Haaretz is reporting that an unnamed Arab state has declared that it “won’t oppose” an Israeli military strike against Iran. According to the article, this state fears growing Iranian influence in the region, particularly among its Shiite communities. (My guess is that it’s Saudi Arabia, which has a sizable-and increasingly restless-Shiite underclass.) Meanwhile, Israeli sources say that other Arab states are echoing this support.

Yet Israelis would be foolish to take any confidence from this bizarrely vague news. After all, Arab support for Israeli foreign policy aims-on the rare occasions that it even exists-is pathetically ephemeral. In this vein, consider the Arab response to the 2006 Lebanon war. Initially, Israel’s swift response to Hezbollah’s cross-border raid drew the support of moderate (read: loosely pro-western) Arab states, particularly Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. However, when Arab publics held massive demonstrations in support of Hezbollah, these governments quickly retreated, accusing Israel of war crimes.

These states are equally unreliable when it comes to supporting peace initiatives. Indeed, not long after sending high-ranking representatives to the November Annapolis peace conference, Egypt and Saudi Arabia invited Hamas officials to their respective capitals, pushing a Hamas-Fatah rapprochement in an unambiguous snub to U.S.-led peace efforts. Then, on New Year’s day, Iranian official Ali Larijani visited Cairo-the first major Egyptian-Iranian diplomatic exchange in decades and yet another snub.

Moreover, Israel should harbor no fantasies regarding how a strike on Iran would play out on the Arab street. Make no mistake: despite everything that one reads about the Sunni-Shiite divide, such an attack will enflame the entire region in massive demonstrations. This doesn’t mean that Iran is particularly popular–in Egypt, Iran is actually facing a major public relations challenge after an Iranian documentary glorified the assassination of Anwar Sadat. It’s just that Israel is profoundly unpopular, and its confrontation with Iran will be interpreted as part of a larger, evil pattern of the Jewish state attacking a Muslim one. Arab states are well aware of this-which is why even their tepid support against Iran will only come off-the-record.

Of course, this hardly means that Israel shouldn’t attack Iran if its vital interests require it. It only means that the support of Arab states shouldn’t be factored into the equation.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 11:11 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.