“Autocratic regimes use brutality to eliminate any hope their populace may have for a different future,” Anne Appelbaum writes in The Atlantic, in the wake of the removal of one of the region’s most brutal dictators in Syria. Indeed, while many around the world are “celebrating” this development, Appelbaum’s colleague Graeme Wood adds a word of caution, noting that one of the key Syrian rebel leaders, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, formerly led Jabhat al-Nusra, who he calls “the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda that functioned as a slightly less-evil twin of ISIS.”
So let’s remember the neighborhood we’re talking about. This is not Switzerland. This is the land of brutal dictators who must remain brutal dictators in order to stay in power.
And when those dictators fall, watch out.
“We have never been here before in the post-World War II era,” Thomas Friedman warns in The New York Times, noting the danger of having states like Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan all “fail at self-government” when “no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize.”
Why is there so little faith that these failed states can ever stabilize on their own?
For starters, many people still remember how they were fooled by the heady days of the Arab Spring in 2011. What looked then like a dream-like march towards freedom turned into an even worse level of brutality and instability.
But there’s something else few people care to admit. These states have failed so badly because they don’t have what only Israel has: A founding document that holds their state together around the principles of freedom and human dignity.
That document was forged in fire. In May 1948, as five Arab armies were preparing to send the new state of Israel into the sea, Israel’s very first government still found the time to release its Declaration of Independence.
It included such principles as: “[Israel] will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Through endless wars and civil strife, that Declaration has kept Israel alive and relatively stable. It’s crucial to remember that these principles are not evidence of adherence. They are ideals to aspire to. It is those shared ideals that hold a state together; and despite severe testing that has often neared the breaking point, Israel is still holding.
It’s rare to see anyone recognize that Israel is the only country in the region that has anything close to a founding document that values freedom and individual rights. In fact, it’s more like the opposite: Israel receives more venom from the world than any of its neighbors.
You can even see it this week at the United Nations.
As my friend Hillel Neuer of UN Watch wrote to me in an email: “On December 11 [Wednesday], the UN General Assembly will hold an Emergency Special Session against Israel…[and] during December, the UN will hold the second and final votes for many of the 2024 annual anti-Israel resolutions listed here: https://unwatch.org/2024-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-of-the-world/
Think about that. We’ve entered a dangerous “world of disorder” in the Middle East with genocidal regimes like Iran and various terror entities battling for survival and supremacy, and the UN is still obsessed with the one state in the region that is fighting for Western values.
Meanwhile, as millions of Palestinians continue to live in hunger and misery in places like Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, on U.S. college campuses you only see protests about the Palestinians who are connected to the Jewish state.
For better and mostly for worse, the venerable Jews have become accustomed to getting special treatment.
“The Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right,” Saul Bellow wrote in his book “To Jerusalem and Back” almost fifty years ago. “Where Israel is concerned, [the world] swells with moral consciousness.”
The tragedy for the peoples of the Middle East is that this moral consciousness doesn’t swell for the states that need it most.
