A reader writes:
I think Larison misses a big point when he writes:
“Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.”
People in Egypt and Jordan are able to be as virulently anti-Israel as they are precisely BECAUSE they have no power to affect policy.
If a popularly elected Jordanian government took actions (economic or military) against Israel and then suffered the retaliation, I wager many people would change their minds about the proper foreign policy with regards to Israel. But right now the Arab street doesn’t suffer any consequences for their opinions, so Arab citizens are free to advocate for ideologically pure positions calling for the extinction of Israel. If Middle Eastern autocracies gave their people control of government policy, you might see an initial upsurge of violence. But in the long run democratization would have a significant moderating effect on popular opinion — and if popular opinion moderated so could government policy, which despite authoritarian rule is constrained from being too pro-Israel by the threat of protests and riots.
The Dish 