Why I'm hopeful about the Middle East uprisings

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Natan Sharansky
March 13, 2011

I am often asked why so many Israelis are worried by the popular rebellions rocking the Middle East and why I'm so hopeful. My response is that just as their worry is tempered by hope, my hope is tempered by worry.

The worried among us fear the possibility of long-term chaos and/or the emergence of regimes even more repressive than those that are crumbling. Their arguments are serious and deserve an answer.

For decades, the free world's policy toward the Middle East was based on the desire for stability, purchased by deals struck with leaders. That the leaders were corrupt autocrats mattered little. To the contrary, tyranny was seen as guaranteeing stability, corruption as guaranteeing that tyranny's friendship could be bought.

This was rationalized by considerations of realpolitik and the comforting assertion that we had no right to judge the moral standards of societies different from our own.

That pact, however, has been definitively exposed as a sham, yielding not stability but its opposite. And it has been broken - not by us or the autocrats but by the peoples of the region. Their great awakening has shattered the truism that, unlike "us," they have no real desire for freedom. With tremendous courage, they have risked their lives to declare otherwise.

In that stirring spectacle lies the first, elemental reason for my hope that a historical page has at last begun to turn. But the window is only so wide, and many forces aim to shut it. So what comes next?

(Snip)