Israel in a Changing Middle East

The impact of Iran, Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East has changed the region. Israel, the only democracy in the region, has improved relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as such nations react to the Islamist threat to their own societies. Israel has stayed out of the Syrian civil war and maintained good relations with Jordan while increasing its contacts with such nations as India and Greece, a neighbour of Turkey. Between 2001 and 2009, Dr Eran Lerman served as Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East Office, and prior to that as Assistant for Analyses to the Deputy Director for Intelligence Production at the Israel Defense Forces’ Directorate of Military Intelligence. On a visit to Australia sponsored by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Eran Lerman addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 14 August to discuss Israel and its new partnerships.

ISRAEL IN A CHANGING MIDDLE EAST

DR ERAN LERMAN

Those in Australia and elsewhere who think that in our part of the world to be against Israel is to go with the flow of history, couldn’t be more wrong. The exact opposite is the case. Those who stand against Israel stand against the arc of history.

The image that Israel is increasingly isolated is quite the opposite to the reality on the ground in the last few months, not only globally but also in the Arab world. An example is during the recent Temple Mount tensions when Israel attempted to install metal detectors following the murder of two Druze border policemen.

Sometimes the most interesting event is a non-event. And there was not a word coming out of Saudi Arabia officially on these momentous events.  Privately, there were Saudis going out and telling the Palestinians that since this reeks of Qatari meddling (via incitement on its Al Jazeera television channel), they would have none of it, and this is an internal Israeli issue. 

Now, can you imagine that slap in the face from the masters of Mecca and Medina? So, something is very different than what people imagine.

Israel’s diplomatic achievements

Contrary to the assumption that Israel is increasingly isolated, Israel is now running through a fairly incredible sequence of diplomatic achievements which are part of a broader pattern.

A good starting point would be Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Australia, which was excellent, followed by participation in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) summit in Liberia, as the only non-African country invited, which is pretty striking.

Particularly relevant to Australia, given its large Greek population, is what’s happening between Israel, Greece and Cyprus is remarkable.If you’ll remember, some three decades ago under Andreas Popandreu, Greece was practically considered to be the 23rd country of the Arab League.  Nowadays, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras, the most left-wing European politician in power, side-by-side with Nicos Anastasiades, who is right-of-centre, and Netanyahu, they are building something together. 

They have held three tripartite meetings. When you have a tripartite meeting, it means you are beginning to put together something which goes beyond bilateral relations. When you do three tripartite meetings, and you set up a time and venue for the fourth, then you’re basically witnessing the emergence of a geopolitical building block as part of, what I would call, a new Eastern Mediterranean architecture.

Indeed, it is time to let go of the old colonial concept of the “Middle East,” and re-learn to think in Mediterranean terms. The Eastern Mediterranean would be my definition of where we are in the world.

The Mediterranean is a much more relevant template for us, for several reasons. First of all, there is a cultural underpinning. You know, Israelis react very warmly to Greek music. They don’t understand a word of the language but there is something there in the interaction. There’s a strong North African element in Israeli society. The music that we listen to on Israeli radio, in Hebrew, half the time is nowadays referred to as Mediterranean music. It’s North African, Greek, Turkish in its origins, with lyrics rendered in modern Hebrew, mixed up with our own creative talents. And we’ve all been cooked in the same olive oil under the same sun for quite a while.

It’s not just cultural. There’s energy – gas and probably also oil in the eastern Mediterranean basin. We need to work together. The Israeli and Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zones border each other. The Egyptians have their own major find now through the Italians. Meanwhile, Italy is very much interested in eastern Mediterranean oil. Southern Europe would much rather have us supply their energy needs than the Russians.

So, we have now this trilateral set of meetings with Greek and Cyprus which is building a strategic building block of what I call the new variable geometry or architecture of Eastern Mediterranean security.

The third tripartite summit was in Salonica in March. There was also a major military exercise in which the Israeli Air Force participated side by side with Arab air forces. Then you had our commando brigade training in Cyprus. It just gives you a sense of just how much the Eastern Mediterranean is transforming itself into a redefined strategic environment in which Israel is a legitimate player.

If you talk Middle East, you basically are singling Israel out as the only democratic Western oriented country in a landscape of Arab and Muslim nations. If you talk Mediterranean, you’re talking about a mosaic of identities. The landscape is a multicultural one that has Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Turks.

This multicultural landscape in the Mediterranean is far more congenial to Israel’s claim to be an organic part of that kind of landscape and not a foreign implant in an Arab landscape.So, even at the level of identity politics, this business of a Mediterranean definition is relevant. 

Yet Israel’s wave of diplomatic achievements doesn’t end there. Then, on 4 July 2017, came the Narendra Modi visit, leader of the largest democracy in the world and soon to be the largest nation on earth, population-wise. Modi spent three days side-by-side with Netanyahu. He did not even visit the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, though it would not have been an issue if he did.

Leaving aside the booming business in security cooperation, on every one of Modi’s colour revolutions – on milk on the table and water in the fields, and high-tech – he said he needs Israel with him. This was laying the foundation for further cooperation between the two countries. The relationship with India has become deep, important and all encompassing. It is now roaring forward on all fronts and the sky’s the limit.

From there, Netanyahu went to France, where Macron – the lynchpin of European unity – gave a powerful speech castigating anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, which is remarkable. ] Not that – as the United Nations once resolved – Zionism is racism, but anti-Zionism is racism. That’s an amazingly clear unambiguous statement from a man considered the hope of Europe – a man who represents the future, not the past. 

This is just part of an even larger pattern – and I didn’t even mention the Trump visit in March, his first Presidential overseas visit, to Saudi Arabia and Israel – where he said the same things in both places, and both countries were very comfortable with his message.

Four factors

What’s going on? In addition to the hard work being put in by Israeli professionals, diplomats and the security establishment, Jewish organisations including AIJAC, which is going amazing work in this part of the world, not just in Australia but all over Southeast Asia, there are four underlying factors.

Number one, after the spate of terror attacks in Europe and elsewhere in the last few years, is the emergence of a common enemy – modern totalitarian Islamism.

There are three versions, or “camps” of Islamism – I call it the “Game of Camps” – Islamic State, the Iranian regime and its proxies, and the Muslim Brotherhood (which includes Erdogan’s Turkey).

In the internal struggle of cognitive communities in government around the world, the soldiers and the intelligence officers who were shunted aside in favour of the lawyers, the economists, the humanitarians, the diplomats – are rising because there is a real enemy out there. I need not tell Australians about this. When citizens know that they owe their daily lives to the work of these people, that changes the internal balance. And that community, almost by definition, tends to be attentive to Israeli concerns and Israeli views because there’s an understanding of what we’re up against and what we need to do.

Number two, nations are starting to realise how much Israel has to offer them. Looking at the North Korean situation, our achievements in missile defence come to mind.  We are the only country which not only deployed but used missile defence in battle with absolutely spectacular results, and I’m not only talking about the Iron Dome. We used an Arrow this year to shoot down a Syrian ground-to-air missile that was fired at one of our planes. The in-between layer of missile defence technology, David’s Sling, is now coming online. 

In addition, looking down the road, there is cyber security. Cyber defence is the key to our ability to sustain the ecommerce universe that we live in. You cannot drive a car – not even a non-autonomous car – without having to think, maybe somebody can sit somewhere and play with my car’s computer from a distance. It has been done. So, cyber defence is absolutely central to the future, and Israel stands at the very core of capacities in this. Another example is water. Israel leads the world in water recycling. There are many contributions that we can make, and people are beating a path to our door.

Thirdly, countries no longer have to choose between aligning with Israel or its Arab neighbours. Once upon a time the working assumption was that if you befriend Israel, you lose the Arabs. This is no longer relevant – Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are today completely on the same side in the same war against the Islamist dangers. Once upon a time the working assumption was that if you befriend Israel, you lose the Arabs. This is no longer relevant – Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are today completely on the same side in the same war against the Islamist dangers.We and the Saudis are on the same side. There’s no daylight between our strategic perspectives and those of the Emirates nowadays. We saw this over the Temple Mount incident. We see this about Iran. Our list of enemies is exactly the same. 

Israel is part of a new combination of forces. This “camp of stability”, as I call it, also includes Egypt, Jordan and even the security guys on the Palestinian side.

Iran is the key to this story. It is a country of 90 million with an industrial base, with a military nuclear program that is now on hold but not for long, with an ambition to transform the region with a revolutionary agenda. It has networks of terrorists worldwide from Bangkok to Peru, to Bruges and of course in control of Lebanon, much of Syria and so on. Iran is a major challenge and we should not let our eyes off the ball.

Look at the problems with North Korea now. We don’t want to have a similar situation on our hands a few years down the road with a power-mad Iranian leadership. This can still be stopped. If you don’t want to live in the shadow of a disruptive nuclear proposition in Iran, this is the time to start thinking about it. It’s very nice to fight IS, but to contemplate the idea that to fight IS you need the help of Iran is basically like saying, “There is a poisonous snake in my backyard and I’m bringing in a man-eating tiger to take care of it.”

Fourth is a bit controversial, delicate and complicated, but we have also managed to handle our Palestinian relationship – conflict management, not conflict resolution – in a successful way against the background of this wave of violence that began in October 2015.

I think we’ve managed to create a situation where we can draw a clear distinction between the bad guys and the rest of the population and service the needs of the rest of the Palestinian population while going after the bad guys. The Palestinians themselves have given us credit. Their Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah, recently said he appreciates the fact that the IDF has been able to avoid going after the Palestinian population at large, but instead pinpoint the bad guys and go after them. It annoys elements of the Israeli hard right who want to see us much more aggressive. They’re wrong.

These four elements put together go a long way towards explaining this [positive] transformation in our international standing. Quite frankly, it is the BDS movement and their likes who are marginalised and left behind by the real tides of history – as Israel weaves its new relations with the likes of Southeast Asia, India, across Africa, much of Eastern Europe, and even Russia for various reasons.