Juan Cole: Anti-Liberal Netanyahu Slams Arab Spring as Anti-Liberal

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http://www.juancole.com/2011/11/anti-liberal-netanyahu-slams-arab-spring-as-anti-liberal.html

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said yesterday that he had been right to oppose the forced resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last February and categorized the uprisings in the Arab world as “anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave.” He gave the “uncertainty” in the region as yet another excuse for the Likud Party to continue to steal and squat on ever greater portions of the Palestinian West Bank.

Netanyahu’s outburst is of course completely illogical, and also deeply dishonest. When the Arabs were ruled by dictatorships then that was the reason for which Israel could or should steal Palestinian land and keep the Palestinians stateless and devoid of rights. If they have anti-authoritarian grassroots movements demanding parliaments, now that is the reason for the same policies.

Netanyahu seems to be under the illusion that somehow if only the US and Western Europe had tried harder, they could have magically kept Zine El Abedin Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak in power. But when you’ve got a million people in the center of the capital demanding the dictator leave, and millions gathered in cities and towns throughout the country supporting them in that demand, it really isn’t plausible to imagine that an outside power could retain that hated tyrant. Even if Barack Obama could have pulled off this miracle, it likely wouldn’t have been for very long, and the very attempt would have pushed the Arab masses into radicalism.

Netanyahu’s four adjectives for the movements in Tunisia and Egypt are anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic.

There is another possibility, which is that the movements want democracy and liberalism (in the John Stuart Mill sense of the term, i.e. parliamentary governance and individual rights), but that Netanyahu doesn’t want them to have it because he knows that the scam of Likudnik “Greater Israel” expansion can only be pursued if Israel’s neighbors are ruled by dictators that Israel can threaten or bribe into acquiescence.

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