The Arab spring has weakened the Iran-led muqawama (resistance)
bloc, but another threat to Israel looms – Sunni Islamist forces
By Jonathan Spyer
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's backing of the Syrian regime during the recent upheaval has damaged his standing in the Middle East. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
In
recent years, Israeli strategists have identified an Iran-led regional alliance
as representing the main strategic challenge to the Jewish state. This alliance
looks to be emerging as one of the net losers of the Arab upheavals of 2011.
This, however, should be cause for neither satisfaction nor complacency for
Israel. The forces moving in to replace or compete with Iran and its allies are
largely no less hostile.
The
Iran-led regional alliance, sometimes called the muqawama
("resistance") bloc, consisted of a coalition of states and movements
led by Tehran and committed to altering the US-led dispensation that pertained
since the end of the cold war.
It
included, in addition to Iran itself, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, the
Sadrist movement and other Shia Islamist currents in Iraq, Syria's Assad
regime, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organisation. It appeared in recent
years also to be absorbing Hamas.
The
muqawama bloc presented itself as the representative of authentic Islamic
currents in the Middle East, and as locked in combat until the end with the
west and its clients. These included Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, and
above all, Israel.
However,
the alliance always had a rather obvious flaw: while presenting itself as an
inclusive, representative camp, it was an almost exclusively Shia Muslim club,
in a largely Sunni Muslim Middle East.
The
Iranians evidently hoped that militancy against the west, above all on behalf
of the Palestinians, could counteract the league-of-outsiders aspect of their
alliance.
For
a while, this project appeared to be working. The Iran-created and sponsored
Hezbollah movement managed to precipitate Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon
in 2000, and then avoided defeat in a subsequent round of fighting in 2006. In
a poll of Arab public opinion taken in 2008, the three most popular leaders
were Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, in that order.
But
this sense of inexorable ascendancy in which the Iran-led bloc liked to cloak
itself has fallen victim to the Arab spring. First, the Saudis crushed a
largely Shia uprising in Bahrain which the Iranians backed. But more
importantly, Iran's tooth and nail defence of the brutal Assad regime in Syria
is progressively destroying its already shallow support Sunni Muslims.
Thus,
a recent poll by the Arab-American Institute asked more than 4,000 Arabs their
view of Iran. In Saudi Arabia, 6% had a positive view – down from 89% in 2006.
In Jordan, the positive rating fell from 75% to 23%, in Egypt from 89% to 37%
in the same period.
The
uprising in Syria placed Iran in an impossible position. Maintaining its ally
in Damascus formed an essential strategic interest. Iran hoped, following the
US departure from Iraq, to achieve a contiguous line of pro-Iranian, Shia
states stretching from Iran itself to the Mediterranean. But keeping this
ambition alive in recent months required offering very visible support to a
non-Sunni regime engaged in the energetic slaughter of its own, largely Sunni
people. This has led to the drastic decline in the standing of the Iranians and
their friends.
Such
a decline was probably inevitable. Outside the core areas of Shia Arab
population, Iran's support was broad but shallow. It is noteworthy that since
the Arab Spring, Hamas appears to have distanced itself both from Assad and
from the Iranians. According to some reports, this has led to Iranian anger and
a cessation of the flow of funds to the Hamas enclave in Gaza.
These
setbacks do not mean the end of Iran and its allies as a regional power bloc.
Assad has not yet fallen. The Iranian nuclear programme is proceeding apace.
Tehran's Hezbollah client is in effective control of Lebanon. But it does mean
that in future the Iranian appeal is likely to be more decisively limited to
areas of Shia population.
The
less good news, from Israel's point of view, is that the new forces on the rise
in the region consist largely of one or another variant of Sunni Islamism.
AKP-led Turkey has emerged as a key facilitator of the Syrian opposition, in
which Sunni Islamist elements play a prominent role. Turkey appears to be in
the process of making a bid for the regional leadership also sought by Iran.
In
Egypt, too, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist forces look set to reap
an electoral dividend in November. The Sinai area has already become a zone of
activity for Islamist terror directed against Israel, because of the breakdown
in law and order in recent months. The attacks on the pipeline bringing
Egyptian gas to Israel, and the recent terror attack in Eilat, are testimony to
this.
So
while the "Shia crescent" may have suffered a strategic setback as a
result of the upheavals in the Arab world, the space left by the fall of
regional leaders looks to be filled largely by new, Sunni Islamist forces.
Israel
remains capable of defending itself against a strategic threat posed by any
constellation of these elements. But the current flux in the region is likely
to produce a more volatile, complex Middle East, consisting of an Iran-led camp
and perhaps a number of Sunni competitors, rather than the two-bloc contest of
pro-US and pro-Iranian elements which preceded 2011.
-This commentary was published in The Guardian on 07/09/2011- Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research
in International Affairs Center
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