For those who believe the fault for the lack of Middle East peace belongs solely to Israel, the crackup of Israel’s diplomatic relations with both Turkey and Egypt has a simple explanation: Benjamin Netanyahu. According to this argument, the prickly prime minister’s unwillingness to apologize to the Turks or to make concessions to the Palestinians is widely blamed by both left-wingers in his own country as well as the mainstream media in the West for the collapse of the Jewish state’s alliance with Turkey as well as the disintegration of the decades-long peace with Egypt.
This is completely false. The narrative fits in nicely with the notion anything that happens to Israel is somehow its own fault, but it denies agency to Muslims who have their own reasons for rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Those who seek to pin the responsibility for Israel’s diplomatic woes on Netanyahu are ignoring the fact events in Turkey and Egypt have everything to do with the politics and culture of those nations and virtually nothing to do with Israel’s decisions in the past three years.
The Marvi Marmara was not the cause of the crackup of the Israel-Turkey alliance; in fact, it was merely the culmination of a process whereby the Islamic government in Ankara had sought to distance itself from Jerusalem and to move closer to Hamas. Similarly, the tumult in Egypt which led to the government’s failure to stop an angry mob from assaulting and sacking the Israeli embassy in Cairo is the result of the Arab Spring protests that brought down the Mubarak regime and replaced it with a military government that is afraid to confront protesters in the street–even if means the breakdown of law and order.
The actions of the Turks and the Egyptians are rooted in the growing Islamicization of these countries, not the grievances of the Palestinians. This is understood by the vast majority of Israelis who haven’t forgotten the Palestinians could have had their own state in 2000, 2001 or 2008 had they chosen to accept Israel’s peace offers. Though pundits claim the Palestinians have rejected the peace process because of Netanyahu’s intransigence, the truth is they have done so in order to evade the peace process.
It’s much easier to make unreasonable demands on Israel rather than to confront the reality of the Middle East. Even if Netanyahu were to abandon all of the West Bank and Jerusalem, this wouldn’t satisfy Egyptians and Turks or any other of Israel’s critics. That is frustrating for Israelis who would prefer it if their country’s fate rested solely in their own hands, as well as for the West which would like to believe the Middle East conflict has a solution that might be achieved by pressure on the Jewish state.
The Islamic trend sweeping the Middle East is discouraging, but it in no way can be attributed to Netanyahu or any actions of Israel. The ideology that drives the Turkish government to embrace Hamas and the Egyptian mob to attack Israel is not driven by a passion for the 1967 lines but by hatred of the Jewish state. In Egypt, Israel (which was demonized by the anti-Semitic propaganda broadcast by the state-run media even under Mubarak) is the scapegoat not just for wounded Muslim pride but also for the unmet promises of the Arab Spring. Many of us hoped the fall of Arab dictatorships might lead to the creation of governments that would no longer need to use Israel as a scapegoat to divert their peoples from their own failures. Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived.
