How Israelis envision and plan for the future of their country

Does Israel have a plan? What does the country want to look like in 10 or 20 years? What borders does it hope to have? Will the West Bank or the Gaza Strip be part of it? Will the Palestinians residing the territories be granted citizenship and become Israeli citizens? Does the country as a whole even know what it wants, what its goals are, or how to achieve them?

Israel faces a fundamental question, a “trilemma.” It can choose only two of three different goals many Israelis hold dear: to maintain control over the West Bank, with its strategic and religious significance to Israel; to retain a clear Jewish majority, the goal of the Zionist movement that founded the state; or to remain a democracy, with full voting rights for all citizens.

This trilemma has caused world leaders and publics, Israel-supporters and critics, to wonder aloud time and again: what does Israel want? If it wishes to maintain its Jewish and democratic character, surely it must separate from the West Bank and its population; why then does Israel keep building in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, making such separation all the more difficult? And if it plans to retain control over the West Bank, is it really willing to give up on either its Jewish nature or its democracy?

End Game attempts to solve the puzzle of why the Israeli strategic vision seems so elusive to many foreigners and Israelis alike. It explores how Israelis’ beliefs about their future are formed and how their visions are translated into policy, focusing on three factors in depth: the role of security concerns, ideology, and domestic political constraints that combine to shape Israel’s strategic posture.

The book contrasts the full range of views in Israel over the future of the West Bank, from supporters of a bi-national state or confederacy on the left, to supporters of a “one state” on the far right of the political spectrum. It pays particular attention to the worldview of the political center-right, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative, risk-averse and “anti-solutionist” approach to the problem. This worldview, following decades of precedent, rejects the need for a full-fledged strategic “solution” to the problem, leading to widespread confusion over Israel’s goals. The book analyses and critiques this approach, arguing forcefully for ending Israeli indecision over the future of the land and in favor of partition and, eventually, peace.

       

Following the White House signing ceremony for the Abraham Accords, which normalize peaceful relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, Natan Sachs examines the driving factors behind the rapprochement. He also warns that while the peace deal is a net positive for regional relations, the Palestinians, though shunted aside, cannot be ignored.

Related material: 

• Around-the-halls: Experts analyze the normalization of Israel-UAE ties
• The Biden factor in the UAE-Israel deal

Listen to Brookings podcasts here, on Apple or on Google podcasts, send email feedback to bcp@brookings.edu, and follow us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

Thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Chris McKenna, Fred Dews, Marie Wilken, and Camilo Ramirez for their support.

The Current is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

       

On September 9, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted a discussion with David Schenker, assistant secretary of Near Eastern affairs at the U.S. Department of State to examine the current state of U.S policy and diplomacy in the region and its future trajectory. Assistant Secretary Schenker will be returning from a mission to the region, which includes stops in Kuwait, Qatar, and Lebanon and offered thoughts on his recent meetings. Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, moderated the conversation.

Viewers can submit their questions via email to events@brookings.edu or on Twitter using #USForeignPolicy.

       

Students across the United States are heading back to class — in utterly unconventional times, of course, with many attending virtually and under unusual schedules. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: Many will be assigned certain classics in their international relations, history, political science, and/or regional studies courses. Recognizing that newer books and journal articles with fresh takes on the classic subjects don’t always make the syllabus, scholars and staff from Brookings Foreign Policy offer must-reads for students looking to supplement their coursework.

Richard Bush recommends:

Fear: Trump in the White House

For a riveting account of how foreign policy was really made in the Trump administration, I recommend Bob Woodward’s 2019 book “Fear.” It describes a series of encounters that President Trump had with his economic advisers on the one hand, and his national security team on the other, through spring 2018. Each group accepted the basic parameters of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. Each tried in every way they could to explain this to Trump, only to learn — over and over again — that he had rigid, non-mainstream views on trade and defense that smart practitioners were unable to budge.

James Goldgeier recommends:

Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War

I highly recommend Lindsey O’Rourke’s “Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War,” published by Cornell University Press in 2018. O’Rourke conducted significant archival research and created an original dataset of U.S.-backed covert and overt regime change attempts during the Cold War. She discovered that there were 10 times as many covert efforts as overt action, and only one in eight U.S. covert operations supported replacing an authoritarian regime with a democratic government. A critical insight from the book is that policymakers rarely got what they wanted through efforts at regime change, which had profoundly negative effects on the populations and their attitudes toward the United States. The book is a model for students thinking about their own research projects. O’Rourke is clear about the policy problem; she articulates alternative hypotheses; and she tests her theory using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Jesse Kornbluth recommends:

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics

All too often, natural geographical features are absent in geopolitical debates and analysis. In the 2015 book “Prisoners of Geography,” intrepid journalist Tim Marshall uses 10 up-to-date maps to examine the physical features of Russia, China, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan and Korea, and the Arctic to analyze the unique geopolitical challenges facing these countries and regions. Marshall’s book — simultaneously an atlas and analysis — provides a basis for a deeper understanding of global entanglements, why world leaders make the big decisions they do, and how a rapidly-changing physical planet will reshape the global geopolitical landscape as well.

Michael O’Hanlon recommends:

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A former CIA officer’s insights into North Korea’s enigmatic young dictator

This book, published in 2020, is awesome. It is one of the five best-written and most lively tomes I’ve ever enjoyed out of Brookings, in a quarter-century of working here and 35 years of reading the Institution’s work. Jung Pak was the CIA’s top Kim Jong Un watcher for eight years, until we persuaded her to join us as a senior fellow in 2017, and she slaved over this book during her first 2+ years in the Foreign Policy program. I might not have initially realized how much I’d enjoy reading about a young-ish, unusually-kempt, brutal dictator with a weird hairdo. But Jung weaves into the story a lot of things, including explanations of how the CIA studies difficult targets, how Kim was raised and chosen for leadership, what inspirations he learned watching his father but also understanding — more importantly, perhaps — the legacy of his grandfather. You read here about “Pyonghattan,” Kim’s goals for economic reform and modernization of his country’s capital city; about “pruning the family tree,” including Kim’s assassinations of his uncle and half-brother, as well as the parts of the family tree Kim likes better, such as his stylish sister; and about the life-long “education of Kim Jong Un,” namely what lessons Kim has learned dealing with the outside world. Jung explores how we in the United States have the power to shape this nuclear-armed dictator’s future lessons and incentives — after having come perilously close to going to war in 2017. For so many reasons, this book is great.

Bruce Riedel recommends:

The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) commands America’s foremost security service, responsible for collecting and analyzing all source intelligence for the president. Now we have a brilliant new book that provides portraits of the DCIs of the last half-century. Chris Whipple’s 2020 book, “The Spymasters,” provides gripping biographies of every director since Richard Helms in the 1970s. Controversy surrounds every one of them. “The Spymasters” gives credit and fault where each is due. The author of a previous insightful book on White House chiefs of staff, Whipple interviewed almost all the living former DCIs and dozens of other experts and observers (myself included). He provides interesting new accounts of CIA covert operations like the death of Hezbolla terrorist Imad Mughniyah in 2008. If you are a student interested in American foreign policy or considering a career in the Central Intelligence Agency — or simply interested in the men, and now one woman, who run the CIA — this is the book for you.

Ted Reinert recommends:

Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference

David Shimer’s 2020 book “Rigged” gives a detailed account of Russia’s catastrophically successful covert interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.S. response before, during, and after Election Day. What’s more, he first provides the historical context of Russian and U.S. covert electoral interference across the globe — from Cold War operations in Italy, Chile, West Germany, and the U.S. itself to the more asymmetric era of recent decades in which Washington’s cost-benefit analysis and democracy promotion toolkit evolved and Moscow weaponized the evolving online environment. The book features cases like Russia’s 1996 election, Serbia, Iraq, Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, and Montenegro. Shimer synthesizes a wide breadth of research and interviews with a very impressive roster of covert interference practitioners and other high-level former policymakers, and has produced a gripping narrative with sharp analysis and timely, useful conclusions.

Natan Sachs recommends:

Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq

A brand-new study in the journal Science by a graduate student caught my eye both for what it says both about peacebuilding in war-torn settings and about the design of social science research. Salma Mousa randomly assigned youth soccer players, Christian and Muslim in post-ISIS Iraq, to either mixed or single-religion teams. She then measured the effects of the on behavior within the soccer setting but also outside of it. Experiments like these — which come with their own ethical and methodological difficulties, to be sure — provide concrete and replicable data about what actually works in peacebuilding, something many people opine about without much data. Players on mixed teams indeed showed more affinity to players from other religions. But mixed-team players were no more likely to overcome faith boundaries outside of their sports league a couple of months later. It’s frustrating, but familiarity does not necessarily breed universal affinity. It hints at what I think is a general, if unfortunate, fact: People can have “some of their best friends” from another faction, and still be caught in a group dynamic that fuels conflict.

Amanda Sloat recommends:

The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for its Renewal

Although “The Back Channel,” published in 2020, is not an academic book, it can provide an important real-world supplement to the research-oriented texts on this list. Bill Burns, a career diplomat for 33 years, gives readers a front-row look at the highs and lows of American diplomacy across the last five presidents. At a time when the State Department’s work has been denigrated, this book provides valuable insights into its inner workings and makes a compelling argument about its necessity.

       

On August 13, Israel and United Arab Emirates (UAE) struck a major diplomatic agreement, with a joint Israel-UAE-U.S. statement announcing that in exchange for “full normalization of relations” between the two countries, Israel would forgo, for now, “declaring sovereignty” over disputed territory in the West Bank. Brookings experts on the Middle East analyze the news and its implications.

Natan Sachs (@natansachs), Director and Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: Normalization between Israel and the UAE is an excellent thing, in and of itself. It’s high time these countries have open, normal relations. But the context is of course key: the Israeli plan to annex parts of the West Bank, along the lines to be delineated by the U.S. and Israel after the release of Trump administration plan. The UAE-Israeli-U.S. deal allows everyone to climb down: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can avoid the terrible mistake of annexation while claiming he got something big for it (he did!). The UAE can claim it prevented annexation from happening — from UAE Ambassador Yousef Otaiba’s Hebrew-language op-ed warning of the move, to the big carrot of diplomatic normalization. Trump gets to avoid the annexation he himself sanctioned, and all the complications it could have produced, while showing a big win for two of his favorite allies.

There is, of course, something odd about rewarding a non-blunder. Annexation could have been (and perhaps already was) avoided easily with a decision in Washington or Jerusalem alone, but the countries can now move forward with what they’ve long wanted: cooperation among two often-like minded countries, with common regional concerns.

The losers, as often, are the Palestinians. The impatience in the Gulf with the Palestinians now comes to full daylight. The Gulf won’t wait for them any longer, asking of Israel only to avoid declarations of a major change to the status quo.

A question is whether anyone else, and especially the Saudis, might follow. For now, though, the camp of Arab countries with peace or normalization with Israel grows to four: following Egypt (1977), Jordan (1994), and Lebanon, whose nominal leaders signed a meaningless peace treaty with Israel during the Israeli invasion in 1983. This latest agreement to normalize is not nearly as consequential as the first two. Hopefully it will have more meaning than the latter one.

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: Jordan’s King Abdullah is a big beneficiary of this deal. Annexation of the Jordan Valley by Israel would have required a harsh Jordanian response. The king had pointedly not ruled out suspending the peace treaty his father had signed with Israel 25 years ago. Many Jordanians wanted him to cancel the gas deal with Israel, which would have cost Amman a fortune it doesn’t have. So the suspension of annexation takes a ticking time bomb off the king’s plate.

Adding another (very rich) Arab country to the peace camp, with an embassy in Tel Aviv, is also good for Jordan. It eases the isolation of Amman and Cairo. The king has been praising Muhammad bin Zayed for months.

Jeffrey Feltman, John C. Whitehead Visiting Fellow in International Diplomacy: Anticipating a potential Joe Biden victory in November, Netanyahu may have had second thoughts about large-scale annexation. But even smaller-scale annexation, while rejected internationally, would have established yet more Israeli facts on the ground that are difficult if not impossible to reverse. The UAE normalization offer provides Netanyahu a ladder to climb down from his annexation tree. Critics complain that this dissolves the Arab solidarity of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. But the presumed leverage of the Arab Peace Initiative has never translated into tangible gains for the Palestinians. Suspending annexation at least prevents a bad situation on the ground from becoming worse.

Tamara Cofman Wittes (@tcwittes), Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem each had their own good reasons for finding a way to open the door to formal relations, but there’s no question the announcement today is also a boon to Donald Trump as he faces a re-election with few concrete accomplishments to his name and many policy failures. Still, the White House should not take too much comfort from this outcome: Among other things, Netanyahu and Emirati Foreign Minister Muhammed bin Zayed (MBZ) have now positioned themselves well for the possibility of a post-Trump Washington. Netanyahu has taken off the table a step that the Democratic presidential candidate has said he firmly opposes, and for which other Democrats in Congress are threatening to impose consequences. And MBZ has taken a step that can only win praise and plaudits from any incoming U.S. administration, while separating his nation from Saudi Arabia in the minds of Democrats who are ill-disposed to Riyadh. It seems both Bibi and MBZ have placed their bets for November.

The big losers in today’s announcement, of course, are the Palestinians — who are supposed to be grateful at being spared a de jure annexation of territory in the West Bank that many would say has been in place de facto for years already. Abu Dhabi, like Anwar Sadat’s Egypt in 1978, is putting its national interests above Arab solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The Emiratis are betting they can easily weather the storm of unwelcome reactions in the Arab world — and they have far more reason than Sadat did to make that judgment.

The dynamic between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Arab states has been shifting for a long time. Ever since the end of the Cold War and the Gulf Crisis 30 years ago, Arab governments have become less concerned about Israel’s impact on regional stability and more focused on Iran and on their own internal troubles. Palestinian politics have become fractured, and have also been caught up in the regional power rivalries that now obsess Abu Dhabi and other capitals.

When the Arab Peace Initiative was launched in 2002, amidst the violence of the second intifada and Israel’s reoccupation of Palestinian cities in the West Bank, the assembled Arab governments in Beirut put the power of the Arab states’ normalization offer at the service of the beleaguered Palestinians, led by Yassir Arafat. Today’s announcement cements a reversal of the dynamic. Now the Emiratis can claim that they have saved Palestine from annexation, when what they’ve really done is used a suspension of annexation (which was probably suspended anyway) as cover for their pursuit of their own national interests in ties with Israel. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas may not be able to do much about this betrayal of Palestinian interests — but Palestinians will remember.

Suzanne Maloney (@MaloneySuzanne), Interim Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy program: The historic breakthrough between the United Arab Emirates and Israel would not have come without an assist from Iran’s Islamic Republic. The quiet ties developed over years of pragmatic cooperation between Israeli and Emirati officials around the threats posed by Tehran helped to overcome one of the most stubborn diplomatic schisms. The Israeli government’s suspension of the immediate threat of annexation was a relatively small price to pay in exchange for formalizing its security partnership with the Gulf states, and the move positions both countries — as well as those who may follow the Emirates’ lead — to simultaneously curry favor with the Trump administration, which sorely needed some tangible diplomatic achievement, as well as a possible Biden administration that would be more hostile toward the prospect of annexation.

Tehran has already responded with predictably scalding rhetoric, no doubt hoping to exploit residual support for the Palestinian cause among Arab public opinion to enhance its own regional reach. For that reason, some within the Islamic Republic will view this as a victory for the regime’s abiding ideological opposition to Israel, especially since today’s move was preceded by a thaw in the Emirates’ approach to Tehran and coincided with the Iranian foreign minister’s triumphal visit to a shattered Lebanon. But for all the fulminations that will be delivered at Friday prayers around Iran, the creeping normalization of Israel within the Arab world exposes the fundamental disconnect between Tehran and the region it seeks to dominate. And even as Iranians wait expectantly for the prospect of a diplomatic opening under a more sympathetic Biden administration, the landmark new ties between the Emirates and Israelis mean that the strategic and financial environment will remain challenging for Iran no matter what happens in November.

Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid), Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: In theory, who can argue against peace? In practice and principle, though, Israel is being rewarded for not doing something it should have never considered doing in the first place — annexing parts of the West Bank. This isn’t diplomacy, and it isn’t peace. It’s cynical, and it shows, once again, that Arab authoritarian regimes can’t be bothered to pretend they care about Palestinian rights. For the UAE, it’s a means to an end, formalizing increasingly warm feelings toward Israel, due to their shared enemy of Iran and their shared (and unusual) preference for President Trump over President Obama.

The word “authoritarian” is worth highlighting here. It’s hard to imagine an Arab country, if it were democratic, striking a peace deal with Israel today. Whether that’s a strike against — or for — democracy is another question. Of course, it’s not exactly an accident that Israel, one of the region’s few democracies, prefers that its Arab neighbors not be democratic, and the deal with the UAE is a reminder why.

Salam Fayyad, Distinguished Fellow in the Foreign Policy program: Yet another sign of bad times. Little did Arab leaders know, when they adopted the Arab Peace Initiative some 18 years ago, that normalization for withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories would turn into normalization for a mere suspension — read: deferment to a more opportune time — of further formal annexation of West Bank territory. Israel got itself a huge prize for merely temporarily refraining from committing another egregious violation of international law.

       

In this special edition of the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast, Lindsey Ford, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Foreign Policy, interviews two experts and authors of some of the latest papers in the Global China series. Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy and director of the Intelligence Project. Natan Sachs is a fellow in Foreign Policy and director of the Center for Middle East Policy.

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on iTunes, send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

The Brookings Cafeteria is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

       

In May 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an extraordinary visit to Israel. The first foreign official to visit since the COVID-19 pandemic swept both countries, he did so amid severe restrictions on travel to Israel. The trip dealt with an issue of top priority for U.S. policymakers: Chinese investment in Israeli infrastructure. Pompeo reportedly came to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet to reject a Chinese bid to run Israel’s largest desalination plant.¹ The pressure worked, and it was not nearly the first time the U.S. had intervened in a major economic interest in Israel for fear of Chinese advancements. The case was but one instance of a far broader phenomenon — one that is likely to grow in importance.

Great power competition between the United States and China, should it arise in full force, would change the face of Middle Eastern affairs. Countries in the region would face a new geopolitical and economic calculus, with new pressures placed on the way many of them conduct their national security. Israel is an illustrative example of this — already torn between economic and diplomatic interests to cooperate with China and consistent, notably bipartisan pressure from the United States to limit such cooperation. This type of balancing act may become far more important in years and decades to come, moving to center stage in the national security calculations of Israel and other countries in the region.

U.S. concerns regarding Chinese investment in Israel extend to issues beyond the desalination plant. Chinese firms are deeply involved in the future management of the major port in Haifa where the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet regularly docks, raising strident objections from American officials.² Washington is also wary of Chinese involvement in the future of 5G telecommunications in Israel, as in many countries in the world.³ In an attempt to assuage American concerns, Israel has set up a board to evaluate foreign investments, and its list of concerns issues seems destined to grow ever longer as Israeli commercial interests intertwine with the country’s critical infrastructure and large security industry.

Earlier cases of the United States vetoing Israeli-Chinese arms deals make the point clearer still. In 1999, Israel and China signed a deal for the sale of three Israeli Phalcon early warning aircraft to China. Strenuous U.S. objection lead to the cancelling of the deal even after a Chinese advance had been paid.⁴ Needless to say, the case caused a great deal of strain in Israeli-Chinese relations. In 2004, China sent Israeli-made Harpy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for upgrades in Israel. The United States demanded that the UAVs — already Chinese state property — be confiscated. Israel eventually returned the aircraft to China without repair, causing both serious stress between Israel and the United States, and a second crisis between Israel and China.⁵

China’s growing regional influence

China’s presence in the Middle East has broadened and deepened over the last decade. Beijing’s importance to the region will likely continue to rise, with commercial and investment ties to the region growing within the rubric of China’s far broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).⁶ For Beijing, an overriding need for energy imports underlies its interest in the region. With its high volumes of energy imports, China is the largest trading partner of many countries in the Middle East. It is, further, an enormous investor in construction and infrastructure, primarily through BRI.⁷ The burgeoning economic activity has been accompanied by a burst of Chinese diplomacy in the Middle East. Beijing has signed partnership agreements of various kinds with 13 of the region’s countries during the last decade.⁸

Source: World Bank⁹

Still, despite its increasing centrality to the region’s economic affairs and its intensifying diplomatic presence, Beijing hesitates to involve itself in regional security issues. In policy documents outlining its approach to the region, including the 2015 “Visions and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road” and the 2016 “Arab Policy Paper,” references to regional diplomatic and economic initiatives are central, while security issues are given far less prominence.¹⁰

In keeping with this focus on economic rather than security ties, China remains largely on the sidelines of the Middle East’s core geopolitical fault lines. Beijing has, for example, maintained positive relationships on both sides of the Iranian-Saudi rivalry.¹¹ The same is true of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is broadly consistent with China’s approach to the dispute between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. China has, in other words, managed to involve itself economically and diplomatically with almost all parties in the region while shouldering none of the security burdens and embarking on none of the security misadventures that have characterized U.S. involvement in the region.

China’s limited naval capacity in the region has grown, though modestly. It maintains an increasing presence in the Red Sea, notably in Djibouti, where it established a military base and has invested heavily in port facilities.¹² While Beijing remains several steps away from becoming a central naval power in the region, its immense energy interests provide Chinese leaders a potential incentive to build their regional naval capacity for a future possibility in which they feel their energy interests are not sufficiently secured. Even if Beijing does not now intend to take on such a role, potential American retrenchment in the region could change its calculations in the long term. For Israel and other close partners of the United States, this prospect raises the specter of an external power influencing regional security affairs and far less attune to Israel’s core interests than the United States. For now, though, “China is happy to have the United States incur the costs in the region while China derives the benefits.”¹³

Despite — or perhaps because of — its relatively light security footprint, China holds several advantages over the Unites States in developing regional relationships. Through strategic partnerships usually founded in economic interests, China has pursued its Middle Eastern interests on a bilateral basis, generally without adopting region-wide or multilateral goals. Beijing has avoided an American-style approach that attempts — or purports — to build from a region-wide political strategy such as democratization or containing Iran. This allows it greater flexibility than the United States in its dealings with individual Middle Eastern countries. Moreover, and unlike the United States, it does not ask its partners for government reform, promote democratization, or otherwise intervene in other countries’ domestic affairs.¹⁴ For many of the region’s governments, used to dealing with American administrations concerned with their domestic governance, Beijing’s silence on such issues makes it an attractive partner.

The avoidance of domestic political issues — especially those relating to human rights — goes both ways in discussions between China and many of its Middle Eastern partners. Most notably, Muslim-majority countries in the region like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have declined to criticize China’s mass repression of its Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province.¹⁵ This creates a comfortable relationship among non-democracies, each refraining from criticizing the other, often leaving the United States as the odd man out.

Meanwhile, for many in the United States, the Middle East seems like yesterday’s problem. The American public and many policymakers consistently express weariness of Middle Eastern affairs and a wariness of U.S. involvement in them, especially in military conflict.¹⁶ There is danger in taking this line of thinking too far — the United States is still heavily involved in the region and most Americans do not express a desire to simply cut all ties — but the trend is clear.

In contrast to the Middle East, Washington’s focus on a new global competition with China has increased in recent years, at times quite dramatically. The Trump administration’s trade war with China and the war of words over China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic contribute to this widespread perception, but they are only part of the story. Several influential Democratic policy voices have also turned their attention toward the likelihood of some form of extended U.S.-China global competition, and quite a few of them are hawkish on China.¹⁷ There is a significant possibility of future raised tensions between the two countries regardless of the party in power in the United States.

Regional countries’ choices amid future competition

The United States and China share an interest in the continued, secure flow of energy from the region. China’s interest in Middle Eastern energy has surpassed that of the United States, with American production capacity — at least at high enough prices — providing for net independence in energy, while China remains reliant on imports. Getting muddled in difficult regional problems would be highly undesirable for Beijing, and would mark a significant departure from its current approach to the region. That said, the continued erosion of U.S. willingness to patrol the Middle East may force China to reconsider this reluctance. China’s interest in Middle Eastern energy supplies may be such that future changes to the geopolitical situation in the region could necessitate a departure from its current stance.

As China’s global prominence and its nascent military presence in the region grow, it may find itself under greater pressure to choose sides in regional disputes. This could provoke a broader realignment of regional geopolitics, especially if Beijing and Washington back opposing blocs in a new contest for influence in the region.

For the United States, China’s interest in the Middle East may actually prove an impetus for staying there. If China’s regional role does increase amid rising U.S.-Chinese rivalry, the defining regional question for American policymakers may be how to balance their own wariness of Middle Eastern affairs with a desire to contain China’s influence.

[D]espite their respective desires to stay out, their rivalry could draw both the United States and China to greater involvement in Middle Eastern affairs than either would otherwise choose…

In other words, despite their respective desires to stay out, their rivalry could draw both the United States and China to greater involvement in Middle Eastern affairs than either would otherwise choose, with each increasing their investments and commitments to counter the other’s regional influence. Given both the American and Chinese government’s present hesitance to wade into complex regional disputes, it seems more likely that global competition would provoke regional competition, instead of the reverse. For both, Middle Eastern security issues may be a geopolitical arena of last resort, but in a broader competition the two countries could seek opportunities wherever they can be found.

If U.S.-Chinese competition leads the two countries to greater involvement in Middle Eastern security affairs, such a contest would place significant pressures on the countries of the region, especially those which have traditionally partnered with the United States. Israel would likely find itself facing a heightened version of the ongoing, difficult task of managing relations with the United States while seeking to pursue opportunities with China, especially in infrastructure and technology transfers.¹⁸

A choice between the United States and China would be costly for Israel — Chinese economic opportunities are large and growing. Yet for Israel, more than for other regional actors, the choice is clear. From Israel’s perspective, Beijing’s continuing interest in maintaining the secure flow of energy from the region, mean that its primary interests lie with parties other than Israel, notably Saudi Arabia and Iran.¹⁹ In extremis, this could prove a major challenge to Israeli national security in a future where China is more engaged in regional affairs and regional dynamics have shifted to Israel’s detriment.

American policymakers and experts from across much of the political spectrum are expecting that allies around the world may have to make stark and difficult choices in the future between the two powers. Israel must therefore play a difficult balancing act: continue to work to broaden its international cooperation, including with China, while recognizing the seriousness of U.S. concerns and the real and costly limitations these concerns place on Israeli-Chinese cooperation. For Israel, the bottom line in its relations with China is clear: Beijing cannot replace Washington.

       

Israel reopened its economy in May to a general sense of success. The interim “bottom” line of the COVID-19 crisis was under 300 deaths nationally of a population of close to 9 million—a relatively contained provisional outcome in comparison to other countries. Israel had responded early and with stringent measures to the global pandemic. It had, moreover, successfully cooperated on health issues with both the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and, separately, indirectly, and quietly, with the Hamas authorities in Gaza, where the risks of a full-blown outbreak are immense. The apparent success was uneven, however. One sector of society suffered the brunt of the pandemic, such as the Haredi (“UltraOrthodox”) community.

But the apparent early success spurred a debate among some scientists as well as the public about the appropriate response to the crisis, given the economic toll of the effort. Some have argued that the country’s low mortality rate was due more to its relatively young population than to the near shutdown of the economy. There is, in fact, a risk that the perception of early success may itself be a cause for subsequent complacency. Israelis and Palestinians emerged from the closure only to see early signs of upticks in infections, and a crisis contained in the spring may yet become a greater one by the fall.

EARLY MEASURES

Israeli authorities confirmed their first case of COVID-19 on February 21. By the first week of March, an outbreak was identified in the West Bank town of Beit Jalla, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and the latter city was closed to outside travel. The Israeli government banned all air travel from highly infected countries, a list that grew quickly to include European as well as East Asian countries. It ordered self-quarantine on those returning from all foreign destinations. By mid-March the government ordered the closing of kindergartens, schools, universities, and restaurants, and declared a general ban on congregations of more than 10 people. By April, the country was largely shut down, with strict limits placed on most people exiting their homes. 

As the pandemic arrived in Israel the country was in the midst of a year of political crisis. The first confirmed case was identified less than two weeks ahead of a national election on March 2, the third such election in less than 12 months. A country well-versed in security crises—indeed a country technically still in a legal state of emergency since the first week of its existence—it was far less versed in handling a health crisis.

The ministry of health, which took the lead, was later joined in a command center east of Tel Aviv by other ministries as well as the military, police, the Mossad (the external security service, which precured equipment abroad from unnamed sources, likely among Arab Gulf states), and the Shin Bet (the internal security service, ISA or Shabak). The latter, with broad technical capacity in surveillance, usually of Palestinians, was deployed to the surveille Israeli citizens, tracking via cellphone data the movement of anyone infected. The measures were extreme, but in a medium-sized country accustomed to emergencies, they were met with relatively little complaint, aside from a warranted concern for a lack of parliamentary oversight over these measures during the political crisis.

With all that Israel was doing, it conspicuously hesitated to take a step its experts recommended: a travel ban on flights from the United States, where the crisis had already emerged, including among Orthodox Jewish communities in the greater New York area who have closed ties to sister communities in Israel. It emerged before long that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had overruled his experts for fear of angering President Trump. Indeed, when the travel ban was eventually put in place, it was instated as a then-still unnecessary global travel ban, in order not to single out Trump’s United States. One study in Israel suggested the link to the United States was the source of perhaps 70 percent of early cases in Israel.

COOPERATION BETWEEN THE PALESTINIANS AND ISRAEL

Despite the fraught relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and the intermittent warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the sides managed to cooperate effectively during the crisis. Medics from Gaza—a territory under varying degrees of closure for 13 years— were brought in to Israel for training. A host of other quiet measures were taken to support the efforts, including the transfer of supplies and the relaxing of restrictions on exports, fueled by a fear of a catastrophic outbreak in Gaza, a crowded, enclosed area of about 140 square miles with nearly 2 million inhabitants. In the West Bank, where Israeli-Palestinian technical cooperation is far more routine, the efforts were likewise pragmatic.

Despite the fraught relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and the intermittent warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the sides managed to cooperate effectively during the crisis.

If Israel benefits in this crisis from a young population, with about 42.5 percent under the age of 25, that is even more the case with the Palestinians. In the West Bank, more than half (56 percent) are under 25, and in the Gaza Strip, the figure is a staggering 64 percent. The three economies are also integrally linked. By far the largest destination for Palestinian exports is Israel, and the latter controls nearly all border crossings (with the exception of the Gaza-Egypt border). As a result, the three territories are linked in health crisis even more than in normal times. The same will be true as the crisis unfolds further.

THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL

The most senior Israeli official infected in the pandemic was the minister of health himself, Yaakov Litzman. It was lost on no one that he came from the Haredi community, the worst hit by the pandemic for reasons both demographic and societal. Along with hospitals, synagogues and religious boarding schools were the primary hotbeds of the pandemic in Israel. The Haredi community is one of the poorest in Israel. It has the largest average family size of any major population sector, and very strong habits of communal prayer and study (Orthodox Jewish prayer generally requires the presence of 10 Jewish men). A highly conservative community, it also looks to authority figures other than the government or the health and science community for guidance. One of the most important rabbis in the Haredi community, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, continued to issue instructions to continue communal religious study long after the government had ordered otherwise. Considered to be the preeminent Litvak rabbi, his instructions carry weight among many Haredim. By April 2, the government ordered a specific closure on Bnei Brak, a largely-Haredi city east of Tel Aviv. 

The spread of the virus among Haredim, and their longstanding communal isolation among Israelis, contributed to their stigmatization during the crisis, but also to newfound solidarity between Israelis of different stripes. Forces deployed to help in Bnei Brak during the closure were supplied with Hebrew-Yiddish translation cheat sheets, to help soldiers dealing with a community where some converse in the Ashkenazi Jewish-German language. Tel Aviv, the real and symbolic center of secular Israel, projected on its town hall the words “Bnei Brak” in a sign of solidarity with its Haredi suburb.

Indeed, the pandemic also created some real soul searching within the Haredi community. Arieh Der’i, political leader of the largest Haredi party, Shas, spoke of the need for internal accountability. With the authority of an insider who is also a cabinet minister privy to the official data. A majority of the cases in Israel were among Haredim, he claimed, calling for soul searching within the community itself.

Larger than the Haredi community, another relatively poor sector in Israel came through the crisis with high marks: Arab (or Palestinian) citizens of Israel. Despite early fear that a lack of infrastructure and resources, and a history of suspicion between security forces and the large minority group (about 21 percent of the Israeli citizenry), the toll in the community inside Israel was contained. This owed, likely, to a combination of pragmatic cooperation of the authorities and the community, and to widescale civil society mobilization in a common effort.

THE DANGERS OF APPARENT SUCCESS

On April 20, the rate of recovery in Israel first outpaced the mortality rate, and the government announced the first measures to reopen the economy. These grew to include the opening of stores, malls, schools, and kindergartens. By late May, the country was mostly reopened, if still under orders toward precautions such as face masks and avoidance of major crowds. Some institutions, including some universities, may not open yet, despite the leeway to do so, and early signs emerging from the reopening suggest caution is warranted. By the end of May, an uptick in infections was recorded, including one in a Jerusalem high school. In the Gaza Strip, the first death was reported, as the total number of cases reached 55, and the Palestinian authorities in Gaza again shut the crossings to Israel. Israel has already announced that specific “signposts” would entail a return to national shutdown, including 100 new cases in one day, a 10-day doubling of cases, or 250 severe cases, nationally.

Of greatest concern, however, is the preparation for the possible next wave. Some Israelis may have learned the wrong lesson from the apparent success: that the crisis was simply overblown. The Israeli shutdown of the economy, like that in other countries, bought the state time to prepare—with widespread testing, random sampling of the population, and targeted rather than nationwide procedures. Israel’s battle with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic appeared successful, if extremely damaging to the economy. The whole costly effort could turn out to be a waste if the country’s approach to a second wave was merely a replica of the first.