Why the Iraq war defanged Israel’s right

That’s the US invasion of Iraq. In a region where the combination of oil wealth, culture and the Cold War has ossified politics for so long, in a region that has been barricaded from history for so many years, in a region where the United States has always been a status quo power, never a revolutionary power — the United States just crashed right through the locked door: ‘‘Heeeere’s Dubya.’’

But here’s what’s surprising: so far the biggest political fallout from the Iraq war has not been in the Arab world. It has been in Israel. Say what?

Yes, by destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime and the real strategic threat posed to Israel by Iraq, the Bush team has taken away one of the strongest security arguments from Israeli hawks: that Israel needs to keep the West Bank, or at least troops on the Jordan river, as a buffer in case Iraq again tries to come through Jordan to strike Israel, as it has done before.

As long as Iraq loomed as a major threat, one could hear three arguments in Israel. One said no withdrawal from the West Bank and Jordan river was possible because Israel needed a security buffer.

Another said withdrawal was essential to maintain Israel as a Jewish democracy. Because if Israel kept control of the occupied territories, there would soon be more Arabs than Jews living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. A third said that no withdrawal was tolerable because the Jewish state needed to control all the Jewish land, including the Biblical West Bank.

The Israeli right has tended to blend the security and the Jewish land arguments, while the Israeli left has focused on need to maintain a Jewish majority so Israel doesn’t become an apartheid state.

But with the Iraq threat now gone, the argument is increasingly between those on the left and centre who want to get rid of the territories to preserve Israel as a whole Jewish state and those on the Israeli right who want to preserve Israel on the whole Jewish land.

Last week, an earthquake happened in Israel when a leading figure of the Israeli right split away and embraced the logic of the Israeli left and centre. Likud deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, gave a gutsy interview in which he indicated Israel can’t continue occupying the West Bank and Gaza, with all their Palestinians, without losing a Jewish majority and eventually having to argue in the world against the universal principle of one person, one vote.

‘‘I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organisations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid … will lead the struggle against us,’’ Olmert said.

This marks a major split in the Israeli right. And one of the key factors enabling Olmert to move from focusing on the external military threat to the internal demographic threat is the fall of Saddam.

The other thing that makes it possible is democracy. Of course Israel is the first state in the region to experience real fallout from Iraq. The freer the society, the more it is capable of speedy reflection, self-criticism and self-correction.

The absence of democracy in the Arab world (coupled with the US failure to stabilise Iraq) makes Arab states much more resistant to immediate political fallout.

So have we smashed down the Middle East door only to find that there is no one on the other side? No, if we produce a decent outcome in Iraq, it will become an inescapable reality, and the whole Arab system will have to respond — but it will be slow.(New York Times)