No, Israel Isn’t Stifling Democracy in the Middle East

In a recent column, Shadi Hamid, a member of the Washington Post editorial board and a former fellow at the Brookings Institution, appears to have devised a new charge to level at Israel: it is responsible for the authoritarianism that dominates in the Arab world. How so? The U.S., says Hamid, fears that democratically elected governments in Egypt, the UAE, or other countries that have signed treaties with Israel would turn against the Jewish state. Of course, this doesn’t explain why Washington propped up autocracies like Saudi Arabia even when it made war on Israel, funded Hamas and other terrorist groups, and exported anti-Semitic teachings to the Muslim world; or why countries that aren’t aligned with the U.S. or Israel are also authoritarian.