In the past few weeks, we've seen revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, a brutal and continuing attempt to put down a rebellion in Libya, and varying degrees of unrest, sometimes violent, in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Sudan and Yemen.
If only Israel would recognize a Palestinian state, we would have peace in the Middle East!
Ha ha. Hardly anybody is saying that now, but it's worth remembering that it has been the accepted view among Mideast "experts" for decades. Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen, who draws the syndicated Dry Bones strip, had a terrific one a few weeks ago. It showed a pair of such experts yammering, "Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Gaza," ad nauseam. In the second panel, the experts are shaken as a voice yells "EGYPT!" In the third panel, they stand silently, trying to make sense of it all.
Nick Cohen of London's Observer, a rare British leftist who does not loathe Israel, confronts his ideological brethren in an excellent column:
To a generation of politically active if not morally consistent campaigners, the Middle East has meant Israel and only Israel. In theory, they should have been able to stick by universal principles and support a just settlement for the Palestinians while opposing the dictators who kept Arabs subjugated. Few, however, have been able to oppose oppression in all its forms consistently. . . .
Far from being a cause of the revolution, antagonism to Israel everywhere served the interests of oppressors. Europeans have no right to be surprised. Of all people, we ought to know from our experience of Nazism that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about power, rather than a standard racist hatred of poor immigrants. Fascistic regimes reached for it when they sought to deny their own people liberty. . . .
Syrian Ba'athists, Hamas, the Saudi monarchy and Gaddafi eagerly promoted the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion], for why wouldn't vicious elites welcome a fantasy that dismissed democracy as a fraud and justified their domination? Just before the Libyan revolt, [Muammar] Gaddafi tried a desperate move his European predecessors would have understood. He tried to deflect Libyan anger by calling for a popular Palestinian revolution against Israel. That may or may not have been justified, but it assuredly would have done nothing to help the wretched Libyans.
Cohen also claims that "the right has been no better than the liberal-left in its Jew obsessions. The briefest reading of Conservative newspapers shows that at all times their first concern about political changes in the Middle East is how they affect Israel."
Maybe he's right--we haven't been following British coverage closely enough to say--but here in America, the anti-Semitic canard that neoconservatives are loyal to Israel first has been disproved. Politico reported Feb. 3:
As Israeli leaders worriedly eye the protests and street battles in neighboring Egypt, they've been dismayed to find that the neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats who are usually their most reliable American advocates are cheering for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's fall. . . .
In particular, neoconservatives such as Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Bush National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, and scholar Robert Kagan are essentially saying good riddance to Mubarak and chiding Obama mainly for not making the same sporadic push for democracy as President George W. Bush.
"If [the Israelis] were to say, 'This is very worrying because we don't know what the future will bring and none of us trust the [Muslim] Brotherhood'--we would all agree with that. But then they then go further and start mourning the departure of Mubarak and telling you that he is the greatest thing that ever happened," said Abrams, who battled inside the Bush administration for more public pressure on Arab allies to reform.
"They don't seem to realize that the crisis that now exists is the creation of Mubarak," he said. "We were calling on him to stop crushing the moderate and centrist parties--and the Israelis had no sympathy for that whatsoever."
One can see why Israelis would be especially anxious about the outcome of the revolution in Egypt, the most populous Arab state and one that has waged war against Israel several times. On "The Journal Editorial Report" a couple of weeks ago, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and a pro-democracy neoconservative, raised an analogy that seems to us pertinent:
There's really been too much hand-wringing. Yes, there are a lot of ways this can go wrong. But, you know, I'm reminded that when the Berlin Wall came down, someone I admire, Margaret Thatcher, and her counterpart in France, Francois Mitterrand, were wringing their hands with the specter of a revived German threat in Europe. And President [George H.W.] Bush said: Look, let's celebrate what the Germans have done, let's embrace unity, and then we'll have a chance to steer this in the right direction. . . .
Look, when the tide of freedom is sweeping, we should love it. And when it's headed in the wrong direction, then we'll have a lot more credibility to say, "Whoa, this isn't freedom anymore."
We agree with Wolfowitz, but there's a more sympathetic way of looking at Thatcher's and Mitterand's unease over German unification--one that ought to inspire some empathy for Israel's anxiety. Germany was in their backyard and had waged a vicious war on both England and France just a few decades earlier. The same is true of Egypt today vis-à-vis Israel. And Egypt's future is harder to predict than Germany's in 1989, when most of the country was already stable, democratic and allied with the West. Regime change in Egypt produces uncertainty about the 1978 peace treaty, an agreement that is essential to Israel's security.
On the other hand, we've long argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is largely a product of Arab dictators, a point even Thomas Friedman acknowledges in a recent column: "The Arab tyrants, precisely because they were illegitimate, were the ones who fed their people hatred of Israel as a diversion." But Friedman still manages to get it backward:
If Israel could finalize a deal with the Palestinians, it will find that a more democratic Arab world is a more stable partner. Not because everyone will suddenly love Israel (they won't). But because the voices that would continue calling for conflict would have legitimate competition, and democratically elected leaders will have to be much more responsive to their people's priorities, which are for more schools not wars.
In truth, a more democratic Arab world--which is now a real possibility, though by no means a certainty--is a necessary precondition for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. On this point Friedman has long been obtuse. Nine years ago, he suggested the Arab states offer "a simple, clear-cut proposal to Israel to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: In return for a total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967, lines, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, the 22 members of the Arab League would offer Israel full diplomatic relations, normalized trade and security guarantees."
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in a 2002 interview with Friedman, enthusiastically endorsed the idea, which Friedman started calling "the Abdullah plan." But as Friedman acknowledged in a 2009 column, Abdullah, who became king in 2005, "always stopped short of presenting his ideas directly to the Israeli people." That 2009 column included the latest Friedman brainstorm, "what I would call a five-state solution," involving the creation of a Palestinian state and promises by Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia aimed at guaranteeing Israel's security.
It was fanciful of Friedman to think that Arab dictators--whom he now acknowledges have depended on scapegoating Israel to maintain their hold on power--would have agreed to such plans. But what if they had?
A little history is perhaps apposite here. From Israel's creation in 1948 until the 1979 Iranian revolution, Jerusalem had close relations with the authoritarian government of the shah. The current regime in Iran is dedicated to Israel's destruction. It's hard to see how Israel would be better off today if it had entrusted its security to the Arab dictators whose own people have suddenly made them an endangered species.
Two Columnists in One!
■"Paradoxically, a more democratic Iraq may also be a more repressive one; it may well be that a majority of Iraqis favor more curbs on professional women and on religious minorities. . . . Women did relatively well under Saddam Hussein. . . . Iraq won't follow the theocratic model of Iran, but it could end up as Iran Lite: an Islamic state, but ruled by politicians rather than ayatollahs. I get the sense that's the system many Iraqis seek. . . . We may just have to get used to the idea that we have been midwives to growing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq."--Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, June 24, 2003
■"Is the Arab world unready for freedom? A crude stereotype lingers that some people--Arabs, Chinese and Africans--are incompatible with democracy. . . . This line of thinking seems to me insulting to the unfree world. . . . It's condescending and foolish to suggest that people dying for democracy aren't ready for it."--Kristof, Times, Feb. 27, 2011
