ERBIL GUNASTI: If Israel faces a mountain of very particular problems, it is not the only country struggling to make democracy work
The situation in Israel is as serious as I have seen it. I have many friends there and never before have they spoken about attempting to move their money out. The nation is turning in upon itself.
The immediate cause is the attempt by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself facing a serious fraud and bribery case, to curb the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court.
The protesters – including army reservists (an almost incredible situation) - believe this is the start of a slide towards autocracy. Or anarchy.
But if Israel faces a mountain of very particular problems, it is not the only country struggling to make democracy work.
I’m writing from a United States more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. The elections in Spain have failed to resolve a crippling political divide.
The protesters – including army reservists (an almost incredible situation) - believe this is the start of a slide towards autocracy. Or anarchy
Throughout Europe, the politics of post-war consensus are collapsing into a never-ending arm wrestle.
If Israel is an extreme example, perhaps, it is also a good illustration.
For decades it has depended upon American power and support - and still gets £3billion a year of US aid. But American power in the region has been waning since the turn of the Millennium.
Other powers are rising, Turkey in particular. China and Russia are extending their influence in the Mediterranean. The American Sixth Fleet no longer stops at Israeli ports so frequently as before.
And without American guarantees about the future, the answers to the present become harder to find.
This is true across the West. Consensus is easy in a world which gets better every day in every way – as we have been promised since 1945.
As American power dims, so do the dreams it seemed to guarantee. A, colder, darker, less secure future is hard for electorates to swallow.
If this is about the collapse of old certainties and the rise of China, it is also about gas and oil.
Can Washington really control a world, in which Saudi Arabia, the autocracy with the planet’s greatest oil reserves snuggles up to Russia, the autocracy with the world’s greatest gas reserves?
The answer is a no.
Yes, shale has come to America’s rescue, but for how long? Meanwhile the central fact about western Europe is that it has no significant reserves of oil or gas. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made us painfully aware of that.
Our room for manoeuvre is small.
Yet for Israel there is hope precisely in this dilemma because, for all the current violence, Israel has hydrocarbons – which Europe needs.
There is gas in the the Leviathan, Tannin, and Tamar fields in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Israel has known this since 2009 yet has bizarrely failed to exploit the reserves because it refuses to pump the gas through Turkey’s vast network of pipelines and over the only land bridge to Europe.
Why the obstinacy?
In part because America dislikes the idea of handing yet more strategic power to Turkey, the most troublesome of NATO members.
Meanwhile, Israel’s policies on new settlements and the Palestinians are profoundly opposed by Turkey, a leading Muslim nation. Compromise does not come easy to either side.
For a while there was talk of driving a pipeline direct from Israel to Greece through the Eastern Mediterranean, the solution favoured by Washington. But the Eastern Med is to some extent controlled by Turkey these days and America will not, or cannot, force the issue through. Times have changed.
I believe Israel’s reluctance to deal with Turkey will soon be overcome. Behind the scenes there is a new mood of realism.
Israeli diplomats know that America’s decline means Israel must stand on its own feet – and sell every cubic inch of gas it can to energy-starved Europe.
There would be no crude quid pro quo for using Turkey’s pipelines – not for the moment. But the diplomats know very well there would, eventually be compromises on Gaza, on West Bank settlements and on beleaguered East Jerusalem, which Ankara is determined should remain the home of all three Abrahamic faiths, not just Jews.
There seems little alternative.
Europe, meanwhile, must find its own answers.
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