Arab Spring or Islam Winter? - Andy David @AJC Board Meeting (Oct/22/2012)

Mid-day board meetings attract a different crowd than evening ones, so I heard from the Jonathan Dove, Director of Development of AJC SF. There must be truth to the statement, as I have seen some new -mostly from the sixty and above generations- faces when attended the noon lecture by Andy David, the newly appointed Consul General of Israel of the West Coast of the United States. His entrance to the room was rather subtle without demanding a sense of respect or urgency, as one may have expected from other political or academic figures. In fact, that perception of being just another guy of the room made the young, Romanian-born, dentist by trade and politician by choice David likable from the very beginning.

Other than his unmistakable accent, his laptop charger, which turned out to be incompatible with the three-pronged US wall sockets, was also testifying for his Israeli upbringing. Luckily, David and I not only shared the Eastern European origin (despite their historical differences, Hungarians and Romanians have a boatload of commonalities), we also happened to have the same type of computers. This resulted in the fortunate situation that he could use my charger to power his presentation. It felt almost almost symbolic that my PG&E issued laptop charger supplies the electricity for such an prominent customer of the company. There must be some sort of award that I should receive, but for now, I was satisfied with the presentation from Andy David.

The central tenet of his talk was to refute the notion of an Arab Spring, and replace it with the more telling term "Islam Winter". He also attempted to explain why it is relevant to the average American in the Bay Area. For the first part of his argument, David used historic cultural analysis that involved looking at how Arab nations in the Middle East embraced their unique secular nationalism, and not their religious or sectarian alliance. In about 15-20 years ago, the so-called 'big disappointment' in realizing the failure to provide economic growth became apparent among the Middle East, the associated secular Arabism lost its momentum. Before that time, country leaders of Arab countries would pose with politicians of the Western world in their matching modern suits, without wearing white robes or head covers that are almost universally characteristic of contemporary Middle Eastern politics today. Economical and tribal conflicts changed the narrative, and while in Iran and Turkey religion started to dictate the agenda, in Syria regional sects gain central momentum. This was the point - according to David - from which Arab secularism was pushed to the background, and Moslem radicalism took control.

The second part of this talk, why this segment of history is particularly relevant to us in the Bay Area, felt a little less sophisticated and more common sense. In short, leadership's greatest power is how they control access to information, and as we have heard this many times, the Bay Area happens to sit in the virtual center of the World. Despite only being here for a relatively short amount of time, Andy David was quick to recognize this geo-political fact, and set his agenda for the coming years as Consul General of Israel accordingly. He admitted that Israel has lost its reputation of a rational agent on the stage of world politics, because it focuses on its conflicts too much. Consequently, Israel is judged and details (of who's right or wrong) don't matter any more. His (and our) responsibility for the coming years is to position the communication around Israel to bring normacy and democracy back to the conversation.