Israel’s ‘spring’?

Since its creation, Israel had been boasting that it is the only stable democracy in the Middle East. The recent descent of many countries in the region into internal strife and state-structure decline must have further strengthened Israel’s confidence that it is immune from the ills befalling its Arab neighbours.

The so-called Arab Spring has been blamed for much of what is now happening in many Arab countries.

Former regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen had to give way to popular uprisings demanding reform and change.

The Baathist rule in Iraq was also toppled a decade earlier, but by the American-led war on that country rather than by popular pressure.

The Assad regime in Syria has been dragged into a desperate, indeed a very bloody, struggle for its political life for almost five years, without any signs that the war that has so far claimed more than a quarter of a million deaths and massive destruction is anywhere near its end.

The common factor among all the said Arab countries’ crises is that none of the toppled political structures — with some uncertain exceptions — was replaced by anything better; not even anything similar.

That, however, is not the end of the story, as any rational assessment of the last five years’ events across the Arab world would expect the current turmoil to come to an end at some point.

It may go on for some time, even for a long time, but the “birth pangs” have to eventually produce some meaningful order.

Israel did not seem to see it that way, and rather than heeding the lessons of history, its ultra rightwing government succumbed to political opportunism, letting its territorial greed loose to the very end, unaware of the risks involved in fishing in the troubled Middle Eastern waters.

More serious was Israel’s persistent disregard for the fact that the ongoing instability in the entire region is the direct outcome of its very extremist policies, its endless occupation, the cruelty with which it has been treating the Palestinians and the constant blocking of any reasonable effort to resolve the historic conflict politically and peacefully.

As such, Israel viewed the decline of Arab order as the golden opportunity to accelerate its expansionist schemes over all the areas designated for the creation of a state for the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and to ignore all logic concerning Palestinian rights or Palestinian people’s future in flagrant defiance of international law and against the good advice from its best allies and protectors in Washington.

Clearly, Israel is least willing to realise that the fires it started all around with the deliberate intention of harming Arab and Muslim countries are now heading its way.

And yet, rather than bring the extinguishers, the Israeli government is calling cranes and bulldozers to demolish more Palestinian houses and to build more illegal settlements right under the light of the raging fires. In other words, Israel is feeding the fire threatening its very existence.

There are clear indications that the current Palestinian violence is just the start of a new cycle of violence. It is unlikely that the Palestinians will be able to put up any longer with the occupation humiliation and practices.

When people reach a point where they are prepared to give their lives for defending their rights, as the young Palestinian men and women are doing, no amount of security measures could deal with the situation.

Gaza has been under a very tight siege since 2007 and yet, and despite the severe hardships and deprivation, the people there are still resisting and were able to defend themselves against repeated massive attacks of Israel’s superior military power and highly advanced air force.

Israel’s sole reliance on military power never made it secure. Further reliance on brute force, demolition of “terrorists” houses, collective punishment, arbitrary detentions and tighter sieges in order to suppress the occupied people’s struggle for their legitimate rights will definitely produce adverse results and lead to more insecurity.

As a matter of fact, this defeats the longstanding “only stable democracy in the region” Israeli claim.

Israel is neither democratic nor stable and has never been.

Practically, Israel’s hostile conduct keeps it in a state of war with its larger environment despite the peace treaties and the Oslo Accord with the PLO.

Israeli occupation has remained in place for nearly five decades on Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian territories, with no sign that it is willing to end it.

With the manner Israel has been treating the Palestinians and their Authority, it will be surprising if it could preserve the status quo for much longer.

Palestinian unrest, however, may not be the only source of danger for Israel. It is the danger from within, the growing danger of the extremist settlers that may complicate matters disastrously for Israel.

The discriminatory culture of hatred that the settlers have been persistently nurturing, mainly towards the Arabs, went on unchecked, if not officially encouraged by the state, for far too long for any effort to put it under control.

From calls of “death to the Arabs” to routine settler attacks on Arab houses, mosques, farms, cars and property under the eyes of Israeli authorities, to burning alive of Palestinians, the Jewish extremists transformed the conflict into a religious and cultural one, on the top of the many other essential political and territorial complexities.

One Israeli journalist talking to the BBC Arabic Service last Sunday said that Israel decided to finally charge the settlers who attacked and burned to death the Dawabsheh family in the village of Duma, near Nablus, last July, only because those extremists are planning to undermine the state of Israel in favour of creating a Jewish-run religious entity in its place.

Under the circumstances, how could any Israeli administration in the future convince those extremist fanatics that the Palestinians could have their own independent state even on a small part of Palestine?

In 1995, a young Jewish extremist who was brought up to believe that the Palestinians have no right to any part of the “land of Israel” assassinated former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for leading a peace process meant to recognise the bare minimum of Palestinian rights on undefined, tiny, parts of Palestine.

In 20 years since that assassination, the level of Jewish extremism has gone way beyond any possible compromise.

In fact, the entire Israeli establishment has been moving the settler extremist way.

Racist tendencies, hatred, denial of Palestinian rights are not the attitudes of just a small minority; they are gradually becoming state policy.

That is why crimes against Palestinians went mildly punished or unpunished at all. Even the Dawabsheh killers’ seeming trial does not sound that convincing.

The question is: Is it time for Israel to brace for its own “Jewish Spring”?