By Brian Beutler
It's been a slow day here at Ezra's, and he rarely dips his toe into Israel/Palestine waters even when he's NOT busy sauntering around Vegas, so I'll come out of hibernation to defend Matt from this odd, but I suppose predictable, post at The Plank.
The issue cuts one of two ways: Either this country's leaders (the ones who demanded democratic reform in Palestine in the first place) are daft idealists who didn't possibly see the election of Hamas as a real possibility and can't possibly countenance it now that it's happened, or they're, uh, just paying lip-service to democratic reform.
Let's say (purely for argument's sake, of course) that our government had sufficient resources to see the specter of Hamas looming all the way across the West Bank. Well, then we've implicitly told Palestinian voters that, two parties or not, they'd better re-elect the incumbents. That might not matter if Palestinians weren't TOTALLY dependent on American aid for rudimentary needs to begin with, but they are. And it's pretty remarkable that, despite this reality, Hamas won the election anyhow.
Cutting off aid, then, isn't really a reaction to the surprise ascendance of a group of sleeper radicals, but it's a punishment for the people who took our pronouncements at face value. Americans are, like Noam said, pro-democracy and anti-terrorist. But they're also anti-fascist and anti-autocracy and anti-a whole host of other shitty forms of government that exist largely thanks to our continued aid. To this, Noam says that there's a greater moral case for cutting off aid to elected as opposed to unelected governments because people should have control over their lives and should get to see the consequences of their liberated decisions.
That's a pretty naive outlook or else a truly blatant casuistry, because it's clear that the choices facing Palestinians, or the healthiness of their democracy aren't NEARLY as good as they are here (ravaged hospitals vs. "Buy Blue"?!) and that, moreover, the aid we provide to unelected governments in the Middle East works specifically to undermine democratic reforms. Insist on those reforms in, say, Egypt and you might see more car bombs there too, but of course it's not always feasible to make big demands of, or switch off aid to, governments of greater strategic importance than Palestine's. Hence the status quo in Cairo. That's what's going on here. Matt hasn't made a logical miscue, but Noam just isn't being fair or consistent about the actual essence of democracy. He's saying, without reflecting on the sordid nature of Middle East geopolitics or the actual choice before the Palestinians (not exactly red vs. blue), that we should oppose terrorism and support democratically elected governments, but if those governments set off car bombs, we should favor the former, rescind our support, and make sure that their democratic experiment fizzles out completely. That's not going to usher in any progress.