One democratic election is hardly enough to erase decades of despotism in Egypt. Measured by every critical component of a democracy, Israel is the only Middle East nation to share Americas values.
President Obama has this to say about the chaos in Egypt:
“I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsi and his supporters.”
Quickly? Democratically elected? Inclusive? Transparent? If events in Egypt have shown anything, it is that a series of “Arab Spring” demonstrations in 2011, a “call” from Obama in 2013, and even a democratic election in 2012 are no guarantee of a democratically elected — stable, inclusive, transparent — government in the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia and other Arab autocracies see this clearly. In fact, they are crowing. “See,” they say, “democracy doesn’t work in the Arab world. Only despotism does. We have it right, not the Arab Spring!”
It is advisable to review just how the democratically elected Muhammad Morsi fell short of the mark in order to understand why Israel is likely to remain the only true, stable democracy in the Middle East for a long time to come.
Morsi tried to build a dictatorship, not a democracy. He was clueless as to what his own election meant.
It meant the separation of powers. It meant an independent judiciary, a de-politicized civil service, a police force that was held to the same laws it was charged with enforcing, a free press.
Morsi did not even work toward achieving these independent institutions, let alone achieve them. Morsi, in Morsi’s view, was the be all and end all, not the chief executive of a pluralistic dissemination of powers.
Morsi manipulated Egypt’s constitution according to whim; he tried to beat back the secular elements in Egypt by putting his Muslim Brotherhood comrades in all key positions. He was intolerant of political and religious minorities — yes, there are non-Muslims, and non-Islamist Muslims, in Egypt. Neither had any say and, in many cases, even any rights, under Morsi.
This intolerance stretched to foreigners who came to Egypt, seeking to train Egyptians in the tools of democracy and of human rights, naively thinking they would be welcomed. Instead, many were arrested.
Morsi embodied an Egyptian culture centuries old. It will not be turned around by a “call” or even, for that matter, by either the continuation or the cancellation of American aid to Egypt. A much more sober, realistic and historically aware analysis was offered by Nabil Bou Moncef, a senior analyst with Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper, as quoted in the Denver Post:
“We should not be surprised to see a long way until we reach an Arab democratic system. I am not surprised by what is going on. The West fought major wars and had bloody revolutions until they reached the current system.”
A jewel in that current system is Israel.
• Israel’s judiciary is independent, so independent, in fact, that Palestinians may petition its High Court for relief even when they have no standing in a case.
• Israel’s press is free and its legislature, the Knesset, is independent, so independent, in fact, that bitter denunciations, catcalls and all manner of outrageous expression are regularly delivered by non-ruling parties toward the ruling government.
• Israel’s civil service is neutral, and so is its police force, so neutral, in fact, that its charges against a sitting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, caused him to resign.
The US cannot pick the “winner” in the Egyptian chaos. There will be no “winner” for a long time. Obama picked the demonstrators against Hosni Mubarak back in 2011 because, Obama said, history was with the demonstrators — and the US was going to be on the right side of history, no matter the risk. History, in fact, is unpredictable. The past, however, is known. And based on the Egyptian past, it will take many iterations of democracy before a true one comes to Egypt — if it ever does.
Meanwhile, it has come to Israel — hardly a surprise, given that the values of democracy originated in the Hebrew Bible. Israel’s democracy is no trifle, to be taken for granted. Israel is a jewel in a neighborhood of despots, some enlightened, most not.
The defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is no cause for Israel to relax. Of course, the weakening of the Brotherhood bodes well for Egypt-Israel relations and bodes ill for Hamas, which considers the Brotherhood its mentor. The defeat of the Brotherhood in Egypt could also trigger a fall in the fortunes of other Islamist groups throughout the Middle East and beyond.
We are not holding our breath, however. It is going to take a lot more than a single country’s defeat of radical Islam to seal its fate universally.
Israel will still need every cultural, spiritual and military asset it can muster in order to stay alive and well in the meanest neighborhood on the globe.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
