Will “Judeo-Christian” Liberalism Thrive In The Gulf?

While we’re bickering here in Lebanon about local power sharing, others are taking a look at larger pictures.

Coming soon to a Gulf state near you…

Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington and chief negotiator with Syria, wrote in Haaretz on the wave of academic imports from the west to Gulf states like Dubai, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. He finds NYU’s upcoming branch in Abu Dhabi a particularly interesting “experiment”: (emphasis mine)

This means that students in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and the authorities of this principality, would be exposed to the full benefits and demands of a major American university and liberal arts education — admission standards, academic freedom and a curriculum that includes the Christian and Jewish dimensions of Western civilization.

Mr. Rabinovich thinks that on the balance, the trend is good news for Israel.

Aside from the institutional values of a school like the highly respected NYU, it is important to note that the Gulf elites are less preoccupied with Israel and more concerned with imminent threats to their security, primarily the Iranian challenge. It’s true that a failure to modernize has weakened the Arab world, and has in part enabled the small Israeli state to stand up against the much larger Arab collective. 
But the flip side of the failure to modernize has been the persistence of values and attitudes that have contributed to the inability of successive efforts to terminate the conflict.Israelis, then, have a stake in the long-term effects that liberal arts education would have on the region. The transition from conflict to peace requires, among other things, the need to abandon the mentality of a zero-sum game. From that vantage point, the arrival of genuine liberal arts education in the Arab world’s eastern part is good news for Israel as well.

I personally am not too convinced of the transformational value of these institutions. After all, the “elites” have always attended schools in Europe and the US, and as the experience of Hezbollah students in AUB shows us, a liberal democratic institution can accentuate attitudes that exist in some sections of the Arab populations. 

I really want to know your opinion on this. Read the article and tell me, is it a good idea to “transplant” westerm academic and cultural institutions in illiberal environments? Is Lebanon as a model melting pot, cultural and academic, a thing of the past?