Welcome to the new Arab world — where no one really cares much about Israel

When Israel declared independence in 1948, every single one of its Arab neighbours sent in their armies to destroy the Jewish state. The war convulsed the region, as did the many wars that followed. To this day, the received wisdom among bien-penants is that Israel’s very existence is the main destabilizing factor in the Levant.

And so, 65 years later, how bizarre is it to survey the results of the Arab Spring? Once again, every single one of Israel’s immediate neighbours is locked in a potentially cataclysmic struggle — but this time, the Arab chaos is all internal. For the populations of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, it as if the Israeli menace were merely an engrossing, terrifying epic film that suddenly has come to an abrupt finale. The house lights have come on, and the viewers’ minds are returning to the real-life internal problems that have been festering in their autocratic societies for generations.

Syria is in a state of full-fledged civil war, largely waged by Sunnis who are seeking to dethrone Bashar Assad’s Alawite-led dictatorship. Mr. Assad has made some vague and pathetic attempts to implicate “Zionist” conspirators, but no one is buying it. The only Israeli border incident of note was a Syrian-on-Syrian skirmish, during which government ordinance accidentally fell on Israeli soil, to no effect.

Next door in Lebanon, there have been spillover skirmishes, and the country’s leaders are doing everything they can not to get sucked into the Syrian vortex. Yet Hezbollah fighters (who support the Assad regime, for cynical reasons connected to their Iranian patrons) go back and forth freely across the border, along with refugees. It is this border, not the Israeli-Lebanese border, that is likely to become Lebanon’s next flash point. Hezbollah remains the dominant power-broker in Lebanon, but will become isolated and vulnerable once Iran loses its logistical routes through Syrian soil. Lebanon fought a long and complicated civil war from 1975 to 1990, and another one could come soon — but this time, Israel will be smart enough to sit it out.

Egypt is not in a state of civil war. But its military leader is warning of a “collapse of the state,” amidst continued deadly clashes with protesters in several cities. (The latest spark involved was a spate of death sentences handed out to 21 Port Said soccer hooligans who’d rioted in 2012.) With a Muslim Brotherhood President at the helm, the country is racked with debate and anxiety about the role of Islam in public life. But even that grand theme has little to do with the current violence, which apparently is rooted in obscure inter-municipal grievances nursed by residents of Egypt’s non-Cairene population. While the Western press has spotlighted President Mohamed Morsi’s views on Israel, and Jews in general, the whole subject of confronting the Zionists is non-existent as an Egyptian national priority: Egypt’s only military project in Sinai has been to confront Jihadi terrorists who are the shared enemy of Egypt and Israel alike. In the May 2012 presidential debate between former Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa and self-described Islamist moderate Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, four and half hours passed before the word Israel was even mentioned.

Finally, there is Jordan, long seen as the Morocco of the Levant. Last week’s parliamentary elections went smoothly. But the country has been destabilized by waves of refugees from Iraq, and now Syria. So much so that the country is now declaring that it will not accept any more refugees — including, most controversially, Syrian Palestinians. “We do not encourage our Syrian brothers to come to Jordan because their country needs them more and they should remain there,” the Jordanian PM declared, explicitly raising the prospect of a quasi-humanitarian military action on the border. “We will stop them and keep them in their country.”

For a regular observer of the Middle East, it is actually quite stunning to read such a steady stream of reports from countries that, in the not-too-distant past, have defined their entire national mission as being the eradication of the Jewish state. Syria is actually still technically at war with Israel — as, of course, is Hezbollah. Even in Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel, explosive gestures of anti-Israel hate were a mainstay of street demonstrations under Hosni Mubarak, since it was one of the few officially permitted forms of political protest.

But now that Mubarak is gone, Egyptians are free to shout and protest, and even riot, over the things that really matter in their lives. And apparently, Israel doesn’t even make the top-10 list. Instead, what these people care about is the nature of their government, the price of bread and gas, the treatment of women and Copts and Alawites, soccer and — yes — freedom.

That f-word is important here because for the last decade, George W. Bush and the neo-cons have been denounced as naive, and worse, for insisting, post-9/11, that the Muslim world hungered deeply for Western-style liberty, so much so that they would welcome American troops on Arab soil.

That last part was wrong. But Bush was perfectly correct on his much larger point, which I never grow tired of repeating. “We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East,” he declared in 2003. “In the past, [we] have been willing to make a bargain to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Long-standing ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.… No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”

Bush was talking about protecting America. Yet the Arab Spring (of which Bush deserves to be considered its godfather) also has destroyed the cynical Arab political game of funnelling all of their population’s accumulated hate and frustration at Israel and the Jews.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that anti-Semitism remains rife in these Arab societies, and that solidarity with the Palestinians will continue to guide their posturing at times of war. But current upheavals show that ordinary Arabs now increasingly view Israel as a sideshow to the acute birthing pains of their own crumbling autocracies. Amid all the death and chaos, that counts as good news.