To Jerusalem via Cairo and Moscow
This is an extraordinarily important week for the Middle East. Egypt is due to hold the final round of its presidential election on 16-17 June, while the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) are due to resume talks with Iran over its nuclear programme in Moscow on 18-19 June. For Israel, the two events have a linkage that is sometimes not sufficiently understood in the West.
In Egypt, there are still significant hurdles even to get to this week-end’s poll. On Thursday (14 June), for instance, it could be that one of the two candidates in the presidential run-off poll – the military’s preferred candidate Ahmed Shafiq – will be disqualified from running by the Supreme Constitutional Court, leading to a delay. The court could also rule that some elements of the parliamentary elections, which were won by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), were unconstitutional and a partial re-run is necessary.
However, assuming that the run-off presidential poll does go ahead as planned, the likely winner will be the MB’s candidate Muhammad Mursi. In the first round Mursi won 24.8% against Shafiq’s 23.7%, which looks tight. But, it should be remembered, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nour, a more hardline Salafi Islamist group, won some 70% of the seats in the upper and lower houses of parliament in the November-February elections which suggests that the election is Mursi’s to lose. He has now been endorsed by Abd-al-Munim Abu-al-Futuh, the independent Islamist who won 17% of the vote in the first round, and he could also pick up votes from secularists opposed to the idea of electing a president who was part of the Mubarak regime.
If Mursi is elected, the biggest fear will be how the MB will behave once it has added control of the presidency to its already-secured control of parliament. That, in turn, raises fears about the attitude of the Tahrir Square youth who sparked the revolution in January 2011 and who do not have a candidate in the presidential poll. Increasingly they feel that they have had the revolution stolen from them.
The Muslim Brotherhood is showing some signs of understanding these dangers. Mursi is trying to gain the support of the revolutionary youth and made a great play of sharing their anger at the recent verdicts passed against Hosni Mubarak, his sons, and their close associates, which were widely seen as inadequate.
On the economic front, the MB is also trying to calm market fears – and with reason. Egypt’s reserves are down to less than half their levels before the fall of Mubarak; and the yield on short-term Egyptian government local-currency debt is above 15%; foreign holdings of Treasury bills has dropped from 25% in September to less than 5%; and futures traders are betting on a 20% devaluation. There are also crucial negotiations with the IMF under way.
Given that the MB draws significant support from property-owning professionals and businessmen, it is sensitive to the need for stability, and in one reassuring move it is seeking the help of the international development economist Hernando de Soto to advise on economic reforms.
These and other pointers are reinforcing the hopes of Western observers that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood will be like Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The view from Israel, however, remains fearful. The Israelis are disinclined to be impressed by what they see as the MB’s tactical pragmatism. And, although not much notice was taken by the Western media, Israeli fears were reinforced last week when the prominent Egyptian cleric Safwat Hagazy told a pro-Mursi rally in Mahalla: “The United States of the Arabs will be restored with the hands of that man [Mursi] and his supporters. The capital of the Caliphate will be Jerusalem with God’s will...We will either pray in Jerusalem or we will be martyred there.”
A video of Hagazy’s speech was broadcast by Annas TV on 5 June, and by 7 June it had been viewed by over 60,000 people on YouTube.
Whether there is a consolidation of Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt, as seems likely, or a descent into strife, as is possible, Israel’s attitude towards Egypt is becoming increasingly anxious. So far every major development since the January 2011 revolution has added to the fear that in due time Egypt could once again pose a threat to Israel.
Hagazy’s speech may be dismissed as an irrelevant rant by many Western observers, but Israel takes such statements seriously. Amongst the millions of words written about the slaying in May 2011 of Osama bin Laden and its significance, the one comment that stood out above all others was made by the Palestinian commentator Zakaria Mohammad, who said: “Bin Laden died notionally the day that Mubarak fell. The people in Tahrir Square pushed him aside before Obama announced his victory against him. Since January 25th [2011] he was no longer a necessity for ordinary Arabs. What he advocated was no longer a necessity.”
The point that Mohammad was making is that what happens in Cairo is of far greater importance to the future of the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular than anything al-Qaeda does, and it was a point that was recognized by al-Qaeda’s new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as long ago as April 1995 when he wrote a pamphlet entitled: “The road to Jerusalem passes through Cairo.”
It is also a point that Iran understands well. Although at odds with much of the Sunni Arab world, particularly the Gulf Arabs, Iran continues to hope for a full rapprochement with Egypt for the specific and stated reason of isolating Israel. On 12 June, Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told a group of visiting Egyptian physicians and others that the ‘Islamic Awakening’ - as he called the Arab Spring - would culminate in the liberating of “the occupied Palestinian territories and driving out occupiers from Holy Quds [Jerusalem]”. He said that the revolution in Egypt was the “turning point”. He was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying that “after the current transitional period” a new chapter would open that “will serve the interests of the Egyptian nation, the Muslim world, and Palestine”.
Salehi is right about this being “a transitional period”. No one supposes for a moment that a Mursi election victory would lead immediately to the abrogation of the Camp David accords, but it would lead to significantly increased Israeli suspicions about the long-term intentions of its neighbour to the southwest, and these in turn inevitably feed into its calculations about Iran and what to do about its nuclear programme.
It is not a happy coincidence, but it is a significant one, that the likely election of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt could coincide almost exactly with the failure of the next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 group, which are due to take place in Moscow from 18-19 June.
We are expecting failure because there is no indication at all of an Iranian willingness to meet the requirements that would satisfy Israel, namely: that Iran stop all enrichment of uranium, high and low; that it remove all material that has been enriched from Iran; and, third, that it dismantle the underground nuclear facility at Fordow near Qom.
If these demands are not met, the most important variable in the weeks following any failure will be the state of mind of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his closest advisers. Even without the Egyptian factor we know that Netanyahu believes that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “the greatest threat facing humanity”, as he told the German newspaper Bild on 6 June, and that “the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would be infinitely more costly than any scenario you can imagine to stop it”.
Sources in Jerusalem describe Netanyahu as being “obsessed” by the Iranian threat, but if he is to authorize military action he has to take the majority of his security cabinet with him, and it is in this regard that what is happening in Egypt is so important. If not everyone is convinced that a nuclear-armed Iran would ever risk attacking a nuclear-armed Israel, they do understand that a nuclear-armed Iran would prevent Israel from using its nuclear weapons to counter an overwhelming conventional attack, as it nearly had to in 1973.
For over 30 years there has been no prospect of such an overwhelming conventional attack happening again, but the reality of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt will have a profound effect on Israeli minds. In other words, what seems likely to happen this week-end in Cairo is almost as important as what happens on Monday in Moscow. JdeC.