Being surrounded has never been a comfortable situation for any country.  But the way Israel is behaving as its neighbors topple dictatorships one by one, flies in the face of what has been United States public policy for decades: support for the idea of democracy in the Arab world

However many diplomatic or undiplomatic moves Israel makes to forestall the Arab spring, or turn it to what it perceives as its advantage, nothing is going to stop the tide.  What will Israel do when it is surrounded, not by dictatorships with a more or less pronounced Muslim orientation, but by peoples demanding ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ as protesters across the Middle East are doing?

Anyone doubting this turn of events should read Paul Amar’s article in the May 23rd issue of The Nation, under the title Egypt After Mubarak . It spells out in detail where the ‘revolutionaries’ are coming from, and that is from the very same places as middle class citizens from developed countries who are out on the streets protesting the consequences of the financial crisis.

In the age of smart phones, BBC International and Al Jezeera, entire popuations have broken free of the Middle Ages to call for freedom.  In Egypt, the five month old movement that forced Mubarak to step down wahts him tried before an army tribunal – as they are being tried, or that both should be tried in front of civilian courts.

Not surprisingly, the Arab spring that calls for human rights and democracy includes in its goals freedom for the Palestinians. Yesterday on Democracy Now, a Palestinian human rights activist named Fadi Quran called for ‘a larger, humanistic type of approach.  We want freedom, justice and dignity and we won’t give up until we achieve those goals.The United States needs to understand that what Palestinians are asking for is what makes America great.’

Referring to the border crossings by Palestinians from Syria and other neighboring countries into Israel on the 63rd anniversary of ‘The Nakba‘ or ‘catastrophe‘, that expulsions of Palestinians by the newly declared Israeli state represent, he said:  Pointing out that ‘they only wanted to return home. Quran noted that Israel was created under a racist ideology, the need to get rid of Palestinians, which was easily seen as ‘anti-Semitism’ and even a desire to see the Israelis driven out. Now Palestinians just want to catch up with the democratic societies, the new alliance between Fatah and Hamas recognizes that as is so often the case in history, their people are ahead of them.

As for Israel, what can Washington possibly do to protect the ‘only Democratic country in the Middle East’ from having to become a team player in a newly democratic neighborhood?

If you don’t watch the news on the BBC, you probably didn’t see the stunning picture of thousands of Italian Fiat workers marching with huge red banners billowing in the wind, refusing management’s plan to demand wage cuts in order to invest in modernization. The idea that we could ever see such a show of force by industrial workers in the United States is ludicrous.

We might as well be on another planet from the rest of the world.  Here the talk is of congresspeople toting guns in the hallowed chambers of government; of ‘blood libel’ tossed out over the airwaves without knowing what it refers to; of pistols that can fire thirty rounds without reloading, and threats against left-wing academics such as seventy-eight year old Francis Fox Piven, a recent president of the American Sociological Association, for plotting socialism.

In the current Nation, on newly released tapes, Nixon’s top foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger is quoted as saying:  “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy.  And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” Deadline Poet Calvin Trillin remarks that “He would have fit in well at State in Nineteen hundred thirty-eight.”  Indeed, in The People’s History of the United States, the late Howard Zinn noted that President Franklin Roosevelt had left the fate of German Jews in the hands of the State Department, known for its anti-Semitism. This week, some commentators noted worriedly that Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congress-woman shot a week ago in Arizona, is Jewish, while Israelis argue about the legitimacy of Army conversions, mostly of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, again in Italy, where the Prime Minister finally lost his immunity from prosecution and faces embarrassing charges of cavorting with party girls, the left is circulating a petition to ban the sentence of life in prison, while United States, along with only a few other ‘developed’ nations (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan), have still not banned the death sentence!

China holds the record for executions, with numbers estimated from two to ten thousand. India applies the death sentence ‘only in the rarest of cases’, of which there were 100 in 2007 to our 52, Saudi Arabia’s 69 and Yemen’s ‘at least 30’ according to Wikipedia.

Long overdue, labor lawyer Thomas Geogehen’s new book Were you Born on the Wrong Continent?, that details the superior European social systems (such as the 35 hour work week in France, the six weeks vacation everywhere, comprehensive health care and education for all), is on back order at The Free Press, after an initial printing of 3,000 copies (one for every hundred Americans). No wonder that in this week’s Nation Harry Sloan, a former Washington D.C. Health Commissioner, cites the need for teach-ins on Obama’s timid health reform, which he thinks may be in jeopardy, even if only from the deliberate withholding of funds by the Republican congress.

In Backlash, Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the age of Obama, Will Bunch signals the return of the John Birch Society.  He also notes that Scott Brown, the Tea Party candidate who won Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat defended Joe Stack, who flew his private plane into the IRS building in Austin, killing an employee, as motivated by “the same anger that got him elected”.  In other words, an American terrorist attack is okay, even if there is an innocent victim.

Michelle Bachman, leader of the Tea Party caucus, managed to secure a seat on the House Intelligence Committee. She announced that Americans should be ‘armed and dangerous’ to prevent higher taxes on energy, or an intrusive census, and fears a global currency could take away America’s independence.

As for the increasing number of militias shooting in the woods, some cite a recent candidate for governor who claimed his opponent’s bill to encourage the use of bicycles was part of a U.N. plan to take over the world.

The November 16th issue of The Nation is not only of special interest because of the interview with Mikhail Gorbachev by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Professor Stephen F. Cohen. It includes a revealing analysis of Yugoslav nationalism that led to war after the break-up of the country, and a no less revealing, in-depth article on what the global economic meltdown did to to the tiny Baltic state of Latvia  – and why.  Toward the end of that article one member of the mostly female new team at the Ministry of Economics, laughs and says: “I want a Latvian Obama.”

There could well be a Latvian Obama. The tragedy, for us, is that the real Obama will never have the Latvian tools with which to make the American economy right.  First of all, he doesn’t have anything even remotely resembling a Ministry of Economics – think of that for a minute: a Ministry of Economics!  Even if in a large country like ours we would need to break economic matters down into several specialized ministries as is the case in most European countries, the vaunted American presidential system may be why for years China referred to the United States as a “toothless tiger”.

We’re only seeing that now, in the aftermath of the economic meltdown that nearly did in several countries.  I  had noticed from the beginning of the financial crisis that the countries that were driven to the brink, such as Iceland, were countries that had abandoned stodgier, but safer economic practices to emulate the American way.  I cannot recall what the other countries were at the moment, but apparently, Latvia was one of them.  As the writer, Kristina Rizga points out, unlike its two Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, left opposition parties have not been part of the ruling coalition in Parliament since 1991 (when the Soviet Union was dissolved).  She writes:  “That has meant that neoliberalism has dominated Latvian politics virtually unchallenged since 1991”  Elsewhere, Rizga quotes Valdis Novikovs, who emigrated to England, then returned.  As the cost of labor doubled from 2006 to 1008, he noticed that his countrymen were traveling to Germany and Finland to buy cheaper clothes and furniture.  In 1007, Latvia had the second-highest trade deficit in the EU, after Bulgaria.

What’s my point here?  The United States cajoled, bribed, pressured the rest of the world into following its economic model of “shock capitalism”.  Those that have most successfully limited the damage of the world meltdown are those in the west that are, or in Eastern Europe have managed to partly remain, social democratic after the fall of communism.

President Obama, alas, has no social democratic structures to work with.