Agenda: With George Friedman on Israel's Future
Video Transcript:
In this special edition of Agenda, STRATFOR CEO George Friedman explains that Israel needs to find a settlement to the Palestinian question or it could find itself in a strategically dangerous situation.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Colin: Attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict have hit another brick wall. Nothing really new at that, but with instability all around Israel's neighborhood, where does that leave Israel's future?
Colin: Welcome to this special edition of Agenda on Israel. With me is George Friedman. George, picture a typical young couple who've just visited their siblings in Israel and finding a country that's alone in a region of increasing turmoil and, to some extent, isolated from its traditional friends. After talking to strategists and having read a lot, including your book, what would they see as its medium-term future?
George: Well, in the medium term Israel is a very secure country. Its greatest threat of a full peripheral war in attacks of the Jordan River line and from Egypt aren't there, even though there's unrest in Egypt, even though it's possible Egypt might up abrogate peace treaty. Egypt isn't about the surge into the Sinai because they can't. They're heavily dependent on American contractors to maintain their military. They have primarily American military equipment; the Americans will turn off the spigot very quickly if the Egyptians become aggressive; Egypt can't wage war I suspect for a generation. There could be an uprising in Israel but the Israelis are ultimately able to handle that. There have been two intifadas. A third is not to destabilize them. They had trouble dealing with Hezbollah to the north but they could manage them in the end. There is increasing diplomatic isolation but to a great extent that's more paper than reality, so whether someone recognizes the Palestinian state or not doesn't change the reality on the ground.
It's in the long run, the very long run, that Israel has its greatest problem, which is that, in the end, Israel is exactly what it says it is - a very small country surrounded by enemies. Many Israelis draw from this conclusion that they must be vigilant, which is true, and fairly rigid in their foreign policy. The problem is that, as a small country surrounded by enemies, there may arise circumstances in which they will be unable to resist. They are heavily dependent on the United States to be willing to support them because in the end Israel's national security requirements outstrip their national security capabilities. The United States must support them in an extreme case. Any country that's dependent on another country for their long-term survival is always vulnerable to shifts in that country's policy. The United States at the moment shows no inclination to shift its underlying policy toward Israel, but in any worst-case scenario, which is what military planning is about, you really can't tell. You therefore have a situation in which, if the conservatives in Israel are correct and they say the Palestinians will never make peace, Israel is a small country and it is surrounded by enemies, you have now described a long-run picture of extreme danger.
Colin: Extreme danger?
George: Here is the paradox in Israel: those who feel that the Arabs are absolutely implacable and that Israel is small and vulnerable and therefore it must not change are really the ones who were painting the bleakest picture of the future of Israel because they're simply asserting that in the long-run, no matter how weak they are and how implacable their enemies, they can resist and win. That's an improbable outcome. And therefore the real problem that Israel has is this: in the long-run, if it reaches no accommodation with the Palestinians either because they won't or because the Palestinians won't, Israel faces an existential threat. Israel, as the Israelis like to say, has very little room for error, to which the answer is always inevitable that Israel will commit an error, either an error as being too weak or an error of being too assertive. The real crisis that Israel has is if you accept the premise that they are weak, small and surrounded by enemies, you have also basically said that given the margin of error, Israel is in mortal danger in the long-run. Therefore Israel must somehow redefine the game either becoming more powerful, and many point to its nuclear capability as being that power, although I don't see it as useful as others do, or reaching some sort of more dynamic diplomatic relationship. Can Israel do that? It's a question of domestic political politics. But again, and this is really important point I want to make, if you believe the position of someone like Avigdor Lieberman, who was the foreign minister and the most aggressive, if you will, who asserts most vigorously the implacability of the Arabs and the vulnerability of Israel, it seems to me that his foreign policy of rigidity is ultimately, at some point, going to get Israel in deep trouble.
Colin: You say the United States at present shows no inclination to shift its policy towards Israel, but in your new book, you say the two countries' interests are diverging.
George: The United States has interests in the Middle East beyond Israel and that includes good relations with Muslim countries. And the United States sees what the administration wrongly calls the Arab Spring as an opportunity. Israel has a very different set of interests in terms of establishing their position on the West Bank and in building settlements. These are two countries with different interests; they have an underlying interest in common in resisting certain tendencies in the Islamic world but not in others. It's a complex relationship. The United States has already pulled away from Israel, as president Obama's speech really made clear, whatever he said afterwards. The Israelis certainly have pulled away from the United States. They are not prepared to follow the American lead on a whole bunch of issues. This is a divergent relationship and it has to be recognized.
In the end, I think the divergence in a relationship puts Israel in substantial danger. I think that in the end Israel is the lesser power that is going to have to accommodate itself to the United States. But Israel, on the one hand, seems not to think that it's in that much danger and can afford this and, on the other hand, thinks it is in so much danger that it can't afford any flexibility whatsoever. Either one of Israel's positions leads it to the same place: a fairly inflexible foreign policy, which is a perfectly good idea unless you hit the margin of error and something goes terribly wrong. It's interesting that those who believe that there's a margin of error, a very small margin of error, for Israel are those who argue that they're the safest by being the most rigid and assertive. That may be true but small margin of error could exist on both sides of the equation. It's hard to predict where it is. The key is that there is a small margin of error and Israel, I think, makes it smaller by taking positions that alienate it from the United States, no matter how unreasonable the United States appears to be. Ultimately Israel needs the strategic reserve that the United States represents.
Colin: Is it then inevitable Israel has to resolve the Palestinian question or could it find some accommodation elsewhere?
George: Israel has reached an accommodation with its neighboring countries in spite of its inability to settle the Palestinian dispute. Egypt has a peace treaty, has had a peace treaty for over 30 years, and that's a very viable one. Israel has a very close working relationship with a Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Israel has many allies inside of Lebanon. Israel even has a quiet understanding with the Syrians, or has had one, concerning Lebanon and Syria's assertion of control over Hezbollah. It's been a complex relationship. It's not really a question of Israel not having decent relations with its neighbors. But the real problem is these relationships change. We have the possibility of Egypt changing its foreign policy. Many things can shift. The worst-case scenario for Israel would be a conventional war along its frontiers and simultaneously an uprising among the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and perhaps in Israel itself. That's the worst-case scenario and a scenario that really is frightening because it's one that is difficult for Israel to survive and certainly difficult to stop with nuclear weapons. What are you going to do with nuclear weapons? Even if you wipeout Cairo or Damascus, it's very difficult to use them against armies because your own armies are so close to them. You really are in an interesting situation and that's why the Palestinian issue, if it can be settled, needs to be settled. Israel is in the potential position, it's not there now but in the potential position, where it's facing significant foreign threats and a massive uprising simultaneously. It's hard to imagine anything worse than that, and therefore finding some settlement with the Palestinians is in their interests. Of course it has to be remembered that for all the discussion of a settlement with the Palestinians, a substantial number of Palestinians adhere to Hamas. Hamas opposes the existence of the state of Israel. Hamas' position on any sort of a settlement is that it's only an interim settlement and in the long-run the conflict will continue. So it's very difficult to understand how Israel creates a peace treaty with the Palestinians when the Palestinians are so widely divided between Fatah and Hamas and where Hamas commands so much respect among the Palestinians and where Hamas simply opposes the existence of Israel. In looking at all of this, whereas you can point to what Israel should do, you also have to point at what can it do when the question of the survival of Israel is not a principle that the Palestinians will accept. This does not mean that Israel doesn't have a problem, that the solution is not a Palestinian state. The problem is that the Israelis have is the danger that arises if the Palestinians are as implacable as they appear to be. And if you have a massive political shift over the next generation in the states bordering Israel, then Israel is truly in a strategic bind.
Colin: George, thank you. And join us again for Agenda next week.
