Israel Matzav

Where are the 'moderate' Arabs?

The West continues to pursue 'Arab democracy' as if it contains the answers to all of our problems. Democratic Arabs, we are led to believe, will be 'moderate' Arabs. They won't hate Jews. They'll stop trying to destroy Israel. They'll live in peace with us forever. Or will they?

David Isaac writes a blog in which he attempts to reconstruct what Shmuel Katz would have said about current events. Katz was a founder of the Herut party and an MK for many years, and might be described as the intellectual inspiration for the Likud, applying Zev Jabotinsky's doctrines to the Jewish state that Jabotinsky never lived to see. In this piece, Isaac discusses how Katz might have responded to the Arab spring and the search for the 'moderate' Arabs discussed above.

It’s become commonplace to say that Jews are the canary in the coal mine. As Eric Hoffer put it, “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us.” But in today’s Middle East, one could make the argument that it’s not Jews, but Christians who are the real canary.

The most recent attack on Christians came Saturday. Two Coptic churches was burned in Egypt, “the latest incident in a worsening rash of sectarian violence between Egypt’s Muslims and its Christian minority since street protests ousted Egypt’s former president in February,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Egypt’s military government talked boldly of harsh retribution against the attackers but witnesses say that soldiers made no move during the five-hour skirmish between Muslims who initiated the assault on the churches and the Copts who gathered to protect them. Twelve were killed and 250 injured.

Egypt may well go the way of Iraq. John Eibner, CEO of Christian Solidarity International, wrote: “Since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, more than half the country’s Christian population has been forced by targeted violence to seek refuge abroad or to live away from their homes as internally displaced people. … over 700 Christians, including bishops and priests, have been killed and 61 churches have been bombed.”

Ironically, the Christians of Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein. As Raymond Ibrahim, associate director of the Middle East Forum, points out: “[B]y empowering ‘the people,’ the U.S. has unwittingly undone Iraq’s Christian minority. Naively projecting Western values on Muslims, U.S. leadership continues to think that ‘people-power’ will naturally culminate in a liberal, egalitarian society – despite all the evidence otherwise. The fact is, in the Arab/Muslim world, ‘majority rule’ traditionally means domination by the largest tribe or sect; increasingly, it means Islamist domination.”

This is the same ‘people-power’ that the U.S. media, the Administration and even certain conservative voices have been projecting on Egyptians, even as their Arab Spring descends more and more into a Bialystock and Bloom production.

Given what populism has wrought on the Christians of Iraq, Israel’s supporters should shudder when Amr Moussa, the secularist front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race says that Egypt needs a new policy toward Israel, one that reflects “the consensus of the people”. Amr Moussa’s popularity springs largely from his anti-Israel stance. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “Mr. Moussa’s popularity skyrocketed in the 1990s, culminating in 2001 with the release of the unlikely pop hit “I hate Israel (I love Amr Moussa) by singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim."

Mr. Moussa predicts – nor does he seem perturbed by the fact – that Egypt’s elections in the Fall will lead to a legislature dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. He will have common cause with them on Israel. If there is one thing secular and Islamist politicians can agree on, it’s that Egypt needs to dissolve the Israel-Egypt treaty. In one sense this is laughable, given that most provisions of the treaty were ignored by Egypt from the start. But what they probably seek is freedom of action to remilitarize the Sinai, which could be the prelude to future war.

The fact of the matter is that when it comes to Israel, Arabs are radical across the political spectrum. For decades Shmuel Katz emphasized this reality. He observed that Israelis who believed that peace between a sovereign Israel and the Arabs was a practical possibility assumed that there existed a solid body of “moderate” Arabs when in fact the difference between moderate and immoderate Arabs was only on the method or process by which the elimination of the Jewish state was to be accomplished.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:10 PM