On my way back from Washington, D.C., yesterday, sitting in a Subway in Breezewood, Pa., I read this must-read article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. And when I say read, by the way, I mean actually — sitting at a bench overlooking the gas pumps, holding the paper in my hands, trying unsuccessfully to avoid staining it with mustard from my turkey sub.
The headline: “How Iran Could Save the Middle East.”
That’s the worst part of the story, though, because it’s only about Iran in the negative sense. His thesis is this: the fall of Iraq and corresponding rise of Iran, by unleashing a tsunami of Shia political power in the Middle East, has created yet another moment of unprecedented opportunity in the Middle east — for Sunni’s (in the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) to unite with Jews against the common threat.
His meta point is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is more than just a cliche in the Middle East. Westerners don’t comprehend the depths of Sunni-Shiite hatred, or, more importantly, the raw fear that the rise of Iran has created among Sunnis in the Middle East. “The Shia are apostates,” Goldberg quotes a Palestinian as saying. “…They want to use Iraq as a base to convert Sunnis.”
Jews, as bad as they might be in the eyes of Palestinians, are not trying to steal their adherents.
As Goldberg writes:
A Palestinian cannot become Persian, but he can become Shia. And this, to a Sunni Muslim—even to a wine-drinking, pork-eating Marxist Sunni Muslim—is a reprehensible idea.
Here’s the nut:
The remarkable thing about this moment in the Middle East is that Arab leaders speak about Iran more critically than even Netanyahu does. In March, Morocco broke diplomatic relations with Iran over what it claimed were attempts by Iranian Shia to convert Moroccan Sunnis…
Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, recently told me that he has sensed an oncoming revolution in Sunni thinking. “For the first time, the majority of the Arab world thinks that Iran is the real danger, not Israel. Seventy percent of the Arabs are Sunnis. The Sunnis look upon us, whether they say it or not, not as a problem but as a hope.”
Peres may be overstating, but moderate Arab leaders would obviously like a Sunni-Jewish alliance: Israeli compromise—an agreement, for instance, to freeze settlement growth on the West Bank—would prove to their pro-Palestinian constituents that Arab states, and not Iran, are guarantors of Palestinian interests, and it would allow them to deepen their subterranean military-intelligence connections with Israel on the Iran question. Such an alliance has even more obvious strategic advantages for Israel: Netanyahu has said he will lobby Europe, China, and Russia on the necessity for strong action to stop the Iranian nuclear program. His case would be strengthened immeasurably if he could make these arguments in concert with Arab leaders.
This puts Obama’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — comments about settlements in a very powerful context: It’s not about peace, in the ephemeral sense, but about a concrete alliance between Jews and Sunni’s united against an Iranian/Shiite threat. And about Netanyahu’s own powers of diplomatic persuasion on the Iranian nuclear issue.
The article goes on to quote David Makovsky, former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of a new book on the peace process:
“There is a convergence of interests between the Arabs and Israelis on Iran. As such, this moment is a gift that shouldn’t be wasted,” Makovsky says. “The two sides need to put their differences in perspective to address the common challenge.”
Makovsky suggests that settlements may be too thorny of an issue right now; instead, the two sides could move to another issue: demarcating the borders of the eventual Palestinian state.
“This is not like the issues of Jerusalem and the status of refugees or security arrangements,” [Makovsky] said. “Both sides have already come very close on the West Bank land issue.” The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, before leaving office, suggested that the future state of Palestine be built on 93 percent of the West Bank, and receive additional territory from Israel in a land swap.
I really love this idea. It feels fresh, and much less fraught, than settlements. If borders are drawn, it would make much of the on-the-ground settlement questions — who can build an addition in which city — totally moot.
And it would help build trust — the bedrock of any alliance, especially a Sunni-Jewish one.