Summary of Editorials from the Hebrew Press – October 26th, 2011

Ma’ariv says, "There is something frustrating in the Islamist victory, also because in contrast to other Arab countries, Tunisia was prominent in its education for tolerance. According to a [November 2009] study by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, Tunisian textbooks are among the most advanced in the Arab world. They educate towards acceptance of the other, religious tolerance and peace values. And here, even such a country has given the victor’s laurel to an Islamist party." The paper concludes that "the election results are a bitter disappointment to those who had high hopes for the Arab Spring. Liberal democracy must be dropped from the agenda. Even in Turkey it did not work. We are left with Islamist democracy. In Algeria and the Palestinian Authority, the result was bloodshed. It could be that in Tunisia the result will be a little less bloody. Not an Arab Spring but, perhaps, who knows, an Islamist Spring."

The Jerusalem Post comments: "If Islamists have succeeded in Tunisia, a country widely considered to be the most secularized and democracy-inclined Arab country, the prospects for Egypt and Libya, both preparing for their own elections, are far from promising. It would be a tragedy and a sober lesson about the dangers of democracy if the very democratic process envisioned for Tunisia ended up bringing to power an Islamist political party that will use its democratic mandate to roll back the positive reforms implemented under Ben Ali’s autocratic regime."

 

Yediot Aharonot derides those calling for a single bi-national state as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and – after a brief historical survey – asserts that, "Political experience shows that bi-national and multi-national states are resounding failures" in the absence of "an iron-fisted dictatorship" such as Tito’s or Stalin’s. The author believes that "One need not have a particularly vivid imagination to guess what a bi-national Jewish-Palestinian state would look like. If, in Gaza, differences of opinion between Hamas and Fatah were settled by murder and repression, it is unclear how adding Jews to this cocktail would turn a seething cauldron into an orderly democracy."

Yisrael Hayom notes that Turkey is now accepting international assistance, including from Israel, in the wake of the earthquake that struck eastern Turkey earlier this week. The author suggests that "even Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has understood that there are situations in which personal or national honor does not top the list of priorities. In such situations, humanitarian assistance must precede everything."

Haaretz writes: "During the IDF’s main Sukkot holiday event, women were segregated in an offensive way, as though this were a remote ultra-Orthodox social hall and not an official army event held with civilian participation in the area of the Eshkol Regional Council. Senior officers in the Gaza division, including Brig. Gen. Yossi Bachar and IDF Chief Rabbi Rafi Peretz, stood idly by and did not intervene on the women soldiers’ behalf. The trend toward ultra-Orthodox extremism that has been gripping religious soldiers takes on a particularly fanatic cast when it applies to women. In recent years the IDF has created unprecedented opportunities for female soldiers, and women soldiers are now promoted in elite units and combat roles based on their abilities. But aggressive religious isolationism belies these new realities and undermines the status of women soldiers who serve in all roles in the IDF. This is a dangerous trend that distorts the army’s character and causes revulsion among most Israelis. It behooves Chief of Staff Benny Gantz to take steps to stifle this trend before it’s too late."

 

[Gadi Taub, Ben-Dror Yemini and Boaz Bismout wrote today’s articles in Yediot Aharonot, Ma’ariv and Yisrael Hayom, respectively.]