I was a bit disturbed the other day by the protests outside Max Brenner Chocolates. Apparently this was not a protest against chocolate but against Israel. Max Brenner Chocolates is owned by another company, the larger company is a supplier to the Israeli army, therefore the protesters were not advocating boycotting a Jewish business but protesting Israeli occupation of the Western Bank. This is part of a larger campaign, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. This campaign seems to me to be based on a false assumption, that peace in the Middle East is entirely dependent on the actions of Israel, as if the Arab nations, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have no part to play in the process. In fact, I never hear or read of any protest against anybody else except Israel, which makes me worry about it on another level. Hopefully, I’m reading too much into it, that ignorance and the hope for an easy solution is responsible for these actions and not a darker motive. Indeed I give the benefit of the doubt to most of the protesters.
Possibly there is a one-word solution to the Middle East, and that word is Democracy. Anyone familiar with the history of democracy in general, and in the case studies of France, Great Britain and Germany for example, know that democracy is not easy to establish or maintain. So Democracy may be one word, but it is not an easy answer. And it can make things more complicated.
I’ve just read Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy; The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Sharansky was a champion chess player in the Soviet Union before his activism on behalf of Soviet Jews saw him declared a refusenik and exiled to Siberia before he was finally able to emigrate to Israel. There he established a political party representing all immigrants which, he is happy to report, seems to have outlived its usefulness. On the other hand, he was a member and minister in a number of successive Israeli governments. His life as a dissident in a totalitarian country then as a minister in the sole democracy among other totalitarian counties gives him a unique perspective. One can certainly argue with him, but you cannot dismiss him. As some people have tried to do anyway.
I don’t want to summarise Sharanksy’s arguments on the power of democracy to lead to greater peace, for fear of expressing them badly. A couple of points are worthwhile repeating here though. The way a country treats its citizens are an indicator of how a country will treat the rest of the world. That’s pretty good. Democracies don’t tend to go to war with each other. Try to think of the exceptions. Everybody is ready for democracy. For some decades at least we have been hearing that the Arabs are not ready for democracy. But the same was said of Germany and Japan and many more besides. And more recently, since this book was written, we have seen clearly that Syrians. Libyans and Egyptians, among others, seem to think they’d like to give democracy a go. Who are we to say no?
Sharanksky condemns the US policy of dealing with dictators for the sake of stability. They have turned away from human rights abuses for political and economic reasons. With the USSR this was called Détente, and people still look at it fondly. And it was not until the US under Ronald Reagan linked aid to Human Rights that cracks appeared in the Soviet monolith. No-one is suggesting this is the only reason for the fall of the Soviet Union, but when the USSR started giving more rights to its people, more freedom, it could not sustain itself. And dealing with tyrants for the sake of stability has given us people like, ooh let me see... Saddam Hussein. Look how well that went in the long run.
Democracy may not give us the results we want. We may see more Islamist governments, for example, take over from secular governments in the Middle East. But if the democracy is real, if the people see the benefit of living in a genuine democracy and being part of the world community, we should see a more moderate approach in the long run, from all parties. But who these days is prepared for the long run? The media certainly doesn’t encourage that approach and going by what I read on social media ie us, we aren’t either. Hence the search for immediate easy results.
All people crave freedom. The history of politics in broad terms is a history of the spread of power and freedom from the few to the many. If we link our foreign aid to human rights we can start to make dictatorships and totalitarian governments rethink the way they treat their people. It's a controversial idea, but it is one worth considering.
No comments:
Post a Comment