“In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress,” Netanyahu told the Knesset last month, before polls even opened in Egypt. “They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading.”…

Inspiring as much of the world found events in Tunisia, Tahrir Square and elsewhere, Israelis harbored deep wariness from the start. Some flat-out said Arabs can’t govern themselves. Others broke down the elements of Western democracies — universal education, civil society, rule of law — and concluded that elections are not the only thing that matter.

“Who says that protests against dictatorship necessarily lead to democracy?” asked Gabriel Ben-Dor, a political scientist at Haifa University, at a recent conference on Israel’s new security challenges at Bar-Ilan University. “Democracy is not what emerged from the revolution against the Tsars of Russia 100 years ago, nor has democracy emerged in many CIS states that threw off the Communist yoke. Thus there is no rational, logical or historical basis for assuming that democracy will result from the revolutions underway today in the Arab world.”

Said Efraim Karsh of King’s College London: “Islam remains the strongest identity framework in Egyptian society in particular, and in Arab society generally. The Arab national dictatorships that were layered over this basic Islamic identity for the past 80 years were but a thin veneer of repression. With the fall of these dictatorships, what remains is the core Islamic underpinnings of society, and these will now come to the fore. Consequently, no democratic structures,processes or values are likely to emerge in the Arab world for many generations.”