Landes:
By ignoring the honor-shame dynamic in Arab
political culture, is the West keeping itself from making headway toward peace?
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 the1990s 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.
