Reviewing David Govrin’s The Journey to the Arab Spring: The Ideological Roots of the Middle East Upheaval in Arab Liberal Thought (2014), Tzvi Mazel notes that already in the late 19th century there were Islamic scholars who sought “an appropriate internal religious response to the cultural and technological challenge posed by the West,” some of whom tried to find a theological basis for constitutional government. Their ideas gained little traction, and the recent “Arab Spring” has seen yet another failure of liberalism:

Today Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed that the explosions that blew two holes in an Israeli-owned cargo ship on Friday were the work of Iran. The incident was followed by airstrikes on military targets in the vicinity of Damascus, likely carried out by the IDF—which might have been retaliation, but might also have been routine attempts to curtail the Iranian military buildup in Syria. But irrespective of its military response, Yoav Limor urges Jerusalem to act diplomatically as well: