Monday, April 11, 2011

Israel will pay the price for Arab democracy Israel will pay the price for Arab democracy

Nick Cohen (They Missed the Story):

The BBC's Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians' problem — and vice versa — the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced.

There may be some truth in that, but some important clarifications are in order. First, blunder or not, insistence by Western governments on support of the Goldstone report despite its author's recant makes it clear that they deem Israel a problem regardless of Arab reality. A collapsing West is terrified by the developments in the Arab world and the ensuing instability likely to be accompanied by an increased antagonism towards the West. Driven by a resurfacing anti-semitism (that has never really left, but was kept hidden from view)--the usual scapegoating of Jews in crisis--the West has decided to appease the Arabs and its own restive Muslim population by forcing Israel to capitulate to the Palestinians, regardless of the consequences. I am willing to bet that were Israel's Jews to heed Helen Thomas's advice and "get the hell out of Palestine", there would be as much willingness to accept them as was in the 1930's and the Beinarts and Roger Cohens would not be too eager either. The inclination is to deplore dead Jews rather than help keep them alive.


This also holds for Obama's US which now follows rather than leads the more hostile and decadent Europeans. In a previous post my answer to Dore Gold's question "Will the US renege on its commitments to and agreement with Israel?" was "You betcha, in a hearbeat". But IsraPundit (The repercussions of a UN recognition of Palestine) argues that it already did:

In reality, the US has abandoned Res 242 and the Oslo Accords, de facto, by pressing Israel to accept security guarantees in place of secure borders and by pushing the Arab League Initiative. She is also pushing for the division of Jerusalem which is not required by the Oslo Accords.


The second clarification: That the Arab uprising was not driven primarily by hatred of Israel does not mean that such hatred does not exist or is not important. Despite the efforts by the Western media to obscure the anti-semitic use of symbols and vocalizations in the uprisings, it was not difficult to observe them if one paid attention. Over the years the media did cover the dictators' exploitation of the Arab-Israeli conflict to distract their publics from the failures of their regimes, but there are two aspects of this it did not much discuss.

One was the reason why this technique was so effective: the inherently anti-semitic, Israel-hating nature of the Arab/Muslim street. I recall at least one serious study, for example, which found that Mubarak's regime itself did not incite hatred towards Israel because it did not need to; it just permitted it to thrive.

The other aspect is the likelihood that anti-Israel attitudes would actually significantly increase following the fall of the dictators. As the insurmountability of the problems the Arab world faces and the inability of any new regime coming to power to address them become clear, anti-semitism and hatred of Israel will erupt. Here's, for example, one of the ways in which the dissatisfaction with Egypt's army performance was expressed:

Egyptian Rioters Try to Rip Down Israeli Flag from Embassy

Egyptian security forces surrounded the Israeli embassy Friday to keep thousands of rioters from attacking it. Protesters burned Israeli flags.

Facing the huge problems the army faces, what's more expedient: repress anti-Israel fury, or appease it?

Rest assured that every politician who seeks and will gain power will do the same. Practically all the political parties and candidates for Egypt's presidency, including the "democratic" ones, have already demonstrated it. Indeed, the more democratic the regime, the more it will cater to the will of the people, which is anti-Israel. The dictators' exploitation of the anti-Israel sentiments was the one area in which they could afford to be democratic.

This is also what might ultimately bring Islamists into power. Unlike the fallen dictators, who ruled in their own name and could be brought down if they failed, the Islamists would rule in the name of Allah and are probably the only ones who can garner obedience and control even if they fail to address the real needs of the population. After all, if conditions are bad, it's Allah's will due to the sinful life violating Sharia. That explains, for example, at least in part, why Hamas is tolerated in Ghaza more than PA is in the West Bank, even though the latter is less oppressing and allows for more prosperity than the former.

What we have here is a collusion between the Western and Arab elites to appease the Arab masses and Islamism, whose real problems, inherent in Arab culture and Islam, cannot be readily resolved. Israel and the Jews are the first to pay the price for the demise of civilization.

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