Churchill once said, “The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat.” Similarly with the Arabs; and I suggest that their oscillations between quiescence and ferocity are driven by the Shame/Honor dynamic that is central to Arab psyche and Arab society. Shame and loss of honor, while toxic to the Arab, cannot be metabolized within the Arab self. Instead, the stigma must be ejected, spat out from the self, and downloaded onto lesser beings: women, defeated enemy, infidels and especially Jews. Once the weakness that originated in the Arab is discovered in the Other, then – symbolically or literally – he must be killed.
Most recently, having crushed the Second Intifada, Sharon trades Gaza, which is a liability, for the strategic West Bank settlements around Jerusalem that he intends to keep. These would be guarded behind the security wall – the barrier that will, in the absence of a negotiating partner, unilaterally define Israel’s final boundaries. Sharon has drawn back the better to advance; but, particularly now that Sharon is comatose, Hamas spins Sharon’s calculated disengagement into a great victory for their own gunmen: “The Jews are running away from us. This is only the beginning; we will make them drown in the sea.”
In its turn, the Palestinian street sees in Hamas, the “liberators” of Gaza, the agents of final victory over Israel and votes them into power. As in 1947 and 2000, the Palestinians smell blood in the water, indulge their triumphalist fantasies, and again choose the fever-dream of total victory over peace and statehood.
Not all Palestinians share this genocidal syndrome. Some no doubt voted against Fatah’s corruption, while others elected for Hamas’s Welfare State.But for Hamas’s True Believers, why is the addiction to blood-drenched fantasy so powerful? Why this overwhelming desire to see the Jews blown to pieces, terrified, and running?
Again, we must refer to the dynamics of shame: I saw the Palestinians abandon their villages in 1947 without a fight, even before we of the Israeli Haganah had enough guns or men to make them run. Their resulting shame was compounded by their Arab “brothers” in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt who contemptuously shoved the dishonored Palestinians into squalid camps.
To repeat, Shame/Honor societies cannot manage shame except by inflicting it back on the enemy who shamed them. Until that happens, the timeless sense of humiliation festers in the soul, and breeds psychosis: Arab leaders still bristle at the word “crusade,” and demand the return of Seville and Andaluz (Andalusia), since 1490 the “occupied territories” of Spain.
So of corse the Palestinians will always sabotage – as they did in 1947, 2000 and now in 2006 – a negotiated peace with Israel. For the Palestinians, the only acceptable negotiating partners are Jews who mirror the Palestinians of ’47 and ’48: defeated Jews, shamed Jews, whose terrified mobs run like lemmings to the sea. .
If the Palestinians constitute a typical Shame/Honor culture, then by contrast Jews – especially peaceniks – constitute a Guilt culture. The Arabs worry about what has been done to them by way of insults and humiliations; the Jews worry about has been done to others by them, or in their name.
History is a tale of blood, and statehood shoved the Jews back into history, into the middle of the battle, where the choices were to fight or die. The Israelis proved to be successful warriors, but many Jews – Israelis as well as Americans – have sickened of the killing, and are fashioning a separate peace. They have reached the point where they plead the enemy’s cause against their own people, and ultimately against their own children.
