Photo by Matthew Cassel

I ended my previous post with the words of an Israeli columnist who dared to believe that the Egyptian people are ready for democracy. Now check out the words another Israeli journalist who dares to dig even deeper:

According to Haaretz, the Israeli government sent a message to world governments urging them to enhance their support of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The message urged that the stability of Egypt’s regime is beneficial to the stability of the entire Middle East and thus must be preserved.

What is the value of our so called democracy if it can only flourish when its neighbors aren’t democracies? We have been told for years that occupation techniques such as the construction of the separation barrier are necessary to ensure the survival of “the Middle East’s only democracy.” We learned to accept that our democracy is dependent on human rights infringements. Now we learn that the scale of these infringements must be fantastically greater.

For 30 years Israel enjoyed the status quo with Egypt, while Egyptians suffered from tyranny, lacked freedom of speech and could not affect their own destiny. What message is Israel sending now? Does it truly imply that only a dictatorial Middle East will permit it to survive as a Jewish state?

Is this Jewish state such a fragile fantasy, that an entire region of the world must be kept imprisoned in order for it to thrive? How many children are in the basement? Four million Palestinians? Eighty million Egyptians? How many more? How many people must be deprived of liberty so we can have ours? Can we only have our liberty by maintaining absolute dictators as allies? Are we really that scared?