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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - January 17, 2011

Barak_Avoda_Snub_186x140.jpgAlpher responds to questions about today's news that Defense Minister Ehud Barak and four Labor colleagues are leaving the Labor party, while the remaining eight Labor MKs are apparently leaving Netanyahu's coalition.

He also reflects upon last week's 'people's revolution' in Tunisia and issues in the region.

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Q. What's your take on Monday's news that Defense Minister Ehud Barak and four Labor colleagues are leaving the Labor party, while the remaining eight Labor MKs are apparently leaving Netanyahu's coalition.

A. Labor was falling apart, as more and more members of its small Knesset contingent indicated dissatisfaction with Barak's leadership and with membership in a coalition that does nothing about peace. Barak and a few remaining loyal MKs preempted; the leader walked out on his own party (mimicking Ariel Sharon, who left the Likud and established Kadima in 2005). Labor stalwarts like Binyamin Ben Eliezer and Yitzhak Herzog are on their way to the opposition. Netanyahu's coalition remains stable from a numerical standpoint, but Sephardic ultra-orthodox Shas and Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu are increasingly at loggerheads over secular-religious issues. Another squabble now will be over whether a smaller "Atzmaut" party ("Independence", the name Barak and followers took for their faction) gets to keep all the portfolios Labor held.

Look for heavier international pressure on Netanyahu now that his government is painted in ever plainer hawkish colors. This may be the beginning of the end for the coalition. It certainly looks like the beginning of the end for Labor.

More next week, once the smoke has cleared.


Q. Turning to the region, last week witnessed a people's revolution in Tunisia. What's the Middle East coming to?

A. It makes sense to answer this question by expanding it to refer to at least three additional unfolding or commemorative events: the governmental crisis in Lebanon sparked by Hezbollah, the referendum that began in South Sudan on January 9, and the 20-year anniversary of the first Gulf war this week. The theme that unites them all is the growing weakness of the Arab state system, though obviously each event also displays important specific characteristics that are worthy of our attention.


Q. Let's begin with the first Gulf war.

A. It began when, on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait. Not a single Arab country lifted a finger against this brutal violation of the Arab League's mutual defense treaty until the United States intervened, leading to war on January 17, 1991. Thus, at more than the symbolic level, this should have been understood as the first serious indication that the Arab state system was becoming weak and dysfunctional.

Closer to home, the first Gulf war with its 40-some Scud rockets fired at Israel, beginning on January 18, ushered in a new and dangerous era in Israel-Arab warfare. For the first time since 1948, the Israeli rear was targeted. And it was found woefully unprepared both logistically and in terms of rear-guard resolve. In the ensuing years, Iran, Syria and Israel's non-state militant Islamist Arab neighbors Hezbollah and Hamas seemingly drew more lessons from this encounter than did Israel. They stocked up on missiles and particularly cheap, easily-concealed rockets with the explicit objective of targeting Israel's civilian population.

Even before January 1991, Israel had begun developing the Arrow anti-missile missile as a counter to Iraqi and especially Iranian missile threats. But it wasn't until the Second Lebanon War of summer 2006 that the Israeli military establishment really woke up to the implications of a vulnerable rear. It was a "civilian" defense minister with no previous security experience, Amir Peretz, who decided to devote serious defense resources to developing weaponry--anti-rocket missile systems like Iron Dome--that can at least partially neutralize the rocket threat. But it will take several more years, and heavy budgetary allotments, before this system will be effective. Meanwhile, with the exception of Negev communities south of Beersheva, which at least for the moment are out of range, a great deal remains to be done by way of providing sufficient shelters for nearly the entire rear population. Just last week, I collected our family's gas mask and atropine injection allotment ("protective equipment") for the next war, in case this time around the rockets and missiles carry non-conventional warheads.

The first Gulf war was also notable for three additional phenomena. Israel had never before fought a war from a position of totally passive defense. That it didn't attack the Iraqi Scud launching sites was due to lack of good target intelligence, but also respect for an American demand. From that standpoint, Yitzhak Shamir was the ideal prime minister for such a war: his entire strategic philosophy was based on doing nothing and maintaining the status quo. Still, Israel's posture during the war hurt its deterrent profile. On the other hand, that very passivity, and the incoming Scuds Israel shared with the Saudis and the Emirates, generated a few small but significant manifestations of sympathy and determination in the face of a shared enemy. Then it was Iraq; now it's Iran. Yet now the western-oriented Sunni Arab states are weaker than ever, thereby diminishing the potential value of their solidarity.

Finally, the war brought Shamir into contact with Jordan's King Hussein to try to coordinate ways of dealing with the Iraqi threat. Hussein, we recall, maintained a neutral stance during the war, refusing to join the US-led Arab and international coalition. Nevertheless, the secret pre-war Shamir-Hussein meeting appears to have significantly modified or minimalized Shamir's "Jordan-is-Palestine" position. It took Saddam Hussein to persuade Shamir that Hashemite Jordan is Israel's natural ally against all forces of extremism in the region, and that the two countries provide one another with strategic depth. The "Jordan-is-Palestine" school has never recovered.


Q. Moving to events in Tunisia. . .

A. The fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunis offers yet another illustration of Arab state weakness, this time in a country considered westernized, secular, and not generally singled out as a candidate for instability. Could the instability prove to be catching, say in autocratic but "moderate" places like Bahrain (where Iran would be tempted to meddle), Yemen, Egypt and Jordan? The "street" in these countries appears to be sympathetic to the victorious Tunisian street. A lot depends on what comes next in Tunisia, but also on how loyal the security forces in these countries are to the regime.

At the time of writing, Tunisia is in a classic "revolutionary situation", meaning we really have no idea what will happen. The overthrow of an autocratic Arab regime by huge public demonstrations is nearly without precedent in the Arab world: the overthrow of Sudan's Jaafar Numeiri in 1985 comes close, not to mention the fall of the (non-Arab, but Muslim and proximate) Shah of Iran in 1979.

The Numeiri case study might be more relevant than meets the eye. He was followed in Sudan by an Islamist regime, then a military regime and various combinations of the two (Numeiri spent 14 years in exile in Cairo, then returned to Sudan, and died there in 2009). Democracy did not blossom in Sudan after a tyrant was expelled. Tunisia's exiled Islamists as well as democrats will now flock back home in an attempt to exercise influence. Tunisia also has a military and police force that were unhappy killing demonstrators, thus prompting Ben Ali to flee, but they will presumably not tolerate for long a situation of anarchy.

Ben Ali's regime was notable for its level of development, its secular nature and women's rights. He made Tunisia a European tourist mecca. He suppressed Islamists vigorously and cooperated broadly in the war against Islamist terrorists. But he ruled as a despot and his regime--his family, really--was also hopelessly corrupt, with details highlighted only recently by Wikileaks and amplified by YouTube and Tweeter. Yet it would be hasty to label this the first Wikileaks revolution. Rather, it was brought on by corruption and suppression and culminated in a lack of resolve on the part of the regime and its security establishment.

We would all like to see a moderate democracy now emerge in Tunisia. But the events of the past month there indicate just how weak the state structure has become. This is the kind of situation Islamists like to take advantage of. In Tunisia, conceivably, only a determined army can keep this from happening on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.


Q. Lebanon?

A. The Obama administration, ailing Saudi King Abdullah (in a New York hotel, after two back operations) and Lebanese PM Saad Hariri collaborated last week to thwart an earlier Saudi-Syrian initiative whereby Hariri would have effectively voided the approaching international judicial commission indictment of Hezbollah for killing his father back in 2005, in return for Hezbollah maintaining stability and "letting him live". Hezbollah responded by withdrawing from the government, thereby precipitating its downfall. Hariri was appointed caretaker prime minister and contacts were initiated over the possible identity of his successor, who would presumably have to be a Sunni acceptable to Hezbollah, Syria and even Iran. Now all parties are focused on three questions: when does the indictment become public; what will it say; and what will then happen in Lebanon?

Notably, Hezbollah confined its response to the US-led move against its hegemonic drive in Lebanon strictly to politics, as it precipitated a government crisis. It did not repeat its 2008 exercise of taking over most of Beirut by force of arms. Hariri, for his part, knows he still has to find a way out of the international tribunal conclusions regarding his father's assassination without plunging Lebanon into civil war. Hence some new political compromise--something quintessentially Lebanese that both indicts and exonerates Hezbollah--remains possible, even likely.

This is because, of all the growing number of dysfunctional Arab states, Lebanon has the longest experience at muddling through and continuing somehow to exist.


Q. Finally, South Sudan. . .

A. The ongoing referendum is almost certain to produce a secession decision, to which the government in Khartoum appears resigned. Given the economic weakness and ethnic divisiveness of both North and South Sudan, it is difficult to imagine two stronger states emerging from this exercise. Disagreement over the disputed oil region of Abyei on the north-south border could easily precipitate new fighting.

From moderates to radicals, the Arab world appears increasingly to be internalizing the consequences for its future. Thus, last week the prestigious Ghassan Charbel wrote in the leading pan-Arab and moderate al-Hayat, "From Juba [South Sudan] to Arbil [North Iraq] . . . we may wake up in the not-too-distant future to a series of civil wars, aspirations to secession, and provincial retrenchment." Omar Jaftali, writing in the radical Syrian Tishreen (at the other end of the political spectrum) concurred: "This secession, which is now all but certain, is in itself a dangerous indication of the very structure of the entire Arab nation and its current order."

He's right. Until recently, I would have elected to illustrate the dis-functionality of the Arab system by pointing to six chaotic or disintegrating states out of the 22 in the Arab League: Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. And I would have noted that the Arabs' traditional leaders, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have experienced a weakened strategic reach under increasingly geriatric governance. Now, after Tunisia, the structural failure encompasses the entire Arab world.