No Matter Who Rules in Cairo or Tripoli, Israelis Are Living in the Same Middle East

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
02 March '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/02/no-matter-who-rules-in-cairo-or-tripoli-israelis-are-living-in-the-same-middle-east/

Evelyn is quite right that Israelis have good reason to be fearful about the future. This is not the first time that they have been promised a “New Middle East,” and given the entrenched anti-Semitism that has become an integral part of Arab political culture, worries about new governments that might seek to curry favor with their populations by inflating hostility toward Israel are based on more than unthinking fear or cynicism.

That said, as many of us, including Evelyn, have written, the only real hope for long-term peace in the region would be an Arab world whose governments were neither Islamist nor authoritarian, since if those are the only choices, then there really is no hope. Arab governments that, even if they weren’t fully functioning Jeffersonian democracies, were sufficiently stable and focused on internal development and the creation of responsible institutions and the rule of law would not need to whip up hatred against Jews and Israel in order to survive the way even a relatively friendly dictator such as Mubarak did.

But the debate about whether or not Israelis and friends of Israel should support the principle of Arab democracy is largely pointless. No one in the Arab world is asking Israel’s permission to democratize, just as they didn’t — and don’t — care about the Jewish view of any other form of Arab government. It cannot be stated often enough that the current ferment in the Middle East has nothing to do with Israel or its policies.

That is a lesson that even generally fair-minded observers can’t seem to grasp. One example is the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, who wrote a column yesterday that admirably highlighted the problem of Arab Jew-hatred and poured cold water on the notion that Islamists like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are changing for the better simply because their authoritarian antagonist has been deposed.

But as much as his analysis of this unfortunate reality was on target, Cohen concluded that all this made it a propitious time for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, as the creation of a Palestinian state would undermine the Islamists. To which one can only reply, well, yes, if Israel could persuade the Palestinians to accept a peace, even on the terms that they claim they want (such as the Israeli offers of statehood in territory that roughly approximated the 1967 borders, which were made in 2000 and 2008), then that would be something most Israelis would welcome. But the problem is, we already know that they won’t, and merely saying that it should be done won’t make it so. Cohen accurately portrayed the hold of anti-Semitism on Arab culture in general, but he failed to connect the dots that link a historic tradition of Jew-hatred to contemporary Palestinian intransigence, not to mention the nuclear threat from Iran.

The problem today for Israelis is not so much that it is foolish for them to publicly lament the fall of Mubarak and oppose the revolutionary fervor sweeping the Arab world. They should not do that; but no matter what they say about these events, most Israelis understand that, for all the changes in the air, they are living in the same Middle East that they have inhabited for the past 63 years. The rest of us should realize this too and resist the temptation to indulge in magical thinking about Israel’s ability to appease either the Palestinians or the rest of the Arab world.

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.