The drama going on in the Middle East eclipses any storyline Hollywood could conjure, Oscar season or not.
Regimes of 30, 40 and 50 years are shaking at their foundations. And it is all happening in the blink of an eye.
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To be clear: the visionary products created by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Evan Williams at Twitter are foundation stones of what is becoming a regional revolution. We reserve a nod for the emir of Qatar, who brought the world Al Jazeera.
Modern day communications are undoing what decades of repression wrought.
Over 25 years of a journalistic career I have kept a close eye on the Middle East. (For those who only know my work in Hollywood, this may be confusing, but I assure you it is the case.)
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And for the past 60 years or so, the regimes of the Middle East contained the widespread frustrations of their populace with a single policy: blame Israel. The semi-democratic states of Egypt and Lebanon, the dictatorial Syria and Iraq, the theocratic Iran and the despotic kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait all aimed their political fire at the Jewish state.
Israel was the villain of the modern political Arab narrative, the way to divert attention from poverty, illiteracy, corruption and unwillingness by entrenched leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to share power in any meaningful way.
It wasn’t common sense. But the Palestinian tale of suffering made the day to day suffering of average Arabs seem bearable, and their need to maintain ethnic unity a noble -- if long-suffering -- goal.
After a certain point, I believed -- and I think many of us who observed the Middle East believed -- that this could go on indefinitely. That a people cowed by an autocratic system, deprived of a voice by military rule, the threat of violence and torture for then and their families, would sustain the status quo.
Israel continued on its complicated and far from perfect path -- a democracy beside a Palestinian people deprived of their freedom and ill served by their own leaders.
The movement and the change that was promised by Islamic fundamentalism created a wave that overtook the region for the better part of a decade in the late nineties and early part of this century.
While it once achieved a critical mass of support, the wreckage left by al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan has convinced the Arab street that it’s not what they want.
And then came social media. These tools have allowed angry, educated, frustrated young people to connect outside the confines of official outlets.
So while Al-Ahram purveyed the Mubarak line, and Nile Television offered the acceptable status quo in Egypt, it turns out the dam does break.
