Is the Middle East on the verge of exploding into flames as a result of the Egyptian crisis?

Melodramatic as the headline may sound that suggestion may soon become a reality as Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen are in flames. Out of this volcano in the Middle East will come nothing good. Civil unrest has reached the Kingdom of Jordan. A revolution might be under way. Israeli security experts are casting an uneasy eye at the civil unrest spreading through the region as Yemen joined the list of Arab states experiencing unprecedented demonstrations, and Egypt braced for more civil unrest.

“We need to understand that we are living on a volcano,” said Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ya’acov Amidror, former head of the IDF’s Research and Assessment Directorate. “We are on thick ice, but even that melts eventually.”The violence in Tunisia is not over.

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, and a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said, “There’s a reasonable chance that if a revolution takes place in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power. That would be bad not just for Israel but for all democracies.” The true struggle in Egypt was not between “Mubarak and pro-democracy elements, but between Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Eiland said.

Shlomo Brom, director of the program on Israel-Palestinian relations at the INSS, said, “We can’t forget that in Iran, at the end of the 1970s, the uprising against the Shah was led by [pro-democracy] youths who took to the streets – but this was taken over by Islamists in the end.”