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
Anthropologists
and legal historians have long identified certain tribal cultures—warrior,
nomadic—with 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 Saïd heaped scorn
on “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 Saïd’s 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 don’t 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 example—despite some liberal
voices, despite noble dissidents—tends to favor 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 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 dhimmi—and
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 Ali’s 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 Jew—is 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 them—nothing 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 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 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 leadership’s
interpretation of honor 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.
***
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 it’s only simple if you assume that Arabs no
longer feel it’s 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
Mash’al, 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 Israel’s 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. … It’s 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 West’s problem is that it does not
understand this.
Sheikh’s
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 they’ll
build democracies.
As
transparently inaccurate an understanding of the Arab world’s 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 Saïd, have predicted the outbreak of democracy any decade
now, from
the 1990s to the “Arab Spring.” Thus, while Yasser Arafat’s “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 Arafat’s 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 Syria’s 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 won’t 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.
It’s not that
our policy makers—and here I speak of not only Israel but the democratic
West—don’t take account of honor-shame dynamics. They just don’t 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
Benedict’s 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 killing—killing 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 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 Abdullah
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 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 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.
***
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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.
Find this story online: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/176673/emotional-nakba
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