Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was right when he expressed pessimism that the Egyptian revolution and Arab Spring in general might allow Islamists to hijack the anti-government uprisings.
“A year ago or so, when this [Egyptian] revolution began, people said you’re not optimistic enough,” Netanyahu said in a speech before Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Sunday.
Days after the 25 January revolution erupted last year, Netanyahu warned of an Iran-style Islamist revolution in Egypt should Mubarak’s Muslim Brotherhood rivals eventually take over. He said Sunday that at that time, there were two possible options for the Egyptian revolution.
“We looked at it with sober eyes, and we said: It might go to the Google generation, but it might not. It might go to the Islamist direction. And by and large it has.”
Islamists in the North African countries of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have dominated their respective political scenes since their governments fell. The Islamist Ennahda party took 40 percent of the seats in Tunisia’s constituent assembly and in Egypt, Islamists won about two-thirds of the seats in its People’s Assembly.
The rise of Islamists is a threat to Israel, said Netanyahu.
“What we see is such a huge transformation in our region that we know that we will have to spend a lot more to defend ourselves,” he stressed. “Regional stability is not automatically guaranteed in the coming years, because there’s an Islamist wave sweeping the Arab world and beyond. There are very few populations that are exempt from it.”
Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state in 1979. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who signed the treaty, was assassinated two years later.
His successor, former President Hosni Mubarak, maintained the peace with Israel and backed US-led efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
