Middle East Protest Round-Up

On Egypt's trial of the millennium, Israel's rent tent protests, and why the crushed rebellion in Bahrain might have been for the better.

Taking a break from the usual squabbling about the inconsequential allegiances for minor Canadian political figures, we take a gander today at the best in columns and op-eds on what's going on in the Middle East. The inimitable Robert Fisk is in Egypt for the The Independent to observe the murder and corruption trial of former president Hosni Mubarak and his inner circle. Fisk imagines that “history – Arab history and western history and world history – will place the scenes in the Egyptian Police Academy yesterday in whole chapters, footnoted and referenced, the moment when a country proved not only that its revolution was real, but that its victims were real, its dictators' corruption detailed down to the last Egyptian pound and the last fake company title, its people's suffering forensically described.” Fisk, as always, does the moment justice, noting just how unlikely this scene would have seemed a short year ago, before wondering – hoping, even – whether we'll see the likes of Libya's Gadhafi, Syria's Assad, or Bahrain's King Hamad in Mubarak's place in due time.

Across the Suez in Israel, Dimi Reider and Aziz Abu Sarah write for The New York Times on the once-in-a-generation protests now unfolding over the cost of rent in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere. While hundreds of thousands of Israelis – Jews, Arabs, and otherwise – have taken to the streets or undertaken general strikes, “there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protests: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.” The pair say that by taking the occupation question out of the protests (for now), “the protesters have created a safe space for Israelis of all ethnic, national and class identities to act together,” even if the lack of affordable housing can almost be directly linked to an increase in funding for settlements in the West Bank. But if the protests continue unabated, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government could hang in the balance. He would be far from the first leader felled by paying too much attention to concerns outside his borders and not enough to those within.

And what of the failed revolution in Bahrain? Peter Pearson argues in The Telegraph that the tiny Gulf country – and indeed the rest of the Middle East, and heck, while we're at it, the world – are probably better off with the way things ended up. Pearson fears that had the Shiite majority overthrown the Sunni regime, a prolonged period of sectarian violence would have followed, leaving a power vacuum for Iranian influence to seep in and the possible end to two centuries of cordial relations between the U.K. and the Khalifa regime. “Sometimes, perhaps, it’s more prudent to hang on to what you have and make the best of it,” says Pearson, noting Bahrain leads the Middle East in almost every category of development. Further, the aftermath of the crisis, in which at least 24 protesters were killed, looks like it might have encouraged King Hamad to examine the state of his kingdom, as he's allowed in UN rights observers to piece together just what happened in Manama earlier this year. Not all revolutions happen overnight. In the case of Bahrain, new freedoms and an injection democracy could very well have been worth the wait.