The past several days have witnessed not one but two momentous, even stunning, developments in Turkish foreign policy that are reverberating through the region. Both are the work of Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former university professor who became Turkish foreign minister last year. Before that, Davutoğlu (shown on far right with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem) served for several years as the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy advisor. In a manner perhaps befitting a university professor, Davutoğlu has aspired to give Turkish foreign policy a comprehensive and consistent conceptual basis. He laid out his vision in his book Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position (Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu). According to this vision, whereas in the past the Turkish Republic followed a policy of quasi-isolation and self-imposed quarantine from its neighbors, today it should instead seek to take advantage of the cultural and historical links it shares with other countries in its region. As foreign minister, Davutoğlu has been working tirelessly to put his stamp on Turkish foreign policy. The past week has offered two dramatic examples of Turkey’s new foreign policy orientation.

An opening to the East. The first of took place on October 10 in Zurich where the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers signed a protocol agreeing to open their border and establish diplomatic ties between their two countries. Up until recently, observers – Armenian, Turkish, and foreign alike – generally regarded the idea of a Turkish-Armenian rapprochement as sheer fantasy. Precisely because their histories are intertwined, the rift between the Armenian and Turkish peoples is deep and multi-dimensional, going beyond already contentious geopolitics to extend into the very hearts of modern Armenian and Turkish identities and the founding myths of the Turkish and Armenian republics. Attitudes on both sides are so sensitive that despite even lengthy and meticulous preparation by the Armenian and Turkish foreign ministries, the signing of the protocol was almost consigned to remain the realm of fantasy right before it took place.

At the last minute both foreign ministers objected to the public statement planned by the other. The ceremony was saved only when, apparently at the suggestion of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the two foreign ministers compromised by agreeing simply to refrain from making any statements at all. Such is the fragility of the rapprochement. Moreover, to come into force, the legislatures of Armenia and Turkey must first ratify the protocols. Multiple constituencies opposed to the normalization of relations exist inside (and outside) the two countries, and they may well prove skeptics and nay-sayers correct.

Nonetheless, the mere fact that Davutoğlu was able to bring the two countries this close in itself represents a fundamental change in Turkish foreign policy. And whereas the likelihood of failure in these sorts of sensitive and politically charged undertakings typically deters most, Davutoğlu’s tack is to capitalize in these situations on the power of boldness combined with persistence to change first expectations and then reality. Simply by striving for seemingly unthinkable change, Davutoğlu reckons, one demonstrates that change is possible, and thereby one changes fundamental calculations of all parties. The fact that Davutoğlu was able to coordinate both American and Russian support for this Caucasian gambit reflects his exceptional diplomatic skills and the considerable momentum he has already generated for normalization. Turkey’s opening to Armenia will have an impact on everything from stability in the greater Caucasus and Caspian region through world energy supplies and the future of NATO.

An opening to the South. As momentous as Turkey’s opening to its east in the Caucasus might be, its opening to the south has the potential to change regional dynamics even more. For most of its existence, the Turkish Republic has enjoyed at best cool relations with Syria. During the 1980s and 1990s, Turkish-Syrian ties were outright confrontational as the two states sparred over such issues as Turkish control of the waters of the Euphrates and Syrian support for the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan or PKK) inside of Turkey. Relations hit a nadir in 1999 when Turkey threatened to invade Syria if it continued to provide sanctuary to the head of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan. This period of heightened Turkish-Syrian tension overlapped with the establishment of a security partnership with Israel that became one of the constituent elements of the regional balance of power.

Relations between Syria and Turkey began to improve slowly after 1999, while ties to Israel became noticeably more strained in the wake of Israel’s 2006 military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But this week, what remained of the old architecture of regional relations came crashing down. First, in a pointed gesture, Turkey retracted its invitation to Israel to participate in the aerial war games known as “Anatolian Eagle.” Turkey has hosted the war games annually since 2001, and it has routinely involved Israel in them. This year, however, Turkey refused to allow the Israeli air force to take part as form of protest over Israel’s policies toward Gaza and in particular Operation Cast Lead.

The United States and Italy subsequently pulled out of Anatolian Eagle in protest. If this gesture was intended to cow Turkey, it failed. Lest there be any misunderstanding about Turkey’s motives for excluding Israel, Davutoğlu clarified matters on October 13 when, in what Turkish newspapers described as a “warning” to Israel, he demanded that the “human tragedy in Gaza” end and that “respect be shown to the al-Aqsa mosque, the Noble Sanctuary, and East Jerusalem, which are sacred to Muslims.” The day before, the Turkish foreign ministry on its website described the public interpretations and commentary of Israeli officials regarding Anatolian Eagle as “unacceptable” and chided those officials to use “common sense” in their future statements and actions.

No less significant than the content of Davutoğlu’s “warning” was the place where he chose to issue it, in the Syrian city of Aleppo at the first ministers’ meeting of the newly formed Turkish-Syrian High Level Strategic Cooperation Council. Whereas a decade ago common opposition to Syria served as a glue binding Turkey to Israel, today Turkey’s foreign minister issues appeals from inside Syria to Israel to heed the sensitivities of Muslims toward their holy sites in Jerusalem.

During his visit to Syria, Davutoğlu underscored that the opening up to Syria is neither a matter of tactics nor temporary, but is constituent part of the new Turkish foreign policy. Thus, for example, when he announcing the introduction of visa-free travel for Syrian and Turkish citizens, he described the occasion as a third common holiday for Turkish and Syrian citizens alongside the two major Islamic feasts Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha. Davutoğlu brought to Syria nine cabinet members and revealed a raft of projects ranging from educating Syrian students in Turkey through the removal of mines from the Turkish-Syrian border to the transformation of Aleppo into a major logistical hub for expanded Turkish trade with the Arab Middle East. The Turks hope to use Aleppo to meet Arab demand for Turkish foodstuffs.

There is a certain poetic irony to the Turkish dream of exporting food throughout the Middle East via Syria. Damascus’ Ottoman-era fame for its sweets gave rise to a Turkish saying that aptly summarized official Turkish attitudes from the 1920s through the end of the century toward all things Arab: Ne Şam’ın şekeri, ne Arabın yüzü, literally “Neither sweets from Damascus nor an Arab’s face,” which can be roughly translated as, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Arabs, even if they do have tasty sweets.

Instead, while in Aleppo Davutoğlu uttered an entirely different phrase to describe Turkish-Syrian relations: “A common fate, a common history, a common future.”

Israeli Anxieties. Needless to say, the developments of the past several days have thrown Israeli politicians and policymakers into confusion and no small bit of anxiety, with some urging caution and others hinting at forms of retaliation against Turkey ranging from ending Israeli arms sales to withdrawing support for Turkish lobbyists in America. At this point, however, it would seem that there is little to be gained from responding quickly in the hopes of either assuaging Ankara or deterring it from similar demarches. The Turkish-Israeli strategic partnership is no longer in crisis, but has essentially ended. Indeed, unconfirmed reports in the Syrian and Turkish media promise the conclusion of a formal Turkish-Syrian strategic partnership in the near future.

Not surprisingly, Davutoğlu’s criticisms of Israel and expressions of solidarity have met with great enthusiasm inside Syria. Without a doubt, the sound of cheering crowds in a country long known to the Turks as an obstinate and troublesome neighbor must deeply gratify Davutoğlu. That gratification will certainly only increase as others in the Arab world and beyond join in to hail the change in Turkey’s regional orientation away from Israel to the Arabs. Turkey’s expanded engagement with the Arab world may well turn out to be a boon for all involved, as Davutoğlu surely hopes. Turkey has a great deal to offer by way of its relative political openness and economic dynamism to the Arab world. If done correctly, Turkey’s engagement could help point the way for the Arabs to transform their societies into more open, competitive, and democratic ones.

But that will be no easy task, nor will it be a short one. Initiatives such as student exchanges and increased business contacts can help change societies, but they require decades to yield fruit and provide little gratification after their inception.

Turkey’s engagement also carries real risks if the course of influence runs in the opposite direction, i.e. from the Arab countries to Turkey. This was the reasoning behind the traditional Kemalist desire to keep all things Middle Eastern at arms length and under control. Turkish officials saw the Middle East as a cultural swamp from which Turkey must escape, not a realm of common culture in which it could thrive.

As Davutoğlu must recognize, the problems of the Arab world, and the sources of its misery, are greater and deeper than the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab countries are politically dysfunctional and most are economically moribund. There is little that they can offer the Turks aside from perhaps oil and gas and markets for Turkish consumer goods. In earlier eras, others such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein sought to expand their influence throughout the region by appealing to Arab sympathies against Israel, but their efforts did nothing but bring their own societies to ruin and leave the Arabs as whole worse off. Today, Ahmadinejad is attempting something similar with his backing for Hezbollah and routine denunciations of Israel. Yet, one need only look at Iran’s recent elections to answer the question of whether Ahmadinejad’s version of statecraft is serving anyone but himself and those close to him.

Israel’s policies are not above criticism, but if Davutoğlu truly aspires to have Turkey play the role of an effective regional leader, he will have to direct some of his criticism toward those entities, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, that celebrate violent confrontation with Israel over the development of their own societies. And he will have to do so soon. With Iran in determined pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, an enigmatic Obama administration sending mixed signals to the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah mantaining their romantic commitments to violence, the sight and sound of Turkey closing ranks with Syria will not spur Israelis to step back and announce a “kindler, gentler” Israel to soothe its neighbors. Instead, it will only magnify existing fears among Israelis that their country does indeed face an unprecedented existential threat that only desperate action can solve. Better than most people, Davutoğlu should understand that precisely what Israel lacks is the sort of strategic depth Turkey possesses, and this has consequences for Israeli policymaking.

But does Davutoğlu understand this? Right now, the indications are that he does not, or at least does not care.

Earlier this month, the Saban Center at Brookings published a monograph by Itamar Rabinovich titled Damascus, Jerusalem, and Washington: The Syrian-Israeli Relationship as a U.S. Policy Issue. Rabinovich, a distinguished Israeli academic and former diplomat, has been a longtime analyst of the Israeli-Syrian peace track. Based on the title, I had expected to read a proposal for how Washington might best advance Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations.

But the paper doesn’t make a proposal. Instead, the study focuses on the history of the Israeli-Syrian track and the U.S.-Syrian bilateral relationship since 1974, concluding with four short scenarios of how that relationship might evolve.

Rabinovich is a highly regarded historian of Syria (he has just published a very readable collection of his essays on the subject), and there is little with which to quibble in his description of U.S.-Syria-Israel dealings from 1974 to 2001. But his analysis of Bush-era Syria policy rests on a subtle presumption that the Bush administration erred in refusing to engage with Damascus. The stage is set in the preface, where Rabinovich critiques the Bush administration’s policy “neither to engage with nor attack [Syria], but to seek soft ways of penalizing it [that] failed to work.”

Rabinovich could have been a bit more charitable. After all, Israeli efforts to engage Damascus in the 1990s (in which he took part) not only failed to deliver any benefits, but resulted in the strengthened position of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the erosion of Israeli deterrence. But the main problem with this paper is that the author tends to downplay the Syrian contribution to the impasse in U.S.-Syrian relations, by a method that might be described as argument by elision and omission. Here are a few examples.

• Syria in Iraq. Rabinovich notes that in September 2008, Secretary of State Rice commended the Syrians for (in Rabinovich’s words) “taking serious steps to seal their border with Iraq.” “In contrast to Rice,” he complains, “Bush persisted with his anti-Syrian, anti-Asad view and conduct.”

In fact, Bush had good cause to “persist.” The very month when Rice made her comment, Maj.-Gen. John Kelly, Commander of MNF-West in Iraq, said this in a press conference:

The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side… The Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi intelligence forces feel that al Qaeda operatives and others operate, live pretty openly on the Syrian side… Syria is problematic for me but, more importantly, for the Iraqis because it doesn’t seem that there’s much being done on the other side of the border to assist this country in terms of maintaining the border and the integrity of, you know, Iraqi sovereignty.

It was immediately subsequent to Rice’s praise of Syria’s border measures that the United States launched a commando strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda operative on Syrian territory.

Syria’s role in abetting the killing of Americans in Iraq was probably the central issue in the U.S. approach to Syria during the Bush years. Bush “persisted” not because he was “anti-Syrian” or “anti-Asad,” but because progress in Iraq depended on persistence against its opponents, which Syria chose to become. Even Bush’s critics now acknowledge that such U.S. persistence in Iraq has paid off.

• Syria-Iran. Rabinovich cites the President’s September 2007 UN General Assembly address, claiming that Bush “lump[ed] it [Syria] together with Iran.” In English, one “lumps together” unlike things that should rightly be separated. But in retrospect, Bush’s rhetorical linkage of Damascus to Tehran was well warranted. The speech came just weeks after the discovery and September 7, 2007 destruction of the illegal Syrian nuclear facility in Kibar. As it turns out, if recent reports are to be believed, the North Korean-built facility was financed by Iran.

In fact, it has been Syria which has been keen to “lump” itself with Iran, and which has issued repeated assurances that it will not be “de-lumped.” As Syrian President Bashar al-Asad explained just last month, Syria-Iranian relations

are firm and continuously improving; they are strategic relations, which have proved their efficiency and importance in all of the issues which our region has been passing through since the Revolution in Iran in 1979. They are not transitory relations.We have no option but to be in a stable and enduring relation[ship].

Last September, Press TV reported that Asad compared Syria’s relations with Iran to Israel’s relations with the United States. “Israel’s demand [that Damascus cut ties with Tehran] ,” he said, “is the equivalent of Syria requesting Israel to break its relations with the United States.” Could Syrian and Iran be more closely “lumped” together?

(Parenthetically, Rabinovich misattributes the reason the Bush administration revealed the details of the Kibar operation in spring 2008. He says the administration released this information to “embarrass the Syrians and their North Korean suppliers.” But the Bush administration didn’t embark on a gotcha effort to embarrass anyone. The precipitating cause of the revelation was Congressional demands for information on the Israeli strike. If there was a secondary motive, it had to do with putting pressure on Iran.)

• Pelosi visit. When Rabinovich discusses House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pilgrimage to Damascus in 2007, he merely notes that it provoked President Bush, and caused “a brief strain in the relationship” between the United States and Israel, which endorsed the trip. He doesn’t mention the regrettable and predictable aftermath of the visit: the incarceration of several leading members of Syrian civil society. The Bush administration didn’t oppose such legitimizing gestures out of pique, but in the full realization that the price would be paid by Syrians.

Omissions in the monograph extend beyond presentation of Bush policy, to two other crucial points: Syria’s relationship to Hezbollah, and Israeli opinion on the Golan.

• Syria-Hezbollah. Rabinovich treats the 2006 war with Hezbollah as an isolated incident, as though Syria were uninvolved. There is no mention whatsoever of the weapons that Syria provided directly from its own arsenal to the Shiite militia, including, most prominently, the Syrian-produced 220 mm rocket—one of which hit the main train station in Haifa, killing ten Israelis—and the Syrian provision of top-of-the-line Russian anti-tank Kornet missiles to Hezbollah that disabled several IDF Merkava tanks, killing several IDF soldiers. Damascus played a crucial role in building Hezbollah’s impressive arsenal, eventually deployed against Israel during the 2006 war. One wouldn’t know that from this paper.

• Golan. Rabinovich notes that in Israel’s most recent election campaign, “right wing parties were vociferous in their opposition to withdrawal from the Golan Heights,” as though such opposition were a fringe sentiment. He does not mention that this is widely believed to be the predominant opinion of Israelis. In fact, according to polling, the vast majority of Israelis would rather divide Jerusalem for peace with Palestinians than return the Golan for a Syria deal.

The concluding section on “Lessons for the Obama Administration” similarly seems to argue by omission. Instead of discussing the elephant in the room—the nature and likelihood of a potential Syrian reorientation or the kind of changes Syria would have to effect to make a deal with Israel feasible—Rabinovich refers to unnamed Syrian officials who have “alluded to the position that Syria’s alliance with Iran is not fixed and that it is mostly a result of Washington’s rejection of Syria.”

It’s a remarkable line—blaming Syria’s relationship with Iran entirely on Washington—yet Rabinovich lets it stand uncontested. He could have identified dozens of other quotes by the same officials—even by President Asad himself—claiming that the alliance is fixed, and is based on shared objectives. “We do not belong to those states which build temporary, transitional or circumstantial relations,” Asad told Iranian TV in September. “We do have our principles, and interests; thus the factors binding Syria and Iran are increased and more solid day by day.” Why isn’t that also worth quoting?

In summation, the triangle of relations that Rabinovich attempts to describe is enormously complex. Yet from reading this paper, one gets the sense that Israel and Syria might already have a peace treaty, were it not for President Bush. Rabinovich knows far too much about Syria not to know better. One hopes that his next paper will shift the focus to decision-making in Damascus.

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The Israeli-Hamas ceasefire, signed on June 9, 2008, had long been a porous one. While Hamas, for the most part, until November 2008 did not fire its own rockets at Israel, it permitted other groups, such as the Iranian-supported Islamic Jihad, to do so. These limited rocket attacks, while clear violations of the ceasefire agreement, did not precipitate major Israeli responses, other than periodic limited closures of the border crossings into Gaza, through which Israel supplied food, fuel and other humanitarian aid to Gaza. Whether Israel should have allowed any humanitarian aid into Gaza in the face of the rocket fire is a very open question: Israel was in fact in a state of war with Hamas, an organization pledged to destroy it, and the rockets fired at Israel simply underlined Hamas’ long term objective by demonstrating its “resistance” to the Jewish State. Under these circumstances, a full border closure might have brought home to the people of Gaza, the majority of whom voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, the costs of supporting Hamas.

In any case, fighting between Israel and Hamas intensified in November when Israel found and destroyed a tunnel between Gaza and Israel which the Israeli military thought would be used to kidnap another Israeli soldier, much as Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped in 2006. Ironically, the kidnap attempt was not aimed primarily at Israel, but at the Palestinian rival of Hamas, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The kidnap attempt appeared timed to occur as Hamas and Fatah were jockeying for position before the start of what proved to be abortive Palestinian unity talks in Cairo. Had Hamas been successful in capturing another Israeli soldier, it would have shown that Hamas was demonstrating greater “resistance” against Israel than Fatah, which had been engaged in fruitless peace talks with Israel.

Following the Israeli attack on the tunnel, the number of rockets fired at Israel from Gaza escalated, reaching a new high after Hamas announced it would not extend the ceasefire unless Israel fully opened the border crossings and stopped arresting members of Hamas living on the West Bank—the latter demand not included in the original ceasefire agreement. When Israel refused to agree to the new Hamas demands, Hamas further escalated its firing of rockets, hoping, apparently, to force Israel to accept the new ceasefire terms in return for restoring quiet to southern Israel. Hamas may have also believed that Israel’s ruling Kadima party desperately needed a ceasefire so as to remove the issue of the rocket firing from the ongoing Israeli election campaign. It had been Kadima that had undertaken the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and presumably it did not want to remind the Israeli electorate that the withdrawal had resulted in the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

If this was indeed the thinking of Hamas, it was gravely mistaken. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, as early as November, had called for strong military action against Hamas because of the rocket firing, and she also stated at the time that she was prepared to eliminate the Hamas threat against Israel once and for all. Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, of the Labor party, was taking a more dovish position, resisting the use of force. In initially opposing an attack on Gaza, Barak may have hoped to win votes from the dovish spectrum of the Israeli electorate consisting of the Meretz party and the parties that had broken away from Labor because they were dissatisfied with his leadership. On the other end of the Israeli political spectrum, the right of center Likud party, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, was attacking Barak for his judgement in unilaterally withdrawing from Lebanon in May 2000—a step which had led not to peace, as Barak had hoped, but to rocket fire into Israel from Lebanon, the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, and finally the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 from which Israel did not emerge victorious. In addition, of course, Netanyahu berated the Kadima party for its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which, as in the case of Lebanon, did not bring peace, but rather rocket firing into Israel in its wake.

Given these circumstances, with Netanyahu’s Likud party leading in the pre-election polls, Livni’s calls for more action against Hamas grew more difficult for Kadima’s lame-duck leader, Ehud Olmert, to resist. For his part, Barak saw his Labor party dropping precipitously in the polls, as his dovish position was not resonating among Israeli voters. The end result of the Israeli deliberations—a major air assault against Hamas bases, missile factories, and arms smuggling tunnels in Gaza—was a compromise between those who wanted a full-scale military assault on Gaza and those, most likely including Olmert, who had been badly burned politically by the 2006 war, and who continued to counsel restraint. The Israeli military action was an effort to show Hamas that not only would the Israeli political leadership not be intimidated by the Hamas rocket attacks into weakening its position on the ceasefire terms, but that Israel too could use force—considerably more force than Hamas was using—and that if Hamas had hoped to use rocket fire to get better ceasefire terms, it was badly mistaken. The military action was also a signal to Hamas that if it still wanted a truce—a very big if—then all rocket fire would have to be halted.

Prior to examining the alternatives available to Hamas after the Israeli military operation, I will now turn to an analysis of the possible repercussions of the Israeli military action in the Middle East, because this will affect how Hamas will respond.

Repercussions

In analyzing the possible effects of the Israeli military operation throughout the Middle East, one has to consider several different Arab and Middle Eastern states which are players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. These include: Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization which currently controls the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank; Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel; Syria; Iran; and Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

• Mahmoud Abbas. With Palestinians being killed by the Israeli attacks, Abbas has no choice but to publicly condemn them, although he has also been critical of Hamas for not agreeing to extend the ceasefire. It should also be noted that many members of Abbas’ Fatah organization have bitter memories of their colleagues in Gaza being murdered by Hamas thugs—some tossed off the rooftops of multi-storied buildings in Gaza—during the Hamas seizure of power in Gaza in June 2006. Consequently, many will greet the Israeli drubbing of Hamas in Gaza with great satisfaction. While there are likely to be riots by Hamas sympathizers on the West Bank, the test of Abbas’ newly strengthened security forces will be how successful they are in containing the rioters. Since Abbas has been systematically cracking down on Hamas operatives in the West Bank since June 2007 (as has Israel) it is not clear how much strength Hamas retains in the region, and the ability of Abbas’ forces to quell the rioters will go a long way toward answering this question.

While Abbas has broken off peace talks with Israel in the name of Palestinian solidarity—he has to be concerned about a sympathy vote for Hamas in the forthcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections (if they are held,as tentatively scheduled,in April 2009)—-nonetheless if Hamas is badly weakened politically as well as militarily in Gaza by the Israeli attacks (a very big if), then Abbas will gain politically in what has become a zero-sum-game struggle between Hamas and Fatah for leadership of the Palestinian movement.

• Egypt and Jordan. As the two countries which have signed peace treaties with Israel, both Egypt and Jordan face similar problems in responding to the Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The main opposition force, which is represented in parliament in both countries, is the Moslem Brotherhood (in Jordan it takes the name “The Islamic Action Front”), and Hamas itself is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Thus the Palestinian issue has been used by Muslim Brotherhood organizations in both countries to accuse both Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan of not being tough enough against Israel.

Yet while both Mubarak and King Abdullah II must be sensitive to the public opinion in their countries, which the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to stir up against them, they are also aware that the United States, their main supplier of economic aid ($2.2 billion for Egypt and $500 million for Jordan on an annual basis), has been strongly backing Israel during the crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has gone so far as to say: “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The ceasefire should be restored immediately.” Consequently, assuming the Israeli military operations are concluded in a relatively short amount of time, it is doubtful whether either Egypt or Jordan would break diplomatic relations with Israel or even recall their ambassadors as they did during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Indeed, a defeat for Hamas would politically benefit both Arab leaders.

• Syria. The first response of Syria to the Israeli attack on Gaza was to freeze the current low-level peace talks which Syria has been carrying on with Israel under the mediation of Turkey. As the home of one of the most militant branches of Hamas, led by Khalid Mash’al who has just called for a new Palestinian intifada against Israel, Syria has long championed the organization as Damascus has sought to exercise influence over the Palestinian movement. Yet the Syrians have to be careful how they behave during the crisis if they want to preserve the possibility of a peace process with Israel—and the link to improved relations with the United States which they hope to emerge from it. It should be remembered in this context that the initial post-Madrid conference talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 1996 when Syria not only did not condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that took place in February-March 1996, but Syrian state radio actually justified them. If Syria chooses to support Hamas during the current conflict in a major way, it may well jeopardize peace talks with the next Israeli leader, be it Livni or Netanyahu. While Syrian leader Bashar Assad may assume that neither Livni nor Netanyahu puts peace with Syria high on their priority lists, strong Syrian support for Hamas may also call into question Syria’s relations with the incoming Obama administration.

• Iran. Iran, like Syria, faces a choice in responding to the Israeli airstrikes. It could urge its ally, the Lebanese–based Hezbollah, to fire rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. Such an action might be problematic, however, for three reasons.

1. There is the question as to whether Hezbollah would wish to jeopardize its rapidly improving political position in Lebanon by launching rocket attacks against Israel, since Israel has threatened to retaliate against all of Lebanon if Hezbollah launches rocket attacks, not just the southern part as it did in 2006, because Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese government.
2. Such a call by Iran might hasten an Israeli airstrike against Iran’s nuclear installations, a development which Iranian leaders, despite their bluster, have sought to avoid.
3. An action of this type would make it far more difficult for Iran to have an improved relationship with the incoming Obama administration, assuming, of course, the Iranian leadership wants such a rapprochement. Consequently, Iran may limit itself to spinning the Israeli attack, much as it has done with the Israeli siege on Gaza, by claiming that the Arab world has not done enough to aid the besieged Palestinians because the leaders of the Sunni Arab world are the lackeys of the United States.

• Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. In the minds of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait,The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman), the main threat in their region is not Israel but Iran. Consequently, if Iranian-allied Hamas suffers a military defeat at the hands of Israel, particularly in a brief conflict before the passions of the so-called “Arab street” are fully ignited, the leaders of the GCC states will not be unhappy. Indeed, for similar reasons they gave tacit support to Israel at first in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, turning against Israel only when the war was prolonged and heavy civilian casualties occurred. If the Israeli military action is relatively limited in time, it is unlikely that the Saudis and the other Gulf states will take strong diplomatic action against Israel, such as removing the Arab Peace Plan from the diplomatic negotiating table.

The Future

In looking to the aftermath of the Israeli military action, there are several possibilities and they both depend on how Hamas reacts to the Israeli attacks. First, if Hamas follows through on its threat to restart suicide bombings and continues to launch rocket attacks of Israel, then additional airstrikes against Hamas can be expected, along with additional “targeted assassinations” of Hamas leaders, and possibly a full-scale military invasion as well. If, on the other hand, the Hamas leadership decides that the airstrikes and the real threat of an Israeli ground invasion may jeopardize its hold on Gaza before it has consolidated its power there, then it may agree, if only tacitly, to another ceasefire by stopping its rocket attacks on the expectation that Israel would reciprocate by stopping its attacks, in an agreement possibly mediated by Turkey. Were this to occur, Israel would certainly emerge as the victor in the conflict with Hamas, Iran and Syria the losers.

Consequently, one might expect that Iran, and possibly Syria, will urge Hamas to continue its “resistance” against Israel, much as Hezbollah did in 2006, and wait for pressure from the “Arab street,” Europe, Russia, the United Nations, and possibly (if the fighting last sufficiently long) the United States to salvage the situation. Whether Hamas will be in a position to do so, however, remains to be seen, and its fate may resemble more the PLO which was besieged in Beirut in 1982 and forced into exile, than Hezbollah in 2006.

In looking at the impact of the Israeli military action on the February 10 Israeli elections, there are also several possibilities. Since Livni had openly been calling for strong military action against Hamas, and that action was in fact taken, it is likely that Livni’s Kadima party will have an improved position in the polls and in the election, now little more than a month away. This will be the case especially if Hamas agrees to the tacit truce, as mentioned above. Similarly, if the military action proves successful, Barak may cement his position as the indispensable Defense Minister, no matter who wins the election.

On the other hand, if rockets continue to fly into Israel from Gaza, Livni may be blamed, along with Barak, for their inability to stop the missiles. Under these circumstances, Livni and Barak may well urge a full-scale invasion of Gaza. Assuming that the Israeli Army is now better prepared for ground combat than it was in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, and Hamas does not have the weaponry possessed by Hezbollah in 2006, and the invasion is preceded by heavy artillery barrages as well as continued air strikes, a softened-up Hamas may not be a major threat to the IDF, no matter how many tunnels it may have dug. Once Gaza is recaptured, and any surviving Hamas cadres imprisoned, the Gaza Strip can be turned over to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization, and then genuine peace talks, now covering both the West Bank and Gaza, can take place. Whether such an optimistic scenario will actually take place, however, remains an open question.

From Itamar Rabinovich

The View from Damascus is a collection of 21 essays and chapters that I have published over the years. The original idea of putting such a volume together came from the late Frank Cass, the London publisher. I then went over more than 30 essays and chapters with two questions in mind: Did each of them merit reproduction, thirty, twenty or ten years after original publication? And did the twenty essays that passed the test fit together as a coherent book rather than a loose collection of disparate essays and chapters dealing with the same country? The answer to the second question is inherent in the book’s subtitle: “State, Political Community and Foreign Relations in Twentieth-Century Syria.” The essays chosen do indeed fall neatly into these three major categories.

Syria’s transformation from a “geographic term” (to use Metternich’s language) into a state is an interesting and, in some respects, an unfinished tale. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the term referred to “Geographic” or “Natural” Syria (practically the Levant) and several of the essays deal with the contending concepts of the would-be Syrian entity and with the course of events that culminated in the creation of an independent Syrian state in its present boundaries. The tension between the notion and vision of a “Greater Syria” and the reality of the truncated Syrian state accounted for the latter’s weakness during the early decades of its existence as well as for its irredentist claims, first and foremost over Lebanon.

The conflict over the nature of the political community that inhabits or should inhibit the Syrian state is closely related to the conflicts over its territorial definition. During most of the 20th century, Arabism was the dominant ideology in Syria, but Arabism has a Sunni-Muslim tincture and the Christian and heterodox Shiite sects that form a significant part of Syria’s population refused to be marginalized. Several of the essays deal with the impact of these tensions on political ideologies and parties in Syria and with the remarkable process that catapulted the downtrodden Alawi minority to the pinnacle of power in Syria.

In coping with such themes as the role of ethnicity in Syrian’s modern history and politics, the advantage of dealing with the 20th century as a whole becomes evident. It is easy to trace the line from the French policy of cultivating the minorities as a bulwark against the hostility of the Arab-Sunni majority through the attraction of Alawis to military service and to the secularism of the Baath party to political domination based on the predominance of Baathist Alawi army officers since the 1960s.

The accent of the essays dealing with foreign relations is on two themes: Syria’s transformation under Hafez al-Asad from a weak state to a powerful regional actor, and the evolution of its relationship with Israel from the pure hostility of earlier decades to the mix of conflict and negotiations since 1991.

The volume’s concluding essay is taken from a forthcoming monograph written for the Saban Center at Brookings and dealing with the trilateral relationship between Washington, Jerusalem and Damascus during the past eight years. It was written with an eye to the unfolding policy debate in the United States and Israel. Several scenarios and options are sketched but priority is given to one. If the Obama administration wants to resume an active role in Arab-Israeli affairs, the Syrian track has several advantages over the Palestinian one. The emphasis on that track has shifted since its heyday in the 1990s. The cutting-edge issue is the prospect of detaching Syria from Iran, thereby transforming the geopolitical landscape in the region. The problem is that Syria is likely to play a familiar game and seek to straddle the line. Whether Washington and Jerusalem will find the effective negotiating strategies which eluded them so often in the past, remains an open question.

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Over the past week, MESHNet, the closed-forum companion to MESH, conducted a poll of MESHNet members, asking them who would make the best Middle East envoy of the Obama administration (if it is decided to appoint one). The structure of the poll emulated an earlier poll administered to a panel of Israeli experts, taking the same nine candidates and the same scoring system. MESHNet members (persons with a professional interest in the Middle East, 179 in number) were asked to rate the candidates, from “most suitable” for the job (a score of 5) to “least suitable” (a score of 1). Sixty-three MESHNet members responded to the poll question. Here are the results, comprised of the average score for each candidate:

In parallel, MESH asked a number of its members to assess whether the appointment of a special envoy is advisable. Their nine responses appear below. (Respondents did not have prior knowledge of the poll results.)

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Alan Dowty :: Would it be wise for the new administration to dispatch a special envoy to the Middle East? Yes, by all means; it has become standard practice, and not sending an envoy would evoke cries of despair and dismay from near and far. It has become de rigueur to create the impression that the United States is making an all-out effort to achieve settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, whether success is expected or not.

Furthermore, if only to satisfy the need to create the impression of seriousness, the envoy needs to be on the A-list—like the names proffered in the poll. A low-level appointee would, again, evoke hue and cry.

And in order for this impression to be convincing, the appointed envoy must actually be allowed to make a serious effort. Perhaps neither the envoy nor the administration really believes that chances for success are great, but the onlookers are too sophisticated to be fooled by a charade. The effort must be real.

And so long as the envoy is making a serious effort, why should the negotiation not be directed at the most tractable channel, the one where a slight possibility of success actually exists? Not the Israel-Palestinian channel; though a majority of both publics probably still favor a negotiated, two-state solution, there is presently no Palestinian negotiating partner who could credibly implement such an agreement.

But on the Syrian front, there is a glimmer of daylight. The strategic logic of a deal between Israel and Syria is such that the last six Israeli prime ministers have all given it their best shot. Maybe the time has come.

So who, among the august personalities posited, should be the deus ex machina? It must be someone with infinite patience, infinite optimism, and an infinitely thick skin to withstand the inevitable barbs from all sides. Are such qualities likely among the high fliers on the present list of candidates? Unfortunately, such a combination of humility and prominence is a rarity of nature.

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Robert O. Freedman :: Obama’s two predecessors took opposite positions on the question of whether or not to appoint a special envoy to the Middle East. Bill Clinton had a special envoy, Dennis Ross, who was active during the entire period of the Clinton presidency and whose book, The Missing Peace, recounts his experience as special envoy. By contrast, George W. Bush chose not to have a special envoy and was widely criticized, justifiably or not, for paying insufficient attention to the Middle East.

In my view, Obama should appoint a special envoy for a number of reasons.

First, Obama will have many important priorities when he first takes office. In addition to the problems facing the U.S. and world economies, which can be expected to take up much of his time, there are serious problems in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Russia. There simply will not be sufficient presidential time to spend on helping to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, even if the conflict were ripe for settlement, which it is not. Under these circumstances, appointing a special envoy will enable Obama to demonstrate his continued interest in the process—as opposed to Bush, whose interest was, at best, episodic—and thereby reassure the parties to the conflict that the United States is concerned about helping to try to find a solution for it.

A second advantage of a special envoy is that it will enable Obama to gather information about the positions of the various sides to the conflict. Neither the Israeli-Palestinian nor the Israeli-Syrian conflicts is at this point ripe for settlement. The Israeli elections are scheduled for February 10, and there are serious disagreements among the three major parties, Kadima, Likud and Labor, as to how to move forward. At the same time, the split between the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas which controls Gaza, is growing greater by the day, as the cancellation of unity talks in Cairo so clearly demonstrated. Meanwhile, Syria is obfuscating as to whether it would be willing to cut ties with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in return for Israel giving up the Golan Heights. With none of the conflicts appearing ripe for settlement, a special envoy could serve Obama by gathering information as to the positions of the parties, and imparting it to Obama. He would then have a firm base of information from which to operate when he finally has the time to devote to the Middle East.

Perhaps most importantly, a special envoy could advise Obama on whether or not it is worth investing scarce presidential time on the Syrian-Israeli conflict, as Bill Clinton did, albeit without success. Given the Israeli elections, the special envoy might best spend his or her time, at least initially, in trying to determine whether or not Syria is willing to pay the price of peace—cutting ties with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—or is just using the talks with Israel to try to improve its position with the United States. Should Bashar Asad of Syria not be serious about peace, as many skeptical Americans and Israelis believe, then the United States can discover this early in the Obama presidency, allowing the special envoy to devote his or her efforts to working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the other hand, if Asad is indeed serious about paying the price of peace, then the geopolitical advantages to the United States of a Syrian split with Iran and its proxies would be well worth the time spent on Syria by a U.S. special envoy.

In sum, even if Obama does not have the time to immediately deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict, his appointment of a special envoy will, at the minimum, commence his administration’s involvement in trying to help find a solution to it.

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Adam Garfinkle :: As I have written before and elsewhere, the idea of appointing a special envoy to, not the “Middle East,” but to the Arab-Israeli arena early in the tenure of the next administration is a good one—but not necessarily for the reasons often advanced. The reasons for appointing someone prestigious but politically shrewd do not include actually advancing the so-called peace process, and they are not based on the myth of linkage—the empirically unsupportable idea that an Arab-Israeli diplomatic settlement would have a dramatic positive bearing on other regional problems. The real reasons are these:

1. Despite whatever progress has been made in the post-Annapolis process, the situation remains unripe for a breakthrough for lack of strong and credible leadership on all sides. Yet the optic of U.S. engagement remains important for other reasons. It makes it easier politically for several important Arab states to cooperate with the United States against Iranian intrigues. Supporting the morale of moderates on all sides may prevent things from sliding backwards. It can help keep the Europeans and others from baying excessively at the diplomatic moon in hopes of miracles that don’t exist. And it may have some benign overwash on the tricky process of extracting ourselves from Iraq. The optic of leaving Iraq cannot be allowed to become one of failure or regional disengagement; that’s why some exiting U.S. troops should go to Bahrain or Qatar or Kuwait and not home, and it’s another reason why diplomatic engagement in the Levant can be at least marginally useful. We should want to spread out the newspaper headlines.
2. The optical approach will help keep the issue off the president’s own desk; he has more important things to do both at home and abroad, and he doesn’t need an albatross of diplomatic futility hung around his neck so early in his tenure.
3. A special envoy can help keep up the optic of engagement while the president’s new team gets chosen, nominated, enmeshed in hearings and finally confirmed—a process that can take many months thanks to the ongoing dysfunction of Congress.
4. That envoy could be a useful point-man to help smooth what could be a rough Palestinian political transition in January—in case no one else is in place to do that job.

It is crucial that any special envoy understand the real purposes of his (or her) assignment, and not go forth as if tilting at windmills. That might only make things worse, and end up burdening the president rather than freeing him (temporarily at least) from this mess. As a famous 20th-century American philosopher once put it, “These things must be done delicately.”

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Josef Joffe :: First, forget the usual suspects like Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright or the likes of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. The only American of weight who understands the duplicities and obsessions of the Middle East is Henry Kissinger. The handicap of his age can be turned into an advantage. Tell the players to come to New York, since Henry can’t shuttle as he used to in 1974. They’ll behave better than in Ramallah or Jerusalem.

But is it wise to appoint an envoy? The Middle East is like Detroit and General Motors: There is no solution, but any American administration has to act as if there were, as if yet another bout of shuttling or another $25 billion will make GM competitive with Toyota. And so with the Middle East.

First of all, the so-called core of the problem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has never been less at center-stage than it is now. It is dwarfed by the struggle for hegemony that pits Iranian ambitions (with Hamas and Hezbollah in tow) against the United States, Israel and the Sunni regimes. This is the central strategic issue. This is where, short of war, coalitions must be harnessed and containment strategies be organized. This is where regional conflict threatens to spill into the global arena. On that enlarged stage, extending from the Levant to Tehran, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has shrunk to almost negligible dimensions, which do not require the bulk of America’s attention and resources.

Moreover, there is no two-state solution at hand because neither party actually wants one. Why such a counter-intuitive judgement? Israel has learned that it cannot relinquish strategic control over the West Bank, given the sorry aftermath of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. It is “never again,” even if a deal could be struck with Mahmoud Abbas, as it could not with Hamas. No imaginable Palestinian Authority can at this point assure a no-threat West Bank; hence, Israel cannot leave.

Nor does Abu Mazen have an interest in seeing the Israelis leave. For it is the IDF that guarantees not only his political, but his physical survival. This is a heartening irony—Israel protecting a Palestinian president. But there is no Palestinian state in this surprising twist of history.

Perhaps one day, Marwan Barghouti, currently in an Israeli jail for multiple murders, could acquire the leadership status that would allow him to prevail against Hamas and rule the West Bank, perhaps even Gaza, with an iron hand. But the time scale is askew here. “Envoy time” is measured in months, the evolution toward a new and stable political order in the lands of the Palestinian Authority should be measured in years—many years.

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Mark N. Katz :: It has been widely reported that on November 18, Obama called Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and told him that the United States “would spare no effort to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.” Obama, then, should definitely appoint a special envoy for the Middle East.

As previous administrations have learned, efforts to achieve peace between Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians as well as neighboring Arab states on the other are extremely difficult and time consuming. Nor is there any guarantee that these efforts will succeed—as several previous American diplomatic initiatives have shown.

Because of the time commitment needed for seriously trying to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, neither the president nor the secretary of state should get immersed in the nitty-gritty negotiations that will be required. There is simply too much other important business for both of them that will not receive sufficient attention if either (or even more unfortunately, both) become overly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Nor is this a task that the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs should undertake either, as this would leave precious little time for him or her to deal with America’s many other important relationships in, as well as the other problems of, this region.

In short, for there to be any hope of an American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian settlement, it will have to be undertaken by someone whose sole task it is to try to achieve one. If this effort is successful, the president can—rightly—take the credit. But if it is unsuccessful, the blame can be assigned not so much to the president as to (yes, you guessed it) the Middle East envoy.

Of course, even with a Middle East envoy working on it full-time, the attempt to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will still take up more of President Obama’s time than he may now anticipate. Although his desire to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is noble, he may find that there is a trade-off between “sparing no effort” on this and getting much of anything else accomplished.

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Walter Reich :: The Arab-Israeli conflict has always been at least as complex as a game of three-dimensional chess. Not only are the problems between Israel and the Palestinians excruciatingly hard to solve. So are the problems between Israel and many of the other Arab parties.

Moreover, the strains within each party—among the Israelis, among the Palestinians, and among the Arabs in general—are very great, and each of them could cause any peace deal to unravel, implode or even explode.

As a result of this, no party has reason to feel confident that a peace deal would actually hold for very long. What would Hamas do before the ink on a peace agreement has dried? What would Hezbollah do? And what would stop the Arab world as a whole from renouncing the treaty once Israel withdraws, even if it’s based on the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was endorsed by the Arab League? During a visit to Ramallah last July, then-candidate Obama reportedly told the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, that “the Israelis would be crazy not to accept” the Saudi initiative,” which, he told Abbas, “would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.” Would it?

And would it now that the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been escalated from the level of three-dimensional chess to an even higher level by the fact that a truculent Iran, which is totally opposed not only to peace with Israel but with that country’s very existence, has, according to nuclear inspectors, finally produced enough nuclear material to make, with further purification, a nuclear bomb? What would Iran do if such a peace deal were signed?

Some argue that, despite this complexity, it’s precisely because of the specter of a nuclear Iran that a peace deal is finally possible: many Arab countries, especially the Saudis, are frightened of this, they argue, and would put muscle behind a peace deal. Moreover, they say, getting a deal, even on paper, might make it easier for the United States to leave Iraq.

Maybe so, and maybe Obama should indeed enter these dangerous waters by naming a Middle East envoy and starting negotiations actively and energetically right away. The risks might be great, but the rewards might be even greater.

Yet the challenge for Obama has grown enormously as a result of the global financial meltdown, which has complicated all of his agendas, both domestic and foreign. Can he afford to take a major, well-publicized gamble and get stuck in the familiar morass of failure? An immense amount of hope has been invested in him and his capacities to save America and the world during this period of economic crisis. Can he afford to dissipate this hope by failing in a very visible and early bid to solve a problem that, until now, has proved insoluble?

At the least, Obama should wait to find out who will win the Israeli elections in February. One candidate, Tzipi Livni, would surely support a major peace-deal initiative. Her opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, presumably would not—though American pressure might well cause him to change his mind. But events in the Arab/Muslim world, especially in connection with Iran, a major terrorist attack, a crisis elsewhere, or a worsening global economy, could well cause Obama to put all of his plans regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict on hold.

Given these risks and uncertainties, I don’t think Obama should name a peace envoy now. Certainly, he can wait until February. Meanwhile, this new American leader, who based his candidacy on the theme of change, is about to experience a lot of it, both domestically and internationally, and most of it not, alas, under his control.

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Robert Satloff :: Candidate Obama promised he would appoint a special Middle East envoy. President Obama’s decision whether to fulfill that promise depends a) on the purpose of the appointment and b) on the personality of the envoy.

Appointing an envoy makes a lot of sense if the purpose is to signal heightened, sustained and political-level interest on the part of the new Obama administration in key aspects of Arab-Israeli relations, recognizing that a breakthrough toward Israeli-Palestinian peace cannot occur until vital structural factors are put into place. These include building Arab acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state (i.e., putting flesh on the bones of the Arab peace initiative); developing Palestinian security forces as an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism, incitement and corruption; investing in the array of social/economic initiatives currently championed by Tony Blair; and extending the political legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas past the original end of his term of office to prevent a void of Palestinian leadership and an easy political victory for Hamas.

Appointing an envoy does not make sense if the idea is to signal American urgency for achieving an early peace breakthrough, the pursuit of which is both impractical and counter-productive in the near term. Nor does it make sense if the envoy views his/her mission as the vehicle to repair America’s relations with the wider Arab and Muslim “worlds,” which is a burden that Israelis and Palestinians should not have to bear.

Given this analysis, the personality of a proposed envoy is important. The particular choice should be someone endowed with patience, persistence, and a willingness to pass the baton to someone else – perhaps the president, perhaps the secretary of state, perhaps another envoy – depending on circumstances. This is not the job for someone who believes that the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be achieved on his/her watch or someone who views this responsibility as the path to a Nobel Prize.

More broadly, under certain circumstances, it makes sense to empower an envoy to be the lead person on both Arab-Israeli and the Iran issues, given that the Iran issue is the most significant strategic factor in Arab and Israeli thinking these days and that demands made of key regional states (i.e., Arabs ) on the Iran issue will be met in turn with demands made of America and Israel on the peace process. Efficiency suggests, therefore, that it is better for a single empowered envoy be capable of holding serious conversations on the issue with his counterparts abroad, who in most circumstances will be the same person. The danger here, however, is of feeding a negative concept of “linkage”–the idea that “if only Israel were to do x, y, z then all the problems of the Middle East would be solved.” This means that anyone asked to fill this broadened envoy portfolio would have to be someone inoculated from the linkage bug, someone who understands the Middle East as it is, not as we Americans would like it to be.

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Raymond Tanter :: Whether it is wise to appoint an envoy for the Middle East depends on the president-elect’s planned focus of attention, whether he intends to have a White House-driven or cabinet-driven administration, and whether he would like to encourage or suppress differences in recommendations to the White House within and from the State Department.

If the president-elect wishes to focus on the economy from the White House, he should have a strong secretary of state, which would argue against having an envoy for the Middle East. However, if the secretary of state were to be given a substantial part of the action on international economy, a Middle East envoy would be desirable. Likewise, if it looks as if policy-driving national security events from the region merit an overarching strategy developed within the White House, he may wish to have a less prominent secretary of state, a strong national security advisor, and an envoy who reports to the White House and State. And if the president-elect wishes to encourage a process of “multiple advocacy” at State, then an envoy with direct reporting to the White House and to the secretary of state would be warranted.

Consider historical examples to illustrate these principles. During the Nixon administration, the president desired highly centralized foreign policy formulation from the White House, at the expense of State. In this regard, Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, played the envoy role in the Middle East, as well as in virtually every other important theater.

In the Reagan administration, I was the White House liaison to Middle East envoy Ambassador Philip Habib, who had an office at State and reported regularly to President Reagan. Although Secretary of State Alexander Haig was at first not keen on sharing the action with the White House, his personal affinity for Habib and me minimized bureaucratic rivalry.

President Clinton chose resolution of Arab-Israeli disputes as the area in which he would make his foreign policy legacy, and so appointed Dennis Ross “Special Middle East Coordinator.” Having Ross at the White House allowed Clinton to organize a last-ditch effort at Camp David during 2000. Although the outcome left much to be desired, it was more the responsibility of Yasser Arafat than the division of labor among Americans or the fault of any of them.

If President-elect Obama decides to appoint an envoy for the Middle East, this person should have a writ that includes a larger region than the Arab-Israel zone, to coordinate contact groups of allies for interrelated problems, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Such contact groups might resolve pressing issues like the future status of the Iranian dissidents in Iraq, an Awakening Council model for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and developing leverage against the Iranian regime by reaching out to its opposition in advance of higher level American negotiations with Iran. An envoy would coordinate these issues as part of a strategic architecture for a similar area of responsibility as CENTCOM.

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Obama stated repeatedly during the campaign his intention to devote early and focused attention to the Middle East peace process. Since the transition period is mostly about structure and personnel, observers are naturally focused on the question of whether to appoint a special envoy for the peace process. But to my mind the question is misplaced.

In a bureaucracy, structure is power—but appointing an envoy does not necessarily convey much power or many resources to a diplomatic effort on behalf of Arab-Israeli peace. A special envoy without many staff, or one who is not situated at a senior level within (or above) the State Department bureaucracy, will not have the authority or capacity to mobilize efforts across the department, and will therefore not have as much impact as an envoy with his/her own office and a reporting line direct to the president or the secretary of state. So structure matters, and appointing an envoy does not alone produce the required structure.

Furthermore, effective peace process diplomacy is more than having the right mediator in the room with the warring parties; it must bring in key Arab governments, key U.S. military and intelligence resources, and key external stakeholders—meaning that, to be effective, a peace process envoy must be able to call on the full range of executive branch resources, from U.S. ambassadors at post to CENTCOM planners. Most crucially, an effective peace process envoy must be able to represent the president and bring the president’s personal engagement to bear at the right times.

Thus, the key question is not whether there will be a special envoy, but whether the person taking the point on Arab-Israeli affairs—whoever he may be—will carry with him the authority and credibility of the U.S. president. The local actors all have, or aspire to have, special relationships with Washington. They will not respond well to any diplomatic envoy who cannot both symbolize and operationalize a direct link to the American president. Whether the point person is a special envoy or the secretary of state is less important than whether she can speak on behalf of Obama, and whether she can bring Obama into the process at those critical moments when he needs to weigh in. So the identity of Obama’s peace processor will be crucial—much more crucial than her title.

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.

Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.

But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

That ideological excess, known as pan-Arabism or Nasserism, rested upon a prior sense of injury, in which 1948 played the major part. In that earlier war, Israel succeeded in defeating or holding off an array of Arab armies, and three quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees ended up in camps. The injury of 1948 was so deep that, over the following twenty years—Kerr’s “good old days”—there was no peace process. The Arabs nursed their wounds and dreamed only of another round.

1948 also had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Arab politics. Three coups took place in Syria in 1949, and often thereafter; Jordan’s King Abdullah was assassinated (by Palestinians) in 1951; Free Officers toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952. Everywhere, the 1948 regimes were faulted for their failure to strangle Israel at birth. Military strongmen seized power in the name of revolution, and promised to do better in the next round. Those “good old days” were in fact very bad days, during which Arab politics became militarized in the certainty and even desirability of another war with Israel.

In 1967, the other war came, and these regimes suffered a far more devastating defeat, delivered in a mere six days. Unlike 1948, when they had lost much of Palestine, in 1967 they lost their own sovereign territory. The shock wave, it is generally assumed, was even greater.

Yet what is telling is that the regimes didn’t fall. Nasser offered his resignation, but the crowds filled the streets and demanded that he stay on—and he did. The defense minister and air force commander of Syria, Hafez Asad, held on and ousted his rival two years later, establishing himself as sole ruler. King Hussein of Jordan, who had lost half his kingdom, also survived, as did the Jordanian monarchy. The only regime that failed to withstand the shock waves of 1967 was Lebanon’s, and Lebanon hadn’t even joined the war. Kerr wrote that 1967 had left the Arab players “crippled for life.” In the three Arab states that lost the war, the regimes survived, the leaders ruled for life, and they are now being succeeded by their sons.

What explains the fact that 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab system as 1948 did? It is true that even before 1967, these regimes had started to harden themselves. The evolution of the Arab state as a “republic of fear” dates from the decade before 1967, and this probably helped regimes weather the storm. Unlike in 1948, there weren’t many refugees either—the Arab states lost territory, but the war was quick, and most of the inhabitants of the lost territory stayed in their homes.

But I believe the reason 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab order is this: Arab regimes and peoples drew together in the fear that Israel could repeat 1967 if it had to, and that it might show up one day on the outskirts of Cairo or Damascus (as it threatened to do in 1973), or come right into an Arab capital (as it did in Beirut in 1982).

The memory of 1967 thus became the basis of an implicit understanding between the regimes and the peoples: the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile. The regimes have upheld their end, by gradually coming to terms with Israel, and by leaving the Palestinians to fight their own fight. Pan-Arabism—which largely meant sacrificing for the Palestinians—faded away because no Arabs were prepared to risk losing a war for them. The skill of rulers in averting war has helped to secure and entrench them.

I call this understanding implicit—it doesn’t have an ideological underpinning. Pragmatism rarely does. But the evidence for it is that no Arab state has entered or stumbled into war with Israel in over thirty years. The memory of the 1967 trauma has been translated into a deep-seated aversion to war, which underpins such peace and stability as the region has enjoyed. 1967 thus marks the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the conflict between Israel and Arabs states, which had produced a major war every decade. 1973 marks the end of the end, in which two Arab states stole back some honor and territory, precisely so they could lean back and leave Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their own differences. This narrower Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a sore, but its costs have been limited compared to a state-to-state war.

It is important to note that pan-Arabism did survive elsewhere in the Arab world, where its illusions continued to exact a very high cost. I refer to Baathist Iraq, which wasn’t defeated in 1967, and where pan-Arabism continued to constitute one of the ideological pillars of the regime, vis-à-vis Iran and the West. There it also led to miscalculation, war, and defeat, on a truly massive scale. The Iraq wars—there have been three in the last three decades—provide a striking contrast to the relative stability in Israel’s corner of the Middle East—a stability which rests, I suggest, on the Arab memory of 1967, which restructured Arab thinking in the states surrounding Israel, away from eager anticipation of war, and toward anxiously averting it.

So in regard to Arab politics, I have offered a possible revision of the usual view of 1967: perhaps its memory, far from making the Arabs angry and volatile, underpins the stability of the Arab order and regional peace. If so, then perhaps we should recall it as a year of net benefit all around—as compared, say, to 1979, the year of Iran’s revolution, or 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The impact of 1967 was to create a new balance, and push ideology to the margins of politics. The impact of 1979 and 2003 has been to unbalance the region and strengthen radical ideologies. 1967 ultimately produced a process that led to the finalizing of borders between states. The combined impact of 1979 and 2003 threatens to erase borders from the map.

The risk today, over forty years later, is not that the consequences of 1967 are still with us. It is that memory of 1967 is starting to fade, and its legacy is being eroded. I am struck by the subtitles of the two leading books on 1967. Michael Oren’s is June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Tom Segev’s goes even further: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. If only it were so. The problem is that the Middle East continues to be remade and transformed by subsequent events, whose legacy is much more damaging than the legacy of 1967.

What then happens when the Arab world is dominated by generations that no longer remember 1967 or, more importantly, no longer think Israel capable of reenacting it? What memories are replacing the memory of 1967? The 2006 summer war in Lebanon? (To rework Kerr’s analogy, that was like Columbia playing Notre Dame to a draw.) Without the memory of that defeat of forty years ago, the ranks of the Islamists could swell with people who imagine victory. Without the fear of war, peoples could turn away from those rulers who have made peace—away from the implicit understanding that underpins order. Will it be possible to build stability and peace on other memories, or other promises?

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Earlier this week, U.S. helicopters killed a high-value Al Qaeda target in Syria. While the attack shocked some observers, the presence of Al Qaeda operatives on Syrian soil has surprised few. According to CENTCOM, since 2003 Syria has been the leading point of entry of insurgents—Al Qaeda and others—into Iraq. Damascus allowed these insurgents to establish training bases and facilitated their movement across Syrian territory, not only to Iraq, but to Lebanon and Jordan as well.

Predictably, Damascus condemned the strike as unprovoked U.S. aggression. One might have thought, given the Asad regime’s documented ties with Al Qaeda, Baghdad would have had less of a problem with the U.S. cross-border raid. Yet Iraq—like North Korea and many Arab states—roundly condemned the operation.

In the days following the strike, there have been large government-sanctioned demonstrations in Syria protesting the U.S. military action. No doubt, popular outrage over the loss of innocent civilians is genuine. Seemingly lost on the protesters, however, was the fact that the target was Al Qaeda—which was widely believed to have been behind an early October car bomb that killed 17 in Damascus. Of course, this oversight is understandable: the Syrian government-controlled print media neglected to mention the Al Qaeda connection to the strike.

The Asad regime’s response to the attack stands in stark contrast to its reaction to the September 2007 Israeli strike on Syria’s nuclear weapons facility in Al Kibar. Relatively speaking, Israel’s audacious raid hardly elicited a protest. Indeed, although Syria accused Washington as having been “party to the execution” of the Israeli attack, unlike this week, the United States did not have to close the embassy, nor did the Asad regime respond by shuttering the American School and cultural center in Damascus.

Many analysts both in the region and in Washington are saying that the strike was politically motivated, with some even speculating it was authorized by the few remaining “hawks” in the administration intent on rolling back the seemingly inevitable march toward U.S. diplomatic re-engagement with Syria. Given the Bush administration’s long-standing policy of hot pursuit, however, this line of thinking seems rather conspiratorial. More likely, the decision to cross the border was made by commanders on the ground eager to take advantage of actionable intelligence on a high-value target.

In the short term, the strike may derail eleventh-hour Bush administration efforts to engage the Asad regime, but it is unlikely to have any lasting impact should either President Obama or McCain determine to initiate dialogue with Damascus. The U.S. strike will also have no bearing—as some have argued—on whether Damascus will ultimately split from Tehran. Even the most ardent advocates for U.S. diplomatic re-engagement with Syria no longer believe this type of strategic reorientation is possible.

What’s more, there is very little evidence to suggest a correlation between Washington’s posture and Syrian behavior. Syrian behavior is not necessarily any more appealing—either domestically or in regard to its neighbors—when Washington takes a conciliatory tack.

Just compare events of this week to what happened in April 2007, shortly after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Damascus for a cordial meeting with President Asad. The similarities in the headlines are uncanny. Days after the U.S. airstrike, the Asad regime sentenced twelve Syrian liberals to two and a half years in prison for signing the Damascus Declaration—including Riad Seif, who suffers from advanced prostate cancer. In 2007, judging from the pictures of Asad and Pelosi strolling and shopping in Suq al-Hamadiyeh, conciliation was in the air. Yet days after Pelosi’s departure, Asad sentenced six leading dissidents to harsh jail terms of three to twelve years.

Nearly five years after the invasion of Iraq, the fact that high-value, high-profile Al Qaeda figures continue to operate on the Syrian side of the border—even after Damascus dispatched an ambassador to Baghdad—should be instructive. If the past thirty years are any guide, regardless of what Washington does, Damascus will likely remain a problem. Whether Obama or McCain comes to the White House in January, it would be advisable for the next administration to diminish expectations of what diplomatic engagement with Damascus can achieve.

At the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia, Russia was following a policy of encouraging the main anti-American forces in the Middle East—Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran—while at the same time trying to cultivate the major Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and drawing them away from their alignment with the United States. The invasion of Georgia, coming as it has in the midst of the Russian diplomatic offensive in the Middle East, is likely to have the most impact on Russia’s relations with Syria, Israel, Turkey and Iran.

Syria. In an almost classic case of political opportunism, Syrian President Bashar Asad seized upon the Russian invasion of Georgia—and the fact that Israel (along with Germany, France, the United States and Turkey) had provided military equipment and training to the Georgian military—to try to convince the Russians to sell Syria the weapons they have long wanted and that the Russians have so far proved unwilling to sell them, especially the short-range, solid fuel Iskander-E ground-to-ground missile that can reach virtually every target in Israel, and the SAM-300 anti-aircraft missile system which, if installed in Syria near Damascus, could control most of Israel’s airspace. As Asad told the Russian newspaper Kommersant on the eve of his visit to Moscow when Georgian-Russian hostilities were still going on, “I think that in Russia and in the world, everyone is now aware of Israel’s role and its military consultants in the Georgia crisis. And if before in Russia there were people who thought these (Israeli) forces can be friendly, now I think no one thinks that way.” It is clear that Asad was referring to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who on repeated occasions stated that he had denied the Iskander missiles to Syria because they could harm Israel.

In backing the Russian intervention in Georgia—one of the few countries in the world to do so—Asad was repeating the policy of his father Hafiz Asad whose Syrian regime was one of the few in the world to support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. While Asad senior was richly rewarded with Soviet military equipment for his support of Soviet policy in Afghanistan, it remains to be seen what Bashar Asad will get. All Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would say after the Asad visit was that Moscow would “consider” Syria’s appeal for new weapons sales, and that in any case Russia would not sell any weapons that would affect the Middle East strategic balance. Since sale of both the Iskander-E and SAM-300 systems would definitely affect the regional military balance, Syria is unlikely to get these weapons—that is, if Lavrov is telling the truth or he is not overruled by his superiors. What may come out of the visit are the sale of short-range anti-aircraft missiles (perhaps to make it more difficult for Israel to conduct raids on suspected Syrian nuclear installations as it did in September 2007); the sale of additional anti-tank missiles, such as the ones Hezbollah used effectively against Israel in their 2006 war; and a more robust agreement between Russia and Syria for the Russian use of the Syrian port of Tartus for the expanding Russian Navy,

Israel. Russian-Israeli relations have had their ups and downs under Putin, but in recent years it is clear that relations have deteriorated. Russian support for Hamas, its turning a blind eye when Syria transferred anti-tank missiles to Hezbollah, and its military and diplomatic support for Iran at a time when the Iranian leadership has been calling for the destruction of Israel, have all soured relations. Yet, as a high-ranking Israeli diplomat who specializes in Russian-Israeli relations told me in 2007, “relations are not as bad as they could be.” Indeed, Moscow has a bifurcated if not schizophrenic relationship with Israel. While on the one hand Russian regional policies vis-à-vis Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria, have clearly hurt Israel, on the level of bilateral Russian-Israeli relations, the ties between the two countries are developing surprisingly well.

Thus, on the eve of the Asad visit to Moscow, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had a telephone conversation about Israeli-Syrian relations and about the situation in Georgia. Trade between Russia and Israel has exceeded $2.5 billion a year, much of it in the high tech sector which Putin needs to develop the Russian economy so that it is not dependent on dwindling energy exports. Cultural ties are thriving, and Moscow just established a cultural center in Tel Aviv. The two countries have signed a visa-waiver agreement to facilitate tourism. Negotiations are underway for the return to Russia of Czarist property in Jerusalem. Russia and Israel cooperate in the sale of weaponry to third countries, such as an AWACS aircraft to India (Russia supplies the airframe and Israel the avionics). And Israel’s ruling Kadima Party has just signed an agreement with Putin’s United Russia Party to establish party-to-party relations. While some in the Russian military such as Russia’s Deputy Chief of Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn publicly complained about Israeli aid to the Georgian military, Foreign Minister Lavrov went out of his way to praise Israel for stopping arms sales to Georgia.

What then explains Russia’s bifurcated policy toward Israel, and how will the Russian invasion of Georgia affect it? It appears clear that Russia has three goals vis-à-vis Israel. First, it is the homeland of more than a million Russian-speaking citizens of the former Soviet Union, and Russia sees Russian-speakers abroad as a source of its world influence. Hence the emphasis on cultural ties between Russia and Israel, in which Israelis of Russian origin play the dominant role. Second, Putin badly wants to develop the Russian economy, and high-tech trade with Israel is a part of his plan. Third, the Arab-israeli conflict is a major issue in world politics, and Putin would very much like to play a role in its diplomacy, if not in finding a solution to the conflict. For this reason he has called for an international peace conference in Moscow in November and he would like Israel to attend, so as to build up the role of Russia as a world mediator. In this context, one should not discount the possibility that Putin has told the Israelis (and the message may be reinforced if Olmert makes a rumored trip to Moscow in September) that Russia will overlook Israeli arms sales to Georgia, and will not sell the feared Iskander-E or SAM-300 missiles to Syria, if Israel agrees to attend the November peace conference in Moscow.

Turkey. In the case of Turkey, the Russian invasion of Georgia should awaken past memories of Czarist and Soviet military pressure against both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire fought a dozen wars with Czarist Russia, losing the northern shore of the Black Sea, the Crimean Peninsula, and extensive territory in the Balkans. While relations improved after the collapse of both the Ottoman Empire and Czarist Russia, relations chilled again at the end of World War Two when the Soviet Union exerted pressure on Turkey to grant Moscow bases in the Turkish Straits—a demand that drove Turkey into the arms of the United States and NATO.

Relations improved between the USSR and Turkey in the 1980’s as the two countries signed a natural gas agreement, and by the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia, Russia had become Turkey’s number one trading partner, with trade exceeding $25 billion per year and Turkey now dependent on Russia for more than 60 percent of its natural gas imports. On the other hand, Turkey had been a major ally of Georgia, and along with Germany, France, Israel and the United States, had cooperated militarily with Georgia. In addition, Turkey’s hopes of being a major energy hub rest not only on plans to tranship Russian and Iranian natural gas, but also on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and on the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline, both of which cross Georgian territory. In addition, the Turkish leadership can’t be too happy over the precedent set by South Ossetian and Abhaz independence, given the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority for independence.

Torn by these conflicting pressures, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sought to mediate the Russian-Georgian conflict by proposing a “Caucasus Cooperation and Stability Alliance,” composed of Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, given the fact that Georgia and Russia are still actively hostile to each other, and Armenia and Azerbaijan remain near war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Turkish president’s proposal seems little more than an attempt to prevent the Georgian-Russian relationship from deteriorating further, a development that would pose significant problems of choice for Turkey. Nonetheless, the Russian move into Georgia may, in the long run, prompt a rethinking of policy in Ankara, something that could reverse the deterioration of Turkish-American relations which was caused by the 2003 Iraq war.

Iran. In the short run at least, the Russian invasion of Georgia, with its accompanying diplomatic clash between the United States and Russia, may well work to the benefit of Iran. Any chance of Russia agreeing to further UN Security Council sanctions against Iran seems to have gone by the wayside, although given the very limited sanctions which the Russians had agreed to in the past, this is probably not too important a factor. In addition, Russia may now more willing to sell Iran the SAM-300 missile system. On the other hand, with sanctions no longer being considered, the chances of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations are enhanced, particularly if an Israeli national unity government is formed following the Kadima primaries in mid-September.

In the longer term, however, the Iranians may share some of the concerns of Turkey. Iran, like Turkey, has suffered Russian invasions in the past, and the cautious Iranian response to the Russian invasion of Georgia may reflect that concern. In addition, Iran, like Turkey, has restive minorities, and the independence of South Ossetia and Abhazia could set a negative precedent for Iran. Perhaps for this reason the Iranian Fars News Agency ran a story citing the Georgian ambassador to Tehran’s praise of Iran for its position in the Russian-Georgian conflict.

In summation, the Russian invasion of Georgia was the culmination of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy on the part of Putin in the Middle East and elsewhere. While Syria quickly supported Moscow, most of the rest of the Middle East, including Russia’s ally Iran, withheld support, calling only for a quick cease-fire. While there has been a good bit of speculation that the invasion will lead to an improvement of American-European relations in the face of the new Russian threat, the American position in the Middle East could also improve as a result of the heavy-handed Russian policy in Georgia, although that improvement may have to wait until a new American administration takes office in January 2009.

This report of the return of Samir Quntar to his home village of Abay on Thursday is how you would expect a news story like this one to play in a foreign media outlet. (If you do not see an embedded clip, click here.)

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No imagination. No real sense of what’s going on. Just an examination of the superficial paradoxes of the scene, particularly Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s welcoming of Quntar as a resistance fighter when only two months ago Jumblatt’s followers were fighting Hezbollah. Oh Lebanon! Land of contradiction, of fickleness!

What is really going on is far more interesting. Roughly speaking, the Druze have a dual political leadership structure in their community, with Jumblatt heading one faction and Talal Arslan heading the other, in the latest reflection of the traditional Jumblatti-Yazbaki dichotomy. Arslan’s power happens to be vastly more limited than Jumblatt’s, even as Jumblatt has a vested interest in puffing Arslan up to protect the dual structure of power tilted to his own advantage, to maintain Druze unity, and to prevent the emergence of Druze upstarts.

Even before Quntar, a Druze, was released from prison in Israel, both Jumblatt and Arslan realized he might be co-opted by Hezbollah and used against them. Indeed, the first thing the party did to the released prisoners was dress them up in military fatigues and send them out on a round of welcoming ceremonies. That’s why Quntar arrives in Abay in a Hezbollah uniform. Jumblatt’s and Arslan’s rally for Quntar was motivated by the need to avoid Druze ill feeling by ignoring their coreligionist; but more importantly by a desire to defend their leadership over the Druze by containing Quntar, which they did by embracing him to better defuse him. Although Quntar presents no threat to their power base, he could emerge as a small headache. For example, he could conceivably be brought into parliament in next year’s elections in the Baabda constituency, where Hezbollah and the Aounists, if they decide to bother Jumblatt, have considerable electoral sway.

What is interesting in this context is that the Syrian intelligence services have set up a similar such figure in the Druze community. His name is Wiam Wahhab, and while his Druze support is negligible, he has retained public attention because he is one of Damascus’ megaphones in Lebanon. Wahhab’s rise had threatened Arslan much more than it did Jumblatt, though Arslan and Wahhab are both close to Syria. In a new reversal, Quntar’s release threatens Wahhab, while Arslan, thanks to his collaboration with Jumblatt, has re-entered the Druze political scene in relative force after a period of relative quiet. This was made possible because last May the Jumblattis and the Arslanists united in fighting Hezbollah.

A sign of Quntar’s limitations among the Druze was not recorded in this video. When the Hezbollah representative, Muhammad Fnaysh, made a speech, he was booed on several occasions; and when Quntar praised Syria in his statements, he was booed as well. The Abay gathering had little to do with Samir Quntar. It was about the traditional Druze leadership affirming itself against Hezbollah, against an interloper, by neutralizing what Jumblatt and Arslan fear may be a Hezbollah creation in their midst.

This is a great video. The scene: the end of the Bastille Day festivities following the Mediterranean Union meeting in France last weekend. Syrian President Bashar Asad and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stand just meters away. It’s an awkward moment. (Click here if you do not see the embedded clip.)

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Olmert moves toward Asad, but is temporarily thwarted when he is forced to shake hands with dignitaries. Asad senses the impending contact and moves away. But Olmert persists in the quest for the historic handshake. He stops to say hello to Egyptian President Mubarak.

Meanwhile, Asad remains just out of reach, chatting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and Qatari Emir Hamid bin Khalifa bin Thani. Moon breaks himself away from Asad to greet Olmert, perhaps relaying to the Israeli Prime Minister that Asad does not seek contact. Asad is shepherded past Olmert by the Emir. He stands alone, but out of the danger zone.

The scene really seems to capture the dynamic of the Turkish-sponsored Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Israel pursues, Syria plays hard to get. From the video clip, one might reasonably infer that Asad isn’t particularly interested in the peace endeavor. Or maybe Asad just believes that direct engagement now would be premature—some kind of reward for Israel.

We don’t know what Asad was thinking when he was ignoring Olmert. But we do know what he was saying during the meeting about the kind of deal he envisions with Israel. According to the summary of Asad’s interview with Al Jazeera that appeared on the Syrian Government Champress (thanks to Tony Badran of FDD for the link), Asad apparently does not envision “normalization”—‘alaqat tatbi’iya, the formulation in the Arab Initiative—but rather, ‘alaqat ‘adiya, or “routine” relations with Israel.

Although this likely won’t be a deal-breaker, this is already setting the bar pretty low. In any event, it certainly won’t generate confidence that Damascus will meet the Israeli quid pro quo of distancing itself from Tehran. But given the effort in Paris that Olmert was making to just touch Asad, one wonders whether this, too, might be negotiable.

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