinch what should be referred to as the framework of negotiations. It’s not a framework agreement. A framework for negotiations is a document, which the Americans will submit which includes watered-down terms of reference for the negotiations but no more. To this document they will attach two other letters – one by Mr Netanyahu listing Israel’s reservations, another from the Palestinian Authority listing the Palestinian reservations.

Where would this take us? It will take us to another year or so of negotiations. A final status deal or resolution of the conflict, unfortunately, will prove elusive for one reason. And on this I’ll conclude. I’ve spent all my life in the no man’s land between Israelis and Palestinians. Jerusalem, as a capital, is not the prize or the objective of the Palestinian national movement. The battle is over acknowledging that there was any Jewish history in the land for this statelet. So what John Kerry is doing is pushing the envelope. He’s doing that on his own. And President Obama has given him the message that if he is determined to work to an outcome, that is fine, But Obama will not accept being made to look foolish over the outcome that transpires.