By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Even if you believe that Israel’s Palestinian policy is unfortunate, you’ve got to sympathize with Israel today. Israel was happily playing divide-and-dictate while aggressively promoting settler real estate on the occupied West Bank. And then the world changed. Can Israel adjust? Can the U.S.?
Not only did the Arab street demonstrate that ordinary Arabs aren’t mindless passive ciphers with no self-respect or appreciation for democracy, Israel’s comfy modus operandi of the past few years has come under threat---and not from rock-throwing adolescents. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are speaking to one another again. They may collaborate in preparing for a new election that will encompass not only Gaza but the West Bank. Will Israel accept the results, even if Hamas does well? Will the U.S.?
Call it the new Arab uprising. Call it the Arab spring. Middle Eastern authoritarianism has been under attack. Can Israel’s equally autocratic my-way-or-the-highway approach to Palestine survive intact now that Hosni Mubarak is gone? Even Jordan, relatively untroubled so far, will have to be very circumspect about its relatively sympathetic approach to this peremptory neighbor.
Whether a particular manifestation of rebellion succeeds in replacing an unpopular Arab government this year or not, it’s clear that underlying realities have changed. Much has been said about the loss of fear. Well, fear can be re-inculcated, if a regime gets unspeakably brutal, and yet, with the exception of Syria and Bahrain, most of the regimes under fire have been remarkably restrained, even when they have resorted to force to stay in power. Consider the peculiar stand off in Yemen. And consider Syria. It’s unlikely that Bashar Assad will be toppled, given the increasing harshness of his regime's response, but the extraordinary persistence of protest by the majority against its ruling minority suggests that a victory for Bashar Assad will be fragile indeed.
All in all, these past few months, the demand for change has been so wide-spread, so deep, so articulate, so persistent and so brave that we may very well conclude that the zeitgeist has changed. Only the slightly insane Muammar Gaddafi, who sees rebels as vermin to be annihilated, seems not to have taken this in. Other entrenched regimes have resorted to more conventional excuses for violent push back. Foreign elements. Religious extremists. Otherwise the people are happy. Really! Nowhere, not even in the U.S., have such self-exculpatory claims been taken seriously.
Of course, the “democracy” that results in Tunisia or Egypt, where the rebellions may have been most successful, may turn out to be radically imperfect. And some manifestly unjust regimes will survive, although it’s likely that even they will have to make adjustments, however surreptitiously, to save face. This includes the Sunni sheikdom in Shia majority Bahrain, whose regime has been preserved by Saudi tanks and U.S. silence, as well as Assad’s Alowite regime in Syria.
Thus, one way or another, the spring of 2011 may be seen as a before-and-after moment for the Arab world. And yet the action on the street this year is simply a manifestation of changes that have been accreting, year by year, in the consciousness of repressed populations. Like the accumulation of stresses along fault lines in the earth, when the pressure gets too great, earthquakes occur. Regimes, like buildings, topple. People die.
But when regimes are structured to allow for change, through open discussion, through elections, through rejection and replacement of inadequate representatives or leaders, there is no need for desperately unhappy people to take to the streets in normal-life-disrupting ways. There is no need for threatened regimes to “make order” via tanks and tear gas and live bullets. This is the beauty of democracy. It legitimizes change.
Seismologists could give the U.S. some good advice here: don’t build on obvious fault lines. Translation: don’t base your policy on or tie your reputation to regimes that are bound to be rejected sooner or later.
Meanwhile, a political earthquake has shaken the Arab Middle East, and the aftershocks continue. Barack Obama, whose much applauded speech in Cairo was intended to build bridges to the Muslim world, suddenly finds that he doesn’t have to preach democracy. He has to catch up with demands for self-governance emanating from within the Arab world itself. One would have thought that the U.S. would be chortling at this point. Wow! We gambled on the possibility of change, and now our decades of democracy-promotion have paid off! Instead the Arab revolutionaries find us wondering whether or not to support them. It’s a curious and delicate moment. One size policy-wise does not fit all countries, but too much variation on real politik grounds invites charges of hypocrisy. Like lapses into torture, it erodes our soft power.
The mention of extremism brings me back to where I began: Israel and Hamas. Many say that the experience of governing in Gaza has moderated Hamas. This is entirely possible. Governance does that to one-note ideological movements. Consider Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. Consider, for that matter, the terrorist roots of Israel’s Likud party. Is Israel ready to thaw, to change, to negotiate, to take a chance on a more mature Hamas? Ludicrously enough, Bashar Assad is playing the Israeli card: without me to ratify the status quo, Israel will be in danger. Nice try. But the status quo is already gone. Post-Mubarak Egypt shows no sign of unquestioningly ratifying Mubarak’s benign policy toward Israel.
Times of change are also times of opportunity. Will Barack Obama, riding high in U.S. opinion polls thanks to the Abbottabad success, use his new foreign policy clout to press Israel to come to terms with a respectable two state solution? One hopes so, because there’s no going back, and it’s not certain that Israel’s current leaders have the courage or vision to meet the new realities in the Arab world constructively.