“Those who are merciful to those with whom they should be cruel will end up being cruel to those with whom they should be merciful ” Chazal tell us (Midrash Tanchuma Parshas Metzorah 1). From this we learn that it is possible to act in diametrically opposite ways and be totally wrong both times. We may be witnessing a modern demonstration of this principle.

In mid-2009 massive street protests erupted in Iran over the stolen presidential elections. The protesters begged for some show of American support. But President Barack Obama responded in the most tepid fashion possible to the protests. “It’s not productive [for the president of the United States] to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections” he declared.

An internal revolution by Iran’s discontented population had long seemed the best possible solution to the Iranian nuclear menace. The nuclear weapons themselves are not what make a nuclear Iran so terrifying but the prospect of their possession by a theocratic regime determined to spread the Islamic Revolution around the globe and unconstrained by calculations based on mutual assured destruction that preserved nuclear peace during the Cold War. As Bernard Lewis the greatest living Middle East scholar puts it nuclear conflagration for Ahmadinejad and his clerical sponsors may be an “incentive not a deterrent” — an E-Z Pass to paradise for the Muslim victims and a means of bringing about the appearance of the so-called “Hidden Imam.”

The absence of any supportive American response signaled to the Iranian demonstrators that they were all alone and could count on no international support and thereby made it easier for the brutal Revolutionary Guards to restore order and suppress the protests.

In Iran the target of the protests was a theocratic regime that poses the greatest danger to the world today. The target of the ongoing protests in Egypt President Hosni Mubarak has been a vital American ally in the Middle East for thirty years and the guardian of a “cold peace” with Israel.

In Iran a far more advanced country than Egypt the immediate trigger for the protests was the claim of stolen elections. So there was an opposition candidate around whom the protests coalesced. In Egypt the immediate trigger for the demonstrations was not electoral theft but the bread riots in Tunisia which brought down that country’s strongman. The doubling of wheat prices in Egypt over the past year has had a devastating impact on Egyptians half of whom live on less than $2 per day. Demonstrators were first and foremost expressing anger and anger as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens noted is an emotion not a political program.

In Iran in the summer of 2009 a successful revolution would have been anti-Islamist. The biggest beneficiary of political chaos in Egypt today would be the Muslim Brotherhood by far the best-organized opposition group. According to a 2007 Pew Survey of Egyptian public opinion 84% of Egyptians support executing any Muslim who leaves the faith 77% favor cutting off of the hands of thieves; and 59% support the imposition of sharia. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological father of both al-Qaeda and Hamas and has consistently demanded an abrogation of the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty.

Whatever emerges from a rush to elections in Egypt it will not be a stable parliamentary democracy for which no foundation has been created. The Muslim Brotherhood might put forth a puppet candidate like Mohamed ElBareidi the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in which capacity he consistently downplayed the threat of the Iranian nuclear program. (The normally diplomatic Malcolm Hoenlein described him last week as an “Iranian stooge.”) But ElBareidi has no independent base of support in Egypt and would at best be a puppet of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yet the same administration that feared meddling in Iran called last week via White House press secretary Robert Gibbs for President Mubarak to resign immediately. (On Saturday the US special envoy to Egypt Frank Wisner appeared to backtrack and was quoted as calling for Mubarak to stay on to oversee a transition to democracy.) The contrast sent an implicit message: If you are a sworn enemy of the United States facing rebellion the United States will not meddle but if you are long-time ally in the same situation you are on your own.

If the United States is attempting to win favor with the Muslim Brotherhood by cutting Mubarak loose it will be disappointed. President Jimmy Carter tried that in 1979 by sending the Shah of Iran a message that it was time to go and within nine months the American embassy was taken over and 63 Americans were held captive for over a year. Carter’s mistake was the failure to recognize that the Islamists hate American not for what it does but for what it is: the Great Satan representing all the forces of temptation from the righteous path.

The most favorable gloss on the Obama administration’s actions so far is that it seeks to defuse the situation in the hopes that offering the mob Mubarak will quiet the protests and allow the Egyptian military to reassert control. If that’s the plan we better pray it works.

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Whenever we witness hundreds of thousands of people previously terrorized by a regime suddenly finding the courage to take to the streets to protest against those who had held them in thrall we experience a surge of joy. That was true across Eastern Europe in 1989 in Iran in the summer of 2009 and most recently in Tunisia and Egypt. In each case the sudden break with the past reminds us of the turnabout of Purim and the extra measure of joy it brings. The source of laughter lies in the unexpected. The ultimate laughter is that which will fill our mouths at the Redemption. And every demonstration of the possibility of sudden reversal fills us with joy by hinting to that ultimate Redemption.

Unfortunately some less happy thoughts and lessons accompany recent events in the Arab world as well. One of the most notable aspects of the turmoil currently roiling the Middle East is how unpredicted it all was. No expert warnings preceded the ouster of Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine ben Ali after days of street demonstrations. There was nothing inevitable about what took place. Protests over rising bread prices might never have escalated into a full-scale rebellion absent the self-immolation of one of the protestors. Similarly there were no advance warnings that Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule in Egypt might be vulnerable.

Dictatorships provide an illusion of stability as long as they are in place. Brutal security forces and a willingness to suppress dissent can preserve power for a long time with few outward signs of unrest but at some point quite unexpectedly something may ignite mass demonstrations of discontent. Like Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle — “ruler of all I can see” — who keeps piling up turtles below him only to be brought crashing down by the burp of a humble turtle named Mack at the bottom of the pile the aura of dictatorial invincibility can disappear overnight.

For the United States recognition of the inherent instability of “our” dictators has important implications. The billions of dollars of annual military aid showered upon the Egyptian armed forces over the past thirty years could now fall into the hands of a regime deeply hostile to the United States. Precisely that happened in Iran after the fall of the Shah. More recently the United States has continued to provide advanced armaments to the Lebanese army even as Iranian-puppet Hizbullah solidified its domination of Lebanon.

For Israel too there is an important reminder in Egypt’s current instability: There are great dangers in basing relationships with non-democratic countries solely on today’s dictator. Only treaties signed with democratic countries enjoy popular legitimacy and are viewed as binding by subsequent governments.

The nearly twenty-year-old Oslo process has been predicated from the beginning on the hope of convincing first Yasser Arafat and then his successor to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The late prime minister Yitzchak Rabin even viewed Arafat’s freedom from the complaints of irksome civil rights groups as a great advantage and imagined that Arafat would stamp out a future intifada against Israel (rather than ignite it himself as he did in 2000).

While Arafat enjoyed great popularity in the Palestinian street ultimately his authority rested not on elections but on the numerous security services on his payroll. His successor current Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas enjoys none of Arafat’s status as a revolutionary leader. A treaty signed with him would be worthless. For one thing his rule is highly fragile. If not for Israel’s presence in the West Bank there is no assurance that the Palestinian Authority would not experience the same fate that it did in Gaza. In addition even now few Palestinians would view themselves bound by a treaty concluded by Abbas.

Abbas knows as did Arafat before him that no possible peace treaty with Israel would command widespread support among the Palestinian people. That is why Arafat told President Clinton at Camp David that even admitting a Jewish connection to Har HaBayis would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. And that is why Abbas reacted with such panic to Al Jazeera’s purported revelations of his acquiescence to Israel maintaining the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem built since 1967 and his flexibility on the “right of return”; he accused Al Jazeera of plotting his downfall.

The Palestinian leadership has not taken even the first baby step of educating its population for peace with Israel. Its media and textbooks continue to portray all of Israel as Palestine and perpetuate a cult of martyrdom. These failures are not some technical violation of the Camp David Accords. They go to its very essence. As long as there is no popular support for peace with Israel any peace treaty would be nothing more than a sand castle. For Israel that might just be the most important lesson of recent events in Egypt.