It has been a week since the death of Arab leader-terrorist-anti-Semite-statesman-gangster Yasser Arafat, and the mountains of journalistic commentary about his life may have missed some vitally important matters.
Indeed, few things better show the intellectual limits of the journalism profession than the failure of so many of its practitioners to examine or even perceive what might be significant aspects of the Arafat phenomenon.
Arafat was an Arab leader who functioned in a culture that may not evaluate behavior the same way we in the West do. In that world, if the books I have read on the subject are correct, considerations of shame and honor trump even morality as Western culture understands it.
As David Pryce-Jones wrote in his 1989 book, “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs,”: “What otherwise seems capricious and self-destructive in Arab society is explained by the anxiety to be honored and respected at all costs, and by whatever means….
“Honor is what makes life worthwhile: shame is a living death, not to be endured, requiring that it be avenged. Honor involves recognition, the openly acknowledged esteem of others which renders a person secure and important in his or her own eyes and in front of everyone else.”
The implications of this are vast, wrote Pryce-Jones. “Shame-honor ranking effectively prohibits the development of wider, more socialized types of human relationships. Status considerations of this kind are impervious to Western concepts of contractual relationships….
“Equality under the law, that central constitutional pillar, cannot be reconciled with codes of shame and honor. On the contrary, the individual finds honor-justification in whatever will promote his career, and shame-justification for not compromising in anything that might lessen his advantages over other people.”
Did Arafat order and carry out mass murders, steal money that was intended to benefit his people, undercut any attempt to bring democracy and accountability to his regime? Absolutely, and to us in the West this was corruption and grotesque immorality. But to himself and his followers, these behaviors may have had completely different meanings.
“Considerations of shame and honor forbid crimes of careerism from being judged for what they are,” wrote Pryce-Jones. “Honor is accorded to the man who succeeds in capturing the state because he has truly proved his mastery, he has displayed ruthlessness beyond the imagination and capacity of the ordinary man….
“So it happens that the Arab masses come to accept and even to admire their oppressor. Time and again, the Westerner looking for mercy or human pity in the case of some brutality is at a loss when confronted instead by an Arab reaction of approval.”
And did Arafat, and many other Arab leaders, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace with Israel, as the late-Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban said? Absolutely and shamefully, to our view. But to theirs, these may have appeared to be not opportunities but snares.
In the 1983 second edition of his book, “The Arab Mind,” anthropologist Raphael Patai points out that “In every conflict, those [Arabs] involved tend to feel that their honor is at stake, and that to give in, even as little as an inch, would diminish their self-respect and dignity. Even to take the first step toward ending a conflict would be regarded as a sign of weakness which, in turn, would greatly damage one’s honor.
“Hence, it is almost impossible for an Arab to come to an agreement in direct confrontation with an opponent. Given the Arab tradition of invective and proclivity to boasting and verbal exaggeration, any face-to-face encounter between two adversaries is likely to aggravate the dispute rather than constitute a step toward its settlement.”
If these observations are correct, then Arafat the individual was not the sole or primary obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace, as such observers as former U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross contended in his recent book “The Missing Peace.” (See last week’s Chronicle.)
Arafat may have been only a symptom of something much deeper. As Pryce-Jones put it:
“The loss of Palestine … was a public revelation that the Arabs were defeated by the Jews, whom they were known to hold in contempt…. From the moment when Israel could no longer be extricated from the Arab response of shame, Arab self-interest and rationality were forfeit. If honor might be recovered, then any deed or thought was licensed for that purpose, no matter how vicious or suicidal…. Shame-honor dictates revenge, not compromise. Loss of territory is secondary to loss of honor. No process of negotiation can recover honor, therefore territory has to be relinquished.”
Moreover, this sense of shame has produced the Arab countries’ treatment of the Palestinians, contended Pryce-Jones. “Far from receiving the sympathy due to innocent victims and refugees, the Palestinians have been considered cowards and troublemakers, people who ran away from their homes and brought shame upon themselves and who have therefore shamed all other Arabs.”
Thus the Palestinians’ public embrace of Arafat and the wild display of grief at his death; his concrete failings were less important than what he symbolized in Arab cultural terms.
These claims are controversial in many quarters, and, I believe, many who have studied and lived in the Middle East disagree with them. Even were they all true, I would not want to claim that the whole Israeli-Arab conflict can be reduced to them. Nor would I want to claim that these cultural patterns completely exonerate Israel and Israelis from having committed, and the larger Jewish world from having condoned or ignored, some real crimes and injustices against the Palestinians.
But it does appear to me that these concepts explain a lot that is puzzling about the Arabs’ behavior; and that too many Western seekers of peace, from Ross to the Green Party, either don’t know about or underestimate their influence.
Moreover, if Arab culture is as these writers say, then to most of the Arab world Jewish lives and well-being are expendable for Arab “honor”; and we Jews face a divide from the Arab world that may be unbridgeable for decades and perhaps centuries.
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