The Egyptian People Have Won—Long Live the Democratic Revolution in the Middle East!
The 18 days of the people's revolution in Egypt, a revolution which followed on the heels of the victory of the Tunisian people and the fall of the dictator there, is one of the most important historical events to have occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Millions of people, without firing a shot, brought down one of the most veteran dictators in the region, the ruler of a powerful Middle Eastern country. We need have no doubt that this was an historical act carried out by the people, people who want democracy, respect, freedom and social justice.
The fall of Mubarak exposed the Israeli elite in all its pathetic blindness – the elite of the generals (in and out of uniform), the commercial media, the analysts and commentators - who view any change in the established order in the Middle East as a security and economic threat, a fundamentalist threat. The Egyptian revolution demonstrated that the Egyptian people, like all the peoples in the region, want democracy and social justice.
What we are seeing today is not the Iranian revolution of 1979; the conditions and the political forces are totally different. Only Western ignorance and arrogance can ignore the fact that we are talking about a generation of 100 million young people throughout the Arab world, who were born into a reality of hopeless tyranny and who will not necessarily view fundamentalism as the realization of their aspirations. The celebration of democracy is a real celebration and not a manipulation by the Muslim Brotherhood. It can be clearly seen how the masses of demonstrators skipped over the heads of the existing opposition parties, especially the fundamentalists.
And this is exactly what is important – undermining the dichotomy that threatened to paralyze social life in the Middle East: corrupt, tyrannical regimes or fundamentalism. What is happening now marks a salient political change, both in the form of the struggle and in its demands, something that has not been seen in our region for decades.
This change in the regional political map will have a deep influence on our future. The quiet required by a neo-liberal Middle East, "the new Middle East" of Shimon Peres and his ilk, the quiet of corporations and tyrants, is being torn to shreds before our eyes. The wave of democratic revolution is sweeping all the states in the region. An aggressive and occupying Israel, as the representative of the West in our region, will become ever more isolated. This doesn't mean that our current deranged leaders won't attempt to change the direction of the wave by force, as they did in 1956 and in 1967. But it is very clear that today the world understands much better that it is impossible to continue to maintain a country serving as a nuclear aircraft carrier in the heart of the Arab world. Power relationships have changed.
This is also true for the corrupt anti-democratic regime of the Palestinian Authority. The wave of democratic revolution will have a deep influence on the future of the Palestinian people. We can already see this, in the joy in the streets of Gaza and Jaffa, the West Bank and the Galilee.
Our support for the democratic revolution of the Arab peoples is unconditional. The Egyptian people will have to work very hard for a long time in order to establish a true democracy that embodies social justice and a respect for human rights. But we are not commentators standing on the sidelines and waiting to see what tomorrow will bring. Our support for the democratic revolution stems from our belief in the ability of oppressed nations to write history with their own hands and to continue to struggle.
From this also stems the role of the radical forces inside Israel:
Struggle for a democracy that includes all the citizens of the state, Jews and Palestinians;
Preserving and expanding freedom of expression and freedom of assembly;
Ceaseless struggle against the inciting, racist and fascist forces in Israel that are interested in dividing and conquering and hiding the socio-political reality;
Building the connection between democracy and social justice;
Exposing the lack of democracy in the control of the tycoons over the Knesset, the media, the economy and the army;
Exposing the place of the settlers and the messianic and fascist forces in fortifying the social order, and the connection between them and the tycoons;
Belief in the power of the people to take their destiny into their own hands.
We have work to do.