It’s impossible to predict what will change for Israel, strangled in the middle of the extraordinary revolutionary movement that is shaking the Middle East.
Of the children of Abraham, the descendants of Ishmael occupy 800 times more land than the descendants of Isaac. Any political change in these countries have a quadrupled effect on Israel’s security and sovereignity, especially when the Arab dictators are dropping like autumn leaves.
A good yardstick for the future has always been to count the number of missiles pointed towards the Jewish State and the power of death in the region has increased dramatically. Terrorists from Gaza have just aimed and hit an Israeli yellow school bus in the south, and have fired an Iranian missile just ten kilometers from Tel Aviv, at the city of Rishon Lezion.
Missiles did not hit so close to Israel's main population center since 1991, when Saddam Hussein launched his rockets from Baghdad.
Israeli analysts are speaking about Israel's “loss of deterrence". It is not deterrence, it is a desire to use the arsenal from Iran.
From Gaza, a couple of years ago, the terrorists were able to strike at most of Sderot, the twon just three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. Then they reached Ashkelon (20 km), Beersheba (40 km), Ashdod (31 km), Rehovot (42) and now Rishon Lezion (58 km). The next target will be Tel Aviv (68 km).
In the north, Hizbullah is even more deadly. An Israeli security official just provided the Washington Post with a map detailing 550 bunkers, 300 surveillance sites and 100 other facilities that the Jewish state believes belong to the Lebanese- based terrorists.
Behind the green quietness of the Galilee, there is the Islamist work of rearmament and reconstruction, even in the absence of yellow Hizbullah flags and posters that displayed the head of Israelis.
Today all the territory of Israel is within the Islamist range.
The new wave of bombardment has been the more intense since the end of the “Cast Lead” operation against Hamas. One week ago, an Israeli raid intercepted the ship Victoria. The vessel from Iran was carrying a lethal load of mortar shells, anti-ship missiles and radar systems.
The bomb in Jerusalem and the massacre of Itamar’s Fogel family have been a dramatic return to the Islamist terrorism that killed two thousand Israelis.
Western Intelligence is whispering that Iran is waiting only the order of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to announce its atomic bomb.
Middle East expert,Walid Phares, just warned that the effect on Israel of this Arab revolution can be “extremely positive” or “extremely negative”. It depends on Arab Pandora’s box. Frightening things may yet leap out.
Now the signs are not encouraging. History has proven that what the Arab people desire rarely coincide with what is good for Israel and the Jews. The current Middle East is like Iran in 1979 and the Palestinian territories in 2006: many words on liberalism and democracy, but on the ground anarchy, death and Islam. Unfortunately, Islamism has proved to be the only alternative to despotism and now we speak of “square-ocracy”: the autocracy of the Arab masses.
In Egypt, where we have seen that it was not only flowers and Facebook, an iron ally has given the way to a dangerous transition led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the godmother of the all Islamic and anti-Semitic groups, including Hamas. The Islamist group has just announced the willingness to create a “modesty police”, like in Saudi Arabia, that will "purify" the customs of the Egyptian citizens.
Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the most likely candidates for the Egyptian presidency, just threatened a new war with Israel if Israel gets into another clash with Hamas. With Hosni Mubarak leading Egypt, the threats to Israel coincided with those to the Arab regimes: Iran and political Islam.
The current minister for Foreign Affairs, Nabil el Araby, who criticized president Sadat at Camp David for the peace treaty with Jerusalem, has just announced that Egypt will resume its diplomatic relations with Iran, interrupted when Sadat signed the peace treaty with Menachem Begin.
In the north, the Post-Kemalist Turkey has established unprecedented relations with Syria. The reciprocal visits between the Iranian president Ahmadinejad and the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan are numerous, like the common treaties, the incitements against Israel and Ankara’s support of Tehran against Western sanctions.
The picture of a bleeding IDF soldier aboard the Marmara won Turkey's 2010 "Photo of the Year Award". Professor Bernard Lewis has just warned that Turkey could be the next Iran.
For the first time since “Black September”, an Islamist unrest is shaking the Jordanian kingdom. And in Syria, the ghost of Hama, the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold devasted by Hafez el Assad in 1982, is shaking Baathist power and the Golan, strategic for the Israeli security, where you can physically feel the strategic fragility of Israel.
If Jerusalem cedes these heights to Damascus, the Syrians will be able to look inside Israel.
What would happen if, instead of the Assad regime, another government took power, one with Islamist genocidal ambitions toward the nearby Jewish state? Today in the Golan city of Katzrin, a pearl of modernity and Israeli-ness, red-roofed houses are now under construction. And trucks full of bottles of the internationally famous wine of the Golan, boycotted by the anti-Israeli activists all over the world, are travelling towards the ports all the time. The “settlers” are planting new vines.
Before the 1967 war, the Jewish state had built a row of trees along the sides of roads to protect pedestrians from Syrian snipers. Those trees are still there, silent witnesses to a truce always under discussion and never kept by Syria.
The prospect of a reunification between Hamas and Fatah prefigures an Islamist stronghold on the most fragile Israeli border. It’s those mere six miles that separate Netanya on the coast from Tulkarem inland. There is an Arab saying about Netanya as the narrowest and most exposed throat of Israel: “When we hang you, we will hang you from Netanya”.
