CiF Watch interview with Jonathan Spyer, author of “The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict”

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
08 March '11

Jonathan Spyer is a Senior Fellow at the GLORIA Center, author and journalist specializing in the areas of Israel, Lebanon, Syria and broader issues of regional strategy. He agreed to answer some of my questions about his latest book, The Transforming Fire: the Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, which Barry Rubin characterized as “probably the best book on Israel to be published in 30 years.

AL: I was struck by your passage about how the “mythical Israel” has gained traction beyond Islamist circles. You describe this mythical place as “a place of uninterrupted darkness and horror, in which every human interaction is ugly, crude, racist, brutal.” In our work at CiF Watch, we’ve also noted how such a caricature has taken root among the UK intelligentsia, a dynamic which informs much of the reporting, and commentary, about Israel at the Guardian. Do you have any insights as to how otherwise intelligent and sober minds can so easily accept such a facile and distorted picture of Israeli life – one which is unrecognizable to those who actually live here?

JS: Well, having just returned from a trip to the UK, I think one of the reasons for this is because of the sheer volume of copy and programming hostile to Israel which an average, intelligent consumer of media and TV in the UK would come across and be exposed to – compared to a near absence of anything much proposing an alternative view. In the week I was there, there was ‘The Promise’ – an extremely bizarre but very professionally made saga about the last years of the British Mandate, which managed to depict the 1947-8 period as a sort of attempt by hapless and nice Brits and Arabs to resist the onslaught of crazed Zionist immigrants damaged by the Holocaust. Then there was ‘War child’ about children in Gaza, and also a documentary about settler extremists. I’m not sure if this was an especially busy week! Now, in contrast to this, as a Middle East analyst, in the past I’ve also been struck by the near silence in the British discussion concerning the brutal nature of many regional regimes.

AL: You mention the strength of radical Islam in the UK, and recounted your experiences as a student there in the 90s interacting with adherents to this movement. Why, in your view, has the UK shown to be so much more fertile ground for Islamism, as opposed to, other European countries or the United States?

JS: I don’t know the answer to this, as I’m less familiar with the US situation, but I would counsel against any nation feeling satisfied with its performance in this regard. Off the top of my head, the US produced Anwar al-Awlaki, and Nidal Hassan, so I don’t think this represents a shining success. If one is to adopt a strictly empirical approach, the nation with the most ‘success’ in this regard is France, which has yet to suffer a major Islamist terror attack on its soil committed by home-grown terrorists. As I said, I don’t think anyone should feel smug. But its maybe worth noting that the French system combines an absolute, ruthless lack of tolerance toward foreign Islamist preachers and their activities on french soil (in marked contrast to the UK), with a very sophisticated intelligence community, which has for a long time included lots of people with regional languages and knowledge. I think everyone can see why both these things are good assets to have.

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Israel’s Stand Against Islamism Holds

An outstanding new volume explains the sources of its success.

P. David Hornik
pajamasmedia.com
05 January '11

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.

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"The Rise of the Islamic-Israel Conflict"

Arlene Kushner
Arlene from Israel
03 January '11

This was the title of the talk delivered by Dr. Jonathan Spyer -- Senior Research Fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center -- at the Great Synagogue here in Jerusalem, on Motzei Shabbat (Saturday night). He provided a very cogent and insightful overview of the current situation and today I want to share highlights.

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The "peace process" -- going back more than 30 years-- was the product of US hegemony in the Middle East:

Camp David Accords with Egypt were possible because Sadat made the decision to move from the Soviet to the US side. US domination was even more obvious with the Oslo Accords, which was made possible after the collapse of the Soviet Union. People during this period believed that a period of peace and liberalization was inevitable.

Oslo ran aground in the late 1990s, however, when it became apparent that what Israel could offer was less than the Palestinian Arabs wanted.

War (incorrectly referred to as the second intifada) followed.

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Today US influence in the area is under challenge by:

-- The elite that has arisen in Iran
-- Islamization of the regional conflict

This is THE central challenge to the region and to Israel.

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In Iran, Ahmadinejad represents a particular generational group whose formative experiences were the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Now they are at the pinnacle of the revolution they helped create and they see it as a failure: The regime is massively unpopular, corrupt and ineffectual.

They want to revive the original fire of the 1979 revolution. This is bound to fail, but the effort can do a great deal of damage.

The regime is not going to fall as a result of challenge from the street because they are willing to go to the limit in utilizing violence to stay in control.

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This represents a problem for the entire region because Iran wants to be the hegemonic power of the Middle East.

To that end, they are drawing on Iranian patriotism and utilizing their foreign policy.

Their major problem is that they are neither Arab (they are Persian) nor Sunni (they are Shia), as are most Muslim states.

To move past these problems, Iran wants to grab the banner of the Palestinian cause and to promote Islamization of Middle East politics.

The entire region has now become so Islamicized that if elections were held across the region, Islamic parties would win. This is true even in Jordan and Egypt.

The Israeli-Arab conflict had actually been winding down. It's been a quarter of a century since Israel has been arrayed against Arab forces. But the Islamization of the region is partially revising this process and firing the conflict.

There are two hot fronts: Gaza and Lebanon. Both receive Iranian and popular Islamic support.

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Conflict transforms both Israel and foes

Fresnozionism.org
09 December '10

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.

(Read the full review of "The Transforming Fire")

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Transforming Lebanon

Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
22November '10

The first time Jonathan Spyer went to Lebanon was in the summer of 2006 war when he drove a tank in Israel’s war with Hezbollah. He and I met in Jerusalem in July shortly before he was called up for reserve duty. The riveting and tragic story of his unit’s travails in a war that neither Israel’s military nor civilian leadership had prepared for is the centerpiece of his new book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict. Combining reporting with analysis, as well as deeply moving personal accounts, Spyer has written a brilliant book that documents Israel’s last two decades since the beginnings of the Oslo process, a period of self-inflicted Israeli delusion that Spyer wishes he had been wrong about. Instead, he saw it as a disaster from the outset. What looked to some like an Arab world ready for peace was actually a system that was undergoing a profound transformation. Part of that was the ideological shift underway in the Arab world, from Arab nationalist to Islamist, but there was another dynamic as well, driven by a non-Arab actor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“You have state power from above,” says Spyer, “that is, the power of the Iranian regime, combined with these popular movements from below. Iran’s is not an impressive regime—it is backward and corrupt, but has found a way to translate its ideological zeal and willingness to use violence into a successful practice in politics in a number of places. Hezbollah is the poster boy, but they’ve done it with the Palestinian movement as well. It’s remarkable what they’ve done by cutting the Palestinian national movement into two and turned the Islamist half into a client of theirs. They’ve done it in Iraq as well, even with U.S. troops on the ground.”

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The Perfect Iranian Storm on the Horizon

Michael J. Totten
pajamasmedia.com
25 August '10

(An outstanding interview!Y.)

Jonathan Spyer is not your typical Israeli journalist and political analyst. He has a PhD in International Relations, he fought in Lebanon during the summer war of 2006, then went back to Lebanon as a civilian on a second passport.

I can’t say I felt particularly brave venturing into Hezbollah’s territory along the Lebanese-Israeli border, but it takes guts for Israelis to go there. If Hezbollah caught him and figured out who he was, he would have been in serious trouble.

No one he met in Lebanon knew where he was from. Everyone thought he was British. And no one in Israel but his friends and colleagues knew he went back to Lebanon on his own. He decided, though, that he may as well “out” himself on my blog. His secret journey will soon be revealed anyway when his book comes out in November called The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict.

We met in Jerusalem this month and discussed his two trips to Lebanon—with and without a passport—and the perfect Iranian storm brewing on the horizon.

MJT: So why did you go back to Lebanon?

Jonathan Spyer: Lebanon is a fascinating place, and I wanted to visit for all sorts of reasons. I especially wanted to get back to where we were during the war. There is a green valley, which I imagine you know very well, between the towns of Khiam and Marjayoun.

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