NEW YORK (Press Release)— Speaking to a private, invitation-only audience of American Friends of Tel Aviv University on February 4, Prof. Asher Susser, Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, called the recent upheaval in Egypt indicative of a potentially greater Islamist influence in the region, which could negatively affect Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“The events in Egypt are no less than an earthquake with huge ramifications for the United States, Israel, and the world at large,” Prof. Susser said during the teleconference. Though he called the uprising “an expression of popular empowerment never before seen in the Middle East,” he added that the question of the military’s loyalty to Hosni Mubarak will still determine the outcome of the crisis in Egypt.
With clear-eyed pragmatism, Prof. Susser also counselled a policy of Israeli “disengagement” from internal Arab controversies and said that Israel should redouble its efforts to disenagage from the West Bank too with or without a peace agreement with the Palestinians and strengthen Israel’s own internal security.
An internationally renowned historian and foreign policy analyst, Professor Susser is a former director of the Dayan Center, one of the world’s most important Middle East think tanks. During the teleconference, he focused on the significance of the Egyptian uprising for the future of Israeli security in the region, noting that the rise of Islamist power will encourage the more radical sectors of the Palestinian population and make negotiations “less friendly.” Whatever the outcome, he said, Israel will have to reconstruct its defence policy in response to a more volatile landscape in which secularism is in retreat.
On the positive side, Prof. Susser noted that it should now be clear to the U.S. and to Europe that Israel may be its sole truly reliable strategic ally in the region, a status that Israel may utilize to its advantage.
Prof. Susser placed the current situation in Egypt in a broader context of the recent history of the Middle East, comparing it to political changes in Turkey, Jordan and other Middle East nations. Importantly, he said, it was “as clear as daylight” that the recent problems of Egypt and other countries in the region are not the result of Israeli-Palestinian or Israel-Arab questions, but arose out of economic and cultural pressures. He cited the sense of hopelessness among young Egyptians in a depressed economy, and said that no matter what the outcome, the future Egyptian government will still have to contend with a continuing social and economic malaise.
Calling the Obama administration’s reaction to the Egyptian crisis “troubling,” Prof. Susser warned that pressure on the Mubarak regime to dissolve may lead to a less benign conclusion than the U.S. may expect. He suggested that a less interventionist response would have allowed the Egyptian people to resolve the situation on their own, and that the administration should have been less driven by U.S. internal domestic pressures and more by security and strategic considerations in its reaction.
Prof. Susser also commented on the role of the media in the crisis, noting that traditional media outlets like CNN and the BBC had far more influence on events in the region than digital media, the effect of which he called “greatly overestimated.” A far more important factor was “the sorry state of the Egyptian economy and society,” he concluded.
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Preceding provided by American Friends of Tel Aviv University