The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's 30-man crew-there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel-is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship's captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod's destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed-just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

"If I had been downright honest with myself," Ishmael admits, "I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing."

We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run," Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will inherit the earth.

In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred and fear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. We are blind to the evil within us. Melville's description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.

After the attacks of 9/11, Edward Said saw the parallel with "Moby Dick" and wrote in the London newspaper The Observer:

Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.

Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book "Regeneration Through Violence," is "the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose 'wood could only be American.'" Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy and exploitation of nature.

Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies came from the exploited of the earth. L"Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans," Ishmael says of New England's prosperity. "One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea." All the authority figures on the ship are white men-Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color.

Ahab, when he first appears on the quarterdeck after being in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage, holds up a doubloon, an extravagant gold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale. He knows that "the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man ... is sordidness." And he plays to this sordidness. The whale becomes a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed, one that Starbuck denounces as "blasphemous," grips the crew. Ahab's obsession infects the ship.

"I see in him [Moby Dick] outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it," Ahab tells Starbuck. "That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist of violence and blood, on the deck with the crew. He orders the men to circle around him. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts "hot as Satan's hoof." Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ships' harpooners-Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo-his "three pagan kinsmen." He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons and fills the sockets "with the fiery waters from the pewter." "Drink, ye harpooneers! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow-Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest he knows that Starbuck is helpless "amid the general hurricane." "Starbuck now is mine," Ahab says, "cannot oppose me now, without rebellion." "The honest eye of Starbuck," Melville writes, "fell downright."

The ship, described by Melville as a hearse, was painted black. It was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes, a "cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies." The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a "red hell." Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son who has fallen overboard.

Ahab is described by Melville's biographer Andrew Delbanco as "a suicidal charismatic who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose-an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon." Ahab has not only the heated rhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internal security force on the ship, the five "dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air." Ahab's secret, private whale boat crew, which has a feral lust for blood, keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they mark those on Melville's ship. C.L.R. James, for this reason, describes "Moby Dick" as "the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler."

And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab's maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool did in Shakespeare's "King Lear." Ahab warns Pip of Ahab. "Lad, lad," says Ahab, "I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. ... If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be." A few pages later, "untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. ... From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop." Starbuck approaches him. Ahab, for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuck of his "forty years on the pitiless sea! ... the desolation of solitude it has been. ... Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?" He thinks of his young wife-"I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck"-and of his little boy: "About this time-yes, it is his noon nap now-the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again."

Ahab's thirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction, however, overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatred wins. "What is it," Ahab finally asks, "what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time. ..."

Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab's "impious end." Starbuck, "while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man."

And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod's crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship's descent collapses, "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."
(c) 2013 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His latest book is, ""Death Of The Liberal Class."

LET ME come back to the story about Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communist leader. When asked what he thought about the French Revolution, he famously answered: "It's too early to say."

This was considered a typical piece of ancient Chinese wisdom -until somebody pointed out that Zhou did not mean the revolution of 1789, but the events of May 1968, which happened not long before the interview in question.

Even now it may be too early to judge that upheaval, when students tore up the cobblestones of Paris, confronted the brutal police and proclaimed a new era. It was an early forerunner of what is happening today all over the world.

QUESTIONS ABOUND. Why? Why now? Why in so many totally different countries? Why in Brazil, Turkey and Egypt at the same time?

We know how it started. In the souk of Tunis, of all places. I have been there many times, when Yasser Arafat was staying in that city. The market always struck me as a happy place, full of noise, eager shopkeepers, haggling tourists and local men with jasmine flowers behind their ears.

It was there that a policewoman confronted a fruit vendor and overturned his cart. He was mortally insulted, set himself on fire and set in motion a process that now involves many millions of people around the world.

The Tunis example was taken up by the Egyptian masses, who assembled in Tahrir Square and eventually overturned their dictator. Then it was our turn, and almost half a million Israelis went out into the streets to protest the price of cottage cheese. Then there were upheavals in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and other Arab states, collectively known as the Arab Spring. In the US, the Occupy Wall Street movement staged its own Tahrir Square in New York. And now millions are demonstrating in Turkey and Brazil, and Egypt is aflame again. One may add Iran and other places.

How did this come about? How does it work? What is the hidden mechanism?

And especially: why at this point in time?

I CAN think of two interrelated phenomena in contemporary life that make the uprisings possible and probable: television and the social media.

Television informs viewers in Kamchatka about events in Timbuktu within minutes. The huge demonstrations in Istanbul's Taksim Square could be followed in real time by people in Rio de Janeiro.

Once upon a time, it took weeks for people in Piccadilly Circus in London to hear about events in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. After the battle of Waterloo, the Rothschilds made their killing by using messenger pigeons. In 1848, when revolution spread from Paris throughout Europe, it took its time, too.

Not any more. Brazilian youngsters saw what was happening in Gezi Park, Istanbul, and asked themselves: why not here? They saw that determined young men and women could withstand water cannon, tear gas and batons, and felt that they could do it, too.

The other instrument is facebook, Twitter and the other "social media". Five young men sitting in a Cairo cafe and talking about the situation could decide to launch an online petition for the removal of the incumbent president, and within a few days tens of millions of citizens signed. Never before in history was such a thing possible, or even imaginable.

This is a new form of direct democracy. People don't have to wait anymore for the next elections, which may be years away. They can act immediately, and when the groundswell is powerful enough, it can develop into a tsunami.

HOWEVER, REVOLUTIONS are not made by technologies, but by people. What is it that arouses so many different people in so many different cultures to do the same thing at the same time?

For example, the rise of religious fundamentalism. In recent decades, this has happened in several countries and with several religions. Jewish fundamentalism is setting up settlements in the Occupied West Bank and threatening Israeli democracy. All over the Arab world and many other Muslim countries, Islamic fundamentalism raises its head, causing havoc. In the US, evangelical fundamentalism has created the Tea Party and is dragging the Republican Party to the extreme right, much against its own interest.

I don't know about other religions, but there are news stories about Buddhists attacking Muslims in several countries. Buddhists? I always though that this was an exceptionally peaceful creed!

How to explain these simultaneous and parallel symptoms? Commentators use the German philosophical expression, Zeitgeist ("spirit of the times"). This explains everything and nothing. Like that other great human invention, God.

So is the Zeitgeist behind the upheavals now? Don't ask me.

THERE ARE many curious similarities between the mass revolts in different countries.

They are all made by young people of the so-called middle class. Not by the poor, not by the rich. Poor people do not make revolutions -they are too busy trying to feed their children. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was not made by the workers and peasants. It was made by disaffected intellectuals, many of them Jewish.

When you see a group of demonstrators in a newspaper picture, you do not know at first glance whether they are Egyptians, Israelis, Turks, Iranians or Americans. They all belong to the same social class. Young people alienated by a heartless globalization, confronted by a labor market that no longer offers the bright prospects they expect, university students for whose skills there is little demand. People with jobs, but who find it hard to "finish the month"' as we say in Hebrew.

The immediate causes are varied. Israelis demonstrated against the price of cottage cheese and new apartments. Turks protest against the plan to turn a popular Istanbul park into a commercial project. Brazilians rise up against a small increase in bus fares. Egyptians are now protesting against the efforts of politicized religion to take over the state.

But at root, all these protests express a common disgust with politics and politicians, with a power elite that is seen as remote from ordinary people, with the immense power of a tiny group of the ultra-rich, with a barely understood globalization.

THE SAME mechanism that makes these revolutions possible also produces their outstanding weakness.

The model was already apparent in the Paris events of May 1968. These started with a student protest which was joined by millions of workers. There was no organization, no common ideology, no plan, no overall leadership. Activists gathered in a theater, debated endlessly, giving voice to all sorts of possible and impossible ideas. In the end there were no concrete results.

There was a certain spirit. Claude Lanzmann, the writer and director of the monumental film Shoah, once described it to me this way: The students were burning cars. So every evening I spent a lot of time finding a secure place for my car. Until I suddenly said to myself: What the hell! What do I need a car for? Let them burn it!

This spirit lingered for some time. But life went on, and the great event was soon just a memory.

This may happen again now. Again the same thing is happening everywhere: No organization, no leadership, no program, no ideology.

The very fact that everyone has a voice on facebook seems to make it easier to agree on "against" than on "for". The young protesters are anarchist by nature. They abhor leaders, organizations, political parties, hierarchies, programs, ideologies.

You can call a demonstration on facebook, but you cannot hammer out a joint ideology that way. But, as Lenin once remarked, without a political ideology there is no political action. And he was an expert on the art of revolution.

There is a great danger that all these huge demonstrations will fade away some day -Zeitgeist again -without leaving anything behind, except some memories.

This has already happened in Israel. The mass demonstrations had some influence on this year's elections, but the new parties are indistinguishable from the old ones. New politicians have taken the place of old politicians. But nothing real has changed. Neither on the national nor on the social level.

IN ANY democracy, real change can only take place through new political parties which enter parliament and make new laws. For this you need political leaders -now, in the era of TV, more than ever. It is not enough to generate a lot of steam -you need an engine to make the steam do useful work.

The tragedy in Egypt - a country I love -demonstrates this perfectly. The revolution overthrew the dictatorship, but in the elections that followed, the revolutionaries were unable to unite, create a joint political force, elect leaders. Victory was snatched by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were well organized with a solid leadership.

The brotherhood has failed. Power, after decades of persecution, went to their heads. They threw away caution. Instead of building a new state on moderation, compromise and inclusion, they could not wait. So they may lose all.

The democratic revolutionaries have yet to prove that they are able to lead a country -in Egypt or anywhere else. They may yet launch a world-wide Human Spring. Or they may leave nothing behind, except a vague longing.

The logic of imperialism is that, ultimately, the Empire enters a state of war with everyone in the world, without regard to nationality, social system or reasonable possibilities of threat. Every capitalist yearns to achieve monopoly, to corner all markets, all the time. The capitalist imperial state is the political expression of the monopoly capitalist class, whose ambition is to dominate and profit from every aspect of human existence. Far from thriving on competition, the greatest fear of the capitalist is a world in which the game is not rigged in his favor. The state's job is to ensure that the fix is always in. Governments controlled by capitalists are obligated to subvert, literally, the entirety of the rest of the planet.

Therefore, it should surprise no one that the United States spies on the citizens, governments and businesses of every nation on earth, including the home population, which is potentially the most dangerous population of all, if for no other reason than proximity.

The U.S. corporate media narrative, which is identical to the narrative of the corporate state, is that 9/11 was a kind of crack in time, the beginning and end of things, the equivalent of the divide between BC and AD. But the advent of al-Qaida did not give rise to the U.S. surveillance regime. The opposite is true. The international jihadist network was given birth by the Americans and their minions in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, at the turn of the Eighties. If U.S. rulers really believed Muslim jihadists posed a serious threat to American empire, Washington would not be in its fourth decade of arming and financing the jihadists, who serve as both foot soldiers and pretexts for U.S. militarism and fascism.

In the June 27 issue of Counterpunch, indispensable political thinker William Blum republished parts of an essay he wrote in the year 2000. Titled "The Inalienable Right to Snoop? Eavesdropping on the Planet," the piece reminds us that PRISM, the National Security Agency's omnivorous mechanism for worldwide data mining and the mapping of human social networks, is a direct descendant of the pre-911 NSA system called ECHELON, launched in the 1970s. By the late Nineties, it had become clear to the Europeans that ECHELON was largely preoccupied with stealing trade secrets from European companies, and passing them on to favored American enterprises. German wind power technology wound up under patent to American rivals. French Airbus lost big contracts to U.S. outfits. A 1998 report of the European Parliament found that the U.S. was using its control of encryption software for wholesale industrial espionage against its purported allies. French military intelligence concluded that Bill Gates' Microsoft was virtually created by U.S. intelligence agencies. 9/11 was still years away, but the U.S. was already treating the whole planet as if it were occupied by enemy peoples.

The term "Arab Spring" was inspired by the historic 1848 events known as the "Spring of Nations." When it became known throughout Europe that in Paris the monarchy was overthrown and a republic established, the masses in many different countries took to the streets to make their own revolutions. Some were oppressed peoples suffering under foreign rule, others lived under Kings and tyrannical rulers of their own nationality. In some places there were relatively peaceful revolutions, others burst into bloody civil wars and the intervention of foreign powers.

Most of the 1848 revolutions in Europe ended in failure and frustration. In some cases the former rulers were able to maintain their rule by force. In other places, where the people got to choose their representatives, manifestly unfit people got to power and brought their countries low. But despite all, in historical perspective there is no doubt that these revolutions sowed the seed of present day democratic Europe.

The chain of events known as the Arab Spring began with a young Tunisian named Mohammed Boazizi, who set himself on fire to protest a personal act of injustice. He did not live to see that how his death sparked protests which led to the overthrow of tyranny in his native Tunisia and quickly spread to other countries.

The fall of the regime in Tunis did not arouse too much of an interest in Israel. Most Israelis never heard of the dictator Ben Ali until the day he boarded a plane and fled. Egypt was quite another matter. The demonstrations in Tahrir Square two years ago made headlines in the Israeli press, displacing our own politics. Israelis watched the developing drama with bated breath and a clear and evident sympathy, up to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

Egyptian bloggers were amazed to hear how deeply many Israelis were interested in and sympathetic to their struggle. The struggle in the city squares of Cairo also affected directly the social protest movement that arose a few months later in the streets of Israeli cities. In the protest tent encampment on Rothschild Boulevard, there were signs and stickers such as "From Kiryat Shmona to Cairo - The People Demand Social Justice" "Corner of Rothschild and Tahrir" and "With Prices Going Sky-High, We Will Struggle Like in Egypt" (this rhymes in Hebrew).

But the honeymoon did not last long. With the increasing signs that free elections in Egypt would be won by Islamist parties and factions, Israeli enthusiasm for democracy in Egypt noticeably cooled. Writer Amos Oz seems to have been the first to utter the phrase "It's not an Arab Spring, but an Islamist Winter" which at record speed became the most outworn of the cliches used by Israeli commentators and editorial writers.

Meanwhile, Libya got to the headlines for a time. In general Israelis tended to support the decision of the NATO countries to intervene in the war and provide the Libyan rebels with air support, and eventually topple Moammar Gadhafi from the heights of power to a despicable death in a sewer pipe. On the other hand, there was very little interest over here in the brutal suppression of the democratic protest movement focused on Bahrain' Pearl Intersection, a suppression carried out with the tacit consent of the same NATO countries. To the extent that Bahrain got any mention, the Israeli branded Bahrain Shiite protesters as "pro-Iranian", which by definition made their swift suppression into an Israeli interest.

Attention quickly moved to Syria and the brutal war which developed there. To begin with, many Israelis naturally sympathized with the protesters in the squares of the Syrian cities, who encountered very brutal repression. Netanyahu and his government soon seized their chance and rushed to very loudly condemn the repression in Syria - and note with satisfaction that the Syrian army's murderous violence against the citizens of its own country was much worse than the acts of the Israeli Defense Forces in the Palestinian territories. When international Human Rights activists sought to reach the shores of besieged Gaza, each and every one of them got in their detention cells a copy of a personal letter from the Prime Minister of Israel, which directed them to turn to Syria and forget about Israeli settlements or the siege on Gaza.

Gradually, as the weight of global Jihad activists among the Syrian rebels increased, sympathy for the rebels was replaced by regarding them as a threat to Israel, one of the many threats for which we must remain ever vigilant, and the right-wingers triumphantly reiterated the argument "how good that we did not make peace with Syria and give back the Golan Heights." And when news websites published items of Syrian civil war horrors, anonymous commentators used the talkback section to comment: "Let them go on killing each other."

The spread of the Arab Spring from one country to another revived among a certain section of political right-wing the old hope that a fall of the Hashemite Dynasty in Jordan would provide the Palestinians with a substitute statehood, so that Israel could retain the Palestinian territories west of the Jordan River. But amidst the regional turbulence the throne of King Abdullah II in Amman seemed to shake much less than those of other rulers. Moreover, such challenges to his rule which did appear came especially from non-Palestinian Jordanians. Nevertheless, right-wing circles in Israel have not lost hope for a Jordanian Spring taking up the slogan "Jordan is Palestine", and not a week goes by without an article expressing such hopes appearing in one of their publications.

In the meantime – back to Egypt. The elections resulted in the fulfillment of what had been presented as the nightmare scenario: Mursi became Egypt's first democratically elected President and the Muslim Brotherhood became the ruling party. To the surprise of many here, the sky did not really fall. The peace treaty with Israel was not canceled, and President Morsi played a key role in achieving a cease-fire an Gaza in November 2012, ending the fighting after the number of those killed reached "only" one-tenth of the number killed in the January 2009 round. This was followed by President Morsi making an effort to help maintain the ceasefire on the Gaza border and authorizing the Egyptian army to take energetic action against the smuggling tunnels at Rafah - more than it did in the time of Mubarak. All of which did not add to the popularity of Morsi in Egypt itself, and in the militant demonstrations his photo was integrated into a huge Israeli flag, appearing right in the center of the Star of David. Yet in Israel he never gained any real popularity.

For a long time, we have not heard so much about happenings in Egypt. Israeli media did report Morsi's decision last year to dissolve the ruling military council and of the momentary support given to this move by the liberal and secular opposition. But then the media seemed to lose interest in the nuances and complexities of Egyptian politics - the belligerent steps increasingly adopted by Morsi to consolidate his rule and the increasing opposition to that rule and the escalating crisis in the Egyptian economy and the Muslim Brotherhood's failure to implement campaign promises to their voters (in which, it must be noted in fairness, they were far from the only ones among the world's elected governments).

Until last week, when Egypt was once in the focus. It seemed a replay of the scenario of two years ago – once again the huge demonstrations in Tahrir Square capturing the Israeli headlines and driving out our local news, once again expressions of joy at the fall of another Egyptian President. And at the weekly demonstration by social protest activists outside the home of the Minister of Finance appeared a big sign: "Morsi, Bibi, Lapid – the Same Revolution!"

Most Israeli commentators felt no more than a slight unease at the fact that a President elected in free elections had been ousted by the Egyptian army. The respected Hemi Shalev on the pages of Haaretz actually questioned whether democracy should always be the preferred system of government, and the well-known Ben Kaspit went into a paroxysm of joy at the thought that "The Islamists with their galabiya robes had been thrown into the trash can." But according to the most recent news coming out of Egypt, they are not in the trash but out in the streets. They seem far from resigned to being ousted from the power to which they had been elected, and the death toll continues to rise.