Israel, et al: Bogeymen of the Arab World
Heroically, the Arabs are freeing themselves from their authoritarian masters.
But can they liberate themselves from the fears, conspiracies and prejudices that also shape so much of their politics and identity? Their evolution to fully functioning democratic polities may depend on it.
Two principal bogeymen—Israel and the colonial power (AKA America)—continue to haunt the Arab world like ghosts in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Each of these spirits is grounded at least partly in historic and contemporary reality. But each has in turn been magnified and exaggerated into a system of logic that drives not just the lie but the big lie. And very often, these untruths are willfully conjured up by the Arabs themselves to mask their own deficiencies and to distract and rally public opinion.
Israel figures prominently and simultaneously in Arab hopes and fears. On one hand, the Jewish state can be a unifying force in rallying Arab pride and power. Consider the aftermath of Hezbollah’s successful use of high-trajectory weapons in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, when its chief Hassan Nasrallah for a time became almost a revered figure on the Arab street.
On the other hand, Israel is a source of dishonor and shame—and perhaps secretly a source of admiration too, which makes matters even more complex. How could a tiny country defy the will of the great Arab nation and make itself into the strongest military power and most technologically advanced country in the Middle East? For the Arabs, Israel is one tough and painful look in the mirror.
There’s no doubt that Israel’s own policies—from settlements to the occupation and treatment of Palestinians to its use of military power—feed Arab anger, rage and humiliation.
But let’s be clear. The Arabs themselves have turned David into an ugly and mythical Goliath. The anti-Israeli trope goes much deeper than mere criticism of a nation-state’s behavior. Israel has been elevated to a power (backed by America) that, along with international Jewry, has the capacity to shape the world arena, if not to control it.
The view among many Syrian oppositionists is that the United States hasn’t intervened against Assad because Israel prefers the status quo or, worse, an outcome in which the Syrians just bleed themselves through internecine conflict. Meanwhile, supporters of the Assad regime argue that the opposition is driven by pro-Israeli forces bent on eliminating the only Arab state that stands up to Israel and its American patron.
By implication, the view in much of the Arab world (and in Europe too) is that the pro-Israeli lobby holds America’s Middle East policy hostage and can dictate matters of war and peace at will. In effect, it has become and remains the default for any Arabs, no matter what their orientation, to simply blame whatever they don’t like—in the Syrian case, whether the survival or downfall of the regime—on imaginary omnipotent American policies serving exclusively the supposed interests of Israel.