The anti-Mubarak revolution won’t only topple an authoritarian regime. It will also topple 40-plus years of wrong-headed thinking about the causes of Middle East instability among the world’s foreign-policy cognoscenti.
In that view, the horrible relationship between Israel and the Arabs is the dominant issue for the Near East’s 20-plus nations and its 250-million-plus people — and the root cause of the region’s tempestuousness.
But now that Tunisia’s street revolt against a corrupt dictatorial regime has led to Egypt’s similar revolt only in a matter of weeks, with God knows what to follow elsewhere, the plain truth can no longer be denied: Israel is a sideshow.
The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel’s existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state. But one of the little-told stories of the last four decades has been the steady easing of that state-on-state belligerency.
Jordan effectively quit the fight after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 war cut Jordan in half. So too did the Arab states that did not share a border with Israel. The bloody toll of the ’73 war then led Egypt and Syria to surrender their ambitious military efforts to drive Israel into the sea.
So, for the last 30 years, Israel’s violent difficulties have not been with other Middle East states, but with terrorist groups and movements supposedly representing Palestinian interests based either in the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza or thriving parasitically in the southern part of the ruined state of Lebanon.
Yes, the support for the Palestinians and hatred for Israel is an undeniable feature of political life in the Middle East — a pan-national, ideological cause. Rabble-rousing on the subject can bring hundreds of thousands into the streets of Arab countries in expressions of rage and hatred.
Yet if there were a Palestinian state today, and Israel had been crammed back into its pre-1967 borders, would this week’s street revolt in Cairo look any different?
If there were a Palestinian embassy in Washington today, would Hosni Mubarak have been any more mindful of the eventual consequences of his iron-fisted fecklessness in refusing a transition to a more representative Egypt because there was an ambassador from Palestine in Washington?
No one has ever been able to offer a convincing explanation for what role the anti-Zionist struggle, emotionally stirring though it may be, might play when it comes to, say, the price of bread in Tunis, the unemployment rate in Cairo or the prospects for economic growth in Yemen.
It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don’t know than they are about how they’re going to put food on their own tables, or whether their sons will ever find a job.
And yet that is exactly what the solons of foreign policy, and most of the sophisticates in the parlors of Western Europe who so breezily offer firm opinions on the matter, have believed for decades.
Cure the Israeli-Palestinian problem, they tell us, and you cure regional instability. But the problem for the overwhelming majority of countries in the Middle East hasn’t been instability. The problem has, rather, been an excess of stability — the result of sclerotic regimes of preposterously long duration.
Mubarak has been in power since 1981, as part of a movement in charge of Egypt for nearly 60 years. The al-Saud family has run Saudi Arabia since 1903; the al-Sabahs have been Kuwait’s poohbahs since 1913. The Jordanian royal family has held sway for eight decades; the Assads, father and son, have bossed Syria since 1970.
If and when Mubarak crumbles, and the revolt that began in Tunisia continues its relentless spread, the time will have come for the rulers of these blasted lands to take the measure of what their people actually need.
There’s little reason to feel optimistic that the resulting regimes will be friendlier toward Israel and good reason to fear their ideological predilections may pose a renewed threat. We should face the future without illusions — like the strangely comforting mirage that there was a regional solution that ran through Israel, a mirage that gulled foreign-policymakers for four decades.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com