I can’t be alone in saying that the last month of Arab revolutions has been one of the most joyous months of my life. I spend a good part of every day raising my fist in front of the television and screaming Get out! or cheering on the people, and in that joyous and optimistic spirit I wanted to pull out some historical lessons so far.
The nation is ending as the significant political unit in global matters. It’s not over, but the edges are blurring.
We have been told over and over about non-state actors like Al Qaeda and Hezbullah. But the young revolutionaries are also non-state actors in the sense that international networks have given them power. Even Libya, isolated from the world, has been subject to international media pressure. Television crews were greeted by the people in the streets as liberators when they came across the Egyptian border and well they should be, Anderson Cooper helped liberate Egypt with so little bloodshed. “Thank you Facebook” was a Tunisian graffiti and an Egyptian slogan.
On 60 Minutes the other night, the most daring political actor of our time, Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit peddler who burned himself outside City Hall and provided the spark, was offered as a hero for Americans, too, a liberator of the human spirit. Ghaddafi is a nut, yes, but he is on to something when he talks about young people on drugs. The drug is a western ideal of freedom. We in the west haven’t achieved that dream either, but the dream resonates among Arab youth; and they are crossing traditional borders to demand it. They have ignored their leaders’ calls to national unity and allegiance and fear of foreign occupation and fear of Islamism too.
A group of hip revolutionary young Arabs is on Time Magazine’s cover this week– like the counterculture of 40 years ago, and just as surprising. And well they should be. These young people have shown the greatest political imagination of our age and made a thousand experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and even leftleaning blogs look like fools (mea culpa). These young people have recast the very idea of revolution, and made it into an idea about global participation and human potential (yes, serving the educated).
It can’t be repeated too often, the revolutions have shattered ancient stereotypes about Arabs. This is the revolution I savor more than any other. As Michael Omer-Man wrote “These largely non-violent tactics have shattered the framework the world once viewed Palestinians through – terrorism.”
The revolutions have shattered my framework, too. A lifetime of negative stereotyping is hard to overcome, I have really only known Arabs personally in the last 4 years, and was happy to tell you why Arab societies were not ready for democracy. I was wrong. A side note here about the role of women. I have often written about the cramped public space for independent women in the Arab countries I’ve visited, and I still believe this is an issue—the Lara Logan event is completely consistent with the warnings that women get at Palestinian solidarity meetings about how to deal with harassment over there, and with the impression I’ve gotten that if you are an outspoken public female in Cairo, you won’t be married– but the revolutions have shut me up. Arab youths are well aware of these issues themselves. They are my brothers and sisters and I trust them to address these issues, as young Americans had to force awareness about feminism and gay rights in our society. The best I can do to reform women’s roles in the Arab world is to shut up, listen and encourage. Besides, America is struggling with its own issues of sexual victimization and exploitation.
We’re one world. I believe the revolutions will usher in a new era of cultural interdependence. The internet is pushing western-elaborated freedoms to the Arab dictatorships, including women’s rights and free speech (yes and pornography). And what are they teaching us? Only the greatest lesson, that Arabs are as smart as anyone in the west and right now they are far more creative. The youth have given facebook greater meaning than it has ever had here; and westerners are now studying their organizing techniques.
The Arab youths have needed a flank attack from Arab experts on American television to help bring down the regimes, and in turn these appearances are bringing down a regime of racism in our society. The parade of independent Arab minds is never ending, like a dammed river, and I wonder, Why have I never heard of this person before? Yesterday I watched Ali Ahmida and Khaled Mattawa of the University of New England and California State respectively explaining to Charlie Rose why Gaddafi is finished—great perfromances.
Of course we can talk about the media’s destruction of tradition and diversity, about what English and Hollywood have done to world culture, about how there used to be 600 languages in New Guinea and they are disappearing fast. But I am looking at the upside to that process. A sense of global unity has emerged this last month. The revolutions have really needed us; they have depended on the cellphones and blogosphere to get their messages out to communities that could pressure their governments.
In this new order, there is a greater place for international law. The revolutions want their own rulers held to international law standards. They actually believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Alia Malek said last week that 7-year-olds in Palestine can recite the Declaration to you, and Ben Wedeman said yesterday on CNN that the people he’s met in Benghazi want the west to put its money where its mouth is on human rights. Wow. The effect on the Goldstone report (buy it here) – could be huge, the pressure to implement it.
Of course the revolutions will isolate Israel, as the Israeli government is at last coming to understand. The occupation of Palestine and discrimination in Israel can’t survive these revolutions. Obama’s veto in the Security Council showed the power of the Israel lobby but its grim exposure portends a battle in the streets of Washington before long. The world knows the story, and the world is sick of it. No one will stop this wave.
Fearing European nationalism, Jews built their own nation. But most Jews are Diasporans, and the national idea feels more tired than ever. Back in 2003 the late Tony Judt saw all this coming. He wrote in the NY Review of Books that nationalism was an anachronistic concept in a multicultural age and Israel and Palestine should become one state. At the time he came under so much pressure from Israel supporters in academia and media that he had to make a kind of concession, he was talking about an ideal world. Like this:
In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s “clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.
That was eight years ago. The world that visionary Judt could see over the curve of the earth is with us now.
