All your problems are caused by the Israelis

Jonathan Freedland wrote an article in the Guardian where he argued:

The Arab spring proves that Israel is not even the biggest issue in the Middle East – yet it gets all the attention

The consequence of this statement was that he managed to drag out from under their stones all the usual suspects baying for attention. Most of the comments posted had the erudition of football fanatics displaying even less knowledge of the Middle East than hooligans have of the noble game. I read about thirty of these and then I got bored. All of them seemed to miss this very important point made by Freedland:

Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the "core issue" in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine conflict – that it is the "running sore" whose eventual healing will heal the wider region and beyond.

That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn't relieve those in Damascus or Manama or Sana'a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not "the heart of the matter", as the cliché always insisted it was. The heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in, day out, for 40 years or more.

The fellahin, be they Muslim or Christian, and the Jew, are united in their heart of hearts. They need:

1. To be able, without hindrance, to worship their God
2. To work in a dignified manner in order to put bread on their families' table.
3. That the cost of this “bread” does not consume their whole wage.
4. To live in the knowledge that their children have the freedom to develop to their full potential.
5. To live in security and peace.

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Arab elites have sort to deny the fellahin these rights. Be they absentee landlords who sold the land from under the fellahin’s feet; religious leaders who flirted with the Nazis; political leaders who rejected a UN compromise of partition; family members from so-called “kingdoms” who exploited their land and refused any form of integration or assimilation; jumped up “corporals” who used the fellahin to consolidate their fascistic powers; intellectual terrorists who pumped up their own bank accounts with money for “the cause”; crazy financiers of even more terrorist activity who were diverting attention away from their  (now all too obvious) gross exploitation of their own people; “Royal” families living lives of decadence and unimaginable opulence whilst imposing extreme repression throughout their lands.

All of these share a bed with every western pseudo-intellectual who is desperate for a cause to divert attention from his own inadequacies and therefore subscribes to and promulgates this great conspiracy - all your problems are caused by the Israelis.