Secretary of State John Kerry, right, delivering a Joint Statement with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani in Washington, April 29, 2013. (U.S. State Department)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — When it comes to the latest Arab peace initiative, two questions are circulating in Washington: Why Qatar? And why now?

The three answers: Because Qatar is rich; it is scared; and why not?

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, in recent weeks has driven the revivification of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, moderating it slightly to hew closer to the outlines touted by the Obama administration since 2011.

The updated version, outlined by Hamad in remarks to reporters following his meeting April 29 with Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, pulls back from the 2002 demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders in exchange for comprehensive peace.

Instead, Hamid proposed “comparable and mutual agreed minor swaps of the land” — a formulation that opens the door to Israel’s retention of several major settlement blocs. Hamad also did not mention the Palestinian “right of return” and the division of Jerusalem, elements of the original Arab initiative that had led to its rejection by the Israeli government.

Qatar, the fabulously wealthy Persian Gulf state that is host to the forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, hasn’t been known until recently for grabbing onto thorny diplomatic challenges. So what does Hamad hope to gain?

The Qatari Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but experts and officials say that Qatar is wealthy enough to do what it likes and, as an autocracy concerned for its survival in a region roiling with revolution, is driven to make friends and demonstrate its usefulness.

“For a small country, they’re throwing money around, organizing diplomatic events, trying to shape a range of issues, much of it related to the Middle East uprising,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank considered close to the Obama administration. “It’s rich, it’s small, it lacks the inner turmoil of other countries. It’s one of the [Middle Eastern] countries … that are more internally stable and have more resources.”

Just prior to unveiling the revised peace plan, Hamad, a distant cousin of the Qatari emir, was honored by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, an organization that received $2.5 million to $5 million from the government of Qatar in 2012, according to Politico.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, the Saban Center’s director, said Qatar for years had accrued influence through such uses of “soft power” — the generous dispensation of money and assistance — coupled with its ownership of Al Jazeera, the region’s most influential news outlet. When uprisings swept the Middle East at the beginning of 2011, Qatar was able to step into a vacuum left by the toppled dictators, she said.

“It vaulted Qatar into a much more prominent role in regional politics because of the loss of [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak,” Wittes told JTA. “Its regional assistance and Al Jazeera have allowed it to play a larger role in how the awakening is viewed.”

Backing winners, whether the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the forces that helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, also lends credibility — and insurance — to a regime that is itself autocratic, Katulis said.

“If they win as many as friends as possible, get in early on the ground floor, they’ll be all the more influential,” he said.

A State Department official played down Qatar’s role in reviving the Arab peace bid, noting that the new plan formally emerged from the Arab League. And yet he emphasized that the Obama administration is focused mainly on returning the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and hopes the peace initiative can help them get there.

“It’s a sign that the Arab League is a constructive member in the process,” the official said. “The regional partners have a role, but our major focus is getting the Palestinians and Israelis back to the table for direct talks.”

So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Israel is less than thrilled about the new initiative. An Israeli official confirmed that Netanyahu remains as unenthusiastic about the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiations as he was in 2011, when President Obama’s proposal based on those lines precipitated a small crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.

Israelis are also skeptical of Qatar because of its support for Hamas, the terrorist group controlling the Gaza Strip. The country’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, became the first foreign leader to visit the strip last October.

“On the diplomatic front, Qatar publicly claims to support Israeli-Palestinian peace while making certain to undermine it in every possible way,” Seth Mandel wrote last week in Commentary, the neoconservative journal.

But Wittes said Qatar’s relationship with Hamas could be seen as a benefit. Hamas is a mainstay of Palestinian politics, and Qatar could help influence the group to moderate.

“If obstruction of peace was Hamas’s role as spoiler,” she said, “you have to look at the potential for Qatar as a positive influence.”

]]> http://azjewishpost.com/2013/oil-rich-qatar-pushing-to-make-its-name-as-a-mideast-peace-broker/feed/ 0 http://azjewishpost.com/2013/syria-attacks-suggest-israel-can-act-with-impunity/ http://azjewishpost.com/2013/syria-attacks-suggest-israel-can-act-with-impunity/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 19:25:38 +0000 sheila http://azjewishpost.com/?p=22995

An Iron Dome anti-missile battery was moved near the Israeli border town of Haifa in the hours following a second airstrike on Syrian targets, May 5, 2013. (Avishag Yashuv/Flash90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Twice in three days, Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace and fired on suspected weapons caches bound for Hezbollah — and nothing has happened in response.

Some experts are predicting that will continue to be the case following airstrikes near Damascus on Friday and Sunday that are widely believed to be the work of the Israel Defense Forces. According to reports, the strikes targeted shipments of long-range, Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles capable of striking deep into Israel.

Israel hasn’t commented on the strikes, but the IDF has moved two Iron Dome missile defense batteries to its northern border and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his departure to China for several hours to convene his security cabinet. Meanwhile, Syria’s foreign minister told CNN on Sunday that the strikes amounted to a “declaration of war.”

But such gestures, analysts say, are merely symbolic. Torn by a civil war now in its third year, the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is too beleaguered to fight back. And Hezbollah, the Lebanese party considered a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, is considered too preoccupied propping up its Syrian patron to respond.

“Today Israel can act with impunity in Syria,” said Hillel Frisch, an expert on Arab politics at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “The [Syrian] air force isn’t functioning and there’s no defense system. It’s very exposed and weak.”

Syria’s civil war augurs a major strategic shift for Israel. The two countries have technically have been in a state of war since the Yom Kippur War ended in 1973. And though the border since then has been largely quiet, Syria was Israel’s only neighbor to pose a threat of conventional attack.

But the weakening of the Syrian regime has raised the frightening prospect that its stocks of chemical weapons may fall into the hands of Hezbollah. Israeli officials have said for months that they would take action should Syria transport unconventional weapons to Hezbollah. In January, Israel bombed a Syrian weapons convoy near the Syria-Lebanon border. In 2007, Israel allegedly bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor.

Syria and Hezbollah didn’t respond to those attacks, either. But Hezbollah expert Eyal Zisser said Israel still needs to remain cautious.

“Don’t play with your luck,” said Zisser, also from the Begin-Sadat Center. “There might be a response. Eventually something will happen. Everybody is taking precautions.”

Shlomo Brom, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, said the attack sent a message that Israel will act unilaterally if  deemed necessary — in this case, the transfer of long-range weaponry to Hezbollah.

“There needs to be a reason for these attacks,” Brom said. “There was an attack because they crossed our red lines. If they stop crossing our red lines, we won’t hit every weapons transfer.”

Brom added that Hezbollah may avenge the weekend’s attacks several years from now, noting that its deadly bus bombing last year in Bulgaria may have been a response to Israel’s alleged assassination of a senior Hezbollah officer, Imad Mughniyah, in 2008.

Israel reportedly did not notify the United States before the strikes. On Saturday, President Obama said that Israel has the right to defend itself and that he will “let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken.”

“What I have said in the past and I continue to believe is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah,” he told the Spanish-language network Telemundo. “We coordinate closely with the Israelis recognizing they are very close to Syria, they are very close to Lebanon.”

The attacks, according to Frisch, also showed Iran that Israel could bomb the Islamic Republic’s suspected nuclear weapons program — a possibility Netanyahu frequently raises. But Brom called an attack on Iran “a totally different story — a lot harder and a lot more complicated.”

Whatever the attack’s long-term implications, Zisser said Israel’s Syrian border is likely to remain quiet during the coming days.

“We are making too much of this,” he said. “We need to be patient.”

]]> http://azjewishpost.com/2013/syria-attacks-suggest-israel-can-act-with-impunity/feed/ 0 http://azjewishpost.com/2013/after-israel-trip-and-apology-to-turkey-obama-gains-political-capital-will-he-spend-it/ http://azjewishpost.com/2013/after-israel-trip-and-apology-to-turkey-obama-gains-political-capital-will-he-spend-it/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:31:00 +0000 sheila http://azjewishpost.com/?p=22130

President Obama placing a stone on the headstone of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin during a visit to Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, March 22, 2013. (Mark Neyman/GPO/JTA)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — For a trip that U.S. officials had cautioned was not about getting “deliverables,” President Obama’s apparent success during his Middle East trip at getting Israel and Turkey to reconcile has raised some hopes for a breakthrough on another front: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The question now is whether Obama has the means or the will to push the Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who stayed behind to follow up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s team on what happens next, made clear in his statement on Israel’s apology to Turkey to place it in the broader context of the region’s tensions.

“As I discussed with Prime Minister Netanyahu this evening, this will help Israel meet the many challenges it faces in the region,” Kerry said in a statement issued Saturday evening.

Netanyahu’s apology to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, delivered Friday on the Ben Gurion Airport tarmac while crew members readied Air Force One for departure, took the political world by surprise.

After years of resisting, Netanyahu delivered the apology sought by Turkey since 2010 for Israel’s commando raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla that killed nine people aboard a Turkish vessel.

There may have been a hint of what was to come in a remark delivered to reporters by Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national security adviser, in a March 14 conference call before the trip.

“Israel as it makes peace is going to have recognize the broader role of public opinion in peacemaking,” Rhodes said, referring to the need to reach out to populations, not just leaders, in the region.

It was a theme Obama seized upon in his March 21 speech at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

“Given the frustration in the international community about this conflict, Israel needs to reverse an undertow of isolation,” Obama said. Later in the speech, he added, “As more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders, those days are over.  Peace will have to be made among peoples, not just governments.”

The next afternoon, asked during a news conference with Jordanian King Abdullah how he brokered the Turkish-Israeli rapprochement, Obama made it clear it was about advancing shared interests in the region.

“I have long said that it is in both the interest of Israel and Turkey to restore normal relations between two countries that have historically had good ties,” Obama said. “It broke down several years ago as a consequence of the flotilla incident.

“For the last two years, I’ve spoken to both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Prime Minister Erdogan about why this rupture has to be mended, that they don’t have to agree on everything in order for them to come together around a whole range of common interests and common concerns.”

If there was much resistance in Israel to such an apology, it seemed to have dissipated in the wake of Obama’s charm offensive, which won over not only Israelis but even some American Jewish conservatives who have been among the fiercest critics of the president.

“In terms of his attitude toward Israel, in the past three days Obama has altered his status in that regard from being the second coming of Jimmy Carter to that of another Bill Clinton,” wrote Jonathan Tobin, the senior online editor at Commentary magazine.

Emphasizing the Jewish connection to the land with visits to the grave of the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and a viewing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Obama’s good will appears to have superseded any Israeli resentment for being pressured into the apology to Turkey. A snap poll by Channel 2 in the aftermath of the visit by Obama found that 39 percent of Israelis had changed their opinion of the U.S. leader for the better, the Times of Israel reported.

Whether Obama, like Clinton, will be able to leverage such good will into pressure on Netanyahu’s government — and whether he wants to — remains to be seen. Obama has made clear that he wants Netanyahu to give him time on Iran, telling Channel 2 in a pre-trip interview that he sees the dangers of a nuclear Iran arising in about a year’s time, not in several months, as Israeli officials reportedly believe.

Obama also made clear that he wants to see progress in the Palestinian-Israeli talks, but he did so in a passive way, not by offering solutions but by urging Israelis to pressure their government.

“I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks,” Obama said in his March 21 speech. “You must create the change that you want to see.”

That’s not a clear plan, Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in a post-trip analysis.

“Whether the shift on how peace talks should begin translates into a shift on how those talks should then proceed remains unclear,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, should Obama proceed, Satloff suggested, he now has the political capital to do so.

“If the basic idea behind visiting Israel was to open the administration’s second term on surer footing in terms of U.S.-Israeli relations than what characterized the opening months of the president’s first term,” Satloff wrote, “he appears to have succeeded.”

When Abada and her future husband, Nisso, emerged from the water that day in 1956, a security agent was waiting for them. The two teenagers were arrested for spying for Israel and interrogated for days. They were released and then rearrested, along with hundreds of Jews. Finally, they fled to Israel.

“We realized the Egyptians wanted us out,” Abada said.

Abada’s account of her family’s flight is set to appear in “The Golden Age of the Jews From Egypt,” a forthcoming book that aims to preserve the memory of this North African Jewish community against what many Egyptian Jews see as an attempt by the country’s Islamist leaders to blot out their history.

The rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood last year has generated much angst in the Egyptian Jewish Diaspora, descendants of a 2,000-year-old community all but destroyed in a mass emigration in the two decades following Israel’s establishment in 1948 — a period that community members refer to as the “second Exodus.”

In the wake of the election of Mohamed Morsi to the presidency last year, there were reports that Egypt had denied entry visas to Rabbi Avraham Dayan and several others who were due to travel to Alexandria to lead High Holidays services at the city’s Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue. Services apparently will not be held there on the upcoming Passover holiday.

Jewish sources also say a nascent restoration project of some of Cairo’s crumbling synagogues has been suspended, despite the 2010 announcement by Egypt’s then-culture minister that the government would shoulder the cost of the project.

In January, a Muslim Brotherhood politician resigned as a presidential adviser after he drew international attention by calling on Egyptian Jews to return. More recently, authorities censored a film on Egyptian Jews that was to be screened in Egyptian cinemas, though the director, Amir Ramses, tweeted this week that the film will be screened later this month after producers “won the war against security forces.”

“It appears that under President Mohamed Morsi, Egyptian authorities are trying to tear out the pages about the Jewish minority from the book of Egyptian history,” said Ada Aharoni, the editor of “The Golden Age of the Jews From Egypt,” which serves as a kind of Egyptian Jewish haggadah.

A Cairo-born retired sociologist, writer and researcher at Haifa’s Technion, Aharoni initiated the book project, which is being prepared for print just as Jews around the world prepare to remember their own ancestors’ flight from Egypt on Passover. But the holiday was not Aharoni’s main consideration in terms of timing.

Living witnesses to the uprooting of Egyptian Jewry are dying out, she said. And the recent censorship of the documentary film created an additional sense of urgency.

“This film claimed Jews had it good in Egypt and left only to America and France, not Israel — and still it was banned,” she said. “The Morsi regime is determined to delete our history in Egypt and our heritage. In a way, Morsi’s regime wants to return to periods even darker than the one that caused the Second Exodus.”

The 400-page book contains 68 testimonies and will be published in Israel in the coming weeks and sold in bookshops. Though most of it is written in Hebrew, some accounts appear only in French, a tribute to the sizable community of Egyptian Jews that settled in France.

According to Aharoni, only half of the 75,000 to 100,000 Jews who left Egypt settled in Israel. Many went to France, but also to the United States, the United Kingdom and even Brazil.

One of the non-Israelis featured in the book is Aharoni’s younger brother, Edwin Diday, who lives in Paris. In the days leading up to the family’s flight, Diday felt “the same fear that we felt during World War II, as the Nazi forces of Erwin Rommel neared Egypt,” he wrote in the book. Diday says anti-Semitic caricatures were “everywhere, one showing an arm tattooed with a Star of David holding a bloody red knife.”

On an outing to the Rio cinema, a local told Diday’s parents that a gang of hooligans was coming to lynch them.

“Mom and dad took us in their arms and ran with us home, which was fortunately not far,” Diday recalls.

But Diday has other memories of roaming alone as a boy in the Museum of Cairo. And Aharoni recalls her best friend Kadreya, who was not Jewish, at Alvernia, an elite English-language school for girls situated in a well-to-do neighborhood of the Egyptian capital.

“People don’t realize it, they think of all North African Jews as one bloc,” Aharoni said. “But Egyptian Jewry lived in a European enclave in the heart of Cairo.”

According to Aharoni, part of the reason Jews were able to live in such an enclave was that 95 percent were not Egyptian citizens, despite having lived there for generations. The discrimination deprived them of equal rights, but also freed them from the duty of sending their children to Arab state schools, serve in the army or align themselves politically with any one party, Aharoni says.

To help bring the lost enclave back to life, the book features dozens of rare photographs of Egyptian Jewish life. One taken shortly before Aharoni left with her family in 1949 shows nine smiling teenagers from Maccabi Cairo, the local branch of the international Zionist sports organization. Its activities were banned a few months later, Aharoni says.

The book also contains a copy of Nissim Rabia’s 1948 Maccabi membership card with text in Arabic, Hebrew and French. Another reproduction shows the travel document Egyptian authorities gave Jewish families they expelled. Stamped on them were the words “One way — no right to return.”

Many pages in the book are dedicated to the property that Egypt’s well-to-do Jewish residents were forced to leave behind. Diday’s father, Nessim, mistakenly believed his life savings were secure at the Cairo branch of a Swiss bank; the government requisitioned the funds. Benny Roditti recalls how, just before leaving in 1956, he tried to withdraw his family’s savings from a different Cairo bank but was told the account had been “suspended indefinitely.”

Thousands had similar experiences, according to Aharoni.

In recent decades Azi Nagar, the founder of the Association for the Promotion of Compensation for Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands, tried to start restitution talks with the regime of Hosni Mubarak, whose 30 years in power ended in 2011 in a revolution that led to Morsi’s election. Nagar, an Israeli born in Cairo, also was keen to see Egypt honor its announcement that it would cover the costs of renovating the country’s synagogues.

Nowadays, Nagar says, Egypt’s tiny Jewish community cannot even get the government to approve renovations at the community’s expense.

In January, Nagar broached the issue of financial restitution in letters to Morsi, who has not replied.

Aharoni believes speaking about the loss and trauma suffered by Egyptian Jews is important but views restitution talks as a side issue.

“Yes, a staggering amount was left behind in Egypt,” she said. “But going after it is like asking a beggar for a handout.”

Palestinians protesting against the Assad regime and waving Free Syrian Army flags at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, Feb. 1, 2013. (Mahfouz Abu Turk/Flash90/JTA)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — It’s the latest Palestinian refugee crisis, but it has nothing to do with Israel or the West Bank — yet.

With Syria home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the raging civil war there is destabilizing a population with nowhere to turn, and some analysts are warning it could complicate the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.

“The question is what could happen, what is the appropriate regional response,” said Aram Nerguizian, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

More than 70 percent of Syria’s Palestinians live in the Damascus area, Nerguizian noted, “within spitting distance of the Golan Heights.”

It’s not that Israel’s border there is under threat of being breached, he said, but the presence of so many internally displaced Palestinians could complicate Israel’s relations with the Palestinians and other Arab states, especially if Syria breaks up into smaller entities.

“If you have pressure to do more” for the Palestinians, “it opens up discussions about the Arab-Israeli arena and even more instability,” he said.

Officials from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency were in Washington last week campaigning for extra funds for the approximately 500,000 Palestinians under its charge in Syria. The United Nations is trying to raise $1.5 billion for Syrian relief, and $90 million has been earmarked for UNRWA, which services Palestinian refugees from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and their descendants.

The issue already has reverberated in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in January that he was ready to absorb 150,000 of Syria’s Palestinians in the West Bank, but that Israel’s government insisted that each arrival renounce the “right of return” to Israel as a condition of passage. Abbas said he would not force Palestinians to renounce such a right before a final-status agreement. Israel would not comment on the offer.

Dennis Ross, a former top Middle East adviser to President Obama, said the status of the Palestinians in Syria likely would feature prominently in private discussions between Obama and Abbas when Obama visits the region this week.

“What, if anything, can we in the international community be doing to somehow safeguard those Palestinians there?” Ross said Monday at an Obama trip preview at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which he serves as a counsel. “It’s hard to imagine that that’s not going to be part of the private conversation.”

Israel already is watching Syria with great concern. One of the key questions is what would happen to Syria’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and anti-aircraft artillery should the Assad regime collapse. A crumbling Syrian regime could transfer the weapons to Hezbollah, or they could fall into the hands of groups among the rebels that are affiliated with al-Qaida.

For their part, Palestinians caught in the fighting may have nowhere to flee. The two natural exits, given the placement of the main refugee camps for Palestinians, are Lebanon and Jordan — countries with histories of tensions with their own Palestinian populations and resistant to accepting more.

David Schenker, formerly a Syria analyst for the Pentagon who now is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Palestinians in Syria before the civil war were relatively well integrated in the country — far more than in Jordan or Lebanon.

“They had it pretty good, relatively speaking, in terms of being able to work and travel freely throughout Syria,” he said — albeit not as citizens.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, numbering about 400,000 in a population of  4.2 million, have been caught up for years in the country’s civil strife. Jordan, unlike Lebanon and Syria, has endeavored to absorb its Palestinians as citizens. But tensions linger since internecine strife in the 1970s between the country’s Bedouin and Palestinian populations.

Of the 1 million residents of Syria who have sought refuge in neighboring lands, fewer than 40,000 are Palestinian. Lebanon has allowed in about 32,000 and Jordan 4,500, according to U.N. officials.

Filippo Grandi, the commissioner general for UNRWA, estimated that most of the Palestinian population in Syria is internally displaced. He said that of 150,000 residents in Yarmouk, the country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, perhaps 25,000 remain.

Earlier this month, a video went viral showing two alleged Palestinian government collaborators hanged in Yarmouk. Refugees from Yarmouk who have managed to get out of the country say they are subject to kidnappings and ransoms as they endeavor stay neutral.

“We hear from the government side, ‘Some Palestinians are traitors, we’ve hosted them for so long,’ and then we hear from the opposition side, ‘Palestinians are collaborators,’ ” Grandi told JTA.

Moshe Maoz, a Syria expert at Hebrew University who has advised Israeli governments on relations with Damascus, said he does not believe the Palestinian crisis in Syria would directly affect Israel. The longstanding integration of the Palestinians into Syria would stand them in good stead whatever the outcome of the unrest, Maoz said.

“It depends very much on the new government, the new regime,” he said, “but I don’t see any major change with the Palestinians overall.”

The Neirab Palestinian refugee camp near Aleppo is the largest of its kind in Syria. (UNRWA)

HERZLIYA, Israel (JTA) — Three weeks ago, militants in Gaza landed a rocket near the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

Two weeks ago, Egypt raised its state of emergency in the Sinai Peninsula, warning of an increase in jihadist activity there.

Last week, a rock thrown by a West Bank Palestinian critically wounded a 3-year-old Israeli girl.

And this week, Israel plans to ask the United States for support should it strike Syrian weapons convoys en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Along both its northern and southern frontiers, Israel faces more political instability than it has in decades — conditions that some security experts fear could open a door to greater terrorism.

The upheavals of the Arab Spring may have reduced the threat of a conventional war with a neighboring state, but the prospects for peaceful borders — let alone full normalization with the Arab world — have dimmed, forcing Israeli military planners to prepare for long-term uncertainty.

“For the first time in decades, we have four active borders that have terror activities: Lebanon, Syria, Sinai and Gaza,” said Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the director of military intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces. “The change that’s happening is deep and foundational. The central characteristic of this change, even if it seems banal, is instability and uncertainty.”

Kochavi was speaking last week at the Herzliya Conference, an elite policy and security gathering dominated this year by concerns about terrorist activity on Israel’s frontiers. Kochavi said terrorists are “filling the vacuum” of unstable states. While the consequences have been minimal, officials say the danger of an attack is growing.

“Not a week goes by, not to say hardly a day, when I don’t have to deal with an issue that you didn’t even hear about, that could have resulted in a strategic threat,” IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz told the conference.

Of particular concern to defense officials is the Syrian border, beyond which a civil war has been raging for two years — one that is threatening to spill over. Israel has begun building a fence on the perimeter of the Golan Heights and in January bombed a weapons convoy it feared was being shipped from Syria to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

The possibility that Syrian arms, including stockpiles of chemical weapons, could wind up in the hands of terrorist groups is among the primary security concerns facing Israel. But the threats go deeper.

As secular strongmen have vanished from the stage — first in Egypt, and potentially in Syria — Islamists are rising in their place. It’s a development that could recast the Arab-Israeli conflict in religious rather than geopolitical terms.

“We’re seeing a decline in national identity and a rise in religious identity” in the Arab world, said Dan Meridor, Israel’s outgoing minister of intelligence. “The old paradigm of war is changing its face.”

On the whole, religiously inspired terrorist groups can be difficult to deter. Generally they are less susceptible to diplomatic pressure than nation states. And unlike the dictators they appear to be replacing, the groups enjoy more popular support.

“We used to have three or four enemies,” Meridor said. “Now we have 10,000 or 20,000. Our enemies are greater and are not necessarily states. How do you deter a group that’s not a state?”

Beyond the problem of deterrence is the question of victory. Israel’s recent skirmishes with terrorist groups — notably its 2006 war against Hezbollah and its 2009 and 2012 campaigns against Hamas in Gaza — have led to something closer to stalemate than the decisive victories achieved in past conventional wars.

Lurking behind a few of the non-state actors, though, is a state with which Israelis have become all too familiar: Iran. The Islamic Republic is Hezbollah’s primary funder and one of the few remaining allies of the teetering Assad regime in Syria.

Kochavi said that Iran and Hezbollah have organized an army of 50,000 in Syria and are trying to increase their influence there.

“Iran and Hezbollah are both doing all in their power to assist Assad’s regime,” Kochavi said. “Iran and Hezbollah are also preparing for the day after Assad’s fall, when they will use this army to protect their assets and interests in Syria.”

Experts said that in the face of four insecure borders, Israel’s best bet is to stay alert and hang tough. But Danny Rothschild, director of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya’s Institute of Policy and Strategy, told the conference that Israel needs to be proactive in directing the Middle East toward peace and prosperity.

“Israel needs to be more involved in shaping the future of the region, even in a quiet way,” he said. “I have a feeling events will make it deal with issues, even if it hasn’t intended to.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting soldiers in the Golan Heights near the Israeli-Syrian border, Jan. 13, 2013. (Kobi Gideon/Flash 90/JTA)

KATZRIN, Israel (JTA) — For nearly 40 years, Israel’s border with Syria has been, perhaps improbably, its quietest.

The two countries technically have been in a state of war since the cease-fire that ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But over the past four decades, while Israel’s other borders occasionally have exploded with missile salvos, intifadas, shooting incidents and cross-border terrorist attacks, the Syrian frontier on the Golan Heights has stayed largely peaceful.

With Syria now entering a critical phase in its bloody, two-year civil war, however, the years of quiet may end. The Syrian fighting has claimed an estimated 70,000 lives, according to U.N. officials, and recently spread to Damascus, Syria’s capital city. Analysts warn that the regime of President Bashar Assad could collapse in a matter of months or even weeks.

In its place may come Islamist terrorist groups seeking to take advantage of the power vacuum and attack Israel on the Golan border, Israelis fear.

“There won’t be a country called Syria,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to Jordan and the European Union. “Then there’s no central rule. It creates a vacuum for terrorists to enter the space. It will be a wonderful opportunity to attack Israel.”

Analysts do see some bright spots to the fall of Assad, whose regime is a key ally of the Hezbollah terrorist group and Iran, and serves as Iran’s main corridor for funneling arms to Hezbollah. A Syrian rebel victory would hinder that corridor.

That would be “a major blow to Hezbollah and Iran,” said Eyal Zisser, a Syria expert at Tel Aviv University. “Hezbollah will stay there, but it will be much weaker.”

But Professor Mordechai Kedar, a Syria expert at Bar-Ilan University, says Israel could face increased danger in the near future. In the long term, Kedar said, Assad’s regime may be replaced by a government more amenable to peace with Israel. But before he falls, Assad might transfer his large stock of chemical weapons to Hezbollah.

“There’s a huge pile of WMDs there — biological, chemical,” he said. “That can be a big problem if it gets into the wrong hands.”

The Syrian conflict already has spilled over into Israel — a bit. In November, stray Syrian shells landed across the boundary, prompting Israel to fire back. In January, Israel reportedly bombed a weapons convoy heading from Syria into Lebanon that was thought to be carrying weapons for Hezbollah. This month, seven Syrian men injured in fighting just over the border were brought into Israel and are being treated at an Israeli hospital.

In the meantime, security officials are beefing up measures in the Golan to prevent any additional spillover into Israel from the Syrian conflict. Last month, Israel announced that it would begin building a fence along its Syrian border, as it has done along its border with the Sinai.

Should the Syrian region adjacent to the Golan descend into anarchy, experts expect it to most closely resemble the Sinai. Terrorists there have taken advantage of diminished control following the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime in Cairo to smuggle in weapons and launch occasional attacks into Israel.

One significant difference between the Sinai and Syria, some analysts say, is that the Sinai is ruled by a central Egyptian government with which Israel has a formal peace accord, thus limiting Israel’s military options. Operating in an anarchic Syria would not carry the same diplomatic risks.

“What’s happening on our border is what’s happening in Sinai,” said Ely Karmon, a Hezbollah expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. “But with Sinai, we have a peace agreement with Egypt. We don’t have freedom of action in Sinai like we have in Syria. If there will be terrorist acts, I assume Israel will react hard.”

Pazit Ravina, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon who has been in contact with Syrian rebels adjacent to the Golan, says that Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorist groups may not attack Israeli because they will be too preoccupied fighting each other for control of Syrian territory.

“They’re very tired,” Ravina said. “There is not enough food. They’ll be busier fighting Sunni-Shia battles than fighting Israel. It’s all kinds of groups, and trying to unite them against Israel doesn’t work.”

For now, analysts say, Israel’s options are limited. They say its best bet is to protect its border and stay out of the Syrian conflict, but react forcefully should a Syrian group try to attack the Golan. The Israeli government, which declined to comment for this story, appears to be following that policy. Other than that, analysts say, Israel should push the United States to prevent Syria from becoming a base of Iranian influence.

“Israel can’t do much now,” Eran said. “It should stay out of the internal game. Israel will operate locally and won’t give Assad justification to take attention away from the internal situation and to the Israeli conflict. We need to influence parties that are involved in what’s happening.”

Kedar says that Israel’s top priority is to stay on alert as it adjusts to a new reality.

“The culture of the Middle East is strength and violence,” he said. “Now we’re returning to Middle East culture.”

A few feet away from what one area resident called a “cattle fence” — one easy to jump if not for the electric current running through it — a newer barrier of crisscrossing shiny steel bars towers high above the heads of nearby soldiers.

As Syria’s civil war escalates next door, Israelis have grown concerned that spillover could undermine the sense of security that Golan residents have enjoyed since the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

“The chaos presents a situation in Syria where there’s no rule, and a lot of entities can enter that can put us in danger because they have no national or diplomatic responsibility,” said Ori Kalner, deputy head of the Golan Regional Council.

Heightened security awareness is a new feeling for residents of the Golan, the mountainous region in Israel’s northeast corner captured from Syria in 1967’s Six-Day War. The Bible mentions it as a place of refuge, and for many Israelis it is exactly that. Two hours from the country’s congested center, filled with national parks and bed-and-breakfasts, the Golan has remained immune from the terrorists and missiles that have bombarded Israel in recent decades.

But the sense of sanctuary is eroding. Mortar shells and gunfire from the Syrian civil war began spilling into the Golan in November. Israel returned fire — the first cross-border conflict on the Golan since 1973. One shell landed in a backyard in this agricultural village 500 yards from the border.

In January, Israel announced construction of the new fence to prevent Syrians from infiltrating the border. Last week, seven Syrians crossed into Israel to seek medical attention; they are hospitalized in the northern Israeli city of Safed.

Residents have tried to ignore their neighbors’ conflict, but they say it’s becoming more difficult. Some worry that if rebels succeed in toppling the regime of President Bashar Assad, Islamist groups will exploit the opportunity to attack Israel, as terrorists did following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

“They’ll turn this into another Gaza,” said Yaron Dekel, a resident of Alonei Habashan. “I don’t think what’s happening here is different from what’s happening in the rest of Israel.”

Like many Golan towns, the 56-family Alonei Habashan is tightly knit. Residents are used to leaving their doors unlocked and the town’s entrance gate open, Dekel said, though they have become more cautious lately as the threat of Syrians crossing the border has risen.

“If you live in Tel Aviv, you lock your door,” Dekel said. “Here no one does, but now they tell us to. People used to leave the door open for a month.”

Communities across the Golan are adopting increased security measures. The Golan Regional Council, which delivers services to area communities, is providing increased security funding to towns, as well as assembling local volunteer security, logistical and medical teams in case of an attack.

Kalner says the Golan is “ready for change in Syria.” He adds, however, that the Golan, as opposed to Syria, is calm, vibrant and secure.

“Were raising people’s awareness,” Kalner said.

The region’s two largest security threats are missiles and refugees crossing the border, he says. On Sunday, Kalner toured the area adjacent to Israel’s Gaza and Egypt borders, both targets of frequent rocket attacks in the past decade, to learn about security protocols there.

While similar attacks in the Golan could temporarily drive away tourists, the council’s tourism chief, Shmuel Hazan, says that Israelis will return out of a sense of solidarity.

“Israelis like to support places that are problematic,” Hazan said. “We know from experience that in Gaza or Jerusalem, when there was a crisis, when things got better they returned to the way they were.”

One silver lining to the Syrian threat, both residents and officials say, is that Israel will likely hold on to the Golan for the coming years. Israel annexed the region in 1981 and its return has been a subject of peace negotiations with Syria in the past. Given the Assad regime’s instability, the prospects of a deal that would lead to the Golan returning to Syrian control is more unlikely than ever.

“It’s clear that what’s happening there makes that discussion superfluous,” said Dalia Amos, the council’s spokesperson. “We’re all very optimistic.”

Dekel called Syrian peace negotiations “a thing of the past.” He said that while the Syrian unrest has awakened residents to their own vulnerability, it has also brought the Golan’s strategic advantages into sharp relief.

“This is the Middle East,” he said. “Whoever lives here should live on the heights, and be able to see everything.”

Israeli schoolchildren studying at Tel Aviv elementary school, 2010. (Moshe Shai/Flash90/JTA)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – An in-depth comparative study of Palestinian and Israeli school textbooks is offering some conclusions that already are making some Israeli government officials very unhappy: Palestinian textbooks do not have as much anti-Israel incitement as often portrayed.

While this finding might appear to be welcome news for supporters of Israel, it also threatens to undercut one of the central elements of the official Israeli narrative. For years, the charge that Palestinians “educate to hate” has been an Israeli trump card in undermining claims that Palestinian statehood is overdue, and it is an article of faith among many lawmakers in Congress.

“This obviously cuts down one of the pegs and a linchpin in the argument that the Israel government makes, that the Palestinian Authority is teaching hatred to their kids,” said an official who works closely with mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States. The official declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Titled “Victims of our own Narratives?” and funded by the U.S. State Department, the study finds both Israel and the Palestinians lacking in making the case for the other side’s presence in the Holy Land. It also scores Israeli books as better than Palestinian ones at preparing schoolchildren for peace.

But in the same pages it praises both Israel and the Palestinian Authority for publishing textbooks virtually free of “dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other.”

“Both the Israeli and Palestinian communities should be commended for this important positive aspect of their books,” the study says. “Extreme negative characterizations of the other of his sort are present in textbooks elsewhere in the world.”

The study was launched in 2009 by the Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, a multifaith body that aims “to prevent religion from being used as a source of conflict, and to promote mutual respect,” according to its website. It is comprised of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Palestinian Islamic Waqf, and the heads of Christian churches in Israel and the West Bank.

The Israeli government did not formally cooperate with the study; Palestinian Authority officials did.

Yale University psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler convened the study team, which was headed by Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University and Sami Adwan of the University of Bethlehem. They assigned Hebrew-Arabic bilingual research assistants to plow through more than 3,000 passages from textbooks — 74 from the Israeli side and 96 from the Palestinian side.

The assistants assessed the passages based on criteria developed in part by an advisory panel that included Palestinian and Israel academics and outside experts, including those who have critiqued Palestinian books.

Most of the advisory panel, including several Israelis, signed onto a statement Sunday endorsing its findings.

“We agreed that the methods of the study were of the highest scientific standards and agreed on the main study findings,” the statement said.

At least one Israeli member, Arnon Groiss, said he has reservations about the methodology and could not attach his name to the final report, which he said he has not seen.

It’s not clear whether the study will alter fundamentally the standard Israeli narrative about Palestinian schools laying the groundwork for future conflict with Israel, and the study does not absolve either side.

The study quantifies textbooks’ negative depictions of the other side and identifies a lack of positive depictions of the other side as an obstacle to peace.

“This presentation bias, along with the general lack of information about the other’s culture, history and religion, creates an image of the other only as aggressive enemy to whom it is not possible to relate or respect, with whom there can be nothing in common,” Wexler said in an email. “This lack of information even more than the negative information constitutes a lack of recognition of the other’s legitimate presence.”

Wexler said the goal of the study was to test according to rigorous statistical standards allegations that each side has made about the other’s texts.

“The type of testimony that’s been presented to Congress and to our national leaders has been one person reading selected passages from the books,” Wexler told JTA. “As a medical doctor, I don’t make decisions based on that type of information.”

The study found that textbooks in Israel’s state schools were likelier to depict Palestinians in a positive light and to include criticism of Israeli actions, while books in Palestinian and haredi Orthodox schools were overwhelmingly negative in their depiction of “the other.”

Critics, including some of the Israelis on the advisory panel, said this equivalence fails to take into account how each culture responds to such depictions.

“The problem is, he makes comparisons between promotion of education for peace on the one side and education that calls for the annihilation of the other side,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, the director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, referring to Wexler. “It’s like comparing apples and giraffes.”

A statement from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs picks out passages in Palestinian textbooks it says the study ignores; many of them implicitly negate Israel by referring or depicting the entire territory as “Palestine.”

The study, however, addresses that issue at length and finds that maps on both sides tend either to depict the entire area as “Israel” or “Palestine.”

Detractors of the study say its rigorous analytical methodology rips biased and sometimes inflammatory passages from each cultural context. They contend that triumphalism is more incendiary in a Palestinian society that they say is more forgiving of terrorism.

Kuperwasser has been leading the charge against the study.

“It omits important examples of incitement and delegitimization of Israelis and Jews in official PA textbooks, whether in an intentional attempt to blur the differences between the two educational systems or due to poor research,” he said.

A number of participants involved in the study said Kuperwasser has been pressuring groups and individuals to distance themselves from the study’s conclusions.

Israel’s Education Ministry said in a statement that “the results of the ‘study’ reveal that the decision not to cooperate with these bodies was right.” The ministry called the study “biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity.”

Speaking to the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat from Cairo, El-Erian called on Egypt’s Jews “to leave historic Palestine and return to the country from which they came,” and predicted “the demise of the State of Israel within 10 years,” the paper reported.

“The Jews are occupying the historic Land of Palestine and are an obstacle to the right of return of the Palestinians,” El-Erian said.

“I have said that for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, the occupiers of the land … these occupiers have previous homelands, and I pray for the return of the Palestinians and for those who occupied their land to be deported,” El-Erian said.

El-Erian was quoted at length about the alleged motivations behind the “Zionist project.”

“I do not speak on behalf of Egypt, I am speaking on my own behalf,” he said.

“The Jewish occupiers of the territory of historic Palestine are an obstacle to the right of return of the Palestinians. There are an estimated 14 million Jews in the world and only about 6 million in the land of Palestine. They can go out to other places they consider the best for them. The Zionist ideology ended in failure and this project [Israel] fated to collapse in coming years.

“The Zionist project in Palestine came to prevent the existence of democracy in the Arab countries, and to prevent the presence of Arab unity and development in the Arab region. It came to deplete the wealth of the Arabs by making them stockpile weapons in countries that do not fight at all but spend billions on buying aircraft.

“We [Egypt] are the only ones who have a strong and equipped army. I say clearly, those who can read the future see that this project [Israel] will fall within one decade. This is our faith, that the people of Palestine will return to Palestine. There will be no such thing as Israel, it will be called Palestine, where Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze and all the people who live there will remain Palestinian citizens. This is our faith and this is what we live and strive for. We tell all those who came and occupied Palestine to return to their countries,” El-Erian said.

El-Erian linked his work in the Constituent Assembly drafting a new constitution for Egypt, and its provisions for religious freedoms for Christians and Jews, with his prediction of Israel’s demise. “We have a Jewish minority. And while it’s true that it is only in the dozens now but we have [Egyptian] Jews [in Israel] and when the Palestinian issue is resolved and the Jews will have a right of return to Egypt, this is one of the options open to them, either return to Egypt or leave to other places.”

A spokesman for Morsi told the newspaper that the presidency was not responsible for El-Erian’s statements, and that he did not speak on the president’s behalf.

“What he said about the demise of Israel in less than 10 years does not represent the presidency because he is not speaking in an official capacity,” a source in the presidency told Asharq Al-Awsat.

El-Erian is a senior Brotherhood member, vice chairman of the ruling Freedom and Justice Party and heads its parliamentary body in the Shura Council.

El-Erian’s comments come hot on the heels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs report, in which the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, Mohammed Badie, came in first with the following statement: “The Jews have dominated the land, spread corruption on earth, spilled the blood of believers and in their actions profaned holy places. Zionists only understand the language of force and will not relent without duress. This will happen only through holy jihad.”

An Egyptian analyst, Dr. Abdel Razak Soliman of the International Center for Future and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told Asharq Al-Awsat that El-Erian’s comments should be seen in the context of the rise of Islamist political movements in the Arab world, who want to show the West that they can coexist with the Jews, if not the Zionists.

Since the Wiesenthal report showed that “Badie was the number one enemy of the Jews,” according to Soliman, El-Erian is trying to show the world that the Muslim Brotherhood “has no problem with Jews, that this is safeguarded in their constitution.”

“Their problem is with the Zionists,” Soliman said.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in Israel Hayom and is distributed with the permission of that newspaper.