Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he speaks during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (not seen) in Jerusalem January 31, 2011
Jan 31, 2011 – 7:31 PM ET
As Egypt’s crisis evolves, Israel is silent and worried.
If Hosni Mubarak’s regime is replaced by a new anti-Israel, anti-western government, the Jewish state’s only remaining strategic allies in the Middle East will be the Palestinian Authority and Jordan.
That’s enough to give any Israeli government nightmares.
On the weekend, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Israeli diplomats have been ordered “to stress to their host countries the importance of Egypt’s stability.”
More than anything else, Israel wants Washington to resist the temptation to jettison General Mubarak and side with the protesters in Cairo.
Israel desperately wants to maintain the current Egyptian government, whether or not Gen. Mubarak remains its president.
“The peace between Israel and Egypt has lasted for more than three decades and our objective is to ensure that these relations will continue to exist,” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, said Sunday as he emerged from a cabinet meeting at which he ordered government ministers to refrain from discussing the Egyptian crisis in public.
Worried the Palestinians could take advantage of Egypt’s unrest to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip through tunnels on the Egyptian border, Israel has reportedly allowed Egypt to move almost 1,000 troops into the Sinai Peninsula for the first time since Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement in 1979.
Under the peace deal, which has been a foundation stone of Middle East peace, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in return for an Egyptian promise to leave the area demilitarized.
The Mubarak government has maintained its peace deal with Israel under eight different Israeli leaders over 30 years, but it is now under threat, and Israel is experiencing a renewed sense of embattled isolation.
Gaza is already in the hands of Hamas, allies of Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and Lebanon now has a government controlled by Hezbollah. A radical new, anti-Israeli Egypt could change the whole tone of Middle East diplomacy.
Israel would be obliged to steeply increase its defence spending. It would also have to alter its demands for military service on reservists who would be needed to beef up defences along the border with Egypt, which possesses the Arab world’s largest and most powerful army.
Under Gen. Mubarak, Israel and Egypt shared a fear of Iran’s rising power and an interest in suppressing Egypt’s growing Islamist movement.
Gen. Mubarak maintained cool but friendly relations with manyf Israeli leaders in spite of the Egyptian public’s generally anti-Israel sympathies.
His newly appointed Vice-President, Lieutenant-General Omar Suleiman, could be expected to continue Gen. Mubarak’s policies — for the last 20 years he has been responsible for the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and acting as a mediator between Israel and Hamas.
National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
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