Israel, Alone Again? By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/opinion/02Halevi.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Op-Ed Contributor

Israel, Alone Again?

By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

Published: February 1, 2011

Jerusalem

ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.

But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, 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.
 
The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim world’s widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the Israeli intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the Holocaust to blackmail the West.

Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naïveté: the same prediction, after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their predicament in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains David.

Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.

That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian alliance collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty that same year. 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.

Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to Tel Aviv on his peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day. Begin, Israel’s most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times the size of Israel.

Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis craved, the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the Sinai coast experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in one corner of the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized Sinai proved that Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel reasonably secure.

The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel’s borders that hasn’t been fenced off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to close.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

Was British Colonial management more accommodative and less cruel than the US invasions for world’s resources? - By Ghulam Muhammed

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Was British Colonial management more accommodative and less cruel than the US invasions for world’s resources?

In as much as US forays into Middle East and West Asia, is directly related to American Jewish Neo-con’s theorizing about the New American Century and how US can use its newly find uni-polar super power and its immense armed resources to corner world’s resources, just to sustain its own extravagant and credit ridden economy, there are signs that its neo-colonialism has transformed into a monstrous vehicle of Zionist subjugation of the world that has entirely different dimensions than the 18^th century colonialism of say the British kind. A comparative study would bring out the most grotesque nature of hijacking of a great nation with high ideals of freedom, human rights and justice as its founding principals by unscrupulous Zionist operators, deeply embedded in the US polity and now even in UK and Europe. It is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister of UK and the President of France are both Jewish and have an abiding commitment to promote the New Zionist World Order, with as much relentless cruelty and inhuman blood-shedding, that the European history is already lagging behind in comparison as far as bloodshed in wars are concerned.

The New York Times’ ‘startling’ disclosure of Afghanistan’s immense resources are nothing but the captive media’s contribution to the neo-con driven agenda’s need to calm the detractors at home in the US, who want American troops to pull out.  The neo-con Jewish planners have projected the bogey of ‘clash of civilization’ and 9/11, just to find a convenient excuse to hoodwink American people who may not be as greedy as the gnomes of Wall Street, to send out American boys to fight un-winnable wars in distant land which cannot be sustained except through imposing a long term colonial rule on foreign lands. While the American soldiers are dying in the war fronts of Iraq and Iran, the money grabbers at home, were busy milking the US economy of as much moolah, as the system can carry and/or till it collapsed and they will reap further fortunes for reestablishing the tottering financial markets. The same robbers will become whitewashed as saviors.

Even if there are no moral standards applied to the inhumanity of colonial system of world governance, it would appear that the British colonialism was least in a hurry of loot and scoot than the US would appear to be. A fine example is how British have managed Persian/Arabian Gulf emirates by judiciously overcoming their initial distrust and apprehension and quietly transforming the whole region into an area of prosperity and peace. British were able to ensure security in the Gulf with a small but efficient presence in just a small emirate of Bahrain. One night’s journey for a small contingent from the British fleet from Bahrain to Kuwait and Iraq’s Abdul Kareem Qasim pulled back his blanket over his head and went to sleep. British san British Jewry were most efficient and unobtrusive in bringing regime changes in the Gulf. The favourite method was to send the ruler out for medical tests while a new ruler took over in blood less palace coup. In contrast, US cannot manage the ‘security’ without having thousands of forces in all locations from Saudia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar that create the sense of most oppressive imperialist control over the area in a post colonial era. A regime change by the US in Saudia was engineered through an assassin.

Obama has worked on the systems with a longer term reforms in mind. He should come out with new institutions that will demote armed forces and make them subservient to diplomatic initiatives around the world. Hillary does not have to warn nations against ‘consequences’ in public. Let all understand and observe the rules of the game. May be the age of media and communication will find clients other than the unscrupulous politicians and warmongers of the world. And people will live in peace, real or imagined.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com