Try It On For Size

Imagine yourself living in a country surrounded by other countries. Yet your country is isolated from those other countries which surround yours. Moreover, yours is but a sliver of a country, a tiny bit of land, contrasting hugely with the land occupied by each of those other countries all co-located within the same geography. Your country has a relatively slight population, well under ten million people. The other countries have far larger populations.

There is little in common between the type of country yours represents and those by whom your country is surrounded. Their governments are headed by autocratic rulers, by fundamentalist theocracies, by tyrannical kings and their retinues, by powerful militaries. Yours is an elementally Western liberal democracy.

The entire geographic region honours one particular religion. And that religion informs the laws and the social structure of all the countries except yours.

Your country worships another religion entirely, although both types of religion had their origins in the region, and there is a nexus between the two; the other is a type of successor to yours. But the religion is not universally representative of all the inhabitants of your country, which has become a tolerant, pluralist society, welcoming other religions as well.

Violence always threatens because your neighbours do not accept the presence of your country in their midst. It is offensive to them that your country is there, within the same geography that they dominate. As a result there is always the threat of attack by the military of one of the countries, and attacks have been common enough in the past, when combined military forces have sought to unseat your country.

Finally, circumstances where your country repelled all such attacks and in fact won such wars imposed upon it by its neighbours, caused them to lose face. And your country gained additional territory. And two of the neighbours made a decision to sign a peace pact with your country. Peace between your country and those two neighbours has lasted for a period of 38 years.

But peace has not been universal, since non-state militias dedicated to the destruction of your state, and one country in particular announces to the world at large that its intention is to destroy your country, and the non-state militias are a creature of that state, all of whom plan to totally annihilate the population of your state.

Worrying, isn't it, if you are a citizen of that embattled country?

But you take each day as it comes, and hope for the best. Even though there are constant across-the-border rocket attacks against your people and their villages and towns, your leaders, in ordering repercussions to be visited on your attackers, give you hope that some day peace will reign.

And then you discover that the largest, most populous of the countries with whom yours has a peace agreement is prepared to abrogate it.

"It looks like it is going to be a long Arab Winter. The Islamists are going to inherit the mantle of the dictators. A wave of Islamic rule, with all it entails, is sweeping across the Arab world. It will replace secular dictatorships with Islamic ones. We should have expected nothing else." Moshe Arens, former Israeli defence and foreign minister

"The political context in Egypt, when it comes to peace with Israel, might be changing. Islamist parties - led by the Muslim Brotherhood but not exclusively - could be a dominant political bloc." David Makovsky, Washington Institute for Near East Policy