January 29, 2012
The Arab-Palestinian Narrative of Victimhood
A debatable aspect of modern thought is the thesis that the full truth is unknowable and that the interpretation of historical events and present behavior is a "narrative" reflecting the interests of the group that creates it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the narrative created by the Arab-Palestinians and their supporters -- a narrative which is used as the basis of an ideological campaign aimed at condemning the State of Israel and undermining its moral fabric.
The building blocks of this narrative are the "original sin" of the creation of Israel, the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948; the belief in Israeli responsibility for violence and the various wars in the Middle East; the conviction that Israel deliberately created the Arab-Palestinian refugee situation by preventing their return to the homeland; and the supposed indignities and injustices done to Arab-Palestinians who have become victims of Israeli aggression and colonialism.
To gain a sense of how events are manipulated to create the Arab-Palestinian narrative, it's useful to look at some particular examples. Rachel Corrie, who worked with the International Solidarity Movement, was accidentally killed in Gaza in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer that she was deliberately trying to block. She quickly became a symbol of heroic defiance against Israel. The narrative has penetrated the literary, artistic, and theatrical worlds. In her eight-minute play, "Seven Jewish Children," produced in London in 2009, Caryl Churchill builds the plot around the alleged bad treatment by Israelis of Arab-Palestinian babies, evoking the historic blood libel charge against Jews.
All of the elements in this false narrative have become instrumental in the campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and even to call for its elimination. But it is the last point, the concept of Arab-Palestinian victimhood, which has fueled international support for the Arab-Palestinian cause. It accounts for the obsessive concentration on the Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict by so many who view it as the world's most important and dangerous encounter, disregarding the millions killed or oppressed in other countries today.
The narrative of victimhood uses myths and symbols as well as a controversial interpretation of events and actions. Its language at times becomes wildly extreme. Arab-Palestinians are termed the "new Jews" suffering a "new Holocaust." Jews are the new Nazis. Excessive rhetoric and idiosyncratic judgments of this kind are rarely, if ever, applied to the truly despotic and authoritarian regimes in the world that commit crimes against humanity and violations of human rights that are not censured.
The narrative denies Jewish historic national identity. The Arab-Palestinians have gone so far in efforts to bolster the argument against Jewish connection to the land as to destroy the archaeological evidence of the ancient kingdom of Judea. Nor do they accept the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a Jewish historic site.
The formulation of the Arab-Palestinian narrative of victimhood is pernicious in a double-sense. It poisons the attitude to Israel and prevents any kind of accommodation or possible negotiation between Israel and the Arab-Palestinians to reach a peaceful settlement of the long conflict. It also reinforces the Arab-Palestinians' rejection to take positive action to help resolve their problems and becomes an excuse for the failure to develop an infrastructure for their own society or to take advantage of opportunities to found a sovereign state of their own -- opportunities going back as far as the Peel Commission of 1937.
Equally important is the fact that Israel is the political canary warning of the presence of poisonous political traits that intimate impending danger to the world, particularly to the United States and Western democracies. When Western critics concur in the validity of the Arab-Palestinian narrative, they take on the stance of moral relativism. They become appeasers with a mindset that has as its outcome an inability or refusal to defend the West against contemporary threats and the clear and present danger to its culture and way of life. At its worst, this leads to the view that the West is in decline, that the "war on terror" is unwinnable or should not be fought, or that the West is to be eternally found guilty for its past colonial empires and activity.
The world has been through this before. Those who ardently accept the Arab-Palestinian narrative of victimhood are like the people who willingly believed the Nazi and Stalinist narratives, equally blind to the realities of those horrific totalitarian regimes. Some of those people were well-meaning, but they were of the kind that Lenin once called "political idiots."
The Arab-Palestinian narrative has benefited from a fanciful, romantic presentation of the superior virtue of Arab-Palestinians, regardless of their actual behavior. In this fairy tale, the Arab-Palestinians are seen as the embodiment of "the wretched of the earth," the phrase used by Franz Fanon to justify the Algerian struggle against France.
By proclaiming their lack of human rights and their victimhood, the Arab-Palestinians have been able to enlist political, economic, military, diplomatic, and propaganda support from individuals and groups who are sympathetic to those they see as subjugated. They have become the main symbol of the oppressed of the world, to the misfortune of Israel.
Using Jews as scapegoats supposedly responsible for most of the problems of the world is a trope of traditional anti-Semitism. By tortuous logic, Israel has become the scapegoat for racism, oppression, and colonialism in the contemporary world. Jewish nationalism is identified as imperialist and racist, while Arab-Palestinian nationalism is the nationalism of "the oppressed."
The Arab-Palestinians face real problems, as does Israel. It is time to state forthrightly that the Arab-Palestinian narrative as presently conceived, with its inherent anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, does not lead to equity for the Arab-Palestinians or to steps towards peace. Peace between Israel and the Arab-Palestinians can be achieved only when the Arab-Palestinians abandon their fallacious narrative and are willing to accept the existence and legitimacy of a Jewish state.
Michael Curtis is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and the author of the forthcoming book Should Israel Exist?: A sovereign nation under attack by the international community.
A debatable aspect of modern thought is the thesis that the full truth is unknowable and that the interpretation of historical events and present behavior is a "narrative" reflecting the interests of the group that creates it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the narrative created by the Arab-Palestinians and their supporters -- a narrative which is used as the basis of an ideological campaign aimed at condemning the State of Israel and undermining its moral fabric.
The building blocks of this narrative are the "original sin" of the creation of Israel, the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948; the belief in Israeli responsibility for violence and the various wars in the Middle East; the conviction that Israel deliberately created the Arab-Palestinian refugee situation by preventing their return to the homeland; and the supposed indignities and injustices done to Arab-Palestinians who have become victims of Israeli aggression and colonialism.
All of the elements in this false narrative have become instrumental in the campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and even to call for its elimination. But it is the last point, the concept of Arab-Palestinian victimhood, which has fueled international support for the Arab-Palestinian cause. It accounts for the obsessive concentration on the Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict by so many who view it as the world's most important and dangerous encounter, disregarding the millions killed or oppressed in other countries today.
The narrative of victimhood uses myths and symbols as well as a controversial interpretation of events and actions. Its language at times becomes wildly extreme. Arab-Palestinians are termed the "new Jews" suffering a "new Holocaust." Jews are the new Nazis. Excessive rhetoric and idiosyncratic judgments of this kind are rarely, if ever, applied to the truly despotic and authoritarian regimes in the world that commit crimes against humanity and violations of human rights that are not censured.
The narrative denies Jewish historic national identity. The Arab-Palestinians have gone so far in efforts to bolster the argument against Jewish connection to the land as to destroy the archaeological evidence of the ancient kingdom of Judea. Nor do they accept the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a Jewish historic site.
The formulation of the Arab-Palestinian narrative of victimhood is pernicious in a double-sense. It poisons the attitude to Israel and prevents any kind of accommodation or possible negotiation between Israel and the Arab-Palestinians to reach a peaceful settlement of the long conflict. It also reinforces the Arab-Palestinians' rejection to take positive action to help resolve their problems and becomes an excuse for the failure to develop an infrastructure for their own society or to take advantage of opportunities to found a sovereign state of their own -- opportunities going back as far as the Peel Commission of 1937.
Equally important is the fact that Israel is the political canary warning of the presence of poisonous political traits that intimate impending danger to the world, particularly to the United States and Western democracies. When Western critics concur in the validity of the Arab-Palestinian narrative, they take on the stance of moral relativism. They become appeasers with a mindset that has as its outcome an inability or refusal to defend the West against contemporary threats and the clear and present danger to its culture and way of life. At its worst, this leads to the view that the West is in decline, that the "war on terror" is unwinnable or should not be fought, or that the West is to be eternally found guilty for its past colonial empires and activity.
The world has been through this before. Those who ardently accept the Arab-Palestinian narrative of victimhood are like the people who willingly believed the Nazi and Stalinist narratives, equally blind to the realities of those horrific totalitarian regimes. Some of those people were well-meaning, but they were of the kind that Lenin once called "political idiots."
The Arab-Palestinian narrative has benefited from a fanciful, romantic presentation of the superior virtue of Arab-Palestinians, regardless of their actual behavior. In this fairy tale, the Arab-Palestinians are seen as the embodiment of "the wretched of the earth," the phrase used by Franz Fanon to justify the Algerian struggle against France.
By proclaiming their lack of human rights and their victimhood, the Arab-Palestinians have been able to enlist political, economic, military, diplomatic, and propaganda support from individuals and groups who are sympathetic to those they see as subjugated. They have become the main symbol of the oppressed of the world, to the misfortune of Israel.
Using Jews as scapegoats supposedly responsible for most of the problems of the world is a trope of traditional anti-Semitism. By tortuous logic, Israel has become the scapegoat for racism, oppression, and colonialism in the contemporary world. Jewish nationalism is identified as imperialist and racist, while Arab-Palestinian nationalism is the nationalism of "the oppressed."
The Arab-Palestinians face real problems, as does Israel. It is time to state forthrightly that the Palestinian narrative as presently conceived, with its inherent anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, does not lead to equity for the Arab-Palestinians or to steps towards peace. Peace between Israel and the Arab-Palestinians can be achieved only when the Arab-Palestinians abandon their fallacious narrative and are willing to accept the existence and legitimacy of a Jewish state.
Michael Curtis is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and the author of the forthcoming book Should Israel Exist?: A sovereign nation under attack by the international community.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/the_palestinian_narrative_of_victimhood.html#ixzz4UgQUjrHG
The Narrative of Perpetual Arab-Palestinian Victimhood
The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference "The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III," sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, is not really a conflict, it is a war – a war of the Arabs against the Jews. In many ways, this conflict has been a conflict between narratives. We who strongly support Israel have done a poor job in formulating a narrative which will combat the story spun by the other side. We can do better.
The Durban conferences, the request for UN recognition of a unilateral declaration of Arab-Palestinian statehood, and the general animus in the Middle East and elsewhere toward Israel and toward the Jews, what are they really about? Is the Durban conference and the claim that Israel is a racist nation really about reforming the people of Israel and curing them of their racism?
I think their real interest is to situate the Arab-Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization. This is their ulterior goal: to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.
Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Arab-Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Arab-Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.
I will give you one example of a poetic truth that comes from my group, black Americans. We make the following claims: America is a deeply, intractably racist society. It may not be as conspicuous today as it was before. Nevertheless, it is still there today structurally and systemically, and it still holds us back and keeps us from achieving the American dream.
To contradict this claim, one can come forward with evidence to suggest that racism in America today is about 25th on the list of problems facing black Americans. One can recount one of the great untold stories of America, namely, the moral growth and evolution away from that problem. This is not to say that racism is completely extinguished, but that it no longer prevents the forward progress of any black in the United States. There is no evidence to suggest that it does. Yet, this claim is still the centerpiece of black American identity – this idea that we are victimized by a fundamentally, incurably racist society.
Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.
Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Arab-Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.
The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Arab-Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Arab-Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.
The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? One reason why they get away with it in the Middle East is that the Western world lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said "your real problem is inferiority. Your real problem is underdevelopment." That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Arab-Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Arab-Palestinians live by carries on.
International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.
Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth. What would such a narrative look like?
It would begin with the presumption that the problem in the Middle East is not white supremacy but the end of white supremacy. After World War II, the empires began to contract, Britain went home, France went home, and the Arab world was left almost abandoned, and in a state of much greater freedom than they had ever known before.
Freedom is, however, a dicey thing to experience. When you come into freedom, you see yourself more accurately in the world. This is not unique to the Middle East. It was also the black American experience, when the Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964 and we came into much greater freedom. If you were a janitor in 1963 and you are still a janitor in 1965, you have all these freedoms and they are supported by the rule of law, then your actual experience of freedom is one of humiliation and one of shame. You see how far you have to go, how far behind you are, how little social capital you have with which to struggle forward. Even in freedom you see you are likely to be behind for a long time. In light of your inability to compete and your underdevelopment, freedom becomes something that you are very likely going to hate – because it carries this humiliation.
At that point formerly oppressed groups develop what I call bad faith. Bad faith is when you come into freedom, you are humiliated and you say, "Well you know the real truth is I am not free. Racism still exists. Zionism is my problem. The State of Israel is my problem. That is why I am so far behind and that is why I cannot get ahead."
You develop a culture grounded in bad faith where you insist that you are less free than you really are. Islamic extremism is the stunning example of this phenomenon. "I have to go on jihad because I am fighting for my freedom." Well you already have your freedom. You could stay home and study. You could do something constructive. But "No, I cannot do that because that makes me feel bad about myself." So I live in a world of extremism and dictators.
This is not unique to the Middle East. In black America we had exactly the same thing. After we got the civil rights bill and this greater degree of freedom, then all of a sudden we hear the words "black power." Then all of a sudden we have the Black Panthers. Then we have this militancy, this picking up of the gun because we feel bad about ourselves. We feel uncompetitive and this becomes our compensation. It is a common pattern among groups that felt abandoned when they became free.
This is the real story of the Palestinians and of the Middle East. They will never be reached by reason until they are somehow able to get beyond bad faith, to get beyond this sort of poetic truth that they are the perennial victims of an aggressive and racist Israeli nation.
Challenging their narrative with this explanation will enable us to be more effective. Until now, we have constantly used facts and reason and have not progressed.
Durban is a perfect example of bad faith because Durban is way of saying Israelis are racist and they are our problem. Durban really is a way of saying I am not free. I am still a victim. That is the real purpose of Durban. The Arab-Palestinian unilateral claim for recognition from the UN is also a perfect example of bad faith. If Arab-Palestinians proceed to the Security Council, they will very likely be turned down, and will respond by saying: "I told you we were victims. I told you the West is racist," and so on. It refuels the same sad identity.
The irony and the tragedy of all this is that it keeps these groups in a bubble where they never encounter or deal with the truth. This becomes a second oppression for all these groups. They have been oppressed once, now they are free and yet they create a poetic truth that then oppresses them all over again.
How are you going to have good faith if you are raised being told that the society in which you are trying to compete is against you, is racist? It is always the Arab-Palestinians who suffer, and will continue to suffer, because all of their energy is going into the avoidance of their situation rather than into being challenged by it and facing into it.
The strength of our argument is that it gives the Arab-Palestinians a way out. Development is the way out. The West can help you to compete. It may take a little while. But the alternative is a cycle of violence and hatred and poetic truths about constant victimhood.
The pattern of bad faith in certain places comes to embrace a kind of ethic of death. As Osama bin Laden claimed: in the West, you are all afraid of death, but we love death. Why would you love death? If you are not afraid of death then you are aggrandized; all of a sudden you are a big man. You are not a little, recently freed, inferior. Instead, you are somebody who manages, who conquers his world, who has power. For terrorism is power, the power of the gun. This poetic truth leads to a terrible, inconceivable fascination with death and violence and guns and bombs. It consumes a whole part of the world every single day – rather than the boring things that good faith requires, like going to school, raising your children, inventing software for instance, making money.
This is the way the narrative must be retold.
Comments:Reframing the terms of debate and reversing the image of Palestinians as victims
Reader comment on: The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood
Submitted by Jeffrey Reiss, Dec 31, 2011 19:30
Arab-Palestinians as victims: a pedestrian steps in front of an oncoming vehicle, is struck, and apparently injured. Witnesses to the incident step forward and report what they saw: the pedestrian/accident victim deliberately stepped into the roadway into the path of the oncoming vehicle, the driver tried to stop and veer away from the pedestrian/victim. The pedestrian not only didn't jump back but thrust himself further into the path of the vehicle. Why would anyone thrust themselves into harm's way? Financial reward from the insurance companies, litigation, and disability payments; sympathy from family and friends from whom he had been alienated, escape from the harsher realities of their life, all of the above.
The question posed in your article is how to counter the image of the injured party as victim. First, dramatically and publicly create a series of public events, designed to attract media attention to this victim's aberrant behavior. Examples: choose several impactful messages, such as UNRWA's unprecedented support of fictional refugees, the complicity of the West in spending (rewarding) a purported victim, the self-inflicted nature of the Arab-Palestinian victimhood, the documented account of eyewitnesses present at the time of the accident (Nakba) and the absence of rewards to genuine victims/refugees: Sudan, Darfur, Kosovo, etc. So how do you get the media's attention: point the finger at the self-inflicted injury, the financial benefit, and the witnesses to the true behavior of the purported victim; not in articles, papers, or books, but through bold action. Hunger strikes, disruptive demonstrations, street drama, flash mobs, music videos, celebrity readings of contemporaneous documents that recorded the testimony of eyewitnesses. Rather than go on any further, let me step back a moment. A war of propaganda has been waged against Israel for over fifty years. During that time has Israel engaged in any battle in an attempt to win the propaganda war? No. Their response has been words, letters, and statements, but not viscerally impact-ful media warfare. Only recently Israel and its supporters have upped the ante, slightly. Months upon months after an incident, the Hasbara campaign would be undertaken to counter the lies, distortions and vivid images that have been driven into the hearts, minds, and emotions of the audiences to the propaganda lies. This is war, as important as the military wars Israel has fought in the past and fights to this day. Money, weapons, troops, training, strategic planners, and more should be developed and utilized, in real time to counter the outright lies and distortions of the images distributed throughout the world by the propaganda apparatus of the Arab-Palestinians and their Arab supporters and co-conspirators.
Much of what I have written is well known to many observers. What is new is the proposal to mount a counter campaign, well-financed, well developed, and well implemented. If there is any doubt as to how important this counter-propaganda campaign really is, listen to Elie Wiesel's recent speech, in which he stated that not since 1945 has he been so concerned for the Jewish people. That is a heck of an admission from a man as powerful and dedicated as Elie Wiesel. I want to be a part of the mobilization of the forces to attack aggressively and preemptively the propaganda that spews forth from the global media on a daily basis. I look forward to hearing comments on Israel's and the Jewish peoples decades long defeat in the war of images, lies, and distortions, and who is willing to join in a vital new campaign to counter attack and defeat our self-declared enemies. The alternative is delegitimization, or worse, becoming victims ourselves.
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