February 21, 2011: Will Egypt rise to democracy or fall to Islamism?

By Michael Regenstreif

Like most news junkies, I’ve watched many hours of television coverage and read countless news articles and commentaries about the situation that has been unfolding in Egypt since January 25, when mass protesters clamouring for democracy, and for the immediate end to President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade-long grip on power, began to assemble in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Early in the protests, Mubarak vowed to finish his current term in office, but agreed not to stand for re-election in September.

This was not enough for the protesters, who remained determined not to give up as long as Mubarak remained in power. Friday, February 4 was promoted by protest organizers as Mubarak’s Day of Departure and, indeed, many media outlets that morning were predicting Mubarak would be gone by day’s end. He wasn’t.

It was widely expected that Mubarak would step down on February 10. Instead, he went on television and made a long speech in which he defiantly promised to finish his term. Suddenly, the next day, his resignation was announced, the army had assumed transitional power, and the protests in Tahrir Square, and throughout the country, turned into celebrations.

Hopefully, the process of real democratization will now begin in Egypt.

It was hard not to sympathize with the Egyptian protesters.

Mubarak was a brutal dictator these past 30 years. All of the freedoms and rights we enjoy in Western democracies like Canada, the United States and Israel were denied the Egyptians.

There was no free press, there was no free vote in elections, people faced torture and imprisonment without trial, and corruption was rampant. In a country where poverty is the norm, the Mubarak family is worth, according to estimates, upwards of $70 billion.

According to many security experts, the best hope for a positive outcome – a transition to democracy – was Mubarak’s early departure. And now that that has happened, we will watch anxiously to see how the situation develops.

The Egyptian people demonstrating in Tahrir Square seemed anxious for real democracy. Their movement did not seem to have been motivated by Islamism or anti-Zionism.

A democratic Egypt would be in Israel’s best interest and would likely maintain the state of peace – as cold as it may be – that has endured since Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, and Israel’s then-prime minister, Menachem Begin, signed the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.

Israelis recognize that.

Sallai Meridor, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, wrote in a February 10 Washington Post op-ed, “If a real democracy, committed to the values of freedom and peace, were to emerge in Egypt, Israelis would overwhelmingly support it.”

But, as I’ve written before, nothing is simple in the Middle East.

While U.S. President Barack Obama has promised the Americans will stand by Egypt as it transitions to democracy, many Israeli pundits and pro-Israel advocates have expressed deep fears that the democracy movement in Egypt could well fail and lead to a takeover by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Almost certainly, such an outcome would be disastrous for Israel and for the peace process. And, if history is any indicator, it would also be disastrous for the Egyptian people, as an Islamist regime – witness Iran since 1979 – would be undoubtedly as brutal, if not more so, as Mubarak’s long reign has been.

It is often pointed out that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. As I continue to watch the events in Egypt unfold, it is with the hope that, soon, this will no longer be the case.

Iranium revisited

The threatened protests that caused Library and Archives Canada officials to cancel the Free Thinking Film Society’s screening of Iranium on January 18 did not materialize when the film finally was shown to a sold-out audience on February 6; a much larger audience, no doubt, than the film would have attracted before the Iranian Embassy turned the screening into a major media event.

If you missed the screening, Iranium is being shown for “free online for a limited time,” at iraniumthemovie.com. Not only is it a stark reminder of the threats posed by a nuclear Iran, given the unfolding events in Egypt, it is also a warning of what can happen when a democracy movement fails.

March 23, 2009: Isn’t it ironic – Boycott Israel event at Azrieli Theatre

By Michael Regenstreif

In her letter to the editor about the recent Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) events in Ottawa, Evelyn Greenberg notes how ironic it is that the IAW lecture on boycotting Israel was held in Carleton University’s Azrieli Theatre, a facility endowed by and named for David J. Azrieli, an Israeli-Canadian businessman, architect and philanthropist, and a past-president of the Canadian Zionist Federation.

Azrieli was born in Poland in 1922 and was 17 when the Second World War broke out. He managed to escape from Poland and made his way through Russia and Central Asia before arriving in Palestine in 1942. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, fought during the 1948 War of Independence and studied architecture at Technion in Haifa before coming to Canada in 1954.

In addition to his business activities in Canada, Azrieli has been one of Israel’s most prominent developers. He built Israel’s first enclosed shopping mall and the massive Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv bears his name. You’d think that IAW organizers would have wanted to avoid the symbolism of holding an event specifically aimed at furthering the movement to boycott Israel in that specific venue.

For 14 years before coming to Ottawa, I hosted a weekly folk music program on CKUT, the community radio station based at McGill University in Montreal. The station’s format is similar to Ottawa stations CKCU at Carleton and CHUO at uOttawa.

The CKUT schedule included programs produced by and for members of certain cultural communities, including a weekly Jewish magazine show. There was also a Palestinian program I listened to a number of times. The show was typically devoted to anti-Israel propaganda. Occasionally, for a Jewish perspective, they’d interview someone like Norman G. Finkelstein. The show often called for a boycott of Israel and companies that do business in Israel.

One day, I happened to see one of the producers of the Palestinian community radio show in a coffee shop. I couldn’t help but notice that, when he turned on his laptop, it was running Microsoft’s Windows XP, an operating system developed in Israel. Israel is the location for one of Microsoft’s three international research centres. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has referred to Israel as “a high-tech superpower.”

He connected to the Internet and headed straight for Google. The technology that runs Google ads – which is what finances the search engine most of us use – was developed in Israel, a centre for Google R&D. I don’t know whether or not his computer was running on one of the Pentium class chops that Intel developed in Israel.

Then he took a cell phone call. I can’t be sure that his particular phone was using any technology developed in Israel, but chances are it was.

I’m willing to bet that the IAW organizers who held their Boycott Israel event at the Azrieli Theatre all probably use lots of technology developed in Israel.

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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. It was on March 26, 1978 that Menachem Begin, then Israel’s prime minister, and Anwar Sadat, then president of Egypt, signed the historic treaty in Washington climaxing a process that began with Sadat’s unprecedented trip to Jerusalem and his address to the Knesset on November 20, 1977.

Beginning with the War of Independence in 1948 – and continuing with the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 – Israel and Egypt fought four major wars in the first 25 years of Israeli statehood. Some time after the Yom Kippur War, Sadat came to the conclusion that enough was enough, that Israeli statehood was a reality that wasn’t going away, that enough blood had been spilt, and he made the bold choice to pursue peace.

Peace between Israel and Egypt has not been a peace borne of friendship and warmth between their peoples. Rather, it’s been a pragmatic peace, often described as a cold peace, between two countries that have wisely concluded that the alternative is not – and should not ever again be – acceptable.

Sadly, Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Egyptian peace rejectionists, just as Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated by an Israeli peace rejectionist 14 years later.

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Like so many in the community, the thoughts of all of us at the Bulletin have been with Terry Schwarzfeld and her family since we first heard the news of the assault and terrible injuries she suffered while on vacation in Barbados.

April 21, 2008: Rabin and Peres – Bitter rivals who shared a dream

By Michael Regenstreif

On April 10, I was at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre’s screening of Rabin-Peres: Everything is Personal, a fascinating documentary film that examines the lifelong, often bitter, rivalry between two great Israeli leaders: Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1995, and Shimon Peres, also a former prime minister, who is now Israel’s president.

Rabin, born in 1922, was a sabra. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attended the Kadoori Agricultural High School and joined the Palmach in 1941. By 1947, Rabin was chief operations officer. He was in charge of army operations in Jerusalem in the 1948 War of Independence.

By 1964, Rabin was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was under his command that Israel achieved what was probably its greatest military victory by swiftly winning the Six Day War in 1967.

In 1968, Rabin began his post-IDF career as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 and became minister of labour. In 1974, he became leader of the Alignment Party and succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister.

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 as Szymon Perski. His family immigrated to Palestine when he was nine. A kibbutz leader, Peres joined the Haganah in 1947 and was given the responsibility, by David Ben-Gurion, for arms purchases and personnel. By 1953, he was director-general of the Ministry of Defense.

Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 and held a number of cabinet positions. Eventually, Peres became leader of Alignment after Rabin stepped down in the wake of a currency scandal in 1977. Peres lost the 1977 election to Menachem Begin and Likud.

Rabin, the military hero, was Israel’s native-born, fair-haired boy. In comparison, Peres, the bureaucrat, was an outsider, a newcomer with a Polish accent. And even though Peres performed vital functions in Israel’s defence, he was never seen as the war hero Rabin was.

Rabin and Peres were rivals in the Alignment and Labor parties. Both served when the other was prime minister and they were in the cabinet, and they faced off against each other in several leadership campaigns marked by personal bitterness toward the other.

Only in a robust democracy would you see such a personal rivalry within the same political party among competing personalities with similar goals for their country. Watching the film, I was reminded of some other bitter intraparty rivalries, some of which also lasted for years. Perhaps the most obvious example from recent Canadian politics was the long rivalry between former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

South of the border, we’re currently witnessing what has turned into a very bitter battle for the Democratic Party presidential nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two politicians whose platforms and points of view on almost all issues – including their support for Israel – are remarkably similar.

Like the long rivalries between Rabin and Peres, and Chrétien and Martin, the Clinton-Obama fight is mostly about differing personalities and personal egos rather than differing visions for their society.

Despite their personal enmity, Rabin and Peres were on the same side and shared the vision of Israel at peace with the Palestinians. When Rabin was assassinated – not by an Arab terrorist, but by Yigal Amir, a right-wing, religious Jew out to destroy the peace process they had worked so hard to further – you could see in the film that Peres, too, was figuratively shattered by Amir’s bullet.

Rabin, one of Israel’s greatest warriors, did not lose his life on the battlefield fighting an enemy. He was murdered by one of his own people, one of our own people, who did not share the dream of peace that we all should be reminded of every time we say, or hear, the word shalom.

Hopefully, that dream, shared by Rabin and Peres, by the residents of Sderot who visited us in Ottawa recently, and by so many others, will sooner than later become a reality.