Israel’s Stakes, Egypt’s Streets
With Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic, pro-Western regime under threat from the angry Egyptian masses, it appears we are witnessing a new dawn for the power of the “Arab street” in Egypt, Tunisia and potentially elsewhere. This is going to be a profound challenge for Israel, whose only diplomatic or even clandestine relationships with Arab states have been with undemocratic autocrats (there is no alternative type of regime in the Arab world, outside of perhaps Lebanon). When it comes to Egypt in particular, Israel — which in recent years has developed a high degree of strategic cooperation with Cairo in dealing with shared Islamist enemies — has a lot to lose as a consequence of almost any change.
The current reality in Egypt is a classic revolutionary situation that is constantly evolving. The outcome is impossible to predict — just as the very outbreak of the unrest was not predicted anywhere. To better understand what is at stake for Israel, we have to look at possible scenarios for future developments, even if such an exercise is speculative at this point.
A truly worst-case outcome of the unrest in Egypt is frightening to contemplate. It might go something like this: The current situation leads, through a process of resignations, external pressures and interim governments to free elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best-organized opposition group, wins the day. The Brotherhood, which opposes Israel’s very existence, cancels Egypt’s peace treaty with the Jewish state, declares Hamas (an offshoot of the Brotherhood) an ally, denounces the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, demands that international forces leave the Sinai Peninsula and asserts Egypt’s right to send heavy forces into the presently demilitarized territory. The Suez Canal is abruptly closed to passage of Israeli naval ships that have been disrupting Iranian-Hezbollah-Sudanese arms smuggling in the Red Sea.
All these events spark serious unrest in Jordan, where the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood espouses a similarly hostile line toward Israel, and in the West Bank, where a Hamas uprising threatens the rule of the Palestine Liberation Organization. (Even before the current wave of unrest, the absence of a meaningful Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the past two years has prompted Jordan’s King Abdullah — whose country has a large Palestinian population — to issue dire warnings about regional deterioration and even to flirt with Iran, signaling to Israel and the West his growing discomfort.)
Thus, in this worst-case scenario, Israel is surrounded by hostile Islamists. The entire region goes on a war footing.
This state of affairs would pose grave strategic and military challenges to Israel. The advent of peace with Egypt some three decades ago enabled the Israel Defense Forces to radically reduce its overall force size and deployment levels in the south, lower the age at which reserves are mustered out and generally downgrade its armored warfare and large-scale offensive exercises. Instead, the army developed tactics for dealing with Palestinian unrest and countering guerilla challenges by non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah. The only active Israeli military leaders who remember what it’s like to fight Egypt are Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the army’s outgoing chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi. The Egyptian armed forces, on the other hand, have never stopped “fighting” Israel in their annual military exercises.
What, alternatively, would a best-case scenario in Egypt look like? From Israel’s standpoint, this essentially means the status quo, perhaps with Egypt’s new vice president, Omar Suleiman, taking the reins of power. Suleiman has worked closely with Israel, knows its leadership and is at least as committed as Mubarak to strategic cooperation against militant Islam, to quarantining Hamas in Gaza and to working against Iran’s regional designs.
These two speculative scenarios are the extremes. Out of the current unrest, we’re more likely to see a situation emerge that falls somewhere between these two poles.
Egypt’s Islamists might be given a secondary role in government, where they would have relatively minor but still negative (from Israel’s standpoint) influence. Even the secular Egyptian opposition, if coopted by the regime in the hope of quelling public protests and satisfying pressure from the Obama administration, might exact some sort of anti-Israeli price. Indeed, a secular regime cleansed of military influence and relying on a relatively narrow popular support base might become as anti-Israel as the Islamists in the hope of currying favor with the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters.
Where does all this leave Israel today? Hawks in Netanyahu’s government will almost certainly argue that Jerusalem is wise not to get too deeply involved in a peace process which could require it to make territorial concessions that it might regret tomorrow, in a very different Middle East. Others — myself included — would counter that the very absence of a peace process could encourage the next rulers of Egypt and possibly Jordan to turn their backs on Israel tomorrow. But we all agree that tomorrow is now totally unpredictable.
Yossi Alpher is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of Internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 2
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Books The White House Seder started in a Pennsylvania basement. Its legacy lives on.
-
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
-
Fast Forward Yarden Bibas says ‘I am here because of Trump’ and pleads with him to stop the Gaza war
-
Fast Forward Trump’s plan to enlist Elon Musk began at Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.