Efraim Halevy with George Jonas

To contact us Click HERE




 I am not a pessimist regarding the Middle East. It is just that itis sometimes unpleasant to watch.
The world is evolving toward what I will call modernism although thatis too weak a descriptive. Some of the core ingredients of modernismare not even in place yet. It is an revolutionary evolution thoughand it is uprooting all societies and that disruption easily burstsout in violence. Our challenge is to manage it if we can and acceptfacts on the ground as temporary sideshows that will ultimatelysuccumb.
Does anyone now doubt that the Iranian mullahs will succumb? It isonly a matter of when.
Israel is a demonstration in the desert of modernism as work. And asI have posted before, the military threat has actually waned unlessyou really think that one can form an army of suicides. Low leveldisruption is now turned inward in the Islamic world and regimes arefailing and changing.
To put this all in perspective. China went through a full seventyyears of what can only be described as adjustment to modernism. India is still adjusting although with the present aid of rapidgrowth. Africa has begun to get serious about this adjustment. Islam has actually resisted the adjustment with a nasty two forwardone back type of movement.
It is this propensity to go backward that is so difficult to watch. It does not last because you cannot wipe out people's memories andhalt their natural resistance to forced poverty.
An example of this is present day Iran. The next regime will be amodernist democracy that dominates through example. They have theeducated middle class in place who are simply out waiting themullahs. Sooner or later the shoe will drop.

George Jonas onEfraim Halevy: Israel’s ‘realistic optimist’
George Jonas Oct 24,2012
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/10/24/george-jonas-on-efraim-halevy-israels-realistic-optimist/
During a recent visitto Washington, D.C., Israel’s former top spook, Man In The Shadowsauthor Efraim Halevy, addressed a group of scholars, journalists andforeign affairs types at the Wilson Center. For combining realismwith optimism, his sober presentation was the clearest analysis ofthe current situation of the Middle East I’ve encountered.
Halevy, a formerDirector (1998-2002) of Mossad, is in a position to know. Born inEngland but arriving in Palestine as a boy just before it turned intoIsrael, Halevy rose through the ranks of the institution he ended upheading in 1998, after being recalled from his second career as adiplomat to do so. Try envisaging an amalgam of the OrientalistProfessor Bernard Lewis and Dr. Henry Kissinger, wrapped into theaura of James Bond — or better still, his boss, M, a spymasterrather than a master spy. The scholar, envoy and ex-agency chiefcomes across as an inter-disciplinary edition of all his parts.
In public speaking,which he does without notes, Halevy creates the impression ofoutspoken, direct, full-disclosure sincerity, so much so you’retempted to say to your neighbour “Wow, listen to this guy tell itall,” until the speech is over and you look at your notes todiscover that whatever Halevy spilled it wasn’t the beans.
The man emerges fromthe shadows to speak his mind, without quite telling us what’s init. He offers no comfort to left or right; hawks or doves; anti-,post-, or ultra-Zionists. He offers none to the enemies of the Jewishstate either. He seems resolved, though, not to substitute what hemight like to see for what he actually sees.
Paraphrased (I’ve notranscript of his Wilson Center remarks), these are some facts asHalevy sees them. Put in my words, they add up to his portrait of thecontemporary Middle East.

• Religion, having declined as a political factor in the region after the First World War, erupted with a vengeance in the 1970s. It cannot be swept under the carpet and needs to be reckoned with as a key force, keeping in mind all its complexities and ramifications, including the conflict between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam
• People inspired or fuelled by religion aren’t necessarily irrational. It’s misleading and dangerous to assume that rational discussions cannot be held with people whose arsenal includes suicide bombers. Note that groups launching suicide missions often send their children rather than go themselves.
• Governments in the region are increasingly losing grip on their own countries. Civil war is becoming the norm, with Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon being overrun by spirits released from the Pandora’s box of the “Arab Spring.” Even the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan are threatened. Iraq’s government has virtually lost the Kurdish third of its territory, for better or worse. And Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, verges on becoming dysfunctional. Halevy’s point is that certain Western initiatives, encouraging “reform,” may be detrimental to Western interests.

Halevy has writtenelsewhere about the “policies of 2011” setting back theachievements of 2003 in Libya, when Muammar Gaddafi was persuaded todismantle his nuclear program. “In light of the Libyan experience,”Halevy wrote in The New Republic, “what nuclear aspiring nation cannow put its trust in a rollback deal of any sort? When NATO tookto the skies over Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, it delivered thegreatest possible blow to future non-proliferation diplomacy.”

• After a decade’s absence following the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Russians are back as a factor in the region. We disregard them at our peril.
• Democracy, western-style, is a fine form of government when it coincides with the culture of a region. It’s not the only form of functional government, though, and trying to force it on cultures it won’t fit is a mistake.
• Halevy doesn’t believe in “red lines” — limits set by one party threatening a military response against the other party crossing them. Drawing a red line confines the party that draws it as much as the party against whom it is being drawn. “It creates a commitment that cannot always be met.”
• Halevy doesn’t look at Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons as an existential threat to Israel. Why plant the notion in the minds of the Jewish state’s enemies that if Iran acquired the capacity to build and deliver the bomb Israel’s existence could be put into doubt? Halevy would rather say that acquiring nuclear weapons capability is an existential threat to Iran.
• In many ways, the relationship between the United States and Israel has never been better. Halevy tells a story of Barack Obama’s intervention saving Israeli lives in a recent incident to illustrate that there’s no “daylight” let alone bad blood between the White House and Israel.

Right. If you sayso, chief. Anyway, we may have four more years of the fellow, so whygive people ideas?
Realistic pessimistsare a dime a dozen; realistic optimists are as rare as gold.(If they’re top-notch thinkers, like Halevy, it’s a bonus.) I’mnot knocking realistic pessimists, being one myself, but if anythinggets done in the world that is remotely beneficial, we usually owe itto the efforts of realistic optimists. May their tribe increase.