March 29, 2024

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Hamid on Palestinian Dignity: Getting it Exactly Wrong

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2019/06/06/hamid-on-palestinian-dignity-getting-it-exactly-wrong/

A twitter friend pointed to this article by Shadi Hamid, suggesting it was “worth a read.” Rather than answer him on twitter, I thought it “worth a fisk,” because the essay is so quintessentially illustrative about what’s wrong with the mainstream punditocracy on the subject of the conflict between Israel and her neighbors. So here is the fisk:

The Israeli-Palestinian Dispute Is Only Partly About Land

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.
MAY 25, 2019

Shadi Hamid
Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution


Palestinian children watch a band perform from the rubble of a building destroyed by Israeli air strikes.MOHAMMED SALEM / REUTERS

Note both picture and caption. Not: “Palestinian children watch a band perform from the rubble of a building destroyed by Israeli air strikes in 2014 and now, five years later, still not yet rebuilt by a government that spends its resources on building this:


Gaza Malls

and this:

IDF Soldiers Uncover Tunnels in Gaza
Gaza attack tunnel. Hamas spent $30 to $90 million, and poured 600,000 tons of concrete.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

One might assume from this opening that Hamid has been listening to both sides. Alas, not.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel and the West Bank organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

Western-minded folk need to be cautious here. There’s dignity (a positive-sum, egalitarian term, something everyone can have) and honor (a zero-sum hierarchical term, something reserved for those “on top”, as in “I’m up because you’re down.”)

Given how long and hard Palestinians have invoked honor in their crazy war of extermination against Israel, one should be very careful before assuming that when a Palestinian official uses “dignity”, he means the Western version of the word.

And given how Palestinian elites get their honor on the backs of their people’s indignities, the pattern of zero-sum honor over positive-sum dignity seems embedded in Palestinian (and more broadly Arab) political culture, independent of the “Zionist entity” which just seems to make it worse. Did Hamid ask him to define “dignity” (just as every Westerner should ask a Palestinian interlocutor what he means by “Occupation” and “Settlements”), or did he just take his sound byte and run with it?

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that.

oops. he’s running with it.

And no one even knows what the plan actually calls for. But “we all know” it demands that Palestinians give up their “dignity.”

The entire Donald Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and on hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence.

How many misconceptions can one lump together! Let me count the ways.

First of all, the Palestinians lost a very nasty war of ethnic cleansing that their leaders initiated. So surrender is appropriate, especially since the leadership – with few objections – continues to insist on winning that nasty war of extermination. Anyone who argues that Palestinian dignity depends on their maintaining their degrading attitude towards their neighbors has joined the honor-brigade. Defining the denial of that dream of exterminating Israel as “unilateral surrender” is adopting Palestinian demopathic discourse.

Second, if the will of a people is to exterminate their neighbors, it may well be that that “will” needs to be denied (in Hamid’s overheated rhetoric, “destroyed”). As long as you think Israel wants to deny Palestinians dignity, and not vice-versa (ie impose dhimmitude on defeated Jews), then it really does seem to be Israel’s fault.

Third, the use of despair here makes a mockery of every previous invocation of “Palestinian despair” as an excuse of Jihadi terrorism, even as it misreads their frustrated aspiration to annihilate Israel (honor), with their “despair” at not getting their own state (dignity). Now to accuse the plan of trying to provoke Palestinian despair as a way to peace, seems pretty “heads I (Westplainer) win, tails you Israelis lose. That may be satisfying to Hamid the pundit, but neither fair nor accurate.

This is the only way to interpret Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence on prioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

No, it’s precisely not the only way to interpret it. On the contrary, it’s your misreading of “Palestinian dignity” that blinds you to the other possible meanings.

I have a bias: I don’t tend to think that people are primarily motivated by measurable, quantifiable things. To the extent that territory becomes a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, it matters, but it matters as a proxy for other, deeper issues. As my Brookings Institution colleague Shibley Telhami put it: “To assume that the promise of economic improvement would outweigh ordinary human aspirations of a people who have painfully struggled for decades is to miss the nature of the human condition.”

This is a perfect illustration of Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism, the Western weakness that Palestinian demopaths systematically exploit. His “ordinary human aspirations” are the desire for freedom, autonomy, dignity, and a materially decent life. He apparently can’t imagine – and yet he can speak and read Arabic, the language in which they express their aspirations – for revenge, dominion, honor. As a result, even though Palestinian leaders regularly sacrifice their people’s dignity, for their quests for a lost alpha male status, Hamid doesn’t even notice.

Our Palestinian interlocutor’s refusal to cede his dignity wasn’t a performance; it was despair.

Good grief. He swallowed a demopathic performance hook line and sinker. His Palestinian interlocutor (who, I’m willing to bet without knowing him, is not prepared to relinquish what Abbas Zaki of the Palestinian National Council calls, “the inspiring idea” which “everyone agrees” on, namely the elimination of Israel.

It felt to me like an epitaph. There have been conflicts in which leaders have made compromises that may have seemed like betrayals, only for history to view them as both bold and necessary. But those conflicts are not this conflict.

I’d argue exactly the opposite. There is literally no conflict in the history of mankind in which one side (the Palestinian/Arab/Triumphalist Muslim) adopted a position so worthy of discarding despite how much to their supremacist, honor-driven, frustrated imperialist peer group seemed like a betrayal… a perspective that has brought the Palestinians nothing but humiliation and indignity.

The israelis’ narrative is quite different from the Palestinians’, and on its own terms, it’s not necessarily wrong. According to this perspective, Arabs, from the founding of Israel in 1948 onward, have either longed for the Jewish state to disappear or taken action to actually make it disappear. This relates to the Israeli refrain that there is no Palestinian partner for peace; the most moderate Palestinians may accept Israel’s existence as an unfortunate fact, this argument goes, but not even they believe in Israel’s right to exist as the national homeland for the Jewish people.

Here we have Hamid’s effort to tell the Israeli “refrain.” It’s brief, vague, and doesn’t even mention genocidal hatred. The final remark about the (possible) lack of moderate Palestinians who don’t think Israel should exist but will put up with it, pales besides a different sentence that would show a real understanding of Israeli fears (which should also be Western fears):

the fact that the most moderate Palestinians, even were they the majority (for which there’s no evidence), would be rapidly overwhelmed by ruthless Jihadis bent on both eliminating Palestinian moderates and Israelis, means Israel not only doesn’t have reliable partners for peace, they have reliable partners for murderous war.

For Hamid, that’s enough of the Israeli viewpoint. Now let’s go back to “empathizing” with the Palestinians.

In their long history together, Muslims knew Jews less as an ethnic group than as adherents of another religion, different from Islam but also like it. In The Jews of Islam, Bernard Lewis noted that when Muslims expressed negative attitudes toward Jews, they were “usually expressed in religious and social terms, very rarely in ethnic or racial terms.” In conversation, many Palestinians express discomfort with the idea that Jews are both a people and a religion, and Israeli Jews tend to view this lack of recognition as sinister and evidence of Arab irreconcilability.

All this without mentioning that the Arab-Muslim identification of the Jews as a religion was an integral part of their subjugation to Muslim (imperial) rule: they were, before they had the nerve to assert their own identity as a people in the 20th century, an inferior, legally disempowered, stigmatized group, visibly inferior to Muslims. Now normally, by current progressive Western standards, this Palestinian “discomfort” is completely unacceptable: they, as privileged and powerful, won’t allow Jews to define themselves; on the contrary, the Jews must accept Islam’s designation.

But no. In Hamid’s presentation this imposition of a limited (and inferior) definition stands side by side with the Israeli narrative as equally valid, when in fact, understood properly, Palestinian denial of Jewish peoplehood is exactly why Israelis are right in seeing it as the source of Palestinian irredentism. Actually the two statements are identical: Israelis say Palestinians deny Jewish identity as a people, and indeed they do. From Hamid’s pen, however this a “he-said, she-said” of conflicting opinion.

Many of the early Zionists were secular, so their vision for a State of Israel did not depend on a shared religious faith. It depended, instead, on being a people. The moniker “Jewish state” itself captures this, since a Jewish state can be a secular home for Jews, whereas an “Islamic state”—to use another legalistic religion—suggests a religious mission and theological premises.

Divergent histories and narratives shape the interpretation of otherwise factual questions about what actually happened and didn’t happen at key moments. For example, Israeli politicians attack

what’s wrong with “criticize”? Too civil? Too reasonable? Or does any criticism of Muslims seem like an “attack” to those worried about the prime directive of the 21st century? (“Don’t Piss them off.”)

Palestinians for squandering Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” of 2000, and so a story of Arab and Palestinian recalcitrance builds uninterrupted, with each new rejection confirming the previous one: First, Arabs rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan. Then Arab nations waged war against the new Israeli state. Decades later, when they finally had their chance, Palestinians rejected Barak’s offer. Then they rejected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, and so on.

That’s what “Israel said.” Yadayadayada.

To put it mildly, Palestinians do not share this interpretation of what went wrong. They believe the offer was far from generous, coming after six years of “more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economic conditions,” as the senior Clinton-administration adviser Rob Malley and Hussein Agha argue in one of the definitive accounts of the 2000 Camp David negotiations.

This was
a highly contested, highly polemic, account, designed to protect Arafat from
criticism for having said “no.” If anything their account is a case
study in exploiting liberal cognitive egocentrism, of turning
“honor-driven” behavior into rational choices for passing up the
opportunity to make that historical decision that some see as a betrayal, but
the people, retrospectively, see as a hero’s gift.

In practice, Barak, the dove, wasn’t much of a dove. As Malley and Agha write: “Behind almost all of Barak’s moves, Arafat believed he could discern the objective of either forcing him to swallow an unconscionable deal or mobilizing the world to isolate and weaken the Palestinians if they refused to yield.”

To put it mildly, Hamid is on the Palestinian side here. Malley and Agha’s account appears here as definitive, when it can be read as an elaborate apology for Arafat and Abbas’ refusal to take a deal that could bring peace. Note how Hamid leaves out (is he aware?) that more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economic conditions” are a direct product of Palestinian violence in the “Second Intifada.” Barak, who actually made major concessions to get peace (splitting Jerusalem), becomes a fake dove, whose sneaky behavior justified Arafat’s paranoia. ‘No, really, if only Barak had been more respectful, Arafat would have said yes. Really.’

Palestinian activists tend to speak in terms of justice. An injustice was done, so it must be undone. Christopher Hitchens, in his valediction for the Palestinian American author Edward Said, wrote that his friend’s “feeling for the injustice done to Palestine was, in the best sense of this overused term, a visceral one. He simply could not reconcile himself to the dispossession of a people or to the lies and evasions that were used to cover up this offense.”

Wow. Impressive. He’s misunderstood justice as badly as he has dignity. In honor-shame culture, vengeance is justice, and honor can only be restored (justice) when blood is shed. It’s precisely the Palestinians outlandish sense of injustice that feeds the fight: For them, the “Nakbah” of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless in a war they started is equal to or greater than the Holocaust of millions dead and millions homeless. When Hitchens wrote:

But for Edward, injustice was to be rectified, not rationalised. I think that it was, for him, surpassingly a matter of dignity. People may lose a war or a struggle, or be badly led or poorly advised, but they must not be humiliated, or treated as alien or less than human. It was the downgrading of the Palestinians to the status of a ‘problem’ (and this insult visited upon them in their own homeland) that aroused his indignation. That moral energy, I am certain, will outlive him.

…he got it exactly wrong. It’s not a matter of dignity when your people are badly led and poorly advised to try and wipe out their neighbors. And when you do that and, thank God, fail, it is humiliating. Well deserved.

On the contrary, the dignity would be in admitting that their leaders had behaved abominably (allied with Hitler, planned ethnic cleansing, preached genocide), and apologizing for their past behavior. To view Israel’s treatment of them as a problem, or as treating them as “alien or less than human” is to adopt the language of the honor-driven. We Palestinians deserve to be treated with dignity no matter how grotesquely we behave. Said’s indignation was not over how Israel treated his people, but how his people were frustrated in their efforts to dehumanize , downgrade, and humiliate Israel.

Pro-Palestinian protesters often chant the mantra of “no justice, no peace.”

They also chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” (of free Jews), which, if Hamid gave it a thought, might make him question the Palestinian meaning of “justice.”

One former Israeli official we spoke with in Jerusalem had a different view. He said, “If we make this about justice, there will not be peace.” Too many Palestinians celebrate victimhood—fueled by a profound sense of injustice—rather than overcome it, he suggested.

I’d rephrase that. If we make this about a one-sided definition of justice as revenge, and not a reciprocal acknowledgment of multiple injustices, there will be no peace.

But then we return to the question of dignity. No one should be asked to overcome their victimhood by giving up their dignity, the one thing even an occupier shouldn’t be able to take away. That might sound naive and impractical, especially for those who would rather Palestinians just get on with it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Now we’re in full dupe monty. Having misunderstood Palestinian use of Western terms like dignity and justice, Hamid comes to exactly the wrong conclusion. No one is being asked to give up their dignity unless that dignity depends on the degradation of someone else which in the Palestinian case it does, ie, it’s honor. No one is being asked to overcome their victimhood, unless that victimhood is the loss of zero-sum honor (ie dominion), in which case, we all need to give up that kind of victimhood. The Palestinians are justifiably being asked by their neighbors to overcome the victimhood they feel about their loss of zero-sum honor (ie dominion), in which case, we all need to give up that kind of victimhood.

Indeed, even justified grievances, nursed too long, can become self-defeating. In Dignity:  Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, Donna Hicks names embracing victimhood as one of ten ways in which we violate our own dignity.  In fact, Hicks notes that this particular violation of dignity is exactly what fuels conflict rather than resolving it. 

The temptation to see the other person as the perpetrator and oneself as the innocent victim is one of the greatest obstacles to resolving conflicts in relationships (p. 143. HT: the Eisenbergs)

No people on the planet have made more of their victimhood, which to an astonishing degree is self-inflicted (refugee camps. No other people has amplified their suffering a thousand-fold (six thousand dead and six hundred thousand fled vs. seven million dead and displaced) in order to claim that the Naqba = or > the Holocaust. No other people on the planet, not even those who have genuinely suffered a genocidal attack (Native Americans, Armenians, Jews, Tutsis) have turned their suffering into a cult, and sacrificed their children at its altar.

If I were advising the Palestinians, I’d tell them to reject Kushner’s offer, but they don’t need anyone to tell them what’s already painfully obvious.

Don’t sell your victimhood for a mess of pottage. Hold on to your birthright: the group chosen by the Arabs to be the great victim of the Jews in order to parade their suffering before the world.

What’s painfully obvious is that Hamid has no idea of what’s at play here. He’s imposed his liberal cognitive egocentrism on a situation and motivations where it could not be less appropriate. He misreads every key term. His advice is merely mimetic and reflects a broad consensus in policy circles that the Israeliis need to make concessiion to the Palestinians, an attitude that bodes ill for the future of Palestinian and Israeli, and global dignity.

If someone doesn’t understand anything about the history of the Palestinians, their grievances and their narratives, then what’s the point?

What a
strange lament. Unpacked it means, “if one doesn’t accept the
Palestinians’ narratives about their victimhood (grievances), then there’s no
discussion.”

On the contrary, if someone doesn’t understand anything of the misplaced role of triumphalist honor in shaping Palestinian grievances and narratives, then they can be duped with lethal narratives? All you do then, is become a cheerleader urging the people you allegedly support to continue their self-destructive repetition compulsion. What’s the point in that? (Sticking it to ‘al Yahood’?)

The outgoing French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, described Kushner this way: “He is so pro-Israeli also, that he may neglect the point that if you offer the Palestinians the choice between surrendering and committing suicide, they may decide the latter. Somebody like Kushner doesn’t understand that.”

Tertium non datur: exchanging honor for dignity by renouncing a suicidal drive to restore triumphalist honor. Given the disastrous previous experiences of Palestinians with political power (PLO in Jordan, 1964-70 and Lebanon, 1970-82, PA iin West Bank, 1994-present, and Gaza, 2006-present) there very little to suggest that Palestinian sovereignty would bring dignity to Palestinians or peace to their neighbors. On the contrary, the one constant in Palestinian political culture is the degree to which they sacrifice their people’s dignity for the sake of their honor.

Because the two sides are so far apart and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, the United States—if it’s unwilling to put serious pressure on Israel or take seriously Palestinian objections—is better off disengaging from an imaginary peace process, rather than lending legitimacy to Israel’s behavior or giving the illusion of progress without the substance. Otherwise we are all just wasting time, at least until a new president attempts to fundamentally rethink America’s sometimes well-intentioned but almost always tragic role in one of the world’s most enduring conflicts.

And now we are explicitly told that Hamid’s on [what he thinks is] the Palestinian side. The right position for an outsider is either to seriously pressure Israel (the powerful and wrong) to make concessions to the Palestinians, whose narrative deserves not deconstruction and critique, but to be taken seriously.

Of all the “well-intentioned but almost always tragic role in one of the world’s most enduring conflicts,” that of “progressives” who, with their liberal cognitive egocentrism, are determined dupes to Palestinian demopathy, has perhaps the most prominent place. Hamid stands firm in that folly.

Cling to your victimhood, Oh miserable Palestinians. We pity your suffering, deplore the Jews who inflicted it, and support your quest for “dignity.” Brings virtue-signaling to new lows.

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