While the Arab countries are sweating blood to survive the scorching heat of the ‘Arab Spring', the Israelis are dangling their feet joyfully in the cool water on the other side. They are confident that raging domestic disputes in Arab countries over identity, ethnicity, religious freedom, compensation for war crimes committed by removed leaders or their descendants will take ages to overcome. While Egypt remains the exception, there is much internal fighting in Arab countries bordering Israel; and the destruction of the strong armies in Iraq and Syria could mean that the Arabs will need quite some time before they will be able to resume their hostilities towards the Jewish state. The Arab Spring appears to have prepared the Middle East stage for ethnic and ideological wars in Israel's neighbouring countries. Israeli Arabs will be the victims of Israel being declared a Jewish state. As non-Jews they will be stripped of their Israeli citizenship and given the choice of living there as foreigners or move elsewhere. The Israeli authorities have already started displacing Arab holders of Israeli citizenship by confiscating their land. The Israeli authorities refuse to issue building or maintenance permits to Israeli Arabs to force them to leave their homes. The Sinai Peninsula seems to be identified by Washington and the EU as an alternative home for Palestinian refugees displaced from the overcrowded Gaza Strip. Territorial disputes, which have plagued the region in the 20th century, are no longer the scourge; the classic Arab-Israeli conflict over a Palestinian territory has been relegated to footnotes in history. The Arab Spring, which seems to have been strategically planned by the US and EU, has given rise to a new reality in the Middle East. In the face of Israel's determined campaign to establish a Jewish state, Islamists have noisily and impatiently risen to power in different Arab countries, whether bordering Israel or not. Syria is now on the brink of disintegration and giving birth to Sunni, Shi'ite, Kurdish and Christian states. The Syrian army is bombarding towns and villages to wipe out any armed resistance to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Western countries are warning that without the immediate departure of Assad's regime, Syria will plunge helplessly into an all-out civil war, the flames of which would engulf neighbouring Lebanon. Iraq is desperately trying to hold itself together in the face of incessant attempts by Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites to break away from their motherland. European countries have flung their doors open to Iraqi Christians to escape the horrible clashes between warring parties. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (MB) are trying to tame chauvinist Salafists (diehard Muslim conservatives) who provocatively campaigning to establish the absolute rule of Muslim Sharia (law) in the country. The imposition of Muslim Sharia in the Sudan was the last nail in the coffin of this Arab country after decades of brutal civil war, which claimed more than one million victims on both sides. Sudan is now divided into two states. The Islamists, who ascended to power in Tunisia, are trying to allay the Tunisian people's worries over Islamic chauvinism, which allegedly spurns and rejects any non-Islamic ideology. Tunisia's Islamists are promising the nervous nation that the imposition of Muslim Sharia would be carefully calibrated to guarantee the human rights of non-Muslims and unrestricted freedom in observing their religious rituals (Egypt's MB is doing the same). The general elections in Libya next door have revealed that the nation's bleeding wounds will take a long time to heal. These elections showed that Libya's Islamists struggled with the liberals to establish an influential presence in a country torn apart between Gaddafi loyalists, revolutionary forces and Islamists. Israeli war strategists declare with glee that it will take ages before the Arabs could get back on their feet. These strategists are now ruminating about the doomed Arab nationalism in favour of an Islamic identity. Licking big ice cream cones and crunching crisps and cookies, they are betting on which Arab country (or countries) would have to host millions of Palestinians after their departure from the narrow Gaza Strip, while Sinai has been nominated as the permanent location for the proposed Palestinian state.
