Middle East Revolutions: Is There A Silver Lining For Israel?

Joel Brinkley, Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times seems to think so. Not only does he downplay the antisemitism that was a highlight of the protests in Egypt, Brinkley contends that the Arab obsession with Israel is basically a strategy of Arab dictators:

For more than half a century, ever since the nakba, the Arab world's "day of catastrophe," the day Israel was founded, Arab leaders have used one consistent strategy to keep their people in line.

Our life's goal, they would say over and over, is to take back "Palestine." Nothing else matters. Deliberately implicit in that was the expectation that their people would stop thinking about their own stunted lives and focus instead on the fight.

For many years that seemed to work. Then came satellite television, the Internet, and over time, ordinary Arabs began to realize that Israel had nothing to do with their own circumscribed lives. All of it was the fault of their corrupt, implacable dictators.

Brinkley contends that this became the turning point:

Frustration grew and grew until finally a catalyst - that vegetable merchant in Tunisia who burned himself up - set the region on fire. Now the world has been watching actual and threatened uprisings, from Morocco to Iraq and beyond. They are televised. All of us can see and hear what these people want. And one remarkable fact is now patently clear.

Even after decades of indoctrination, these protesters, in state after state, have nothing to say about Israel. That conflict is not even a tertiary concern. Early this month, television did show one protester waving a poster-board depiction of Hosni Mubarak, stars of David scrawled across his face. But that was more about Mubarak than Israel.

He will however admit that hatred for Israel has not been replaced by warm and fuzzy feelings:

Few Arabs hold warm feelings toward Israel. But for nearly all of them now, Israel is just an unfortunate fact of life, not an obsession. Remember, the nakba was 63 years ago. The most recent Arab-Israeli war ended 38 years ago. Today, well more than half of the world's Arabs were born years after these events. The average age in Libya right now is 24; in Egypt it's 25. These people now know that their dictators' alarmist warnings about Israel were cynical distractions.

As it turns out, Brinkley is not the only one who notices that the fixation with Israel has diminished. Robin Shepherd writes that the media is less preoccupied with Israel as well:

The obsession with Israel is not just making us sick – societally, morally, civilisationally – it is also making us stupid. People watching and reading the major media outlets can tell you the names of suburbs of east Jerusalem. Ask them to name the capital city of Jordan, and most will struggle.

And it's not just making us stupid, it's corrupting us as well. Witness the London School of Economics which, it has just been revealed, has been taking hundreds of thousands of pounds from a charity chaired by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son. Conservative MP Rob Halfon rightly described it as "blood money. Our universities should not be in hock to tyranny," The Times quoted him as saying.

This all sounds very good, as far as it goes. The question of course is how far does it actually go? Has the fixation with Israel, both in the media and the Middle East, really diminished--or is it just temporarily taking a back seat.

Truth be told, it is not even a given that this fixation has diminished at all. While Alan Brinkley writes about a single protester waving a poster with a picture of  Mubarak with a Jewish star, John Rosenthal has written about those posters, and he has counted more than one--and has written 4 posts so far about the phenomenon:

• Anti-Semitic Imagery at Egypt Protests Draws Yawns from Western Media
• Democracy or Jew-Hatred? More Evidence of Anti-Semitism at the Egypt Protests
• Mubarak and Anti-Semitism: A Boomerang Effect?

and more recently

• Democracy or Jew-Hatred? The Libyan Edition

Brinkley's mistake is that he discounts the antisemitism that underlies the Muslim hatred of Israel.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Muslim Brotherhood leader Kamal al-Halbawi wants Israel destroyed:

This week, al-Halbawi became the first Brotherhood leader to visit Tehran. There, he announced that he wanted for Egypt what Iran has today: "a true Islamic state."

"Egypt and the world of Islam as a whole need leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," he said in a speech.

Egypt, he said, should join "a new world order with Iran and Venezuela plus Hezbollah and Hamas to chase away the Americans...

"Every night when I go to bed, I pray to wake up the next day to see Israel is wiped off the map," the Brotherhood leader said.

Besides, even assuming that the preoccupation with Israel is incited by Muslim dictators solely as a distraction, what is to keep the Muslim Brotherhood--or any other new 'democratic' Muslim leader from picking up the anti-Israel chant in order to further cement their position with the people. All he need to is promise reforms to satisfy the people, and then go back to the usual litany of condemnations of Israel--without missing a beat.

After all, as Andrew Bostom has documented in detail in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, antisemitism has a history among Muslims that spans the entire history of Islam itself.

Muslim hatred of Jews--and of Israel--isn't going anywhere.

Technorati Tag: Islam and Antisemitism and Israel and Middle East.