Priests of Killing: The Palestinians and the cult of death

National Review, April 22, 2002 by David Pryce-Jones

The Arab summit recently concluded in Beirut was a public farce, but alas not at all comic because it reflected so accurately the disarray of the Arab world. The participants were all either one-man rulers or their representatives, and their legitimacy rests solely on their military and security forces. All are engaged in a variety of power struggles among themselves. In the complexity of these deadly machinations, the rulers of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan chose to stay away from Beirut, each giving specious excuses. The summit peaked when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called for normalization of relations with Israel. The Syrian one-man ruler and others quibbled about the meaning of normalization, but all signed up. They then pledged to give $480 million to Yasser Arafat to ensure that the intifada continues and there will be no normalization.

In the complete absence of democracy or any genuine representational factor, these encounters among one-man rulers and their representatives are highly personal, and sometimes emotional to the point of tearfulness. The stress is immense. The embracing, the professions of unity and friendship, mask wariness. A false move might cost anyone his life. To play safe, words and deeds have to be coded. The Arabs can't have normal relations with one another, never mind Israel.

At the moment when the summit was agreeing to pursue normalization with Israel, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 22 Israelis and wounded over a hundred more. The victims were in a hotel in Netanya, a town on the Mediterranean coast, where they were celebrating Passover. Shortly before this atrocity, Arafat had gone on record as saying, "We would like to say to the Jews, Happy Passover." The Beirut summit took no notice of the Netanya atrocity.

The summit also took no notice of Osama bin Laden, who is today the most popular of Arabs, and a revolutionary threat to every single one- man ruler. The participants tend to believe that the United States means at least some part of what it says, and will soon be doing whatever is necessary to counter the "axis of evil," but they cannot be sure of American resolution and are eager to take out as many insurance policies as possible.

There is open talk of regime change in Iraq. So Saddam Hussein's representative shook hands with a minor Kuwaiti prince. Amid more applause, the man from Baghdad stated that Iraq would now respect the independence, sovereignty, and security of Kuwait. What this choreographed scene means is that the United States can count on no Arab friends. The participants went on to pass a motion affirming that they "categorically reject a strike against Iraq and any threat against the security and territorial integrity of any Arab country," as this would "constitute a threat against the national security of all Arab countries." In plain language, they mean that they are more afraid of Saddam Hussein than of the United States.

The Arab states have brought their impasse with Israel on themselves. Israel is occupying Arab territory not out of imperialism but only because Arab armies attacked it from these territories in 1967. After that war, the Arab states resolved at an earlier disastrous summit not to recognize Israel, or to negotiate with it. But the obvious land-for- peace exchange was tantalizing, and there has been a peace process based on this prospect for the past 25 years, with success in the cases of Egypt and Jordan.

For the Palestinians, though, Yasser Arafat at the Camp David talks in 2000 concluded that he could obtain more through a campaign of violence. The intifada has a cycle of its own. A suicide bomber does his worst. The United States condemns it. No country, including Israel, endures casualties of this sort impassively. The government of Ariel Sharon has pressured Arafat to police his people, but this is futile, and so it resorts to force in self-defense. The United States is prone to condemn that too, and dispatches yet another mediator in a situation beyond mediation.

If this were a military struggle, Israel could win it quickly. More than that, here is a clash of incompatible cultures. Arabs and Muslims generally live in what anthropologists call a shame society, in which acquisition of honor and avoidance of shame are the key motivators. These values distort reality and oblige people to cancel out feelings of shame through heroics. Differ as they may on political approaches, Saddam, the Iranian ayatollahs, bin Laden, Arafat, and the Muslim extremist groups of Hamas and Islamic Jihad all share a rhetoric arising from the need to acquire honor and avoid shame. Almost at the outset of his speech about normal relations with Israel, Crown Prince Abdullah was talking about Arab "humiliation."

Whether Israel handled the years of occupation well or badly is by now irrelevant. The phenomenon of suicide bombers has to be understood before it can be dealt with. Ghassan Khatib, a respected Palestinian intellectual in Jerusalem, conducts opinion polls. The latest findings indicate that three-quarters of the Palestinians approve of suicide bombers. Khatib says, "It's not a matter of religion or ideology, but politics." This is a Western-type analysis of actions that do not fit into any Western scheme of things. Japanese kamikaze pilots in the last war at least could calculate that they might take an American fighting ship with them. In reality mass-murderers of civilians, Palestinian suicide bombers have to see themselves primarily as rescuing honor.