Israel Matzav

Israel, the 'Palestinians' and the Arab spring

Lee Smith ties it all together for you: The dispute between Israel and the 'Palestinians,' the recent terror attacks in Israel, and the 'Arab spring' going on in countries all around the region.

Now the notion that the genie of revolution in the Arab world can be put back in the bottle by blaming Israel is laughable. Even Arab populations with no special love for the Jewish state know that the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria were not loved or hated by their people because of their adherence or opposition to the Palestinian cause. In fact, one of the most baffling things about the current wave of Arab revolutions to professional Middle East watchers must be the complete absence of any mention of the Palestinians in popular demonstrations and regime counter-propaganda alike.

However there is a clear connection between the Palestinian cause and the wave of popular discontent that has upended the foundations of Arab politics. By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo’s “revolution”) is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “no voice louder than the cry of battle”—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.

If the recent wave of revolutions in Arab countries has proven anything it is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn’t even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically.

Read the whole thing.

The real question here is given the analysis above (which I believe is indisputable), why is the Obama administration continuing to push the narrative that the 'peace process' is central to resolving all of the Middle East's issues. I believe that there are two ways to explain it. One is the soft racism of lower expectations - Obama and the policymakers in Washington don't believe Arabs are capable or deserving of anything better than being cannon fodder in a holy war against the Jews. The other way to explain this administration's continued obsession (see the previous link) with the 'peace process' is good old fashioned anti-Semitism, and yes, I believe that Obama and Co. have plenty of that.

Of course, it could also be a combination of the two.

Labels: anti-Israel obsession, anti-Semitism, Arab spring, Middle East peace process

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:27 PM