Neve Gordon: Israeli Media 'Fears' the New Egypt
[Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be reached through his website.]
Over the past three weeks the Israeli media has been extremely interested in Egypt.
During the climatic days of the unprecedented demonstrations, television news programmes spent most of their airtime covering the protests, while the daily papers dedicated half the news and opinion pages to the unfolding events.
Rather than excitement at watching history in the making, however, the dominant attitude here, particularly on television, was of anxiety-- a sense that the developments in Egypt were inimical to Israel's interests. Egypt's revolution, in other words, was bad news.
It took a while for Israel's experts on "Arab Affairs" to get a grip on what was happening. During the early days of unrest, the recurrent refrain was that "Egypt is not Tunis".
Commentators assured the public that the security apparatuses in Egypt are loyal to the regime and that consequently there was little if any chance that President Hosni Mubarak's government would fall....
Israeli commentators are equivocal on the issue of Egyptian democracy. One columnist explained that it takes years for democratic institutions to be established and for people to internalise the practices appropriate for democracy, while Amir Hazroni from NRG went so far as to write an ode to colonialism:
"When we try to think how and why the United States and the West lost Egypt, Tunis, Yemen and perhaps other countries in the Middle East, people forget that. The original sin began right after WWII, when a wonderful form of government that protected security and peace in the Middle East (and in other parts of the Third Word) departed from this world following pressure from the United States and Soviet Union... More than sixty years have passed since the Arab states and the countries of Africa were liberated from the 'colonial yoke,' but there still isn't an Arab university, an African scientist or a Middle Eastern consumer product that has made a mark on our world."...
Read entire article at Al Jazeera
Over the past three weeks the Israeli media has been extremely interested in Egypt.
During the climatic days of the unprecedented demonstrations, television news programmes spent most of their airtime covering the protests, while the daily papers dedicated half the news and opinion pages to the unfolding events.
Rather than excitement at watching history in the making, however, the dominant attitude here, particularly on television, was of anxiety-- a sense that the developments in Egypt were inimical to Israel's interests. Egypt's revolution, in other words, was bad news.
It took a while for Israel's experts on "Arab Affairs" to get a grip on what was happening. During the early days of unrest, the recurrent refrain was that "Egypt is not Tunis".
Commentators assured the public that the security apparatuses in Egypt are loyal to the regime and that consequently there was little if any chance that President Hosni Mubarak's government would fall....
Israeli commentators are equivocal on the issue of Egyptian democracy. One columnist explained that it takes years for democratic institutions to be established and for people to internalise the practices appropriate for democracy, while Amir Hazroni from NRG went so far as to write an ode to colonialism:
"When we try to think how and why the United States and the West lost Egypt, Tunis, Yemen and perhaps other countries in the Middle East, people forget that. The original sin began right after WWII, when a wonderful form of government that protected security and peace in the Middle East (and in other parts of the Third Word) departed from this world following pressure from the United States and Soviet Union... More than sixty years have passed since the Arab states and the countries of Africa were liberated from the 'colonial yoke,' but there still isn't an Arab university, an African scientist or a Middle Eastern consumer product that has made a mark on our world."...