Many Israelis see the uprising as a sign of a dangerous new instability in the Arab world
Photograph by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
“I am not interested in democracy in this region,” the former Israeli deputy minister of defence told a conference room full of dignitaries at the annual security conference in Herzliya, a Mediterranean Sea resort north of Tel Aviv. “Personally I prefer to have stability.”
Sentiments like Sneh’s are easy to find in Israel these days, although the wiry 66-year-old expressed them more bluntly than most. Just look around, he said. Everywhere Israel’s neighbours get the vote, things get worse. Take Gaza, or as Sneh called it, “Hamastan,” after the ruling Hamas party’s 2006 election victory. “Based on a democratic, free election, we are facing now some of the worst terrorists.”
Or consider Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-backed candidate became prime minister in January. “Lebanon is democracy, so-called,” he said. “Lebanon is a constitution without a state. But it’s very democratic. You have an elected president, you have an elected prime minister, you have a speaker of Parliament, you have all these institutions. But the country is losing itself. We call it Hezbollahstan.”
Democracy, Sneh concluded, “is not only voting. If there is democratic process in the Middle East, it will bring, for sure, dictatorships that will make this area like hell.”
It doesn’t take a visitor to Israel long to figure out that the euphoria accompanying most North American coverage of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is in short supply here. Sure, everything could work out for the best. Few are inclined to bet that way. There is widespread concern that the people’s revolution in Egypt might stall, or that the regime could fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Israel’s 30-year “cold peace” with Egypt, the fruit of a 1979 peace treaty between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, would be at risk.
Some observers are more than just nervous. There is a bitterness to some Israeli commentary that contrasts starkly with the amazing images from Tahrir Square in Cairo. “From an Israeli perspective, the most depressing and worrying overview of this staggeringly rapid shattering of regional certainties is that it reverses a generation’s momentum,” the Jerusalem Post’s editor David Horovitz wrote in his column. Peace with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 could have given Israelis the feeling their country was growing safer in a dangerous neighbourhood, he wrote. “Now, for the first time in more than 30 years, we see the spectre of our gains being rolled back, of the adjacent countries we thought we had grudgingly won over, slipping away again into hostility.”
Officially the Israeli government is saying little about events in Egypt. The only detailed comments so far came from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Knesset on Feb. 2. He took note of the elation “in Washington, London, Paris and throughout the democratic world” at the news from Cairo, and was careful to admit it might not be misplaced. “It is obvious that an Egypt that fully embraces the 21st century and that adopts these reforms would be a source of great hope for the entire world, for the region and for us.”
