A significant Middle East anniversary passed this week with hardly anyone noticing.
On January 14, 2011, Tunisia’s autocratic leader, president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, abruptly and unceremoniously fled the country he had ruled with an iron fist for nearly a quarter century, boarding a plane for Saudi Arabia.
His departure made him the first Arab strongman to be toppled in what came to be known as the Arab Spring – a revolutionary wave that began 28 days earlier, when a 26-year-old street fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in central Tunisia to protest the country’s authoritarian rule.
Today, as Iran’s Islamic Republic teeters amid massive protests and US President Donald Trump’s threats of military intervention, the legacy of the Arab Spring offers a sobering lesson about the promise of revolution – and the resilience of authoritarian rule. The overall results are hardly encouraging: nearly every country that experienced an uprising during that period either reverted to authoritarianism or descended into civil war.
As Israel and the West watch developments in Iran with both awe at the courage of the protesters and fervent hope that this time the fanatical ayatollahs are swept from power, the Arab Spring should nevertheless serve as a cautionary tale.
Tunisia: An Arab Spring success story?
TUNISIA, FOR example, was supposed to be different. As the birthplace of the Arab Spring, it became the movement’s only success story for a decade. After Ben Ali fled, Tunisia adopted a progressive constitution that enshrined fundamental rights and set democratic checks on power. Tunisians held six elections between 2011 and 2019 that were generally considered free and fair.
But this Tunisian experiment with democracy ended in 2021, when the country’s president, Kais Saied, suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and began ruling by decree. Within two years, Tunisia had returned to the type of authoritarianism that the Tunisian protesters had overthrown a decade earlier.
And, again, Tunisia was the Arab Spring’s bright spot.
Nearly everywhere else, the wave of protests opened the door not to democracy and freedom, but, in the best cases, to authoritarianism and, in the worst, to utter chaos.
In Egypt, the 18 days of mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that culminated in president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation after 30 years of authoritarian rule did not lead to democratic consolidation but to the election of a Muslim Brotherhood-led government that proved disastrous. It was overthrown in 2013 by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has since ruled the country with an even heavier hand than Mubarak.
Syria’s Arab Spring trajectory was even worse.
Demonstrations there in 2011 led to a ferocious crackdown by president Bashar al-Assad, which morphed into nothing less than a brutal civil war that lasted for 14 years, drew Iran and Russia into the conflict, killed an estimated 500,000 people, and displaced millions.
Libya and Yemen fared no better. After Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, chaos ensued, with Libya today fragmented between two rival governments and hundreds of militia groups. The country’s lucrative oil industry has collapsed.
In Yemen, protests forced longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh to transfer power, but this was then followed by a Houthi takeover of the capital, a Saudi-led military intervention, and a humanitarian catastrophe of mammoth proportions that split the country along regional lines. The Arab Spring brought perpetual winter to Yemen.
Protests, inspired by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, also broke out in Bahrain, with protesters calling for an end to the monarchy. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, concerned that the unrest could spill over into their own kingdoms, sent troops to Bahrain to stamp out the protests. And stamp them out, they did.
Other monarchies in the region – Jordan and Morocco – responded to the Arab Spring with limited constitutional reforms to placate demonstrators, while Gulf money helped buy off dissent. Saudi Arabia and the UAE also poured billions of dollars into Egypt to keep Sisi’s regime afloat.
The UAE and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia were accused of bankrolling media campaigns inside Tunisia that fostered disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, so that when the president moved against parliament in 2021, the country’s democratic institutions were already deeply delegitimized.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia were motivated by twin fears: the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they feared could gain power through the ballot box throughout the region, and Iran. They saw the Brotherhood as an ideological threat to the regional monarchies, and Iran’s regional ambitions as an existential danger.
PARADOXICALLY, this led to the creation of a “camp of stability” in the region, bringing together Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and eventually Israel, against an opposing axis of Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated movements such as Hamas.
The shared threat perception among those in the camp of stability laid the groundwork for the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and was on course to do the same with Saudi Arabia, before October 7 intervened and derailed that.
While the world gushed over what was happening in the public squares in Tunis, Cairo, and Damascus during those first heady days of the Arab Spring, Israel stood back and urged caution. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pilloried for this position by both foreign leaders and media pundits.
For example, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a February 2011 column headlined “Postcard from Cairo, Part 2,” skewered Israel.
“The children of Egypt were having their liberation moment,” he wrote, “and the children of Israel decided to side with Pharaoh – right to the very end.”
Well, no, actually. Israel didn’t support Pharaoh; rather, it was concerned about what would come in the wake of Mubarak’s fall.
It had no illusions that this would open the gates to democracy and that idealistic youths in the street would succeed in taking power peacefully. Rather, it feared the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, of unpredictable chaos, instability, and anarchy – fears that came to fruition in spades.
Yet, paradoxically, as the Saudis and the UAE invested heavily in limiting the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and curbing Iran’s influence, previously untapped areas of cooperation with Israel emerged. In the Middle East, even well-worn phrases about shared enemies forging friendships often reflect reality.
What can history teach us about the Iranian protests?
WHICH BRINGS us back to Iran and the protests that have erupted there, and the regime’s brutality in putting them down.
There are some parallels between what is happening there and the Arab Spring, but the parallels are imperfect. As in Tunisia in 2010, economic hardship triggered protests that metastasized into broader demonstrations against the regime.
As was true in the protests in Tahrir Square, those on the street in Iran now cut across class divisions – students and merchants from the bazaar, the urban and the rural. And, as was the case in the Arab Spring, a “barrier of fear” has courageously been crossed, as masses have – yet again – taken to the streets.
Yet there are some critical differences.
First, Iran’s regime is more ideologically entrenched than the Arab autocracies that fell. Also, and this is so far the most significant difference, Iran’s security forces remain cohesive and have not yet shown signs of defection, a crucial precondition to the collapse of a regime, and something evident during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, where soldiers refused to fire at demonstrators.
Regardless of whether Iran experiences regime change or the protests are brutally repressed, there are lessons from the Arab Spring that are instructive here.
If the regime falls, Iran faces the same challenges that doomed Arab transitions: How to build democratic institutions without experienced democratic leadership? How to manage economic expectations – after all, it was economic triggers that sparked this flame – when immediate improvement is impossible? How to prevent security forces from reasserting control? And how to maintain unity among diverse opposition factions after their common enemy disappears?
What the world saw with the Arab Spring – as it has seen throughout history – is that it is much easier to remove dictators than to build democracy. Replacing an evil regime is the first step, and an essential and critical one. But it is not the final step.
As was the case during the Arab Spring, Israel should take a sober and realistic approach – not a starry-eyed or euphoric one – when looking at the events unfolding inside Iran.
One of the Arab Spring’s central lessons is that the fall or weakening of authoritarian regimes does not necessarily produce an orderly and neat transition. Rather, it generally leads to prolonged instability, fractured authority, and violent competition for power. Just look at Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Israel’s planning, therefore, should be grounded not in hopes of democratic transformation, but in preparation for a great deal of volatility – including violent power struggles or efforts by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to use harsh measures to try to reassert its control.
The Arab Spring demonstrated that the uprising itself – while extremely dramatic – is not even the most consequential phase. What is even more significant in the long term is the power vacuum that ensues.
Whether Iran’s regime survives, fractures, or eventually falls, Israel’s interests will be shaped by what follows and – if a power vacuum emerges – by who fills it, how quickly, and under what conditions. The task now is not to predict Iran’s future, but to ensure Israel is not surprised by it.