BUT rEALISM IS NARCISSISM::

Israel, Egypt and the ‘F’ Word (Rob Eshman, 1/30/11, Jewish Journal)

What’s going on? A massive, heartfelt liberation sweeps through the most populous Arab country in the world, with the prospect of rescuing future generations from drowning in oppression and stagnation. The Arab street cries freedom, and what do we cry? Oy!

True, the uprising is chaotic and messy, its potential outcomes treacherous. But what did we expect? We paid for stability with billions of dollars. The Egyptians paid for it with repression, fear, torture and corruption. We got peace, they got blood on prison walls. How long did we think that was going to last? Fascism fell, Communism fell. Anybody who believed the screw wouldn’t eventually turn in the Middle East doesn’t think much of history, or of Arabs.

“That the pursuit of Arab peace came at the expense of Arab democracy is nothing new,” Shadi Hamid wrote in a long, prescient article about Egypt in the journal Democracy just last month.
“In short, the pursuit of peace came to depend on prevailing authoritarian structures. Unless autocracy can be made permanent–and there is little reason to think that it can–this state of affairs is unsustainable.”

How did the geniuses at Council of Foreign Relations and the State Department and Mossad think it was going to end? That Mubarak was going to wake up one day and decide unlimited power, privilege and wealth were just not his thing after all? Mubarak’s paralysis in the face of the demonstrations proves that he knew well what it took his “good friend” Hillary Clinton so long to fathom: his people despise him. One Cairo protester I saw on CNN held up a sign that said it all:

Mubarak you must get it we hate you.

And liberation is messy. The movie version, the one Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney promised us would play out in Baghdad, involves half-tracks and daisies, candy for the children and gallows for the bad guys. That is fantasy.

We Jews know better. Think of the Allied victory in World War II: What lay ahead for the peoples of Europe were limbo and violence.

“It was a time without structure or form,” William I. Hitchcock wrote in “The Bitter Road to Freedom,” “a time of uncertainty, fear and loss.”

But just because we have no right to expect the best, there’s no reason to fear the worst (other than the fact that, of course, we’re Jews). The Egyptian uprising is hate-fueled but hope-filled.

“I urge you to look at the positive aspect of what’s going on,” Egyptian-born columnist Mona Eltahawy pleaded with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “This is a peaceful uprising that wants freedom and dignity for the Egyptian people. This is an internal Egyptian issue.”

In other words: It’s not about us.