The Israeli Perception of International Order: Transformation of the Political Mental Map

The question set forth in this chapter is “What has the 'Arab SpringArab spring' brought to international politics in the Middle East?” and attempts to answer it from an Israeli perspective. We conceptualized the Middle East regional system within the framework of the international systemInternational system and prepared our analysis using a political mental mapPolitical mental map. A review of the descriptive statistics of the public opinion data used to create the Political Mental Map revealed that the 2011 Egyptian revolution was perceived by Jewish Israelis as an event contrary to their national interests. We then drew a political mental map of Israelis as of 2016 and compared it to that of 2011 to interpret the structure and processes of the Middle East regional system. The structure of the Middle East regional system from the perspective of Israelis is a bipolar structure with IranIran as the leader of the “Axis of Resistance” and Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia as the leader of the “Axis of Realism.”