Saturday, February 12th, 2011
Stephan: The Israelis are going to have to be very supple to move through this enormous transformation in the Middle East, themselves. If they are smart they will support the development of a democratic Egypt. This will lead to the blossoming of a new era in the Middle East. However, if their Right wing prevails they will fail in this by responding, just as the American Right is, from fear and paranoia. It will be one of history's great lost opportunities to everyone's loss. If you want to get a sense of what this worldview looks like spend a hour with Fox News. I spent about two hours today listening to them. It is the Shadow parallel universe.
Our goal, I believe, as I wrote when the revolution began, is to help Egypt turn into a version of Turkey. A democracy with religious tolerance for all its citizens, a just legal system, and a robust private market. It will be more conservative than Turkey, but if it stabilizes in this way, within three years the Middle East will be transformed. Every other country in the region will see that it can be done, and people will see that radicalization just results in one's country becoming a pariah from most of the world, like Iran.
I think this democratic Egypt can happen. Not that it will, but that it can. Egypt has three major income streams, tourists, a bit of oil, and the Suez Canal. It is different than Iran. I lived in Egypt for most of two years, and know that every Egyptian understands prosperity flows in part from tourists, and that they will disappear if the country is radicalized, repressive, and violent. Also Egyptians like stability. They see themselves proudly as the heirs of one of humanity's great civilizations. Much will depend on how Israel and Egypt work out their relationship.
As Israel faces what many fear could turn into its most serious national security threat in decades, fault lines are widening over how it should respond and some critics say the government appears ill prepared.
With the resignation Friday of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was widely seen as Israel’s most predictable Arab ally, a quiet panic is spreading here as Israelis debate their next move.
‘This whole situation is making Israel’s hawks more hawkish and the doves more dovish,’ said Yossi Alpher, a former government peace talks advisor and co-editor of Bitterlemons.net, a Middle East political research firm.
Critics say Israel’s leaders have so far seemed surprisingly unprepared to react to leadership change in
Egypt
, whose landmark 1979 peace treaty with Israel has long been a cornerstone of Israel’s stability.
Even as late as Thursday, many Israeli officials were still confidently predicting that Mubarak would survive until at least September. An Israeli lawmaker telephoned Mubarak on Thursday afternoon to offer words of encouragement.
‘They allowed themselves to go into denial,’ said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli Justice Ministry advisor who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. ‘Now they’ve got no strategy and their options just narrowed.’
Levy said Israel […]
