Why They Will Hate Us

It was illegal to own a duplicating device.  Newspaper presses,  Xerox machines,  even school mimeographs were all government controlled.  It was impossible to make a telephone call to the outside.  A wall kept East Berliners from communicating with people in the west.   For the first 47 years of my life, I lived in a world where it was understood by pretty much everyone that the Soviet Empire would last forever behind that iron curtain.  But the curtain was transparent to radio frequencies.  By 1980, West German radio and TV signals were spilling into Poland and East Germany.   The shorter waves of the BBC and Voice of America were penetrating even deeper into the Soviet Empire.   By the end of the decade it was no longer possible for Eastern Europe’s dictators to control the information flowing to their citizens.  Their regimes collapsed like dominoes.

In 1996, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa of Qatar granted 140 million dollars to establish Al  Jazeera, an Arabic language cable news channel with an independent editorial policy.  In 2004, roommates Mark Zuckerberg,  Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes created Facebook to facilitate social networking among students at Harvard.  Seven years later it has 600 million users all over the world.  Al Jazeera, Facebook and Twitter have penetrated the Arab world.  Tunisians, Egyptians,  Algerians, and Yemenis have gone to the streets, and the regimes appear to be about to collapse like dominoes.  

All those countries are police states whose corrupt, autocratic regimes are supported by the United States despite their miserable human rights records.  So, when they are replaced by governments that reflect the sentiments of their populations, the new governments will almost certainly be hostile to the United States.  Under the Bush administration’s short-lived calls for democracy in the Arab world, the United States supported elections in the Palestinian territories.  When Fatah lost those elections and Hamas won, the United States and Israel chose not to open a political dialogue with elected Palestinian government. Instead, they continued to deal only with Fatah, and conspired to use economic, political and military pressure to try to destroy Hamas.

Unfortunately, the concessions made by both sides in the negotiations that led to the Beilin Maazen document in 1995, the Clinton Parameters in 2000, and the Geneva Accords in 2003 were not made as widely known to the Palestinian public as they were to Israelis.  The Geneva Accords, for example, were delivered to every household in Israel, but the same did not happen in the West Bank and Gaza.  Instead, the Palestinian Authority maintained a public position that came across as if it had never backed away from old Palestinian red lines.  Now that Al Jazeera has published the Palestine Papers, many Palestinians are likely to perceive the Palestinian concessions as a revelation of a conspiracy that  the Abbas regime engaged in to try to subvert the will of the Palestinian electorate. Facebook and twitter will empower that electorate to effectively organize to demand new elections.   I am far from certain that Palestinians will end up better off under a different regime, but I am certain that any such regime will be hostile to the United States.  And, as in the case of Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Yemen, much of the resulting loss of American credibility will have been self inflicted.