The Mideast’s Ground Zero
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT
The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”
That is, Gaza is a mini-version of three great struggles that have been playing out since 1948: 1) Who is going to be the regional superpower — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran? 2) Should there be a Jewish state in the Middle East and, if so, on what Palestinian terms? And 3) Who is going to dominate Arab society — Islamists who are intolerant of other faiths and want to choke off modernity or modernists who want to embrace the future, with an Arab-Muslim face? Let’s look at each.
WHO OWNS THIS HOTEL? The struggle for hegemony over the modern Arab world is as old as Nasser’s Egypt. But what is new today is that non-Arab Iran is now making a bid for primacy — challenging Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran has deftly used military aid to both Hamas and Hezbollah to create a rocket-armed force on Israel’s northern and western borders. This enables Tehran to stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will and to paint itself as the true protector of the Palestinians, as opposed to the weak Arab regimes.
“The Gaza that Israel left in 2005 was bordering Egypt. The Gaza that Israel just came back to is now bordering Iran,” said Mamoun Fandy, director of Middle East programs at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. “Iran has become the ultimate confrontation state. I am not sure we can talk just about ‘Arab-Israeli peace’ or the ‘Arab peace initiative’ anymore. We may be looking at an ‘Iranian initiative.’ ” In short, the whole notion of Arab-Israeli peacemaking likely will have to change.
(More here.)
NYT
The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”
That is, Gaza is a mini-version of three great struggles that have been playing out since 1948: 1) Who is going to be the regional superpower — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran? 2) Should there be a Jewish state in the Middle East and, if so, on what Palestinian terms? And 3) Who is going to dominate Arab society — Islamists who are intolerant of other faiths and want to choke off modernity or modernists who want to embrace the future, with an Arab-Muslim face? Let’s look at each.
WHO OWNS THIS HOTEL? The struggle for hegemony over the modern Arab world is as old as Nasser’s Egypt. But what is new today is that non-Arab Iran is now making a bid for primacy — challenging Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran has deftly used military aid to both Hamas and Hezbollah to create a rocket-armed force on Israel’s northern and western borders. This enables Tehran to stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will and to paint itself as the true protector of the Palestinians, as opposed to the weak Arab regimes.
“The Gaza that Israel left in 2005 was bordering Egypt. The Gaza that Israel just came back to is now bordering Iran,” said Mamoun Fandy, director of Middle East programs at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. “Iran has become the ultimate confrontation state. I am not sure we can talk just about ‘Arab-Israeli peace’ or the ‘Arab peace initiative’ anymore. We may be looking at an ‘Iranian initiative.’ ” In short, the whole notion of Arab-Israeli peacemaking likely will have to change.
(More here.)
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