The As-Yet Unknowable

"Israelis are conditioned to being isolated. So what if the world thinks we're not OK? this has been our lot for 2,000 years." Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies Israel, he feels, is in a stronger position today than it was a year ago. "Our rivals in the Arab world are busy with domestic problems and are less capable of mobilizing force against us. We should sit and weather the crisis. Sometimes doing nothing is the best strategy."

From the frying pan into the fire. Little wonder official Israel was uneasy when the Arab Spring events that so galvanized the international community, transfixed Israel. Its former relations with Muslim and Middle East countries like Tunisia and Egypt and Jordan suddenly seeming to take a turn for the unknown. Israel officially and through its media made a concerted effort to remain silent, objective, with little to comment on.

Lest they be accused vehemently of interfering, of having an agenda, of attempting to manipulate the forces of change in the Middle East in countries whose politics would have an impact on Israel, but which it would have no opportunity to meddle in. Great apprehension was the order of the day. Something like the devil you know is usually better than the devil you don't know.

Accommodation having been made with administrations that proved to be reciprocally accommodating, why would Israel look forward to any change that might threaten lack of accommodation, or worse, a return to the days of bellicose threats? But events have a way of unfolding with the onlooker having no recourse to pleading for consideration when they are merely that; outsiders, onlookers.

The administration that was coolly accommodating has become coolly indecipherable, with the potential of becoming alienated toward reasonable accommodation. Israel is faced with new administrations demanding that it become as a cringing supplicant to the new powers that be. It took some time getting to that stage from Turkey, but the Islamist party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn't want to rush things.

And the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt well knows that such things as transition from a secular Muslim state to an Islamist theocracy takes some time for adjustment, for the reality to sink in. Israel apologized to Cairo for the inadvertent killing of Egyptian security guards when Israel was under attack by Islamists on their mutual border. But when Turkish goons deliberately fomented a violent confrontation under guise of a humanitarian mission which ended with 9 Turks dead, no apology was in the order of the day.

"In our region, peace is not made with the weak and obsequious. Peace is made with a strong and proud Israel", states Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And this is not a self-indulgence, it is a reading of the Arab/Muslim psyche, that apologies are interpreted as signs of weakness representing a 'surrender'. And surrender is just what Israel cannot afford.

Surrounded by hostile neighbours within the general geography. And further afield, by hostility bred of ancient anti-Semitic inclinations in Europe and elsewhere, freshly come to the fore, and exercised with great righteousness by an international community that chooses to accept the Arab and Palestinian version of Israel as 'occupier', not as hapless protector of its own from incessant Arab and Palestinian violence.

Forces quite beyond Israel's ability to counteract are in play, with Turkey's new Islamist government aspiring to regain its previous position controlling the Muslim world in reflection of the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. Throwing Israel aside in this new game plan represents no matter of fond regret to Erdogan and his allies.

And the Egyptian street, just as elsewhere in the Middle East and the Muslim world views Israel as an interloper, expendable, an insult to Islam. If and when the Arab and Muslim countries ever get around to straightening out their hostilities toward one another, their tribal and clan grievances and their miserable hatreds and yearnings for revenge, perhaps then Israel will have a timely concern.

For the present, it endures the as-yet-unknowable.