HEAD IN THE SAND

This week I’m going to stick my head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and  ignore Israeli politics completely. Before you rush to correct me, I know ostriches don’t stick their heads in the sand.

First of all, I want to point out that when I quote sources, I invariably use quotation marks. Often, I add a comment, a personal observation. Usually as a margin note intended to be read outside the main text.

I mention this because in the feedback from readers I occasionally receive credit I don’t deserve.

Having said that, I will take credit for a knack I have for finding unusual source material. My daughter Daphna Whitmore has a similar aptitude.  Recently she referred me to an article written by Richard Landes for Tablet Magazine - “Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There”

Professor Landes is an American historian and author who specialises in mediaeval millennial thinking. Until 2015 he taught at Boston University, and then began working at Bar-Ilan University where his current interests include arguing Israel’s complaints about media manipulation by Palestinians.

Although the article was published eight years ago, it is just as relevant today, perhaps even more so.

I am including here some of the points Richard Landes emphasised:  

“But even before literary critic Edward Saïd  heaped scorn on ‘honour-shame’ analysis in Orientalism (1978), anthropologists had backed off an approach that seemed to make inherently invidious comparisons between primitive cultures and a morally superior West. The reception of Saïd’s work strengthened this cultural relativism: Concerns for honour and shame drive everyone, and the simplistic antinomy ‘shame-guilt cultures’ must be ultimately ‘racist.’ It became, well, shameful in academic circles to mention honour/shame and especially in the context of comparisons between the Arab world and the West. Even in intelligence services, whose job is to think like the enemy, refusing to resort to honour/shame dynamics became standard procedure.

Any generous person should have a healthy discomfort with ‘othering,’ drawing sharp lines between two peoples. We muddy the boundaries to be minimally polite: Honour-killings, for example, are thus seen as a form of domestic violence, which is also pervasive in the West. And indeed, honour/shame concerns are universal: Only saints and sociopaths don’t care what others think, and no group coheres without an honour code.

But even if these practices exist everywhere, we should still be able to acknowledge that in some cultures the dominant voices openly promote honour/shame values and in a way that militates against liberal society and progress. Arab political culture, to take one example—despite some liberal voices, despite noble dissidents—tends to favour ascendancy through aggression, the politics of the ‘strong horse,’ and the application of "Hama rules"*—which all combine to produce a Middle East caught between prison and anarchy, between Sisi’s Egypt and al-Assad’s Syria. Our inability, however well-meaning, to discuss the role of honour-shame dynamics in the making of this political culture poses a dilemma: By keeping silent, we not only operate in denial, but we may actually strengthen these brutal values and weaken the very ones we treasure.

Few conflicts offer a better place to explore these matters than the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

At this juncture I’ll add two footnotes

* New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman coined the term “Hama Rules” to denote the brutality of the Assad regime and how it would respond if threatened.

** The Strong Horse – Power, Politics and the clash of Arab Civilizations, is the title of journalist- author Lee Smith’s non-fictional book.

The book's title is drawn from Osama bin Laden’s assertion that "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Smith, who spent several years reporting from the Arab world, writes that "violence is central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and that Arab politics is driven by the "strong horse" principle." Smith describes the region's rulers as self-interested factors struggling by any available means to retain their hold on power, while constantly threatened by regional power holders and by a rising generation of would be leaders He denies that the region's problems are rooted in Western imperialism, "if we think that we are to blame for what is wrong with the Middle East - it is because of two things: our own narcissism and the tendency of Arab nationalists to blame outside forces for the problems of their region."

Back to the main text:

“In order to understand the role of hard zero-sum, honour-shame concerns in the attitude of Arabs toward Israel, one must first understand the role of the Jew in the Muslim Arab honour-group. For the 13 centuries before Zionism, Jews had been subject to a political status in Muslim lands specifically designed around issues of honour (to Muslims) and shame (to Jews). Jews were dhimmi, “protected” from Muslim violence by their acceptance of daily public degradation and legal inferiority. Noted Chateaubriand in the 19th century: “Special target of all [Muslim and Christian] contempt, the Jews lower their heads without complaint; they suffer all insults without demanding justice; they let themselves be crushed by blows. … Penetrate the dwellings of these people, you will find them in frightful poverty.”

For more than a millennium, Arab and Muslim honour resided, among other places, in their domination and humiliation of their dhimmi—and when the occasional reformer equalised their legal status, he struck a heavy blow to Muslim honour. Noted a British envoy on the impact of Muhammad Ali’s reforms: “The Mussulmans … deeply deplore the loss of that sort of superiority which they all and individually exercised over and  against the other sects. … A Mussulman … believes and maintains that a Christian—and still more a Jew—is an inferior being to himself.”

To say that to the honour-driven Arab and Muslim political player, in the 20th century as in the 10th century, the very prospect of an autonomous Jewish political entity is a blasphemy against Islam, and an insult to Arab virility, is not to say that every period of Muslim rule involved deliberate humiliation of dhimmi. Nor is it to say that all Arabs think like this. On the contrary, this kind of testosterone-fuelled, authoritarian discourse imposes its interpretation of ‘honour’ on the entire community, often violently. Thus, while some Arabs in 1948 Palestine may have viewed the prospect of Jewish sovereignty as a valuable opportunity, the Arab leadership and ‘street’ agreed that for the sake of Arab honour Israel must be destroyed and that those who disagreed were traitors to the Arab cause.

Worse: The threat to Arab honour did not come from a worthy foe, like the Western Christians, but from Jews, traditionally the most passive, abject, cowardly of the populations over which Muslims ruled.

So, the prospect of an independent state of should-be dhimmis struck Arab leaders as more than humiliating. It endangered all Islam. Thus Rahman Azzam Pasha, the head of the newly formed Arab League, spoke for his ‘honour group’ when he threatened that ‘if the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.’ As the Armenians had discovered a generation earlier, the mere suspicion of rebellion could engender massacres.

The loss in 1948, therefore, constituted the most catastrophic possible outcome for this honour-group: Seven Arab armies, representing the honour of hundreds of thousands of Arabs (and Muslims), were defeated by less than a million Jews, the surviving remnant of the most devastating and efficient genocide in history. To fall to people so low on the scale that it is dishonourable even to fight them—nothing could be more devastating. And this humiliating event occurred on centre stage of the new postwar global community, before whom the Arab league representatives had openly bragged about their upcoming slaughters. In the history of a global public, never has any single and so huge a group suffered so much dishonour and shame in the eyes of so great an audience.

So, alongside the nakba (catastrophe) that struck hundreds of thousands of the Arab inhabitants of the former British Mandate Palestine, we find yet another, much greater psychological catastrophe that struck the entire Arab world and especially its leaders: a humiliation so immense that Arab political culture and discourse could not absorb it. Initially, the refugees used the term nakba to reproach the Arab leaders who started and lost the war that so hurt them. In a culture less obsessed by honour and more open to self-criticism, this might have led to the replacement of political elites with leaders more inclined to move ahead with positive-sum games of the global politics of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan. But when appearances matter above all, any public criticism shames the nation, the people, and the leaders.

Instead, in a state of intense humiliation and impotence on the world stage, the Arab leadership chose denial—the Jews did not, could not, have not won. The war was not—could never—be over until victory. If the refugees from this Zionist aggression disappeared, absorbed by their brethren in the lands to which they fled, this would acknowledge the intolerable: that Israel had won. And so, driven by rage and denial, the Arab honour group redoubled the catastrophe of its own refugees: They made them suffer in camps, frozen in time at the moment of the humiliation, waiting and fighting to reverse that Zionist victory that could not be acknowledged. The continued suffering of these sacrificial victims on the altar of Arab pride called out to the Arab world for vengeance against the Jews. In the meantime, wherever Muslims held power, they drove their Jews out as a preliminary act of revenge.

The Arab leadership’s interpretation of honour had them responding to the loss of their own hard zero-sum game—we’re going to massacre them—by adopting a negative-sum strategy. Damaging the Israeli ‘other’ became paramount, no matter how much that effort might hurt Arabs, especially Palestinians. ’No recognition, no negotiations, no peace.’ No Israel. Sooner leave millions of Muslims under Jewish rule than negotiate a solution. Sooner die than live humiliated. Sooner commit suicide to kill Jews than make peace with them.” ……..

“But culture is not a superficial question of manners. In the Middle East, honour is identity. Appeasement and concessions are signs of weakness: When practiced by one’s own leaders, they produce  riots of protest, by one’s enemy, renewed aggression. Benjamin Netanyahu stops most settlement activity for nine months. Barack Obama goes to Saudi Arabia for a reciprocal concession he can announce in Cairo. King Abdallah throws a fit and the Palestinians make more demands. And too few wonder whether basic logic of the negotiations—land for peace—has any purchase on the cultural realities of this corner of the globe. If only Israel would be more reasonable …

When we indulge Arab (and jihadi Muslims’) concerns for honour by backing off anything that they claim offends them, we think that our generosity and restraint will somehow move extremists to more rational behaviour. Instead, we end up muzzling ourselves and thereby participating in, honouring, and confirming their most belligerent attitudes toward the ‘other.’ They get to lead with their glass chin, while we, thinking we work for peace, end up confirming and weaponising the Arab world’s most toxic weaknesses—their insecurity, their embrace of all-or-nothing conflicts, their addiction to revenge, their paranoid scapegoating, their shame-driven hatred. And there is nothing generous, rational, or progressive about that.”

To conclude I’m adding a comment Lee Smith made:

“The daily circumstances of ordinary Palestinians are tragic. Most simply want to lead dignified lives, enriching and enjoying their families and communities. The fact that many can’t, however, is not the fault of Jerusalem or Washington, nor even primarily of the Arab regimes, which for so many years used the Palestinians as pawns to advance their own domestic and international interests. With the Abraham Accords, a coalition of prominent Arab states publicly and unreservedly gave up on the rejectionism that still drives the sclerotic ruling cadre in Ramallah, and embraced Israel’s dynamic economy, society, and military as models and partners.”

Have a good weekend.

Beni,                8th of December, 2022.