Jonathan Spyer

By Steve McDonald

The Transforming Fire
The Rise Of The Israel-Islamist Conflict

By Jonathan Spyer
Continuum 2010, 240 pp.

NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher was bang on when he recently wrote that “Israel has to be the most analyzed yet least understood country in the world.” There is a mountain of literature, and more added to it every day, examining Israel’s many challenges. Whether the issue is one of diplomacy, domestic politics, or the security situation, you can bet there are a dozen thoughtful books and countless articles on the specific topic in question. We have access to endless resources that help us comprehend the trends affecting the region in general, and the pressures confronting Israel in particular.

But can the same be said when it comes to understanding Israelis themselves? The very literature that illuminates the processes, patterns, and policies that shape the region and Israel’s place in it can often, ironically, leave us in the dark when it comes to what really makes Israelis tick.

Thankfully, Jonathan Spyer has given us a groundbreaking – and heartfelt – contribution that bridges the divide. His recently published work, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, is a masterful analysis of the changing dynamics in the never-ending war against Israel, as seen through the lens of one Zionist who was nearly killed in a tank in Lebanon.

Jonathan Spyer, currently senior research fellow at a prominent Israeli think-tank, made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) in the early 90’s from the UK. Having survived years of IDF duty in the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention a subsequent bout as an advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office, Spyer entered Lebanon in the summer of 2006 under no illusions for the difficulties facing Israel in its brief, painful war against Hezbollah. Spyer’s academic and government background, combined with front-line combat experience, makes for a rare and compelling treatise.

The Transforming Fire centres on the thesis that the war to annihilate Israel has recently shifted from one of Arab nationalism (or pan-Arabism) into one propelled by radical Islamic theology (pan-Islamism). If this is the case, as the evidence affirms, the consequences are enormous.

Take the land-for-peace formula derived from UN Resolution 242, which conceives that in return for recognition, peace and security guarantees from the Arab world, Israel would cede territories captured in 1967. As Spyer rightly notes, radical Islamic theology is not rooted in the same pragmatic parameters of those former belligerents governed by a pan-Arabist perspective. We are no longer dealing with individual Arab states willing to compromise if it means the restoration of national “honour” (as Egypt did in signing the 1978 peace treaty).

Today, we are faced with a transnational Islamist cause that can neither be dissuaded by Western carrots and sticks, nor satisfied with anything less than total victory over the Jewish state. Now more than ever, Israel’s enemies genuinely believe the entire land to be an eternal and sacred Islamic waqf (trust). From their perspective, how can one negotiate away any piece of something that, by definition, cannot accommodate another sovereign power?

The pragmatism so often induced by the nature of state sovereignty, which can bring the most bitter of opponents together to sign treaties, is entirely non-existent among Israel’s hard-line Islamist enemies. And it is precisely this transformed Islamist bloc that Spyer sharply examines – more theological, less compromising, and thoroughly willing to play a very long game in pursuit of the “resistance”.

But the real weight of The Transforming Fire lies in Spyer’s brilliant, often painful, personal account – which offers us a glimpse into the soul of Israeli Zionism.

Walking past body bags lining the street outside Café Hillel, the night it was gutted by a suicide bomber in 2003. Smoking cigarettes in a Jerusalem bar just hours after returning exhausted from Lebanon – and overhearing an Arab journalist voicing his support for Hezbollah. Holding conversations about what it means to be a Zionist with the family of Alon Smoha, a gregarious tank commander killed in an ambush the author barely survived.

It is through these anecdotes that Spyer brings us into the minds and homes of real Israelis. The ones who don’t make the news, who are unknown in the West, and who refuse to be submit to those who wish their annihilation. In so doing, Spyer points to a phenomenon within Israel that many have noted, but few have articulated with as much insight.

In a chapter entitled “The New Jerusalem”, Spyer discusses the diffusion of power within Israel beyond the secular, European circles that founded and led the state in its early years. Understanding the rise of the Sephardim and Modern Orthodox is key to grasping the new face of Israel, which has become more skeptical of its enemy’s intentions and more traditional in outlook. And yet, the New Jerusalem is very much willing to make painful concessions for peace – if only there were a reliable partner on the other side.

Spyer indicates that this transformed Israeli mainstream sees Zionism less as a response to European anti-Semitism and a desire to “be like every other nation” (a view common to many of their Ashkenazi predecessors). Rather, Israelis increasingly see themselves as a modern incarnation of an ancient, unique nation – a response to the totality of Jewish history, rather than the devastations of the pogroms and the Holocaust.

If I were to add margin notes to Spyer’s work, it would be to say that if we indeed accept the entirety of Jewish history, we will see that statelessness is not at the root of our sufferings. Yes, statelessness renders the Jewish people defenseless, and history is replete with its devastating results. The culmination of two thousand years of exile, statehood has been an extraordinary blessing for the Jewish people and the entire world. The benefits are incalculable, and we are fortunate beyond words to be living in this era.

But statehood has not solved the issue of anti-Semitism – because the answer to that question lies in something much deeper within man. Certainly it will not be solved by the issues of sovereignty, borders, and international recognition. And Israel’s suicidal enemies are committed to ensuring that, as long as Israel refuses to forfeit statehood, it cannot be “like every other nation”.

In spite of the dangers and chaos just across its borders, it is astonishing to walk the streets of Israel and observe how “normal” it is. That said, it appears that the new Israeli mainstream is right. Israeli statehood exists to free the Jewish people of stateless persecution, so that we may contribute to the world in our own unique way – just as we have for millennia. But it doesn’t mean that we as a people will ever be treated as “normal”, for the totality of Jewish history shows that that was never the case.

And why should we aim for “normal” and “like every other nation”? Personally, I want something much greater than that. The sort of inspired Zionism that today motivates the likes of Alon Smoha’s family, and Spyer himself. The sort of Zionism felt by the average Israeli who comprises the country’s committed and diverse new mainstream – and just might be Sephardic, Modern Orthodox, or Ethiopian.

If you want to know what that is, you have to read one of the most informative, insightful, and brilliantly crafted books on the Middle East. Read The Transforming Fire.

Seth Mandel, February 2, 2011

THE TRANSFORMING FIRE: THE RISE OF THE ISRAEL- ISLAMIST CONFLICT
By Jonathan Spyer
Continuum, $29.95, 240 pages

How can a society remain perpetually ready for war yet uncorrupted by the readiness?

It is a question posed by Jonathan Spyer in “The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict,” and it’s a thoughtful question that highlights the book’s composition as equal parts philosophical memoir and strategic analysis.

Mr. Spyer, a journalist and fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (Gloria) Center in Herzliya, Israel, begins the book with a seemingly anodyne anecdote from the 2006 second Lebanon war about his Israel Defense Forces unit waiting through a series of false alarms along Israel’s northern border. The soldiers barely slept in anticipation of the order to reinforce another IDF unit in Lebanon’s el Khiam.

But the false alarms finally give way to the real thing. As Mr. Spyer’s unit prepares to go after the Hezbollah fighters – who started the war with a deadly cross-border raid in July – one of his fellow soldiers says starkly, “Not all of us will be coming back.”

Mr. Spyer instinctively reassures his comrade that it isn’t true. But it is – not all of them will be coming back. The almost intolerable hurry-up-and-wait, followed by the dangerous action of rooting out members of such a resilient terrorist group on their own soil is made worse by the inconclusiveness of the war’s end – essentially a draw, as Hezbollah began stockpiling missiles for the next war the moment the cease-fire went into effect.

Hezbollah is central to the story because Mr. Spyer’s book takes a close look at the ease with which Islamism has replaced Arab nationalism among the Muslim nations of the Mideast. There is no better example of that than Hezbollah, which as Mr. Spyer notes is probably the de facto political power in Lebanon even though it’s controlled by Iran and coordinates with Syria. Mr. Spyer charts the rise of Islamist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad but puts one country at the center of this story: Iran.

“All these elements – the increasing Islamization of society, the proliferation of small Islamist sects, and the growth of increasingly radical positions within Hamas itself – are direct byproducts of the construction of a jihadi enclave in Gaza, from which all more moderate Palestinian streams have been expelled or else suppressed,” Mr. Spyer writes. “What is emerging in Gaza, as in Hizballah-controlled southern Lebanon, is a Levantine blueprint for the kind of societies the rising elite in Iran hope to see emerge throughout the region: steeped in religious observance, repressive, and geared above all to the successful prosecution of war.”

Mr. Spyer isn’t shy with labels. He promptly calls this a new cold war emerging in the Middle East. Iran, Mr. Spyer writes, is seeking to take ownership of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of its emotive powers in the region and because, as a Shiite, non-Arab state, Iran generally would be considered an outsider – suspicious and unable to gain widespread trust otherwise.

Borders mean much less than in the past because of the communications revolution – something the mullahs had used against them in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent presidential elections in June 2009. Aside from the state allies of Syria and Sudan, Iran has formed alliances with – or taken effective control of – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Both Turkey and Qatar have moved into Iran’s orbit as well.

Mr. Spyer pits this alliance against the states that fervently oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Israel (for obvious reasons), Egypt (as the former speaker of pan-Arab political passions), Saudi Arabia (which considers itself a leader of the Arab Muslim world), Jordan, Morocco, the Gulf Arab emirates and Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

While it is difficult to gauge how the Arab “street” is responding to Iranian meddling, Mr. Spyer says Israelis are girding for the fight. “The emergence of a regional coalition committed to the Jewish state’s destruction is having a profound effect on attitudes also within Israel itself. A more militant, stark, pessimistic outlook is taking hold in the Jewish state, as the country readapts itself to the new climate taking hold across the region.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is Mr. Spyer’s prescription for victory against Islamism: patience.

Israel’s survival – which Mr. Spyer prescribes should be attained by gearing all battles toward conventional warfare, where Israel has the advantage – will destroy Islamism’s credibility.

“Iran and its allies suffer from the fundamental problem that they cannot produce societies in which people actually want to live,” Mr. Spyer writes. “Rather, they create immensely repressive internal arrangements, coupled with an endless repeat of acts of military theater, which then bring down retribution and suffering on the populations they control. The anger and sense of humiliation that they are focusing on is real. But once it becomes clear that they are not in fact able to bring the victory, they are likely to decline.”

Remember that the next time Israel is pushed to make concessions that would endanger its security, especially when most agree that Iran represents an existential threat. You can sacrifice Israel, or you can survive and defeat Islamism. Mr. Spyer makes a persuasive case that you can’t do both.

January 5, 2011 BY Sol Stern

The second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006 forced Israelis to come to grips with the definitive end of the Oslo era and the shattering of two fundamental assumptions about the nature of their conflict with the Palestinians. The first was that the struggle was over real estate and borders and the “occupation.” The second was that economics mattered: that is, that an improvement in the material conditions of Palestinians would nudge their leaders finally to accept a compromise peace based on dividing the land.

The Northern Tinderbox Jonathan Spyer, Gloria Center. With the rearming of Hizballah, and its unrestrained commitment to jihad, the situation on the Lebanese border requires only a single wrong move to end the fragile quiet since August 2006.

No Israelis came face to face with the new reality more brutally than the soldiers on the front lines of the war zone. And few have documented the experience or analyzed its lessons with greater acuteness than Jonathan Spyer, a thirty-something scholar and journalist specializing in the Middle East conflict. Spyer, who emigrated from England at the age of nineteen to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is now a reservist in an armored combat unit. Appropriately enough, his new book, Transforming Fire, both riveting and politically timely, begins like an Israeli war memoir, with an automated phone call ordering him to report immediately to an assembly point in one of Jerusalem’s Orthodox neighborhoods.

From there, it was but a two-hour bus ride to the northern border with Lebanon and the latest battlefield. After a few days spent checking equipment and ducking Hizballah rockets, Spyer’s armored unit was ordered to engage the enemy forces firing at Israel from the town of el-Khiam about five miles across the border.

Just about everything that could have gone wrong with this ill-conceived mission did go wrong. It was planned to last three days, but just as the Israeli tanks reached the outskirts of el-Khiam, they received an order to turn around and head back. Unfortunately, the message arrived at the break of dawn when the unit should have been seeking cover; instead, they were fully exposed to Hizballah’s missiles. The company commander’s tank was disabled, and Spyer’s crew had to try dragging the vehicle behind them with cables. Unable to move faster than 5 kilometers an hour, both carriers took several more direct hits, killing one reservist. Abandoning their tanks, Spyer and his comrades scrambled for cover through an irrigation ditch, barely eluding the hundreds of Hizballah fighters in the area until, through a stroke of luck, they were rescued by an Israeli armored vehicle. The entire harrowing operation spanned a mere thirteen hours.

What makes Spyer’s description of his brief sojourn in Lebanon all the more chilling is his use of this near-death experience as a metaphor for the IDF’s general lack of preparation for war and the government’s strategic and diplomatic bungling of the fighting and its aftermath. Israel was led in 2006 by Ehud Olmert, a distracted prime minister facing charges of financial corruption; by a defense minister, Amir Peretz, who had spent his entire public career as a trade-union apparatchik; and by a chief of staff, Dan Halutz, whose previous military experience had been confined to the air force. For good measure, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was a neophyte.

Such were the unsettling political facts that agitated Spyer’s fellow reservists—all responsible adults and in many ways a cross-section of Israeli society—in the hours after their return to base. And against this backdrop, Spyer raises the most profound questions about Israel’s future. In his judgment, the reality is that the Jewish state now faces a new mode of warfare: Islamist/jihadist (rather than political/nationalist) in character and relentless in its seriousness. With Hizballah and Hamas sitting on its northern and southern borders, and with Iran, the principal backer of these two terrorist organizations, about to go nuclear, the Jewish state has entered into what Spyer characterizes as a permanent cold war. By its nature, this overarching struggle is wholly unrelated to whether or not Israel ends its “occupation” of the West Bank.

It is hard to disagree with Spyer’s diagnosis. If anything, his cold-war analogy is inadequate to describe the situation. Israel’s mortal enemies are not an ocean away as in the U.S.-USSR cold war; they are a short bus ride from Jerusalem in either direction. Nor are the Islamists interested in any territorial or political settlement; they are interested in Israel’s elimination. This is, in sum, a 30- or 40-year or perhaps even longer hot war, on and off, that will challenge Israel’s democratic society and severely test the fortitude of its people in unprecedented ways.

Indeed, the Islamists have already scored a partial success by launching and pursuing a world-wide campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. Even as they decry Israel as aggressive, expansionist, and all-powerful, their strategic outlook is based on an assumption of the opposite—that is, of Israeli weakness and loss of nerve. And, among some of Israel’s supporters or erstwhile supporters in the West, this strategy has already produced a failure of nerve of its own. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, for instance, has recently let it be known that “even people like me, who understand that not only one side is responsible for the conflict and that the Palestinians missed an historic opportunity for peace in 2000, can’t take it anymore.”

It is the particular contribution of Spyer’s book to make it clear that, for their part, Israelis have no choice but to keep on “taking it.” Hearteningly, and despite failures like the Lebanon war, he also shows that the country’s center is in fact holding; that a new political consensus has formed, transcending the old divide between “greater Israel” and “land for peace”; and that at the heart of this consensus is popular support for a re-partition of the land, tempered by a mature skepticism regarding the existence of a partner ready to strike such a deal. Would that the Remnicks of the world possessed a fraction of the resolve-under-fire shown by Jonathan Spyer and his countrymen.

January 5, 2011 – by P. David Hornik

In his new book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, Jonathan Spyer maintains that what was once called the Arab-Israeli conflict has evolved into something with a different coloration, and that the Islamist side — at least declaratively — underestimates Israel’s ongoing resilience. Spyer, a researcher and Jerusalem Post columnist, has been clarifying the situation in the Middle East for years. Not only does this book not disappoint. It displays whole new dimensions of his talent.

Spyer could not have been better qualified to write it. A British immigrant in Israel for two decades and a scholar of the Arab-Islamic Middle East, he has both academic and firsthand knowledge of both worlds, complete with risky escapades to Lebanon and other regional countries. Skillfully interwoven with its analytical sections, the book’s memoir-like passages reveal Spyer as possessing not only compelling intellectual but also literary gifts.

The old Arab-nationalist effort against Israel, in Spyer’s telling, “met its Waterloo” in the Six Day War of 1967. It was replaced by a sustained PLO terror campaign — which also went down in defeat, in the First Lebanon War of 1982. Five years later came the First Intifada — also aimed at wearing Israel down (this time with riots and moral pressure), and also quelled, by the early 1990s.

By that time, though, Israel — particularly its old secular-Ashkenazi elite — had indeed grown tired of the conflict, thinking, in the heady optimism of the post-Cold War world, that the Palestinian side must have, too. The Palestinians could be brought around, the logic went, with enticements: a state on the one hand and economic development on the other. Thus was born what came to be called the Oslo peace process.

By the autumn of 2000, however, Israel did not find itself at peace but under a savage Islamist assault — though Prime Minister Ehud Barak had pulled the IDF from Lebanon in the face of Hezbollah attacks and offered Yasser Arafat the fabled Palestinian state at Camp David. (It was contemptuously rejected).

The old, ostensibly nationalist Fatah, the dominant part of the PLO, played a large role in the latest onslaught. But a brazen cross-border kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two Iranian-backed Palestinian organizations of a decidedly religious bent, brought home its Islamic character.

It was a time of surging confidence for the Islamist camp. Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon particularly inspired a view of the Jewish state, in Spyer’s words, as a “temporary, ephemeral and flimsy” phenomenon — inherently, essentially, doomed. But they, says Spyer, were wrong. While its old elite has lost much of its spunk, Israel itself has not weakened.

Instead, he maintains, it has changed. In the army, national-religious soldiers, heavily overrepresented among officers and elite combat soldiers, have replaced the scions of Israel’s former secular-socialist elite. The “new Israeliness,” Spyer suggests, “is steeped in a comfortable [though] not particularly rigorous attachment to the symbols of Jewish tradition,” including “the Temple Mount, the Hebrew language,” and “the Jewish festivals[.]” This “immensely powerful complex of images and ideas” forms a “bedrock” of strength, ultimately more solid than the latest wave of humiliated rage, known as Islamism, coming from the other side.

That does not mean Israel has not faltered over this past decade of Iranian-propelled Islamist aggression. It did so, egregiously, in its badly mismanaged 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Toward the end of that conflict, Spyer was part of a reserve tank force sent into Lebanon in a pointless mission that took a fellow soldier’s life. It was then that “my comrades and I glimpsed for a moment what it would look like if things did not hold together” — if, that is, Israel were to collapse as its Islamist and formerly Arab-nationalist enemies have claimed that it will.
Since then, though, Israel’s strength, confidence, and power of deterrence have been restored — by successful military actions against the Syrian plutonium reactor in 2007 and against Hamas in Gaza in 2008; by a major revamp of the IDF; and, most important, by a serious reevaluation of the continuing importance of ground combat. Spyer contends that Israel remains the only regional force capable of withstanding and prevailing against the Islamist tide.

Read this book. Illuminating a great deal in 200 pages of simple, friendly prose, it’s worth more than hundreds of superficial, distorted reports in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets.

Posted By Seth Mandel On December 22, 2010 @ 3:00 pm In Feature,News | 2 Comments

One night in August 2006, Jonathan Spyer’s unit in the Israel Defense Forces prepared to head into South Lebanon to reinforce their fellow soldiers in the war against Hezbollah, the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization. “Not all of us will be coming back,” his friend said as they shook hands.

“Our little war in Lebanon in 2006 was the last chapter in a story of great hope, and great disappointment,” Spyer writes in The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, his recently released account of the new phase in Israel’s–and the West’s–battle for survival. After serving in the IDF, Spyer went to work in the Prime Minister’s Office and is now a widely published journalist and fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center in Herzliya, Israel.

In his still thick British accent (Spyer immigrated to Israel from Britain in 1991), Spyer told me over the phone this week that Iran is at the center of this Israel-Islamist conflict, in what is frankly a new cold war in the Middle East. The war against Lebanon in 2006 was an indication of this new Iranian-fueled cold war, he said, which like any cold war has its hot spots. Hezbollah, as Iran’s client militia in Lebanon (and which may be the “de facto” political power in Lebanon, he said), is responsible both for the battles it fights directly against Israel and those it inspires.

“The Second Intifada we can see is a direct and legitimate child of Hezbollah’s fight against Israel in South Lebanon,” he said of the terror war launched against Israel in September 2000 by Marwan Barghouti, the Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. “The direct model they had was the successful campaign waged by Hezbollah throughout the course of the 1990s that ended with ‘success’ with Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon.”

We were discussing a conversation Spyer once had with a Hamas leader who told him that resistance clearly works, because the Jews had gone from wanting a state between the Nile and the Euphrates to wanting a state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to accepting even less, all because of Arab resistance. This thinking was clearly both prominent and prevalent among the Palestinians.

“Success breeds success and success breeds emulation,” he said.

As Spyer shows in his book, the Israel-Islamist conflict is also a global conflict, because of the spread of Islamist violence and the support Islamism finds politically among the global Left, nostalgic for their own failed revolutionary ideas and obsessed with the concept of Palestinians as victims.

Spyer said the most important part of the West’s role in the conflict is to understand its true parameters.

“That is to say that the same forces that threaten the stability firstly of Western interests throughout the Middle East, of course, and also to a considerable extent in countries which have large Muslim minorities and large Islamist minorities in those Muslim minorities, threaten also the social peace of those countries themselves,” he said.

Unfortunately, that recognition is simply not taking place. Israel is seen far and wide in the West as something that can be sacrificed, he said, to appease the Islamists. This type of thinking is exactly the opposite of the reality of the situation.

“I think what has to be understood is that in actual fact the enemy that Israel is facing is exactly the same enemy as that enemy which is threatening the stability of the West,” Spyer said. “And once you have that realization then the rest of it becomes obvious: You have to ally with Israel; you have to understand that Israel’s fight is the same as Britain’s fight or France’s fight against radical Islam.”

Spyer notes in the book that Islamism has no serious competitor in the Middle East for the hearts and minds of Muslims. I asked Spyer if it needs one in order to be defeated, and he pointed out that the places in the Arab world where Islamists have power are in countries that lack a strong state–Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq–not, for example, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan.

Spyer also said that once Islamists gain power, they tend to discredit the movement–such as in Iran, where the mullahs are unpopular. This brings up a quandary, then: Is it better for Islamists to gain power and discredit themselves, or to remain a popular minority?

There is no question in Spyer’s mind that the answer is the latter. The theory has been tested, he said, in Gaza by allowing Hamas to stand for elections in 2006. As they showed, once Islamists win an election, there tend not to be any more elections.

“The experience of power does tend to make Islamism unpopular,” he said. “That doesn’t mean to say we can afford the luxury of sort of allowing them to get into power and then allowing them to discredit themselves.”

But Spyer said these kinds of revolutionary movements tend not to produce very much other than revolution–the art of governing is usually beyond the capabilities of such radicals. This will eventually cause Islamism to lose its luster.

“My view is that Islamism will eventually play itself out because it will be seen to have produced nothing,” he said. “It creates a very successful mood of militancy, but in the end when that begins to be seen as producing nothing in terms of real victories or real achievements, so the shine will begin to go off it.”

This demonstrates the importance of Israel’s survival. Contrary to what many in the West believe–that the Islamists’ stated goal of Israel’s destruction is a rallying cry and a slogan more than a defining raison d’être–Israel’s enemies seek and expect its eventual destruction.

“As months turn into years and years turn into decades, and Israel remains–I think it will remain, for all its problems, a very successful, flourishing country–and the Islamist movements remain mired in backwardness, and mired in the ability to produce martyrdom and martyrs but not much else, so I think that the shine will go out of it,” Spyer said.

In the meantime, the focus must be Iran, which is at the center of strife in the Middle East.

“We’ve seen the WikiLeaks in recent weeks and we kind of now know that when the grownups are talking behind closed doors, that’s what they talk about all the time,” Spyer said. “That’s the real problem. Iran and its ambitions and its linking up with Islamist forces in country after country, is the key problem facing this region, facing Israel and also facing Arab reformers and people who like stability in the region.”

Review: The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, by Jonathan Spyer. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4411-6663-0.

By Vic Rosenthal

I read a lot of books and articles about the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict, but I can’t remember when I read anything as exciting and relevant as Jonathan Spyer’s The Transforming Fire.

This is a remarkable book, in which Spyer blends academic and journalistic analysis with his own experience as an IDF reservist called up during the Intifada and the Second Lebanon War. It’s so well-done that I had difficulty putting it down.

Spyer explains the rise of Islamism in the region and the way it has taken up the flag of ‘resistance’ from the corrupt and exhausted secular Arab nationalist movements. He explains the revolutionary optimism that inspires the Islamists, and their view that Israel is an ‘abnormal’ entity in the Middle East, one which has lost its ideological foundation and the ability to sacrifice. They are sure it is decaying from within and are prepared to fight a war of attrition for as long as necessary until it collapses.

But just as the face of Arab rejectionism has changed in the crucible of conflict, Israel is changing too, and not all segments of Israeli society are moving in the direction that the Islamists think. Although the left-wing Ashkenazi Zionist elite, the source of most of Israel’s political and cultural leadership for many years, is indeed ‘privatizing’ — turning inward, away from involvement and sacrifice, there are other segments of Israeli society that are gaining influence and control, and they are prepared to fight for their survival as a Jewish nation. Spyer writes,

What is happening … is not the general decline into fractiousness and ennui which the ideologues on the other side would like to see. Rather, as the old elite steps back into self-privatization, its place is being taken by new forces, formerly marginal or hardly heard from in Israeli society…

Most important and most visible of these groups is the national religious community. Religious Zionists, with their distinctive knitted skull-caps, are emerging as the dominant group in the fighting units of the IDF…

Other population groups, meanwhile, increasingly over-represented in front-line units of the IDF, are new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, members of Israel’s Druze community, and lower-class Israelis of North African and Asian origin…

Involvement in combat and elite units of the military, of course, is only one gauge of public commitment. But in a society entering a long period of protracted struggle against an enemy committed its destruction, it is a fair measure of which population groups remain most committed to the the society’s professed goals.

What is taking place in the Israeli military is that the long-established elite of secular Israelis of European origin is giving way to something new. A new elite, more Jewishly observant, perhaps more narrowly nationalist, less European in origin and in outlook. (pp. 77-78)

This transformation is somewhat harder to see from the outside, because the left-wing elite still has a firm grip on Israel’s academy, media and arts, and their point of view is heard — especially in English — more loudly than others.

This leads to absurdities like a recent article by Peter Beinart — widely considered important among liberal US Jews but ignored in Israel — in which he blames the very groups cited by Spyer as holding the key to a reinvigorated Zionism as guilty of creating an illiberal, undemocratic, morally defective Israel. Beinart could not be more wrong, but it’s understandable that he takes this position: the Israeli ‘authorities’ he quotes include Yaron Ezrachi, Ze’ev Sternhell, Shulamit Aloni and David Grossman, all members of the establishment that is in decline.

But Spyer, who made Aliyah to Israel from the UK in 1991 and has had the opportunity to serve in the IDF is in a much better position than someone whose main source of information about Israel is the English edition of the left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper, where post-Zionist intellectuals write from the Tel Aviv ‘bubble’! Perhaps this is where Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah gets his ideas about Israel’s ‘weakness’?

Spyer’s analysis — both of the Islamists and of Israel — is fascinating and explains much, from the behavior of Hizballah and Hamas to that of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who famously said

We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies [speech at Israel Policy Forum in 2005]

Spyer’s friend Alon Smoha, who lost his life in Lebanon a year later thanks in part to Olmert’s incompetence, would not have agreed with him. His brother Dekel put it this way:

This nation has passed through the exodus from Egypt, countless wars in conquering the land, the destruction of two Temples, the Holocaust, and this nation is alive and living and breathing. While empires rise up and live and fall, this nation goes on living. (p. 86)

This is an important book, light-years closer to reality than the imaginings of writers like Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen and of course Peter Beinart. Buy it and read it if you want to understand Israel’s enemies — and Israel.