Is Israel a stabilizing or destabilizing agent in the middle east?

Answer 1

It is possible to argue either side of that question. Right now we see a terrible civil war in Syria, and many other conflicts have happened recently that involve either civil war (Egypt, Iraq, Libya, etc.) or war between other nations than Israel, such as the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraq-Kuwait war, etc. Since everybody in the Middle East hates Israel, that hatred is a unifying factor. It helps Arabs to make peace with other Arabs, or Sunni Muslims to make peace with Shia Muslims, if they can both agree that the real enemy is Israel. There was a period of a number of decades when the universal hatred of Israel brought about a relatively peaceful middle east. Of course, hatred of Israel does periodically erupt into war against Israel, which tends to spoil the effect. In any event, in recent years we have seen that even the universal hatred of Israel has not been enough to prevent all kinds of wars from breaking out in the middle east.

I believe that if the middle east is able to overcome its resentment of Israel and actually try to learn something from Israel, which is the most democratic and most advanced nation in the region, everyone could benefit and the overall stability of the region could improve. The middle east desperately needs to escape from a medieval mindset and become part of the modern world, with functional democracies and functional economies, with education, with better treatment of women, and so forth. It needs these things and it can learn about them from Israel if it was willing to do so. Failing that, the middle east is going to continue to be unstable, with or without Israel. They have plenty of other things to fight about, even without the obsessive issue of Israel and its existence as a Jewish state in the Muslim middle east. The real powder keg of the middle east is not Muslim vs. Jew, but Sunni vs. Shia. That one is going to be much tougher. But if Muslims can learn to tolerate Jews, they may even be able to learn to tolerate each other. And that is what they need, for a stable middle east.