Israel Update for August 2013

On August 20th, Egyptian authorities arrested the overall leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Muhammad Badie, who is officially known as the "Supreme Guide" of the Sunni Muslim group. Wearing his usual gray tunic, the 70 year old clerical leader was apprehended at his apartment in Cairo. He joined Muhammad Morsi and other senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including chief financial strategist Khairat Shater, who are being detained by the new interim military government. Badie's son, Ammar, was subsequently killed during a violent protest rally in Cairo.

Popular support for the new government's actions sharply increased after Muslim Brotherhood supporters ambushed two minivans transporting dozens of policemen to their outposts in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Officials said 25 policemen lost their lives in the attacks near the border town of Rafah, while several others were badly injured. Security forces all over Egypt were then ordered to step up their suppression of pro-Morsi protest rallies, which have often sparked off violent mob attacks upon nearby police and army positions in many locations.

The dramatic and highly controversial Egyptian military action came just days after Sunni Muslim terrorists linked to Al Qaida fired several rockets at the southern Israeli coastal city of Eilat, prompting the Netanyahu government to shut down the international airport there for the second time this month. The Iron Dome anti-missile system, which was recently deployed near the resort city, was also ordered into action. The head of the Egyptian army's Strategic Centre, Major General Alaa Ezzidine, later told reporters that military leaders are currently working on a plan to reign in growing lawlessness in the strategic Sinai Peninsula, which links Africa to Asia near to where the Suez Canal connects the Indian Ocean to the landlocked Mediterranean Sea. He said it "includes intensifying the movement of military patrols in sites which jihadists have taken advantage of in the past, along with providing more weapons to curb the existing ambushes."

The World Responds

Western leaders were in a quandary as to how to respond to the military takeover of Egypt, which some termed excessive if not brutal. The Egyptian military's main international backer, the United States, denounced the army crackdown. In Washington, President Barrack Obama ordered the cancellation of joint "Bright Star" military exercises that annually bring American and Egyptian forces together each September to test their ability to cooperate in times of war.

After supporting the ouster of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the American Commander in Chief once again blasted last month's military coup and subsequent suppression of pro-Morsi demonstrations. While vacationing in Martha's Vineyard on the Massachusetts Atlantic Ocean coast, President Obama said the United States "strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by Egypt's interim government and security forces. We deplore violence against civilians. We support universal rights essential to human dignity, including the right to peaceful protest." While adding that the American administration "wants to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back." Similar statements came from London, Paris and other Western capital cities. Few noted that Islamic militants had played a large role in provoking the increasingly harsh Egyptian military crackdown, especially by ambushing government security forces in the Sinai Peninsula. Several Muslim groups blamed Israel for somehow instigating the turbulence in Egypt in an attempt to destabilize the region, as if Israel needed any more trouble along its roiling borders.

Israeli Middle East analysts generally supported the Egyptian military action, noting that the influential Arab country had been plunging back into chaos for nearly a year as a result of the inept Morsi government, which was fanning sectarian flames in Egypt and threatening to sever the 1978 Camp David peace treaty with Israel. Had the army not stepped in, a total collapse of Egyptian society may have been on the horizon, they said. Many also criticized Obama for his lukewarm support at best for the Egyptian military leadership, which has played a vital role in keeping the controversial US-brokered Camp David peace treaty in force for three and a half decades. "Obama has once again revealed his ignorance of Middle East issues and America's essential security interests in the region," said one analyst interviewed on Israel television. Another went even further, saying that as he did in his Cairo speech during his first term in office, the American leader has revealed his underlying sympathy for Islamic jihadist groups that have openly declared holy war against Israel and the West.

American Republican Senator John McCain was among many voices in Washington calling upon the Obama administration to immediately cut off all foreign aid to Egypt forthwith. Currently the United States provides 1.3 billion American dollars each year, almost all of it flowing to the military. Analysts say around 80% of the army's annual weapons procurements are funded by Uncle Sam. However the new Egyptian interim regime expressed indifference to the threatened aid cutoff, with new Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy announcing he is currently reviewing the American aid provide to Egypt. He said he wants "to determine what is useful and what it not, and what is being used to pressure Egypt, and whether this aid has good intentions and credibility." Analysts said the comments probably reflect the interim government's growing conviction that Saudi Arabia and other wealthy gulf Arab Sunni Muslim states will quickly open their government coffers to support the Egyptian military in its quest to restore order to the highly influential country. They point out that the last thing the sheikdoms need right now is uprisings led by Al Qaida-linked Muslim militants who are encouraged by America's tepid support for the Egyptian army crackdown.

With American taxpayer aid to Egypt now at risk of being imminently severed, the Virginia-based Defense News media outlet reported that both US and Israeli government officials have signaled their desire to increase the amount of annual support given by the United States to Israel in order to insure the Jewish state's continuing survival in an extremely hostile Muslim neighborhood. Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to Washington, told the American media outlet that the Netanyahu government "is looking at a holistic Mideast picture, which includes the growth of missile arsenals in Lebanon and Gaza; the strategic situation in Sinai; the Syrian situation as it impacts us and other countries, including Jordan, and the fact that all this is going on in an age of sequestration." Since 1985, the United States has provided Israel with three billion dollars in annual aid, three-fourths of which must by law be spent in the United States to purchase weapons, army uniforms and other military items, meaning most of the US aid quickly returns to the country where it helps bolster America's wobbly economy.

Trouble In The North

While naturally focusing on the intense crisis plaguing neighboring Egypt, Israeli government and military officials were forced during the month to refocus on the blood soaked warfare raging in nearby Syria and growing violence in Lebanon. Military analysts say the embattled Assad regime now controls less than half of the mostly Muslim country, mainly around the capital Damascus and the southern border area with Jordan and the Mediterranean coastal zone dominated by the small Alawite sect that is allied with the Shiite wing of Islam. Mostly Sunni Muslim rebel forces now control around 50% of the country of almost 21 million people, which is three times larger than Israel's current population but less than one-third of Egypt's over 80 million residents. A third zone of control lies in the northeast corner of the country, where Kurdish forces have set up a virtual autonomous mini-state in recent months adjacent to Kurdish areas in neighboring Turkey and Iraq.

The Syrian crisis roared back into the Israeli headlines when it was reported on August 20th that forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad had fired chemical agents into a neighborhood south of Damascus under the control of opposition fighters. News reports said at least 350 people, most of them civilian noncombatants, had perished in the horrendous assault. Other reports claimed more than 1,000 people had been killed, with thousands more injured. The regime quickly denied that it had deployed the deadly weapons that are known to exist in the government's large military arsenal. Television outlets around the world broadcast gruesome scenes of some of the victims, many of them children, squirming for life in the wake of the apparent chemical assault, said to be the largest since Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein gassed some internal opponents and Iranian troops toward the end of his war with Iran waged in the 1980s.

Almost exactly one year to the day after he declared that significant use of chemical weapons would trigger an American response, President Obama indicated that he would order some form of military response to the attack. However it was not clear what action the American government would take in the face of the deadly assault, given that all opinion surveys show the American public is fed up with seemingly never ending wars in the region stretching back to 2001. Analysts said at the very least, Obama will probably begin to enforce a no fly zone over Syrian skies, which would mean stepped up US involvement in the two and a half year old internal war but not any actual boots on the ground. US warships were ordered to head to the eastern Mediterranean region late in the month as the President met with his national security team to discuss the deteriorating situation. Syrian officials warned the entire Middle East would be set ablaze if Western forces intervene in the conflict.

In London, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the British government "believes that this was a chemical attack by the Assad regime. The only possible explanation of what we've been able to see is a chemical attack. There is no other plausible explanation for casualties so intense in such a small area on this scale." Hague stressed the insidious attack was "not something that a humane and civilized world can ignore." He urged the Assad regime to grant visiting UN weapons inspectors quick access to the site of the reported chemical attack in order to verify widespread evidence that Syrian government weapons were indeed deployed against hundreds of the country's own citizens. Local anti-government activists were busy gathering up evidence of the apparent massacre to hand over to UN monitors who were in Syria to investigate earlier reported chemical attacks in the north of the country.