Clean Break War = Israel & Sunnis vs Shia?
Here is a new piece in the (very good) Jewish Daily Forward re theme touched on in prior posts here — that the evolving regional war in the mideast may find Israel allied with Sunni neighbors against Shia forces, and that the sudden Israeli interest in peace with the Palestinians is related.
Could Israel Make Common Cause With Sunni Arabs?
The Strategic Interest
| Fri. Feb 09, 2007
It is now generally understood among Middle East experts that last summer’s war in Lebanon created a kind of paradigm shift in Israel’s interaction with the region. The threat posed to Israel by Iran, its proxy Hezbollah and its ally Syria was also recognized as a threat by the Sunni Arab heartland.
The Sunni-Shi’ite struggles in Lebanon and Iraq were understood in both their historic Persian-Arab contexts and their internal Islamic ones. Israel and the major Sunni Arab states — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates — now appeared to share an enemy.
But could they actually make common cause? The Arabs made their condition clear: Israel had to make peace with its neighbors, beginning with the Palestinians, in order to confront Iran side by side with the Sunnis. And for that to happen, everybody suddenly remembered, the Arab League had established a strategic framework back in March 2002, the Saudi plan for comprehensive Arab-Israel peace.
SEE LINK above for rest of story.
