Israel has been panicked by recent events in the Arab world, causing it to demand ever-greater deliveries of weapons, writes Galal Nassar Barakpresident Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1970. Recently, however, Elie Podeh, an Israeli scholar on Arab and Islamic affairs, observed in Ha'aretz that "the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the demonstrations sweeping other Arab capitals (which will probably lead to more revolutions) prove -- as though it needed proving -- that the Arab world has not disappeared." Podeh stressed the importance of appreciating this fact. "Because of its linguistic, cultural and historical relations, the Arab world is a region in which something that occurs in one place will have effects in other places." He further noted Egypt's unique position in this regard. Since Egypt has always been the pacesetter in the Arab world, "it is reasonable to presume that its current revolution will lead to demonstrations, uprisings and, perhaps, too, revolutions in other places in the Arab world." Clearly, one of the chief aims of the Israeli propaganda campaign today is to persuade the Israeli public of the need to increase the Israeli defence budget. The general line is that the popular uprisings throughout the Arab world spell peril for Israel, forcing it to rethink its political and military strategy and to reconstitute military units dismantled following the peace treaty with Egypt. In fact, such scare-mongering by the military establishment should be familiar to the Israeli public. This is virtually an annual tradition that coincides with the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, ratifying the military budget. For three years now, it has been the good fortune of advocates of larger defence spending that this occasion has also marked the anniversary of the assassination of Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyah and therefore a time when Israeli security goes into a state of alert. This year the advocates of increased Israeli military spending have had the added benefit of the uprisings in the Arab world, which they feel sure will lead to an expansion of Iranian influence in the region, to feed the type of paranoia needed to win approval for higher military spending. Such increases would aim at a further US$1.5 billion this year, which would be a record increase in the IDF budget, and, if approved, would bring it up to US$18 billion. When boasting of the successful test of Israel's HITS defence system, primarily intended to intercept Iranian and Syrian missiles, Barak said that "during talks over the past year within the framework of a multi-year plan, it was agreed that the plan should include agreement on the size of the budget and how it should be distributed." He added that "we are working to coordinate four systems, among them Iron Dome, intended to defend Israel from recurrent threats, and HITS-2, both of which have been fully tested." Barak then said that the money would be found and allocated in order to defend Israel "in times of calm... and in times of emergency." However, Barak has failed to convince many Israelis, who see the country's present situation in a different light. In such people's opinion, the present upheavals in the Arab world in fact reduce the likelihood of war because political divisions and other factors in the Arab states hamper their ability to go to war. Significantly, one person who has expressed this view has been the former director of the Israel ministry of finance, who has pointed out that conditions in the Arab countries now compel the latter to focus attention on security and stability and on improving the economic conditions of their people and not on threatening war with Israel. Many other Israeli economic experts agree, though these have nevertheless not managed to curb the financial ambitions of the country's military establishment, which continues to ask for more. Today, Israel's military establishment is demanding between US$40-70 million for the country's navy in order to implement defence plans for the Tamar and Leviathan offshore natural gas fields that Israel has discovered more than 130 km into the Mediterranean. Israeli military officials have argued that the anti-Israeli organisations that threaten the gas pipeline from Egypt could also threaten pipelines from fields they claim lie within Israel's territorial waters. The present drilling plan envisions dozens of wells, each of which could become a potential target. In order to defend these fields and pipelines, such people say, Israel's naval defences need to cover an area one-and-half times the size of Israel itself. In addition, the Israeli military is also asking for surveillance equipment for use along the country's borders with Gaza, Egypt and Lebanon, in order to prevent alleged infiltrators and money to furnish its artillery units with Namir tanks, upgraded versions of the Merkava tanks the country currently possesses. It is also asking for more money to defend military bases and airports, in order to ensure that these are protected against missile attack in the event of war. The list goes on and on, and barely a week goes by without the military adding a new item to its list on the grounds of the "urgency of the dangers that threaten the state of Israel." Such "security tricks" have been frequently used by the Israeli military to obtain increases in defence allocations in the opinion of many analysts. Last year, the government approved a state defence budget of 53.4 billion shekels for 2011, while the ministry of defence submitted a request for 55 billion shekels based on its own projections. In other words, the military received $1.6 billion shekels less than it asked for, though things could still have been worse: the Israeli ministry of finance wanted defence spending reduced by 7 billion shekels over two years. The Israeli defence budget could be said to have increased by regular and steady increments. In 2000, it stood at 39 billion shekels, and by 2010 it had increased to 49 billion shekels -- a growth of 10 billion shekels over a decade. About a quarter of this growth was due to earlier commitments, such as the need to pay benefits to the growing numbers of veterans from the military and security services. Yet, over the past two years, the defence establishment has been looking for a 5 billion shekel annual growth rate, two-and-a-half times the average annual growth rate over the past decade and equivalent to more than 10 per cent of security expenditures (without taking into account US aid). This year a number of book-keeping inconsistencies have also come to light. How much has been spent on the IDF's human resources, for example? By how much has defence spending grown over the past few years? Differences between the army's and the ministry of finance's figures sometimes amount to several billion shekels. If this is now accepted as an established fact, how exactly will the requested money be spent over the next two years? To the Israeli government and army, such things seem insignificant details. Their answer is simple: until 2012 we will spend more money and we will have a richer army as a result. *** T he Tel Aviv-based Israeli National Security Research Institute recently published an important study that held that "Israel's need for a strong security apparatus is an existential question" and that, accordingly, defence allocations had to be proportionally higher than in many other countries. Nevertheless, the study also held that there was a need to establish a scale of national priorities in which there should be ongoing discussion over the amount of economic resources earmarked for security at the expense of other national objectives. The report cited professor Omer Moav, chair of the advisory forum at the Israeli ministry of finance, who said that the ministry felt that "the security budget is too large and that it jeopardises the Israeli economy." The report went on to observe that the country's "security budget is the largest of all the state budgets, even deducting the amounts contributed by US aid. Nevertheless, it should also be pointed out that the security budget contains items that are not included in other ministerial budgets and that are not connected with military activities, such as payment of salaries of retired security personnel, which come to 4.5 billion shekels, and expenditure for rehabilitation facilities and bereaved families, which come to 4 billion shekels." The study suggested that the key to understanding Israeli defence spending was to look at it in terms of what it termed "security consumption," listing various categories of this. The first category listed consisted of the wages of conscripts and regular soldiers, together with civilian employees and other ministry of defence workers and other human resource expenses, such as food, clothing and other facilities. It also consisted of retirement benefits for contracted soldiers and workers in the security apparatus and social security payments made on behalf of soldiers serving in the reserve forces. These expenditures came to 41.8 per cent of Israeli gross security consumption in 2009. A second category consisted of the purchase of domestic goods and services and construction expenses, which amounted to 39.2 per cent of Israeli security consumption in 2009. "Security consumption," according to the report, included the services of the intelligence agencies Mossad and Shavak, which otherwise do not come under the regular military budget, but did not include other categories of the budget, such as payments and expenses that in the national accounts are listed as welfare, healthcare, bonuses, rehabilitation, compensation expenses for bereaved families, payments into the fund to rehabilitate discharged soldiers, and the like. According to the report, one area that required special attention with a view to separating off the security component was the budget devoted to the security industries, such as the Rafael Arms Development Authority, which are largely export oriented and serve multiple functions. The same thing applied to payments made to municipalities in Israeli civil administration areas, which oversee education, healthcare, welfare and ring road construction in the West Bank. On the whole, the report indicated that security expenditure places a great burden on the Israeli economy. However, it added, when considered in terms of security consumption in relation to GDP, while Israel still ranks as one of the highest defence spenders in the world, the burden is much lighter than it once was. In fact, the report claimed, this burden had steadily declined since the mid-1970s to the level it was before the 1967 War. If this is indeed the case, then increases in Israeli military expenditures today will not have such severe impacts on the Israeli economy as a whole. However, they will still have a major impact on the public sector. In this regard, US aid (US$2.775 billion in 2010) remains vital to the Israeli national budget and the Israeli government's financial manoeuvrability. Time appears to be a major criterion in Israel's assessment of the likelihood of a confrontation with Egypt. The other factors are details. Israel will, therefore, reorder its strategic calculations accordingly, at both the foreign and domestic levels. The domestic situation in Israel today is not the same as it was before the Egyptian revolution, in view of this event's repercussions on the economy and the possibility of Israel's having to gear itself up for a confrontation, all of which will have sent tremors through Israeli society and ultimately weakened Israel's control over and ability to sustain the occupation of the West Bank. We can, therefore, expect a restructuring of the Israeli political parties. Most likely, the familiar game between the Israeli right and left will end as new balances come into play as a result of the new circumstances and dramatic changes. Israel is also coming under increasing pressure to make its position clear on the occupation. The foot-dragging and evasiveness it has exercised over the two decades of the so-called peace process will no longer be available to it when it faces the choice of either war or ending the occupation. Israeli leaders know this, and they also know that the risks of war today are much greater than they have been before, because in addition to greater military might they will also be facing the return of Egypt to the arena as a powerful and pivotal force. The option of ending the occupation of Palestine also has other types of ramifications for Israel. Above all, it would entail the admission that Israel is indeed an occupying power and force it to examine its Zionist mentality and the inherently arrogant and racist attitudes that have worked to sustain this. As a result of the democratic revolution in Egypt, Israel will no longer be able to market itself as an "oasis of democracy" in the region. At the same time, the revolution may also have alerted Israelis to another possible scenario. If the West could drop a strategic ally like former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak so quickly, might it not, at some point in the confrontation with the Arab world, drop Israel too, were western nations to see this as a strategic necessity? If western countries were to begin to see that their interests lay more with the Arab world than with Israel, what would Israel's fate be? Such are the kind of questions that Israeli decision-makers must certainly be asking themselves today. Indeed, Ari Shefat, writing in Ha'aretz, foresees just such a possibility: "when the West abandons us, we will feel isolated and surrounded, once again alone facing our own fate. That fate is looking worse and worse in view of what is happening in the Arab street, which is naturally hostile to us." This conclusion appears to agree with an Israeli study on the current changes in the Arab world and their impact on the behaviour of the Israeli government. The analysts who wrote the report suggest that Israeli officials are scrambling furtively behind the scenes in the hope of safeguarding gains that Israel made over the past two decades under the old Arab order. Israel has not had to move so secretly in a long time, the analysts say, but it would be impossible for an Israeli official to appear openly in Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco, for this would only trigger further hostility both toward Israel and toward the rulers of these countries and embarrass the US and hamper Washington's efforts to safeguard the remaining bases of the old Middle Eastern order. The study argues that Israel's losses from the changes in the region have been automatically translated into gains for anti-western and resistance forces, notably Syria and Iran, something which has compounded the anxieties of Washington, single-handedly struggling to save both its own interests and those of Israel at this delicate juncture. Given the regional significance and impact of the Egyptian revolution, it is important to ask how Israel will now deal with Egypt in the post-Mubarak era. The likelihood is that Israel will handle Egypt with extreme care until the situation becomes clearer. However, what most worries Israel is the priorities that Egyptian society will declare in the course of its first free and democratic elections, especially as regards the Egyptian-Israeli relationship and the Palestinian cause. What will be the future of Egypt's natural gas agreement with Israel, for example, which many in Egypt regard as unjust? As a result, Israel has already begun to look at alternative sources of fuel. What will be the fate of the Rafah crossing? And what about those thorny provisions in the Camp David Accords and its annexes that impinge on Egypt's sovereignty over the Sinai? Political and diplomatic skirmishes over such issues could well become the flashpoints for a larger confrontation. Hardly had the ink dried on the Camp David Accords just over three decades ago than Israeli forces invaded and occupied southern Lebanon and swept northwards to besiege Beirut. Israel had the luxury to reorganise and redeploy its forces based on the calculation that its central front now lay to the north. However, in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, the possibility of its having to contend on multiple fronts has resurfaced. Would Israel opt for war? Which way would it face? Many Israeli academics now fear that the Arab genie has emerged from its bottle. One comments ominously, for example, that "what began in Tunisia and then moved to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain has been spreading like wildfire throughout the Arab world, threatening to plunge the Middle East into another age of violence and political instability." "However, unlike in the past this violence will come from a new and unknown source in Arab politics -- the people. The people have discovered that they possess something new, something they had never known or used before, namely political power."
