Last Sunday marked 10 years to the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak's regime. In Egypt, the anniversary was marked more with mourning than celebration. Many in the country see the revolution that unfolded and the "Arab Spring" in general that swept across the Middle East as a disaster and even a pandemic that brought with it death and destruction.
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Mubarak passed away last year, after he was freed from prison and had his honor restored. Many of those who carried out the uprising against him and brought about his downfall - members of the Muslim Brotherhood who came to power after him and the young people who took to the streets calling for his ouster – are now behind bars.
When they erupted, the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria sparked hope, or was it an allusion, in the West but also Israel that this was the dawning of a new era and the beginning of a new Middle East. From this point forward, the thinking went, the region would be led by educated and optimistic young people that would shape the face of the Middle East, transforming it into a region of political stability, economic prosperity, democracy, elections, and human rights.
Needless to say, nothing of the sort ever happened. The young people of the Arab world did not unite. The protests died down, and when the dust had settled, the Middle East was stuck in the same place it had been on the eve of the Arab Spring. In some cases, it even regressed. Egypt was lucky. Order was restored there, and the elderly ruler disconnected from reality was replaced by a young, dynamic leader. In other countries, though, the protests led to the collapse of the political system and bloody civil wars whose end is nowhere is nowhere in sight.
It has also been 10 years to the pitching of Israel's social justice protest tents on Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard. In some ways, these protests have also disappointed both the leaders of the movement and its activists, albeit in an entirely different way from the Arab Spring.
Yet these two movements are similar in more than their time frame. They both teach us that young people aren't really all that interested in revolution, and that there is no limit to the patronage of journalists and academics who know better the region's residents what is good for them and what they really want. Both events were imbued with others' fantasies of young people and the change they could bring about.
The reports in the media, and in particular in the West and Israel, on what is transpiring in the Middle East often raise the question: Are there two Middle Easts? One situated to the east of the Mediterranean Sea and the other in the imaginary parallel world we are told of in media reports but also in academic literature.
The reality, though, is that the real Middle East is the same old Middle East, rooted in past traditions; tribalism, authoritarian, if not dynastic, traditions; a region that does not offer its inhabitants liberty or human rights, a region of deep economic and social distress where instability is the only constant.
The sooner the West internalizes that this reality is not about to change and stops trying to wake it up with the promotion of some vision of democracy no one is interested in and the Middle East is not ready for, the better things will be for the region and its rulers, as well as their neighbors in Israel. The Tahrir revolution, the one with the flowers and democracy and the young people in the streets, took place nowhere but in the wild imagination of Western minds.
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