Since returning to power after the fall of the Ehud Olmert government in early 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been persistent in his attempts to force his vision of the Middle East on Washington, and this has brought him to loggerheads with US President Barack Obama, who entered the White House with a different vision. Obama was determined to reach a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the term that has come to replace the Arab-Israeli conflict. Obama hoped to follow through on the two-state solution that had been espoused by the previous George W Bush administration. However, Netanyahu had a better grasp of the Bush administration's project, the nature of which was summed up by Bush's secretary of state Condoleezza Rice at the peak of the Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 when she said that from this war a new Middle East would be born. The most important feature of that new Middle East would be that the Arab-Israeli conflict would be replaced by an Arab-Iranian conflict. Iran, not Israel, would become the regional enemy number one, according to this vision, and the Arabs and Israelis would join forces against this lynchpin of global terrorism. Needless to say, terrorism, in the Israeli lexicon, refers to the resistance forces fighting against Israel, behind which stands Tehran. Accordingly, Netanyahu has set the fight against Iran as his government's priority, and this has brought him into an early collision course with Obama, whose priority was to resolve the Palestinian question. Netanyahu has since had occasion to rejoice that the situation has turned out perhaps better than he had hoped for, albeit less due to his own machinations than to the dynamics of the Syrian crisis. Those dynamics ended up by pitting the US face-to-face against Iran, the Syrian regime's staunchest supporter. They drove a wedge between Ankara and Tehran while at the same time greasing the wheels that led to the resumption of the warmth in the relations between Tel Aviv and Ankara. As a result of the chemical weapons attack against civilians in Al-Ghouta on 21 August, Washington suddenly found itself face-to-face with the “red line” that Obama had drawn with respect to US military intervention in Syria. And that red line was very close to another, Iranian-related red line that Netanyahu had forced on Obama in the course of his campaign to push the US towards the military option against the Iranian nuclear programme. It was little wonder, therefore, that Israel and its allies should have intensified their pressures on Obama to prove true to his word and launch an offensive against the Syrian regime on the grounds that it had crossed Obama's red line. Israeli officials made it clear that any US wavering on this matter would cause Israel to lose faith in Obama's commitment to turn to the military option against Iran should Tehran cross the red line that Israel had drawn regarding Iran's ability to produce a nuclear weapon. For a while all seemed to be going well for Netanyahu, with the result that his shock must have been all the deeper when Obama took Russian President Vladimir Putin up on his initiative to eliminate Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons. Although Israel would probably be the major, if not the sole, beneficiary of the elimination of the Syrian chemical weapons arsenal and Damascus's signing of the Chemical Weapons Convention, as these weapons have been the only real military counterweight to Israel's own arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the Israelis have still been severely disappointed at the waning of the military option against Syria. They had hoped for a military strike that would decimate Syria's strategic capacities — not just its chemical weapons, but also and more importantly for Israel its missile and aerial defence systems — without Israel having to lift a finger. They had also hoped that, after putting the Syrian regime in its place, the US would summon the will to do the same with Iran. To the Israelis, a US war against Syria would be the best route to a US or US-Israeli war against Iran. When Obama felt compelled to turn to the US Congress to obtain a mandate to go to war against Syria, the Israelis were incensed. This had nothing to do with questions of international law, since under the UN Charter the Security Council is the sole agency that has the authority to confer such a mandate in cases where a country is not acting in self-defence, and Syria has never posed a direct military threat to the US or US interests. Rather, to the Israelis, by turning to congress Obama was merely “searching for excuses to avoid having to take the decision for war”, as the Israeli press has put it. According to Uri Ariel, the Israeli minister of housing and Knesset member for the right-wing Jewish Home Party, the “weak” American stance on Syria “teaches Israel an unforgettable lesson — which is not to build its hopes on US support in its fight to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons”. Ariel has added that “we need to realise that we will be alone in the confrontation with the Iranian regime, and we must begin to prepare, as of now, for that battle.” The question now is whether Washington's apparent back-tracking on the military option against Syria will lead Israel to accelerate its war drive against Iran. This is a question that has come to occupy politicians, commentators and strategists in both Israel and the US. In a recent Washington Post article, Dennis Ross, former US envoy to the Middle East and an adviser to Obama, said that the cancellation of the military strike against Syria would drive Israel to undertake military action against Iran. The Israelis believe that once the hardliners in Iran see that the US is incapable of using force against Syria, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — a moderate — will be unable to restrain them, especially those in the Revolutionary Guards, from pursuing their ambition to possess nuclear weapons. Moreover, Ross wrote, Washington's reversal of policy on the military strike option against Syria would make Israel feel that there was no point in waiting and that there was no reason to give diplomacy a chance or to continue to believe that the US was truly interested in finding a solution to the issue. Ross's assessment is consistent with preliminary reactions in Israel to Washington's shelving of the Syrian attack plan. Statements such as that by Ariel were echoed by both Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Moshe Ya'alon. Voicing his disappointment, Netanyahu asked “if I am not for myself, who will be for me? If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?” Israel “will strike deep into the enemy if it dares to attack us”, he said, adding that Israel was capable of defending itself with its navy and outstanding air force. Nevertheless, Netanyahu has not given up on the Syrian gambit as the route towards Iran. He stressed that it was not sufficient for the Syrian regime to hand over its chemical weapons arsenal. “The world must ensure that those who use chemical weapons pay the price. The message that will be delivered to Syria will be heard loud and clear in Iran. [The Iranians] are watching the situation to see how the West behaves towards Syria.” For his part Ya'alon focussed more on Israel's defence capabilities and its need to be on guard against all the eventualities that could arise in the region. “In the end, we must rely on ourselves, on our strength and on our deterrent power,” he said. Israeli frustration and dismay has also turned to alarm in the face of three other developments. The first has been that the subject of Syrian chemical weapons has given the Russian president the opportunity to point the finger at the Israeli nuclear weapons arsenal. Once again the Israelis, who have long harped on Iran's nuclear ambitions, have found the sands shifting beneath their feet. According to Putin, “there is only one reason why the Syrian chemical weapons exist, and that is the existence of Israeli nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction.” The implication was that the Israeli arsenal had generated the need for a deterrent in Syria. The Russian president then went on to speak of the difficulties that he believed lay ahead in stripping Syria of its chemical weapons, indicating that there was a need to strike a balance between the non-conventional weapons possessed by Israel and the Syrian chemical weapons and Iranian nuclear programme. The second development relates to Russia's role in undermining US-French-British plans for a UN Security Council resolution on Syria. The three powers had wanted the resolution worded in such a way that any failure on the part of Syria to meet its obligations with regard to the provisions on the handover of its chemical weapons and the signing of the chemical weapons treaty would automatically invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which would sanction the use of force. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated that Russia's input into the draft resolution had been to delink any Syrian failure from the automatic invocation of Chapter VII. However, the Israelis were undoubtedly even more dismayed by Iran's diplomatic breakthrough at the 68th session of the UN General Assembly and the meetings between Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif and his French and British counterparts. Rouhani's remarks at the UN and in a subsequent press conference to the effect that the crisis over the Iranian nuclear programme could be resolved within six months to a year did not go down well in Israel, which has cautioned its friends and allies to beware of Iran's “diplomatic flexibility”. It would have been even more alarmed by Obama's telephone call to Rouhani, the first direct communication between a US and Iranian head-of-state in over 30 years. The Israeli reaction was summed up by commentator Tsvi Bar'el in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, where he wrote that “the fear of losing the reason to attack Iran and the fear that the US will fall into the trap concealed by the Iranian president's sweet-talk are driving Israelis crazy.” Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, has referred to Iran as the “core of the great danger” to Israel. That great danger resides in the “strategic arch that stretches from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut”, or what some have referred to as the “Shia crescent” which would also include Iraq. Netanyahu had been confident that he could provoke the US into a war against Iran, and his optimism had been encouraged by the successes of the US and European economic pressures on the country, which he regarded as one of his most important achievements. Then there was the thrill of the approaching success, heightened as the Americans moved their fleet preparatory to a military intervention in Syria that would ultimately lead to the fall of Hizbullah and open up an opportunity for a face-to-face confrontation between the US and Iran. However, then the bubble suddenly burst. Now the US and Iran would be facing each other off, but not on the battle field, but rather over the negotiating table. The Syrian president has managed to extend his rule in Damascus, and Russia, which is allied with Syria and on good terms with Tehran, has managed to acquire stronger clout in the region, even raising the subject of Israeli WMDs. Perhaps Israel does have cause for alarm. If Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad meets his obligations under the UN resolution, and if negotiations over the Iranian nuclear programme are crowned with success, then Israel's own WMDs might come next. At all events, as its hopes dwindle of dragging its US ally into a war in the region, Israel may indeed wake up to find itself in a new Middle East, and one with which it is not familiar. (see Editorial p. 20)
