Israel on the Islamist Surge in Egypt: Told You So

The stunning showing by Salafist parties in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections surprised Israeli officials as much as the rest of the world. The estimated 40 percent of the vote that went to the Muslim Brotherhood, the party that founded modern political Islam, was about in line with pre-election polls. But the unexpectedly strong showing by the Salafis -- fundamentalist Sunni Muslims who hold that the only true Islam was practiced around the time of the Prophet Mohammad, 1,300 years ago -- could put a group that rejects modernism in a pivotal position in Egypt's new democracy.

“This is even worse than we predicted," a senior Israeli security official was quoted telling the daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

In other words, events are unfolding much as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned they might in the heady first days of the Arab Spring, which Netanyahu said could well turn into an "Iranian winter." The metaphor draws from the history of Iran's 1979 revolution, which began as a popular uprising united in opposition to the despotic Shah, and thanks in part to the organization and motivation of religious activists, produced the radical theocracy that has controlled the country since.

"In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we're facing a new era of liberalism and progress," Netanyahu told the Knesset last month, before polls even opened in Egypt. "They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don't see where things are heading."

"Who says that protests against dictatorship necessarily lead to democracy?" asked Gabriel Ben-Dor, a political scientist at Haifa University, at a recent conference on Israel's new security challenges at Bar-Ilan University. "Democracy is not what emerged from the revolution against the Tsars of Russia 100 years ago, nor has democracy emerged in many CIS states that threw off the Communist yoke. Thus there is no rational, logical or historical basis for assuming that democracy will result from the revolutions underway today in the Arab world."

Wise words. And anyone who believes that "CWII" etc would turn out any better in the USA is a complete and utter fool.

A few important notes.

1) The MB has managed to avoid international condemnation by shunning violent extremists. Whenever they would get a batch, they would inevitably schism off and become a dangerous group. This happened a lot, perhaps dozens of times. But the overall effect was that the MB itself became increasingly moderated and savvy to diplomacy instead of violence. Importantly, they have already refused any coalition with the Salafists, which is a very good sign, and means that they will form a coalition with the secular parties instead.

2) The MB have a very good model of how an Islamist party can operate by looking at the ‘Justice and Development Party’, the current majority party in Turkey. And they would be wise to follow their model, as the Egyptian army is also very aware of the Turkish military model, of having a military coup when it looked like radical Islamists were rising to power.

Importantly, the JDP became very popular by putting its emphasis on long ignored social problems among the poor and middle class majority. The number one problem being a lack of inexpensive food and consumer products. So their platform was economics, not so much religion.

The JDP has thrived for years by doing this, and only now after nine years is it starting to wear thin, their prime minister Erdogen finally starting to show his Muslim obnoxiousness.

3) So the wise path for the MB would be to start slow in a coalition with the secular parties, root out a lot of the notoriously corrupt and inefficient Egyptian bureaucracy held over from the Mubarak regime, and especially to use whatever money that is left in the treasury to import a huge amount of cheap food for the public. This would do a lot to alleviate the “new boss, same as the old boss” problem.

I’ll add that Egypt has some unique and awful problems independent of whoever is in charge. A poorly executed humanitarian inoculation program that reused needles has resulted in about 10% of their population having hepatitis ‘C’. There is also increasing contention for the water of the Nile river with several other countries, and their internal security against radicals is not going to be getting any better soon.

Turkey and Egpt are not the same. Turkey is/was a democracy, whose secularism was secured by the military. Egypt was a military dictatorship. The AKP has had to work within a democratic framework in a country with competing non-government and religious organizations. It has had to make deals with the Kurds, play nice for Europe, while pushing an anti-Israel and anti-US line to usurp nationalism.
In Egypt, the Islamists were the civil society alternative to the government. Now they will be the government. There is no democratic tradition and the military is largely discredited. The Muslim Brotherhood will co-opt non-Islamist groups under the threat that the alternative will be a Muslim Brotherhood Al-Nour coalition.

This is not an argument between Salafi and non-Salafi. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Nour are Salafi. To use a communist analogy, this isn't Menshevik - Bolshevik, this is Stalinist vs Khmer Rouge.

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