MIDDLE EAST

Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There
By ignoring the honor-shame dynamic in Arab political culture, is the West keeping
itself from making headway toward peace?
By Richard Landes|June 24, 2014 12:00 AM|Comments: 47
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A Palestinian protester aims sparks from a flare toward Israeli security forces
during clashes near the Israeli checkpoint in Hebron on Feb. 25, 2013. (Hazem
Bader/AFP/Getty Images)


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Anthropologists and legal historians have long identified certain tribal cultures
warrior, nomadicwith a specific set of honor codes whose violation brings
debilitating shame. The individual who fails to take revenge on the killer of a clansman
brings shame upon himself (makes him a woman) and weakens his clan, inviting more
open aggression. In World War II, the United States sought the help of
anthropologists like Ruth Benedict to explain the play of honor and shame in driving
Japanese military behavior, resulting in both intelligence victories in the Pacific
Theater and her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Taking her lead, the great
classicist E.R. Dodds analyzed the millennium-long shift in Greek culture from a
shame culture to a guilt culture in his Greeks and the Irrational, where he
contrasted a world in which fame and reputation, rather than conscience and fear of
divine retribution, drive men to act.
But even before literary critic Edward Sad heaped scornon honor-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 Sads work strengthened this cultural relativism:
Concerns for honor and shame drive everyone, and the simplistic antinomy shame-
guilt cultures must be ultimately racist. It became, well, shameful in academic
circles to mention honor/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 honor/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: Honor-
killings, for example, are thus seen as a form of domestic violence, which is also
pervasive in the West. And indeed, honor/shame concerns are universal: Only saints
and sociopaths dont care what others think, and no group coheres without an honor
code.
But even if these practices exist everywhere, we should still be able to acknowledge
that in some cultures the dominant voices openly promote honor/shame values and in a
way that militates against liberal society and progress. Arab political culture, to take
one exampledespite some liberal voices, despite noble dissidentstends to
favor ascendancy through aggression, the politics of the strong horse, and the
application of Hama ruleswhich all combine to produce a Middle East caught
between prison and anarchy, between Sisis Egypt and al-Assads Syria. Our inability,
however well-meaning, to discuss the role of honor-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.
***
In order to understand the role of hard zero-sum, honor-shame concerns in the
attitude of Arabs toward Israel, one must first understand the role of the Jew in
the Muslim Arab honor-group. For the 13 centuries before Zionism, Jews had been
subject to a political status in Muslim lands specifically designed around issues of
honor (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 honor resided, among other places, in
their domination and humiliation of their dhimmiand when the occasional reformer
equalized their legal status, he struck a heavy blow to Muslim honor. Noted a British
envoy on the impact of Muhammad Alis reforms: The Mussulmans deeply deplore
the loss of that sort of superiority which they all & individually exercised over &
against the other sects. A Mussulman believes and maintains that a Christian&
still more a Jewis an inferior being to himself.
To say that to the honor-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-fueled, authoritarian
discourse imposes its interpretation of honor 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 honor Israel must be destroyed and that those who
disagreed were traitors to the Arab cause.
Worse: The threat to Arab honor did not come from a worthy foe, like the Western
Christians, but by from Jews, traditionally the most passive, abject, cowardly of the
populations over which Muslims ruled. As the Athenians explained to the Melians in
the 5th century B.C.E.:
One is not so much frightened of being conquered by a power which rules over others,
as Sparta does, as of what would happen if a ruling power is attacked and defeated by
its own subjects.
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 honor 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 honor-group: Seven Arab armies, representing the honor 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 dishonorable even to fight themnothing could be
more devastating. And this humiliating event occurred on center 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 dishonor 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
honor 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 denialthe Jews did not, could not, have not won. The war was not
could neverbe 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 honor 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 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 leaderships interpretation of honor had them responding to the loss of
their own hard zero-sum gamewere going to massacre themby 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.
***
Yet somehow, however obvious these observations are, their implications rarely get
discussed in policy circles. Current peace plans assume that both sides will make the
necessary concessions for peace, that compromise can lead to an acceptable win-win
for both sides. As one baffled BBC announcer exclaimed, Good grief, this is so simple
it could be resolved with an email; or as Jeremy Ben-Ami puts it, It would take sixty
seconds to lay out the basic solution. But its only simple if you assume that Arabs no
longer feel its a hard zero-sum game, that any win for Israel is an unacceptable loss
of honor for them, that their honor group no longer considers negotiation a sign of
weakness, compromise, shameful, and any peace with Israel, any Israeli win no
matter how small an insult to Islam. During and (more remarkably) after Oslo, it
became a matter of faith among both policy makers and pundits that the old era of
Arab irredentism was gone. As one NPR commentator noted (during the intifada!),
Any Palestinian with a three-digit IQ knows that Israel is here to stay.
The condescension of this remark is matched only by its inaccuracy. Not only does it
consider the entire leadership of Hamas morons, but it ignores how deeply the
psychological trauma of Israel affects the Arab world. Hamas Khaled Mashal, by no
means a two-digit-IQ-er, spoke thus at the height of the intifada:
Tomorrow, our nation [Islam not Palestine] will sit on the throne of the world.
Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today [you infidels], before
remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest
to respect a victorious nation. Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and
degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and
degradation every day.
Even among the most Westernized Arabs, the wound of Israels existence cuts deep,
as does the instinct to accuse Israel for Arab failures. Ahmed Sheikh, editor in chief
of Al Jazeera, blames Israel for the lack of democracy in the Arab world:
The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. Its because
we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small
country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation
with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the
genes of every Arab. The Wests problem is that it does not understand this.
Sheikhs conclusion is not that ending the fight with Israel might lead to democracy,
but rather that once the West lets the Arabs win against Israel, then theyll build
democracies.
As transparently inaccurate an understanding of the Arab worlds problems with
democracy as this appeal might be, it has many Western takers, eager to preserve
their rational choice models. Many post-Orientalists, in the tradition of Edward
Sad, have predicted the outbreak of democracy any decade now, from the 1990s to
the Arab Spring. Thus, while Yasser Arafats no at Camp David shocked Bill
Clinton, Dennis Ross, and a public fed on the idea of a win-win peace process, those
familiar with the values of Arafats primary honor-group predicted that rejection. If
that which has been taken by force must be regained by force, then nothing Arafat
got in negotiations could possibly wash away the shame of a cowardly stroke of the
pen that legitimized Dar al Harb in the midst of Dar al Islam. As a result, while Bill
Clinton and Ehud Barak (and, reportedly, some younger Palestinian negotiators)
mourned, Arafat returned to the Middle East a hero.
None of this mattered to experts like Robert Malley and Robert Wright, who
explained why a reasonable Arafat had to say no. Of course, to make Arafat rational
meant blaming the Israelis for the failure of negotiations and for the subsequent
explosion of violence against them. When Cherie Blair expressed her understanding
for the despair of suicide bombers, she projected her liberal world view on people
who actually aspire to the highest honor their society can offer: martyrdom in the
war to kill the Jews. Israelis themselves offer ample support for this reversal of
responsibility. Unable to tell the difference between strategy and tactics, they
criticize both sides for playing zero-sum games, even though only their side
considers that a reproach.
***
The policy implications here are grave. The rational model assumes that the 67
borders (49 armistice lines) are the key and that an Israeli withdrawal will satisfy
rational Palestinian demands, resolving the conflict. Attention to honor-shame
culture, however, suggests that such a retreat would trigger greater aggression in
the drive for true Palestinian honor, which means all of Palestine, from the river to
the sea. Recently, military historian Andrew Bacevich, expressing the logic of win-
win conflict resolution, wrote that only by leveling the playing field between Israelis
and Palestinians, by weakening the too-dominant Israelis, could negotiations really
work. By ignoring strong-horse Arab political culture and its deep grievance with the
Zionist entity, he even raises the possibility that parity would produce more
conflict, indeed, behavior akin to Syrias civil war, rather than the Scandinavian model
of civility he invokes. Israelis, even the peace camp, instinctively know this and resist
those kinds of concessions; outsiders and the dogmatically self-accusatory view that
resistance as the cause of the problem.
For Israelis, the stakes of these abstruse debates over the meaning and importance
of honor-shame culture could not be higher. Israelis future depends on their ability
to understand why their neighbors hate them and what can and wont work in trying to
deal with their hostility. It would constitute criminal negligence to ignore these
issues.
But the problem goes far beyond Israel and her neighbors. As anyone paying
attention knows, the Salafi-Jihadis, who have hijacked Islam the world over,
embody this self-same honor-shame mentality in its harshest form: the existential
drama of humiliate or be humiliated, rule or be ruled, exterminate or be
exterminated. Dar al Islam must conquer dar al Harb; independent infidels
(harbis) must be spectacularly brought low, their women raped; Islam must dominate
the world or vanish. The language of Shia and Sunni Jihadis alike reverberates with
the sounds of honor, plunder, dominion, shame, humiliation, misogyny, rage, vengeance,
conspiracy, and paranoid fear of implosion.
Its not that our policy makersand here I speak of not only Israel but the
democratic Westdont take account of honor-shame dynamics. They just dont take
it seriously. For them, what they regard as childish, superficial concerns can be
palliated with polite words and gestures, and then these good people will behave like
rational choice actors, and we can all move forward in familiar, sensible ways. So,
when the Pope Benedicts remark about an inherently violent Islam set off riots of
protest throughout the Muslim world, the onus was on the pope to apologize for
provoking them. Only thus could one spare Muslims global derision for randomly
killingkilling to protest being called violent.
But culture is not a superficial question of manners. In the Middle East, honor is
identity. Appeasement and concessions are signs of weakness: When practiced by
ones own leaders, they produce riots of protest, by ones 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 Abdullah throws a fit and the Palestinians make more demands. And too few
wonder whether basic logic of the negotiationsland for peacehas 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 honor by backing off
anything that they claim offends them, we think that our generosity and restraint will
somehow move extremists to more rational behavior. Instead, we end up muzzling
ourselves and thereby participating in, honoring, 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 weaponizing the Arab worlds
most toxic weaknessestheir 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.
***
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Richard Landes, a professor of history at Boston University, is the author of Heaven
on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. He blogs at the Augean Stables.
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