Understanding Pryce-Jones: "A Racist Manifesto"?
HALLAJ, MUHAMMED
MUHAMMED HALLAJ Pryce-Jones's article is full of the most outlandish and historically erroneous assumptions. Understanding Pryce-Jones "A Racist Manifesto"? Anew genre of literature, best...
...The author does not need to stretch the facts to make his point if his point is that the Arabs have not been more sensible than other peoples...
...Having set the stage for his interpretation of Middle East history, Pryce-Jones moves on to his real purpose: to show why Israel is justified in avoiding making peace with the Arabs...
...fi...
...Had the Palestinians been Europeans, the question would not be necessary...
...The plight of the Palestinians is a prime example of this strange Arab affliction...
...Palestinian Jews were not interested...
...But these facts do not fit the Western/ non-Western models essential to Pryce-Joncs's thesis, so they arc consequently ignored...
...the sending of Iraqi troops twice into Jordan, which were not cases of Arab-Arab wars, but were directly related to Arab confrontation with Israel...
...Civil wars arc a common human folly...
...This is not to say that there have not been Arab-Arab wars...
...his thesis requires it...
...Not one of them1' (again he indulges his penchant For universal condemnation) can explain how a just Palestinian society can be created out of stone throwing...
...Such a state of affairs, which neither Hobbes nor any other political theorist said actually existed anywhere anytime, is finally discovered in the contemporary Arab world by Pryce-Jones...
...It took Europe centuries— punctuated with countless bloody conflicts that nearly decimated it-—before it ceased to be the dark continent...
...Unable to learn from previous experience when it "misconceived the nature and intent of Arab nationalism," assuming that Arab self-determination was a "natural and popular" demand, the West is about to make the same mistake and concede Palestinian self-determination...
...He outdoes most Westerners in Eurocentricism by saying that 'Palestinian' has become synonymous with criminal," ignoring the fact that this is an extremely isolated and rapidly vanishing point of view to which only incurable neo-anti-Semiles* still adhere...
...He gives a long list of such wars, many of which, in fact, have a great deal to do with Israel...
...Early on in the intifada, violinist Yehudi Menuhin wrote an op-ed column in The Washington Post in which he counseled Israel to end its conflict with the Palestinians by building a bi-national state in which Arabs and Jews could coexist in a common homeland...
...It is disquieting that the closer the Arabs move to making peace with Israel, the more distance Israel's friends put between Israel and the Arabs...
...Life for the Arabs is certainly that," he asserts without a quiver of self-doubt...
...In America, 100 years of "the great experiment'' collapsed when faced with the issue of slavery and gave this country the worst war of the entire 19th century...
...I recently attended a conference in Pennsylvania at which an American-Jewish leader— parroting an extreme right-wing Israeli interpretation of the intifada—declared that Palestinian parents push their children out into the streets to get shot in order to score public relations points against Israel...
...The Arabs arc doubly damned because they are neither capable of decency on their own nor capable of learning it from the West...
...Trying to understand the Arabs in terms of concepts like these is Eurocentrism...
...Perhaps he also has a problem understanding Israel...
...Smaller towns—Emuas, Yalu and Beit Nuba—where Canada Park now stands— were less fortunate and ceased to exist...
...Once upon a time, the Arabs' sin was their policy toward Israel...
...If the Arabs are the unrepentant savages they are portrayed to be, and if the Palestinians cannot be worthy neighbors to Israel, then why-are all those fools in the world trying to make peace between Israel and its neighbors...
...Pryce-Jones invents some "facts" and molds others to fit his perceptions in order to make his case...
...they were simply expelled at gunpoint...
...The rise of fascism, Nazism and Stalinist totalitarianism in this century—in our lifetime—warns against smug generalizations about Western and non-Western values...
...European monopoly on decency is simply taken as a self-evident truth...
...When the Arabs, including the Palestinians, began to veer in the direction of the two-state solution to their conflict with Israel, they found themselves the object of a relentless smear campaign that reduced their strivings to acts of vicious terrorism...
...At best, it is a piggy-back coexistence where one society rides on top of another...
...If Pryce-Jones is still unaware of this fact, he must be moving within very narrow circles indeed...
...David Pryce-Jones's new book The Closed Circle, and the miniaturized version of it in this issue of MOMENT, are contributions to this branch of dubious knowledge...
...He thinks of the Israeli occupation as "side-by-side coexistence...
...Obviously, he did not know that the PLO had made the same proposal 20 years before, and he was obviously unaware of the fact that the PLO's democratic secular state proposal is one of the main arguments Israel makes against the sincerity of the PLO's desire for peace...
...Pryce-Jones's article—and other writings like it—would be merely tasteless if they did not have political implications that make them dangerous: Making peace in the Middle East is rendered not only difficult, but actually undesirable...
...They were warned that they would be shot if they tried to return...
...But stretching the facts tends to be an affliction of those bent on defamation rather than engaged in analysis...
...Fatah rivals the Democratic Party in the United States in the diversity of its constituency...
...manifestations of decency in non-European societies are presumed to be unique Western values that non-Western peoples are either capable or incapable of emulating...
...The problem is how the Palestinians, being Arabs, can demonstrate to Pryce-Jones—to his satisfaction, of course—that they are not simply cutting off their noses to spite their own faces by wanting to be free...
...The pluralist society inherent in the democratic secular state concept has been equated in Israel with a plan to end Israel's existence, and it has been described as an idea with "genocidal implications...
...Perhaps this is an appropriate place to tell Pryce-Jones about my father...
...Another recent theory about the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Pryce-Jones adopts is that Muslim societies abhor pluralism...
...To him...
...Israel planned to raze the town and did not want the task complicated by the presence of its residents...
...The fact that Zionism was a European movement in response to European intolerance of minorities is conveniently ignored...
...Arthur Ruppin, to organize it...
...the notion seems to come naturally that there is something wrong with a people who are not happy being ruled by a Western society...
...Anew genre of literature, best described as "Why Israel should not make peace with the Arabs," is emerging and rapidly growing into a distinctive branch of "knowledge...
...This fails to make a dent in Pryce-Joncs's self-righteousness...
...alestinians, in the face of overpowering adversity, have created one of the most highly educated societies in the world today...
...And Fatah rivals the Democratic Party in the United States, or surpasses it, in the diversity of its constituency...
...It was not war nor the fear of death (tbo human to be shared by Arabs) that caused Palestinians to flee in 1967, it was "something in their culture...
...In fact, the PLO exists because a large majority of the Palestinians— and not just one—have been able to transcend the "tribal-religious" identity...
...Pryce-Jones is more Eurocentric than he realizes...
...The thesis, in its assumptions and conclusions, is a racist manifesto that attributes to the Arabs an inherent "national character" iliat is derogatory and stereotypical...
...During the 1967 war, Pryce-Jones had seen how the Palestinians fled in a mass exodus across the River Jordan...
...The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not the tribal following of George Habash, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not a Nayef Hawatmeh sect...
...Not one Palestinian," he says, "has so far broken tribal-religious identity" to acknowledge what is wrong with the PLO...
...Now, all of a sudden, these wars "owe nothing to the presence of Israel in the Middle East...
...In fact, much of the town was blown up and bulldozed before international pressure caused Israel to relent...
...He is not only angry with the Palestinians because they disrupted "pluralist links so painfully built up since 1967," but he is also fearful for their future should their rebellion against Israel succeed and they become independent...
...The Arabs, he writes, live in a world of their own "owing nothing to the structures or values of the West," such as nationalism, socialism, justice or equality "as generally understood...
...The Arabs, in Pryce-Jones's view, are prone to "self-inflicted and almost suicidal injury...
...He also makes his question sound thoughtful by reducing the intifada to stone throwing and tire burning...
...The monolithic nature of Muslim society also accounts, in this argument, for Arab intolerance of all minorities...
...Far from being synonymous with criminal, "Palestinian" is V'o-anti-Scmilism refers to ami-Arab prejudices understood by most of the world as ^victim" legitimately confronting injustice...
...Had the "side-by-side coexistence" not been messed up by the Palestinian uprising, he prophesies, "some kind of pluralistic structure might have emerged," presumably making Israel a model bi-national Arab-Jewish state...
...It has developed a following of those who, like all converts, propagate it with unthinking loyalty and aggressive zeal...
...He makes his question sound thoughtful by first ignoring the fact that the Palestinians, in the face of overpowering adversity, have created one of the most highly educated societies in the world today and a nationalist movement that is, by nearly universal admission, remarkably free, pluralistic and democratic...
...The Jews did not demand a Jewish state because they could not coexist with Muslim Arabs but because they could not live with Christian Europeans...
...One might have thought we had heard the last of that kind of thinking, but Pryce-Jones's lament about the "tragedy of the intifada" indicates that the demise of this point of view has been grossly exaggerated...
...They did not see the point because their experience, living in Arab society, was entirely different...
...There has not been a national liberation struggle in this century that has not been depicted as a death wish by the guardians of the colonial system...
...The most outlandish, and historically erroneous, assumption underlying the Pryce-Jones thesis is that liberalism, democracy, rationality and other desirable attributes of civilized living are "Western" instincts alien to others...
...The fact that the most cruel forms of despotism and totalitarianism—'as , ideology and practice—have been European contributions to human relations does nothing to shake Pryce-Jones's certainty about the merits of his argument...
...Many a European society has created democratic and just nations with muskets and guillotines, but that is a different story, of course...
...Where on earth, one is tempted to ask, does the man get his insights...
...Arab life is likened to the state of toral lawlessness described for the purposes of theoretical analysis in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, in which every man is constantly at war with c\ery other man, making life for all "poor, nastv, brutish and short...
...After Qalqilia, my father's hometown, was occupied by Israel in 1967, my father and hundreds of others were loaded onto trucks, dumped near the River Jordan and told to leave...
...This notion, increasingly heard these days to counteract the image of Israel as the intransigent bully, holds that Arab opposition to Israel is a reflection of the monolithic nature of Muslim society...
...The Arabs—cursed with blood lust, as another friend of Israel recently put it—have been fighting all sorts of wars that "defy liberalism and rationality...
...So is the fact that Islam is the only monotheistic religion that accepts the adherents of the other monotheistic religions as fellow believers and people of the book...
...These include civil war in Jordan, which was pretty much a conflict over whether or not the Palestinians had the right to fight Israel...
...They fled, he tells us, because they were "in the grip of a collective response," (similar to that of lemmings, one would presume), "obeying codes of their own" (presumably different than those of European civilians fleeing war), and similar mysterious motivations of which normal human "fear was not among them...
...Some of those Arabs Pryce-Jones saw crossing the River Jordan perhaps were not motivated by fear, but neither were they obeying mysterious non-European codes of their own...
...The West, from its Eurocentrist perspective, has viewed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a national liberation movement, says Pryce-Jones...
...There has not been a rebellious indigenous society that has not been cautioned against the perils of self-government and freedom from Western suzerainty...
...Seemingly incmediable "defects" in the Arab character derive from a substandard social, cultural and u-ligious environment that dooms the Arabs id uncivilized existence...
...He univeVsalizes his own attitude that is, in fact, a deviation from the pi evailing opinion of mankind...
...If he knew more about it, he would have understood the participatory and grass-roots nature of the phenomenon, and the institutional and popular infrastructure through which Palestinian society feeds itself, heals its sick and injured, educates its young and otherwise frees itself of the mechanisms of Israeli control...
...Israel can coexist with them only at its peril...
...it is as irrational to try to understand the Arabs in terms of these concepts as it is to use human behavior as a standard for trying to understand the behavior of wild beasts...
...Pryce-Jones's lack of understanding of the Palestinian nationalist movement is appalling and only surpassed by his compulsion for sweeping generalizations...
...The Arabs have fought all sorts of wars, Pryce-Jones tells us, which "owe nothing to the presence of Israel in the Middle East...
...One wonders if he is aware that South African apartheid is also understood and actually defined by its perpetrators as "side-by-side coexistence...
...and also "the death-agony" of Lebanon which, when it suits Israel's friends, is depicted as part of the Palestinian war on Israel...
...His is a revival of the 19th-century myth about "Western democracy" versus "Oriental despotism," which one might have thought had been put to rest with fascism and Nazism...
...At that time the Arabs were the principal custodian of world civilization...
...Pryce-Jones's article is simply an example of this...
...Finally, if the more accommodationist Arab policy becomes, the more viciously the Arabs are slandered and the more Israel and its friends pull back, then why bother...
...It is, indeed, grounds for indignation that the Arabs are unable to fight European-like wars that advance liberalism and democracy—such as all the wars the West has fought in Asia and Africa in the name of the "White Man's Burden" and the "Civilizing Mission," and the numerous wars Western nations have fought among themselves to glorify God and Market and other such holy causes...
...When the new Zionist organization opened its first office in Palestine in 1908, it had to import a German Jew, Dr...
...The Arabs would not accept, he wrote, but Israel should persist...
...The Arabs are pronounced inherently deficient for failing to create liberal democratic societies in their 40 years of independence...
...Pryce-Jones's grim predictions for the future of an independent Palestine are in the best tradition of colonialist thinking...
...And why are Israel and its friends seeking concessions that are bound to prove meaningless coming from a people with the attributes imputed to them...
...Those who argued that Israel should not make peace with the Arabs used to find adequate ammunition in Arab policy...
...When they made their readiness to recognize Israel explicit and when they renounced and denounced the use of terrorism, their detractors had to dig deeper in the mud...
...To save the West from another grievous error in dealing with the Arabs, Pryce-Jones iinds it convenient to violate his own rules in order to make his point...
...In the Arab world, Pryce-Jones tells us, "nothing appears too inhuman...
...Now they need character assassination to make their case, and the writing of Pryce-Jones is a malicious example of that bankruptcy...
...Condemning the intifada, as Pryce-Jones does, for having "snapped" the possibilities of pluralism betrays ignorance of both the Palestinians and Israel...
...Put succinctly, this body of literature says that the Arabs are a peculiar sub-species of humans incapable of civilized living...
...They have been more numerous than international wars and they have been a universal phenomenon and certainly not an Arab peculiarity...
...This new form of literature comes in a wide variety of formats including books, articles, lectures, official pronouncements and letters to the editors of newspapers...
...The Arabs, it was argued, do not want to recognize Israel and do not want to live with it in peace...
Vol. 14 • October 1989 • No. 6
