A positive news week

Editorial

The seemingly unrelated news of revolution in Tunisia and the leaking of heaps of diplomatic materials relating to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations may actually together portend something dramatic and possibly quite positive.

The situation remains dangerously uncertain in Tunisia. The days following the collapse of Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali’s dictatorship last week brought global attention and wonder at the possibility of a genuine, popular democracy replacing an entrenched authoritarian regime. State censorship has ended for now and Tunisians are experiencing a sense of freedom that is igniting inspiration among other repressed populations.

Worryingly, the fact remains that Islamists are the best-organized opposition across the region. There are certainly secular or moderate opposition figures, but the nature of repression in the Muslim world leaves the mosque as the only reliable organizing venue for most oppositional politics.

While Tunisia has a strong history of secularism, uprisings in other Arab countries could benefit dictators of a whole new variety. Even Tunisia is not entirely safe from the possibility of an Islamist uprising, although the leader of that country’s Islamists is making moderate noises in an apparent effort to be included in the emerging new order.

More significant than developments in Tunisia are the implications across the region. Though dictators tremble (some more than others, certainly) the events in Tunisia may be short-lived, either because they will not result in a lasting democracy or because the experience will not be replicated elsewhere. But the potential is enormous, for reasons and in ways most have not yet imagined.

The entire conflagration in Tunisia began, as major events frequently do, with a comparatively small spark: in this case, a literal spark. On Dec. 17, Mohamad Bouazizi, a fruit vendor whose livelihood was destroyed by local authorities who beat him and confiscated his wares, doused himself in paint thinner and immolated himself in front of the office of the local governor. That self-destructive act of protest is seen as the starting point in a wave of protests that led to the end of Ben Ali’s 23-year regime. In the subsequent weeks, as many as 12 other men lit themselves on fire to protest the repression under which they live – not in Tunisia, but in Egypt, Algeria and Mauritania.

Self-immolation is most commonly remembered as a method of protest by Vietnamese monks protesting the war there in the 1960s and ’70s. but it has an ancient history and a powerful one in drawing attention to situations including the Soviet army’s crushing of the Prague Spring movement and the occupation of Tibet by China. As tragic and grisly as these flaming protests are, they represent the desperate demands of an oppressed, economically disadvantaged population for something better. In the context of the broader region, which includes Israel, they suggest that something monumental could be taking place.

For more than six decades, Arab and Muslim dictatorships have kept a lid on whatever seething resentments might be roiling in their own body politic through a combination of limited expression, harsh punishment for dissent and focus on an external enemy: one of which, of course, is the invaluable scapegoat they call the “Zionist entity.”

The supremely successful charade put on by the leaders of Arab- and Muslim-majority states to deflect anger over their repression of about a billion people through instilling paranoia about a tiny little country with seven million Jews cannot last forever. Eventually, there has to be a critical mass of people who both know that Jews are not to blame for their condition and who collectively gain the courage to stand up to those who actually hold them down. This may have been the most amazing lesson of Tunisia’s revolution. We cannot tell if this is the moment when that realization and that courage will spread across the region but, with populations made up disproportionately of young people, and opportunities for those young people almost totally absent, the Arab world is sitting on a powder keg that has to blow one way or another, whether through demands for democratization and economic opportunity or, alternatively, by succumbing to hopelessness through violent Islamist movements.

At this same moment comes a load of leaked documents that appear to suggest that the Israelis and Palestinians are far closer to potential coexistence than public diplomacy has so far suggested. The materials that came to light this week suggest that the Palestinians’ Fatah leadership is far more pragmatic than previously known about major issues like Jerusalem, settlements and refugees. These documents, encouraging as they are, indicate that Israel may indeed have a partner with which to negotiate after all.

The future being far from determined, optimism at large may not be merited but, if changes are afoot in the Arab world and peace with the Palestinians is closer at hand than we have been led to believe, this may be the most positive news week in some time.

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