[The Jerusalem Post]Does Israel prefer peace with authoritarian regimes?

In the wake of the announcement that Israel and the United Arab Emirates are normalizing relations one line of critique of the agreement has been that Israel and the UAE are authoritarian regimes or that Israel prefers to only sign agreements with monarchies and dictatorships in the region. Historically this argument has a serious flaw because it was Arab nationalist dictatorship regimes that have posed the most extensive threat to Israel and been the most hostile, from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt to the Assad regime in Syria to Saddam Hussein when he ran Iraq. Authoritarian regimes from Iran to Turkey and Hamas in Gaza are implacable foes of Israel. This line of critique has been advanced by some voices on the left, others who are pro-Turkey, pro-Iran, pro-Qatar, and others in the Middle East who oppose the Israel-UAE deal for a variety of reasons. For instance Matt Duss, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, tweeted that “all this does today is give cover to Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land, burnish the reputation of an authoritarian UAE government, and provide Trump a shiny object to wave around.” A Twitter account that claims to be the official account of the BDS Movement, which urges a boycott of Israel, has slammed the UAE in the past for being “authoritarian.” A twitter account that says it supports Palestinian rights said, as the deal was announced, that “authoritarian regimes sidelines Palestinians.” Former Obama administration advisor Ben Rhodes has slammed Israel for being authoritarian. An article at the Conversationalist argued that the deal was a “triumph for authoritarianism.” In addition the pro-government Turkish media Anadolu published an article on August 15 arguing that the UAE and Israel deal is “against democracy” in the Middle East. The Nation in Pakistan reprinted the article.  Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute also argued that the UAE-Israel deal was a “reminder of why Israel, one of the region’s few democracies, prefers that its Arab neighbors not be democratic.” Hamid has argued that the US should “keep Arab autocrats, even the most ‘pro-American’ ones, at arm’s length.” He argued on August 20 that “the US and Israel have worked against democratization in the Middle East, in part because democracies, since they have to reflect public sentiment, are less likely to seek normalization with Israel.”

That’s precisely the point: the US and Israel have worked against democratization in the Middle East, in part because democracies, since they have to reflect public sentiment, are less likely to seek normalization with Israel https://t.co/E5QHM5JmiX

— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) August 18, 2020

To understand the argument that suggests Israel prefers authoritarian regimes or that the current Trump administration’s push to help an agreement between the UAE and Israel is some kind of authoritarian regime alliance would suggest that Israel, the UAE and perhaps the US, are somehow less democratic than other states that might oppose normalization.  If one compares a map of countries that Israel has diplomatic relations with a map by the group Freedom House, which rates whether countries are free or not, one finds that Israel almost exclusively has relations with democracies and more free states. Israel lacks diplomatic reations with a whole swath of countries in the Arab and Islamic world, from Pakistan to Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and others. In general Israel’s relations are with countries labelled free or partially free.  However in the Middle East, where most countries are labelled not free, Israel’s relations are with Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. Only Jordan is seen as “partially free” by the group. Turkey has become more and more authoritarian, but historically Turkey and Israel were some of the few democracies in the region. That appears to indicate that when it comes to Israel achieving diplomatic relations it has had only dictatorships to choose from.  One argument contends that Israel prefers dictatorships because the average people across the region oppose relations with Israel. However in large part the average people oppose relations with Israel after seven decades or more of having education systems in authoritarian regimes that taught them to dislike Israel. A plethora of regimes in the region used anti-Israel and even anti-semitic propaganda to unite and distract populaces against Israel as a way to justify their regime control. For instance when groups, such as the Kurds in places like Iraq, appeared more open to Israel they were accused of being a “second Israel” or a pro-Israel “dagger” pointing at the Arab world. Populists such as Turkey’s regime use anti-Israel rallies to encourage ethnic nationalism and recently even use anti-Israel views too fan religious nationalism, arguing that the consecration of a mosque in Hagia Sophia was a step to “liberating al-Aqsa.” Iran’s use of Quds Day and the “arc of resistance” uses the excuse of “fighting Israel” to justify oppression and extralegal militias, such as Hezbollah. Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen for instance have an official slogan saying “death to Israel, curse the Jews.” This means that demagogues, religious extremists and dictatorial regimes, such as the Assads in Syria, used opposition to Israel as a way to entrench themselves. When more liberal and open minded voices have supported peace with Israel in places like Syria, Iraq, or even in Gaza and the West Bank they have been harassed or even killed for supporting “normalization.” None of this seems to show that anti-Israel views are part of “democratization.” In the opposite, a more democratic polity tends to have more diverse voices about Israel.  In recent years the region has shifted a bit in this respect. Whereas in the period of the 1950s a series of nationalist revolutionary military regimes emerged that opposed Israel, in the 1980s the Iranian revolution added a religious element to opposition to Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood and extremists also emerged in Sunni countries that fanned the flames of anti-semitism. These views were written into the Hamas charter.A shift in the 1990s led to limited and increased democratization in the region. This included elections in Lebanon, Iran, Algeria and even rigged elections in places like Egypt. Most countries in the region adopted a veneer of democracy. When democracy went against the regime it tended to be brutally suppressed. The US Bush administration supported democratization in the region, including in the Palestinian Authority and Iraq. However here there are some of the  examples where democratization led to more anti-Israel views. Hamas victory in the Palestinian legislative elections and the victory of pro-Iran parties in Iraq led to more hostility to Israel. At the same time the rise of the AK Party in Turkey led Turkey to become one of the most anti-Israel countries in the region. However, the rise of Hamas, the AK Party and groups like Badr and Dawa in Iraq were all authoritarian in nature. Turkey is now the world’s largest jailor of journalists where people are imprisoned for critiquing the government on social media. Hamas has run a one-party dictatorship in Gaza, backed by Qatar and Turkey, since 2006. That shows that anti-Israel views are also tied to authoritarianism.The accusation that Israel aligns with the more “reactionary” or authoritarian regimes derives from a post-Arab spring analysis. Israel was perceived as being non-plussed by the rise of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in 2012 in Egypt. Israel is believes to be much close to the Abdel Fatah al-Sisi government today in Egypt. In addition Jordan under the monarchy has cracked down on some dissent, and that dissent tends to be anti-Israel, even though the monarchy is also officially critical of Israel. There were also accusations that Israel preferred the Assad regime’s anti-Israel stability, to the emergence of a chaotic state in Syria. That accusation is not backed up by reality, since there are a plethora of voices in Israel that supported the Syrian rebels, and Israel provided aid to Syrian rebel areas during the conflict.  However the “reactionary” narrative continues because Turkey and Qatar have embraced a façade of supporting Islamic democracy against UAE-backed groups. This is not really a battle between democracies and authoritarians in the region, but rather two types off authoritarianism, either one led by Ankara’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the Iranian regime, or by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and its allies, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan, or Libya’s Khalifa Haftar are autocracies. Their enemies are also authoritarian. For instance Iran’s regime murdered more than 3,000 protesters last year and pro-Iranian groups killed hundreds of protesters over the last year and have assassinated commentators, liberals and dissenters, such as Hisham al-Hashimi in Iraq. Israel certainly prefers stable countries that can guarantee peace, than countries that fall into civil war and are infiltrated by Iranian-backed threats, or jihadist-extremist threats. That means Israel prefers the Jordanian monarchy to the chaos of the 1970s in Jordan when Palestinian militant groups tried to take over the state. Similarly Palestinian groups and Hezbollah have undermined Lebanon and threatened Israel in the past and today. These are not democratic groups, but authoritarians. Israel works with gulf countries on shared interests. These interests are not about promoting democracy or authoritarianism, but about working with common friends, such as Greece, on issues of mutual concern. For instance Israel has found no more support in democratic Tunisia, than dictatorial Syria. There is ample evidence that average Iranians are not as anti-Israel as the regime and that Kurdish groups tend to be more open to Israel than the authoritarian regimes they are forced to live under. That the average voter in Jordan or Ramallah or Egypt might support colder relations with Israel is also likely a reality. But this doesn’t provide a simple answer  to the authoritarian question. It illustrates that in a complex region Israel sometimes can work with authoritarians and democrats, usually based on shared interests or shared enemies, rather than a simple reading of democratic or authoritarian values.