The AP is trying desperately to tie Israeli protests into the Arab spring, even though the only true similarity is, gee, they’re protests. Read this analysis, and watch the writer tie himself into knots trying to prove that Israelis wouldn’t be protesting unless it were for the Arabs. The tone of the story is still anti-Israel. Get a load of the lead paragraph:
Israelis, living in an island of relative freedom and comfort and surrounded by countries they generally view with disdain, are not accustomed to taking their cues from Arabs.
Damn those disdainful Israelis, who loathe their neighbors. Why, they have no reason whatsoever to not want to be like them. None at all.
Both movements also shared a dramatic suddenness: Much like Arabs had for decades seemed resigned to dictatorships, Israelis had taken economic divisions as a fact of life, until each decided they had had enough.
Yeah, those two reasons are just like each other. The high cost of housing and dictatorships? Totally equivalent. You go, AP!
Note that even the quotes used by the author disprove the basis of the story.
So many bristle at the suggestion that the tremors in the Arab world could have given Israel a jostle.
“We are some nice quiet people. We don’t want problems,” said Nissim Slama, a 28-year-old volunteer at another Jerusalem protest tent. “It’s not like Tahrir.”
For Slama, the idea that Jews came together decades ago to build their own state was enough inspiration.
“We know if people get together can do crazy, awesome things – like create a country.”
So, this Israeli is relating the Zionist movement to the current protests—not the Egyptian protests, not the Arab world protests, but the Zionist movement that built a nation. And then our friend Diaa Hadid works even harder to prove this bogus connection. (Once again, ooh, they’re both protests!)
The wider public who dove into the moment in recent days may not feel inspired by the Arab Spring, but some of those who initially organized Israel’s protests acknowledge the influence, in some cases citing also Spain – where young people have been protesting rampant joblessness for months, in some cases erecting tent camps and scuffling with police.
Reach, reach, reach for that connection, Diaa!
“People saw that other people managed to leave their houses and demand their rights. People here were quite desperate – but quiet and even numb,” said protest leader Stav Shaffir. “But in Spain … and the Arab countries – to demand their rights and cope with violence and challenges was of course a great inspiration,” she said.
There is no violence to cope with in the Israeli protests, as A) the protests are peaceful and B) Israel is a democracy, and protests happen. But keep trying, dude.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands demonstrated until President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the signature chant was, “The people demand the fall of the regime.”
The same cadence is in the Israelis’ chant, “The people want social justice.”
Lame. Laaaaaaame. Really? A cadence? Seriously?
One sign in the Tel Aviv demonstration Saturday scrawled the Arabic word and anti-Mubarak slogan, “Irhal” – “Leave.” Underneath, the protester wrote in Hebrew, “Egypt – it’s here.”
One whole sign, in a protest of hundreds of thousands? Oh, well, you got me. It’s just like Tahrir Square. My bad.
There are other similarities. In both countries, the middle class is leading struggles. They share communal solidarity: in impoverished Egypt, volunteers distributed food to demonstrators. In Israel, some protest tents have kitchen volunteers who cook and serve three meals a day. Both began with a single grievance.
Whoa! I cook and serve meals, too, so I must be just like the Tahrir Square protesters! And my friend Sarah, the one with four kids, she cooks and serves for six people, so she’s a super-protestor!
And now that we’re done with the protests, let’s continue slamming Israelis as superior beings who loathe their neighbors. (And there’s no reason for them to mistrust or dislike their neighbors, because it’s not like they’ve had five or six wars with them since 1948 or anything. Oh. Wait.)
But in fact their country is deeply isolated from its neighbors, and not just by decades of enmity and violence.
A majority of Israelis are culturally closer to the West than the Middle East, a legacy of the Zionist movement that emerged from Europe and the European origins of the vast majority of those who have led the Jewish state since. That can translate at times into a disdain for Arab countries as backward.
Israel’s military might and the strength of its economy compared to its neighbors have heightened a feeling of superiority.
Two things: The Arab countries are backward, scientifically, economically, and culturally. It isn’t Israel alone that thinks that way. As for the “feeling of superiority”: That’s the writer putting thoughts into Israelis without backing them up with facts. Your anti-Israel media at work.
Finally, we get to the end of the article, where the author admits that he’s blowing smoke out of his ass.
Even protesters who see regional inspiration draw sharp distinctions.
They note that Israel is a democracy, despite its flaws. Government forces are not attacking demonstrators. The chant of “revolution” is ballot-box saber-rattling. Protesters demand social justice, not regime change.
It really is amazing that the AP can disprove its own theories in its own articles, yet still publish the lies. If I live to be 100, I’m never going to run out of AP bullshit to blog about.
