Following is another insightful opinion piece from the New York Times which   
   explains the Israeli perspective regarding the current developments in   
   Egypt. It also includes a small amount of historical information which helps   
   the reader to better understand what is being said, and why the Israelis are   
   so concerned about Egypt's future leadership.   
      
      
   Israel, Alone Again?   
      
   By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI - NYT   
      
   February 1, 2011   
      
      
   ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt's city   
   squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world's 1989 moment.   
   Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the   
   Middle East's ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.   
      
   But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim   
   assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real   
   opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power.   
   Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists   
   gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.   
      
   Either result would be the end of Israel's most important relationship in   
   the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to   
   peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace   
   treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in   
   Lebanon, Hamas's control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli   
   alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare:   
   living in a country surrounded by Iran's allies or proxies.   
      
   Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western   
   analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn   
   violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is   
   true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood's   
   nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is   
   rooted in crude anti-Semitism.   
      
   The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim   
   world's widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the   
   Israeli intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the   
   Holocaust to blackmail the West.   
      
   Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the   
   Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naivete: the same   
   prediction, after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and   
   Hamas.   
      
   The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their   
   predicament in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians,   
   Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds,   
   Israel remains David.   
      
   Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and   
   diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from   
   the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran   
   and Turkey. Peace with Israel's immediate neighbors would wait.   
      
   That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian   
   alliance collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty   
   that same year. The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the   
   Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional   
   war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian   
   attack on Yom Kippur.   
      
   Since then all of Israel's military conflicts -- from the first Lebanon war   
   in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 -- have been asymmetrical confrontations   
   against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with   
   strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential   
   threat from the Arab world.   
      
   For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also   
   psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their   
   conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the   
   peace with Egypt -- for all its limitations, it is the only successful model   
   of a land-for-peace agreement.   
      
   Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the   
   improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and   
   Israel's prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to   
   Tel Aviv on his peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day.   
   Begin, Israel's most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from   
   the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times the size of Israel.   
      
   Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis   
   craved, the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the   
   Sinai coast experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in   
   one corner of the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized   
   Sinai proved that Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel   
   reasonably secure.   
      
   The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel's borders that hasn't been   
   fenced off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world   
   is about to close.   
      
      
      
      
   Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23   
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