Arab Spring or Islamist Winter?
By Yaakov Lappin
JINSA Visiting Fellow
A fierce debate is gripping Israel’s defense and intelligence community over fateful questions that have arisen from the recent period of Middle Eastern turmoil.
The first, most basic question concerning defense officials is: Can stable states eventually emerge around Israel from the chaos and uncertainty that has replaced the old regional order?
By Yaakov Lappin
JINSA Visiting Fellow
A fierce debate is gripping Israel’s defense and intelligence community over fateful questions that have arisen from the recent period of Middle Eastern turmoil.
The first, most basic question concerning defense officials is: Can stable states eventually emerge around Israel from the chaos and uncertainty that has replaced the old regional order?
Alternatively, will the Arab states be hijacked by powerful, radical Islamist currents that have been deceptively dormant until now, lying in wait for a golden opportunity to fill a vacuum?
Moreover, if the Islamists do take over, is it inevitable that they will drag the region into war?
In January of this year, just as the Arab revolts began spreading like wildfire, I interviewed Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, who would go on to become Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s national security advisor.
Amidror had an unequivocal and discomforting prognosis.
“We must ask ourselves, what is the worst case scenario? We are on thick ice, but even that melts eventually,” he said.
To decrypt Amidror’s analogy, one should take “thick ice” to mean regional stability, made possible by the presence of rationally minded Arab powers in the Middle East.
From an Israeli perspective, the old regimes were far from ideal. In varying degrees, they repressed their own people and indoctrinated their populations with virulent anti-Israel rhetoric to distract the citizenry from their own injustices.
They could, however, be relied upon to keep ‘the peace,’ whether they had an official treaty with Israel or not, due to their recognition that military conflict with Israel would be catastrophic for their grip on power.
Some national security and defense officials are now worried that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and other countries could be replaced by Islamist governments that have forgotten the painful defeats suffered by the secular Arab nationalists in the 20th century.
Several months after the interview with Amidror, as the dust from the regional upheaval still obstructed a clear view of the future, a senior Israeli defense official went on the record in September with some rather alarming forecasts.
Maj. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg is the freshly appointed commander of the IDF’s Home Front Command which is responsible for ensuring that civilians, businesses, essential services, municipalities and first responders are prepared for an outbreak of war.
Eisenberg announced that “the chances for all-out war have risen.”
“It’s called the Arab spring, but it can become the Islamic winter, and it raises the chances for total war, including the use of weapons of mass destruction,” Eisenberg warned.
Iran, he said, is rushing towards nuclear weapons. Egypt is losing control of the Sinai Peninsula, an area filled with jihadi cells. Sinai is also used by Iran as a transit point to smuggle arms to Hamas.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II could see his grip on power loosened, with implications for the Jordanian-Israeli frontier. Meanwhile in Syria, a country that has a well-developed chemical weapons program, there’s no telling how the rebellion against Assad could play out.
In southern Lebanon, Hizbullah is quietly building up its rocket capabilities, as is Hamas in Gaza. Turkey has gone from steadfast ally to neo-Ottoman Islamist adversary.
Yet, a second camp exists within the defense community, which has a less pessimistic view. Its members began sniping at Eisenberg’s outlook.
At first, anonymous “sources” and “senior army officers” told Israeli media outlets that Eisenberg had overstated things.
Before long, Defense Minister Ehud Barak toured the Syrian border, and made a point of downplaying the chances of a major war, adding that Israel’s enemies “know very well why they should not even think of think of using chemical weapons.”
The ‘optimistic camp’ views Eisenberg’s bleak picture as one of the less likely scenarios, and places confidence in Israeli deterrence, which is based on Israel’s military might.
A third view also exists. According to its subscribers, Islamists may well take over the region, but they won’t launch a multi-front war against Israel.
This possibility was outlined to me in September by Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Fighel, who served in various military operational posts, as well as in the research division of the IDF Intelligence Corps.
“These arguments exist in the defense community because we are at the evaluation stage. Nobody, including those at the top, really knows what will happen,” he told me.
“I personally believe we are going towards an Islamist winter and not an Arab spring. The Islamist forces are, relatively speaking, the most stable and organized compared to the other political forces in the Arab world,” he added.
“The Islamists materialize naturally in anarchic or non-democratic environments, and they will be the first to take control.”
But that does not mean the Middle East is on a path to war, he stressed.
A more likely outcome would be an increase in guerrilla attacks on the army and terrorist attacks on civilians.
“I wouldn’t call that situation a war,” he said. “But it would be a different ball game, and it would certainly create instability.”
Yaakov Lappin, JINSA Visiting Fellow, is a journalist for the Jerusalem Post, where he covers police and national security affairs. For more information on the JINSA Visiting Fellows program, click here.