By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–Both my American heart and Jewish soul are filled with admiration and prayers for the brave people of Egypt, the mother of nations, and the incubator long ago of Hebrew dreams and aspirations. Even more than in the parallel upheavals ongoing or brewing in Tunisia, Jordan, and even Yemen, the cataclysm in Egypt speaks with special power to me: the stories of Egypt and Israel (where I was born) have been intertwined since the days of Joseph.
Once again, a Pharaoh is about to fall. With astonishing irony and with our fervent hopes that no further bloodshed or plagues are suffered by anybody, we note that this time his slaves are not chained outsiders relegated to bondage. They are the schoolchildren, housewives, cab drivers, engineers, philosophers, and nurses of Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez who simply want to be free.
Despotism has never ultimately agreed with anybody, especially when people are able to discern that in other corners of the world, men and women are free to pursue their professions and make personal decisions without the approval of a self-appointed authority with heavy guns. For some time, many of us have assumed that the people of Egypt, Iraq, and Iran as well were just too simple to even yearn for their own freedoms.
Such a heinous assertion is as presumptuous as it is, in some ways, racist. All over the Middle East, it seems that winds are blowing a lot more than sand. From Washington to London to Paris, somber political figures and their analysts have to undertake difficult considerations in the category of global calculus. Hosni Mubarak, a military tyrant who happened not to have been also killed on the day that his predecessor, President Anwar Sadat, was assassinated thirty years ago (even as they were seated next to each other), may have been “the guy the Americans can deal with.” But he was never the man his people could tolerate.
Not lost on many, too, is the paradox that during the past few weeks, from the Jasmine uprising in Tunisia to the current crucible in Egypt, the turmoil in the Middle East has had nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. The cruel use of Israel by some Arab despots and sheiks to maintain power, and the cynical abuse of the Palestinian people as a long-standing distraction and opiate (while the Palestinians have remained stateless and too often manipulated by their extremists) has been proven cosmically false by this new wind.
It’s even possible that Israel, still the only democracy in the neighborhood, has been quietly emulated by the neighbors.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego