ISRAEL: Amid Turmoil, Israeli Voters Pick Security as Defining Issue

Risks for peace with country’s adversaries make no sense in a region in tumult

By returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power, Israel’s voters on Tuesday made a call: Amid the implosion of the Middle East’s established order, now isn't the right time to take risks for peace.

In an unexpected windfall from the Arab Spring, that implosion has made Israel a much safer place, at least so far. In the north, Israel’s biggest conventional enemy, the Syrian army, has crumbled. In the south, the regime of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has proved friendlier to Israel than any other since the two countries made peace 36 years ago.

Israeli soldiers scuffle with Palestinian protesters in the 
West Bank near Bethlehem on Tuesday. 
Photo: Luay Sababa/Xinhua/Zuma Press

Yet, the rapid proliferation of new threats, such as the emergence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, have also made Israelis even more reluctant to trade territory for agreements with the Palestinians that some of these powerful new forces sweeping the region won’t ever recognize.

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“The strategic situation of Israel today is better than before the changes in the Middle East. But at the same time the Middle East has become much more volatile—it can change in days,” said retired Maj. Gen. Yaacov Amidror, a senior fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser between 2011 and 2013.

Upheaval in the region, Mr. Amidror added, “has changed the understanding of the Israeli side of what needs we have relating to security in any agreement in the future. Can anyone guarantee to us that we will pull out from Ramallah and not find later an ISIS in Ramallah?”

After all, other Israelis say, Syria’s al Qaeda affiliate is already present all along the border on the Golan Heights—an occupied territory that Israel not so long ago was negotiating to return to Syria in exchange for peace with the Assad regime.

Such an analysis explains why Mr. Netanyahu’s message of standing tough against international pressure and refusing to carry out new withdrawals from the West Bank and concessions to the Palestinians resonated with voters in the very last days of an election campaign that, up until then, seemed to be all about the economy and real-estate prices.

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