There has been significant disjuncture between political and some media responses to the Arab social revolutions and wider popular opinion in Israel.

The Netanyahu government’s reaction to the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt was widely regarded domestically as ham-fisted. It vacillated between open support for Mubarak as a key regional ally and guarantor of the Camp David Accords and garbled recognition of the justice of the protestors’ demands – the latter seemingly promoted by US goading behind the scenes.

This wavering was accompanied by dark government warnings regarding the purported role played by Mubarak in preventing the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter did tend to resonate with the Israeli public, which has little knowledge of the true nature of the Egyptian Islamic movement and its considerable differences with offshoot Hamas.

In contrast, there has been a fairly clear recognition on the part of the secular Hebrew media (the largest element in Israel’s diverse media landscape and most reflective of popular opinion) of the essential justice of Arab social revolutionary struggles.

The Jasmine Revolution did receive extensive coverage. However, Tunisia’s lack of import of to Israel’s national security and wider regional power balance meant that there was a tendency in reportage to follow the wider international media’s focus on the human security aspect of the Tunisian struggle and the excesses of Ben Ali and his administration.

As the struggle played out, this human security dimension was also captured in harrowing reports of Israeli nationals’ experiences on the ground in what had been a relatively safe country for Israelis to travel to and in. Importantly, these reports dealt both with the warmth of the Tunisian people and their suffering in the conflict.

Here we saw an important development, the emergence of a new discursive line in the Hebrew populist press – which has tended to deal with the Arab nation as a unitary, implacably opposed force – that viewed the plight of Tunisians and Egyptians under dictatorial rule as reflective of wider yearnings for democratic freedoms shared with Israelis.

We also began to see the reiteration of arguments from the Israeli right that peace between a free state and unrepresentative governments is ultimately untenable. While this reiteration was largely tactical in seeking to present the folly of established peace agreements, it did contain a sense of solidarity almost never seen in what has become an increasingly open racist rightist dialectic in recent years.

The Egyptian revolution received blanket coverage in the secular Israeli press and was watched with rapt attention throughout by a significant sector of the population.

Understandably, the initial focus in commentary was on what the potential fall of the Mubarak regime meant for Israel, but as the struggle developed there was an upwelling of popular support for the protestors. Here there was a nuanced attention to detail in media presentation almost never seen in previous reportage on Arab affairs, which has always had a strong national security character even in the liberal press.

For those of us who have reported over the years on the progressive racial disaggregation of society in Israel, since the effective collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process in 2000, this widespread recognition of the justice of the Egyptian protestors’ cause and concern for their plight was both surprising and welcome.

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