The tension in the Middle East between Muslims who are “accommodationists,” who want peace with Israel, and fundamentalists is not sufficiently understood, according to Yechiel Leiter, Israeli ambassador in Washington.
“The Reformation in Christianity took place 1,500 years after Jesus. We’re now 1,500 years after Muhammad,” the Israeli envoy said at a JNS reception at the recent Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas.
“The question that Islam is facing is whether or not Islam will continue to try and devour Judeo-Christian civilization or whether it can live side by side with Western civilization,” Leiter said.
The divide, Leiter said, is not between Sunnis and Shiites but “the accommodationists and the anti-accommodationists, the reformers and the fundamentalists.”
“When the Abraham Accords were implemented, the accommodationists got the upper hand,” he said.
Leiter told attendees that Israel has good relations with Azerbaijan, which has 10 million Shiite Muslims, and Somaliland, which has 6.5 million Sunni Muslims, and that one can walk more safely with visible Jewish attire in Abu Dhabi than in London or Paris.
“That’s a civilizational change,” the envoy said. “If you’re in favor of accommodation, what’s the first thing you’re going to do? You’re going to make peace with Israel.”
“If you are opposed to accommodation with the West, what’s the first thing you’re going to do? Destroy Israel,” he said.
The envoy told attendees something that he recently told JNS in a pre-High Holiday conversation in his office at the embassy in Washington—that much is made of the Israeli footprint in Syria, while Turkey has a much larger presence.
“It’s important for you to understand that Israel is sitting on 78 square miles of Syrian territory. That’s 0.1% of Syrian territory,” he said in Las Vegas. “Turkey is sitting on 3,200 square miles of sovereign Syrian territory, which is a total of 5% of Syria.”
“So, when Turkey leaves, we’ll consider leaving as well,” he said.
“We cannot have Turkey moving south in Syria towards our border. We can’t have Turkey influencing Lebanon,” he said. “We can’t have Turkey asserting itself throughout the Middle East as a new radical regional hegemon.”
He said that the Jewish state recommends going slow with the new Syrian government, whose head is a former sanctioned terrorist.
“Hopefully we’ll see over the next few years when he proves himself to be tolerant of his minorities, where there’s no longer a slaughter of the Druze population, or of the Alawite population, or of the Christian population or we don’t see divisions of Syrian soldiers training in Damascus screaming, ‘We’re waiting for the blood of the Jews to flow through the streets of Jerusalem,’” he said.
The United States and Israel might see things differently on occasion, but the relationship between the two runs deep, particularly on Iran, according to Leiter.
“You can’t fly 400 combat aircraft over the skies of Iran without months and months of preparation,” he said at the event. “Let nobody fool you. It wasn’t just one day where somebody decided, ‘OK, we’re going for it. Get your planes up in the air.’”
“We spent months on end preparing,” he said.
