Uncertainty pervades 12th Herzliya Conference

A sense of profound uncertainty pervades the 12th annual Herzliya Conference, which began last week in Tel Aviv, according to Judith Miller, American journalist with the Jewish Tabletmag website.

She continues:

Usually a buoyant assembly of Israel’s best national-security experts, globe-trotting defense analysts, talented pro-Israeli politicians, and policy wonks, this year’s almost weeklong conference opened last night with intense, worried discussions about the country’s future and the many challenges facing the region.

Humility is not a widely admired trait in this crowd. But speaker after speaker at the meeting’s early sessions offered long lists of unknowns. They also revisited a litany of predictions about the Arab Spring offered at last year’s conference that turned out to be dead wrong.

The revolution in Egypt—the first Arab state to have made peace with Israel—was greeted with some euphoria at last year’s conference. Many experts claimed that freedom and democracy were finally coming the Arab world.

While some conference participants—many of them American—still claim that, in the long run, Arabs and Israelis will benefit from the political earthquake on the Nile and in other Arab capitals, the majority this year have so far expressed skepticism. Many of the experts noted that almost no one in Israel had predicted the dramatic upheavals that have transformed the political map of the Middle East.

Egypt alone is stunning to consider: A truly democratic election resulted in Islamists garnering over 75 percent of the vote. The September raid on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Israel’s first diplomatic presence in an Arab land led to the temporary withdrawal of Israel’s ambassador. (A new envoy has recently returned to Cairo, but with a heavy security presence and diminished political expectations.)

The Sinai, where tourists once flocked for vacation, has become a dangerous, crime-infested “no-go” zone for Israelis, as is most of the country. The pipeline providing Egyptian gas to Jordan and Israel has been bombed at least 10 times. The Jordanian government announced this week that due to the disruptions, the government is raising gas prices by 9 percent, another hardship on its already hard-pressed citizens.