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Former Israeli Defense Minister: Israeli-Arab Conflict Is Over
(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - "Today...there is not an Israeli-Arab conflict: There is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict," former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon told a conference Monday at the Hebrew University's Truman Institute marking the 40th anniversary of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. "When we look back at the agreement, there has not been a threat of conventional war against Israel since it was signed. No Arab leader or Arab army dared to challenge Israel as army-against-army, and the Yom Kippur War was the last war the Arab leaders initiated against us." He said that while the peace agreement essentially put an end to the nationalist pan-Arabist threat to Israel, a month before the agreement was signed in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran. And that revolution gave support to all the variations of Islamic radicalism that the region has witnessed since: from an increase in the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood to the rise of Hamas and al-Qaeda. But this also created opportunities for Israel as relations have developed with the Sunni Arab world. The situation is not one of normalization, "but they are no longer telling stories about the extremist Zionist empire that wants to reign from the Euphrates to the Nile."