“It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.”

—President Barack Obama, statement on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, November 4, 2009

The assumption represented by the fresh statement by President Obama on Iran is that all people and peoples are the same: at heart, all people and peoples basically want the same things, basically understand the world in the same way, basically are prepared to come to terms in the same way as everyone else. This is particularly clear in the assertion that what the people of Iran seek is “universal rights.” Such a culture-free world as envisioned in this statement would make communication and agreement a lot easier. The reality, however, is that cultures do differ, and that people and peoples do not see life and existence the same way, and may disagree on goals. Iranian regime goals of Islamic and Shia domination are not secret; these are the explicit raison d’etre of the regime, not to be negotiated away to build “confidence” and a “more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.”

Similarly this statement appears to assume that there are not real conflicts of interest between countries, or between the regimes running those countries. In this view, disagreements are basically misunderstandings, which, with good will and open communication, can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. But power, control, and honor are gained and held only at the expense of other parties. There are winners and losers. Regimes wishing to improve their positions cannot do so by compromising with other parties. Furthermore, it is notoriously necessary in Middle Eastern despotic regimes to control the populace through confrontations with external enemies, real, imagined, or manufactured. Improving relationships with identified “enemies” is not in their interests and not on their agendas.

Finally, what good does it do to acknowledge the “powerful calls for justice” of the Iranian people when you are about to throw them under the bus by trying to make deals with the regime that is shooting them down in the street, torturing them in prisons, and executing them?

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

From Meir Litvak and Esther Webman

From Empathy to Denial explores patterns of continuity and change in the representation of the Holocaust in the Arab world since the end of the Second World War up to the early 21st century. It is the first scholarly, comprehensive attempt to examine and analyze the evolvement and characteristics of the Arab intellectual and public discourses on the Holocaust, and to explain the background and causes of their development.

We employ a wide array of primary Arabic-language sources such as memoirs, historical texts, newspapers and internet websites, and pursue an historical approach, combined with interdisciplinary methods of discourse analysis, social psychology and Holocaust studies. However, in view of the vast scope of sources, we focus on the leading cultural and political centers that produce the discourse: Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian-Jordanian arena, with occasional references to other countries.

The book was born when both of us, after working separately for several years on the spread of Western anti-Semitic ideas in the Muslim world, felt that the Holocaust had become a prominent issue in Arab political and intellectual discourse. Surprisingly, no serious scholarly research, aside from few casual references, had been done on this topic, so we decided to join forces. As we proceeded, we realized just how wide the subject was. References to the Holocaust are incorporated in different contexts and a wide array of publications of all Arab political and ideological trends. In addition to newspapers articles and books dealing directly with Holocaust-related issues, such as the German reparations to Israel, we often had to peruse whole books and dozens of magazine issues to find one significant relevant passage.

Originally, we intended to build the book thematically, ranging from denial to justification through equation of Zionism with Nazism, the charge of Zionist-Nazi collaboration in the extermination of the Jews, and Arab perceptions of Nazi Germany. But we soon realized the need to further contextualize the thematic analysis by including studies of major cases which were instrumental in the evolution of Arab Holocaust discourse.

The first one deals with the formative years of 1945-48, which presaged all the themes that have typified the discourse ever since. The second concerns the responses to the 1952 German-Israeli reparation agreement; the third analyzes the Eichmann affair in the early 1960s; the fourth deals with the Arab reactions to changing Catholic attitudes toward the Jews, prompted by the Vatican II Council. The two final chapters deal with the effect of Holocaust terminology and discourse on the Palestinian narrative of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, and with the emergence of a new approach towards the Holocaust in the wake of the peace process in the early 1990s—an approach favoring revision of the traditional Arab perception and unequivocal acknowledgment of the suffering of the Jews.

From the vast number of scattered references to the Holocaust, we had to select the most important and recurring ones, relying on our personal judgment. There is a subjective dimension in every historical study; no methodology can guarantee an entirely neutral, objective or transparent account of events. We are keenly aware of the pitfalls, as Jews and Israelis re-presenting the representation of the Holocaust in the Arab world. We have tried to maintain a dispassionate approach, enabling our sources to speak for themselves. Only in a few cases, where we thought that the lay reader might be misled by the distortion of historical evidence, have we supplemented those sources with scholarly studies that present a more accurate account of history.

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Understanding the reasons why Americans are more willing to wage wars than Europeans is of historical interest, but not only. It has been asserted, for example, that Americans were willing to wage war against Saddam Hussein because of the manipulation of the American political system by a lobby that was more loyal to Israel than it was to the United States. It has also been speculated that after the latest Iraq war, the American public will become more like Europeans, and less likely to employ war abroad.

Bob Kagan has argued that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. Yes, but why? In my article in The American Interest, “Blood Brothers” (sorry, editor’s choice), I discuss how the large immigration to British North America from the English-Scotch border area, and the subsequent endemic and brutal warfare against the North American Indians, created a political culture in the United States in which failures to respond violently to challenges were seen as the mark of weakness that would lead to predation against the weakling, and in which willingness to fight was part of the duties of a citizen. We are a warlike people. We fought in Iraq because we rise, violently, to violent challenges, and we will remain a warlike people for the foreseeable future.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Islamic Republic of Iran are two of the trickiest countries with which the United States now has to deal. I’ll begin by covering two commonly discussed points of comparison and then turn to what I think are as important, the differences, before concluding with a brief look at Sino-Iranian relations and a question for U.S. policy makers. As a preview, I will argue that Iran and China, notwithstanding their distinctive strategic approaches and very different levels of power, have overlapping interests and are likely increasingly to cooperate in ways that create challenges for the United States. This is because China is seeking to expand its “international mobilization capacity” and Iran is disposed to work with external actors to enhance its perceived strength.

Perhaps the most obvious point of comparison between China and Iran is that both are revolutionary regimes, although one is Shi’ite and the other began as Maoist and remains nominally Communist. A classical political science approach would suggest that we examine the two from a generational perspective. Iran, therefore, would be in the same category of “revolutionary regime” as China, but just behind the PRC, or, if you will, younger in terms of its stage in a revolutionary regime cycle, only having emerged or been born in 1979. In China’s case, there was huge tumult, from the end of the Civil War in 1949 through the Korean War and Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, before Deng initiated the Reform and Opening period and welcomed trade and investment from the West. If the revolutionary regime perspective were illuminating, then, we could expect a kind of “calming down” effect, as a young Iranian revolutionary regime transitions into a more bureaucratized adolescence or even middle age.

This is connected with another common line of comparison that argues that in both the case of China and the case of Iran, engagement is the wisest course for the United States. Through engagement, it is argued, we can hasten the day when both powers act as “responsible stakeholders,” socializing the regimes through our interactions with them.

Would it be best for us to engage? Is Iran’s period of “calming down” just around the corner? Both perspectives are problematic. At the very least, proceeding on either basis should be done with an understanding of the very real, important differences between the Iranian and Chinese strategic traditions, and between the current geopolitical positions of Iran and China.

The differences between the Chinese and Iranian strategic traditions flow from the internal logics of their respective regimes—internal logics that seem to have staying power. To be sure, the leaders of both states share an overriding concern with domestic stability and the maintenance of their own authority. Both traditions also feature classic texts—the Sunzi Bingfa and other texts dating back to the Warring States period in China’s case, and medieval mirrors for princes in the Iranian case—that prescribe indirect approaches to conflict. These texts and the strategic traditions they reflect place a common emphasis on information, managing perceptions, and deception. Finally, both the Chinese and Iranian regimes may be characterized as legitimacy-deficient by comparison with Western liberal representative governments.

Nonetheless, important differences should not be overlooked. China’s strategic tradition is based on the perspectives of Daoism, bureaucratic Confucianism, the Mandate of Heaven, and Marxism, all of which point to a need to monitor global trends and try to be in synch with them. What stage of history are we in? or what is the trend of the time? The tradition teaches that when a regime appears to be out of step, seizing the initiative and acting boldly at such a decisive moment can not only head off disaster but guarantee victory. Therefore, China has often seen fit to initiate war, typically through surprise attacks. The Harvard political scientist Iain Johnston has pointed out that given China’s place in the international system, the PRC was especially likely to be involved in militarized interstate disputes in the latter half of the twentieth century. So there is an element of insecurity that leads China to be war-prone from our point of view. But, at the same time, compared with Iran, China has more ingrained institutions or trust among elites. A set of families qualified by wealth or scholarship or local status in a particular region form a fairly stable class of power-brokers invested in the maintenance of the current regime.

By comparison, the Iranian strategic outlook looks at once more mistrustful and more superstitious, and this inclines Tehran to rely on third-party actors or proxy forces to implement its strategic agenda. Like China’s, this agenda is founded on the need for regime survival, but what is interesting is what is considered necessary to ensure the regime and the measures that are deemed appropriate to take to that end.

Reflect briefly on recent Iranian history. Regimes came and went with some alacrity in the last century, and outside powers had a hand in their rise and fall. For instance, Reza Khan, the Shah’s father, ascended quickly but was then pushed aside by the British, who backed his son, the Shah, before he was overthrown by his own prime minister, Mossadegh. And then we played a role in ousting Mossadegh, only for our choice to be overthrown by Khomeini, in part, it was argued, because we failed to show enough support for him.

Iran’s salient historical experiences center on intervention by other powers and the upheaval that this has provoked—not only in recent decades but also longer ago, from the conquests by Arab and Turkic tribes to wars with Europeans and Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, other countries have suffered external intervention in their internal affairs (as the Chinese would say), and been subject to Western colonialism. But in Iran’s case, these experiences proved especially resonant because they overlay much deeper, older Zoroastrian Persian and Shiite traditions of crediting unseen forces with agency and efficacy in earthly political matters.

Iran has its own history of not only blaming outside powers but also of entrusting proxies, or third-party forces, and working through them to achieve strategic aims. The regime can take credit, and benefit from plausible deniability in the event of failure, if enemies are attacked by third-party groups. And operating this way makes sense in light of the generally paranoid state of the leadership. Why are the leaders chronically concerned? It’s not just because some unseen celestial force could act to eliminate them. But, to modify the old saying, even paranoids have earthly enemies. In all the above cases of regime change with foreign involvement, local actors conspired or cooperated with the external powers. There is a chronic domestic loyalty problem in Iran.

Why might this be the case? As the economist Homa Katouzian has pointed out, Iran does not have a tradition of the rule of law or of any other stable institutional infrastructure within which stable classes are formed and individuals can engage in repeated interactions that create reputations, which require maintenance, so that honesty is rewarded. Therefore, alliances and power are fragile. Infighting prevails, as was demonstrated in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, and it is no accident that in Iranian literature, one’s closest relatives can cause the most damage through their betrayals. Accordingly, the tradition prescribes deception, the magnification of capabilities to create an appearance of strength, while preempting conspiracies and operating through third parties wherever possible. The expectation that others will deceive and conspire, meanwhile, reinforces the belief that political ascendancy is very fragile.

Given the relative fragility and insecurity of the Iranian regime, perhaps the most important China-Iran question for American policy makers to consider is how Iran figures in China’s calculus. Beijing, as a measurer of trends and an aspirant to superpower status, would like to improve what it calls its “international mobilization capacity,” according to the writings of senior Chinese Communist Party intellectuals. Given energy considerations, the Middle East is a region in which China has been seeking increased influence. The PRC has a history of supplying arms (missiles) and other kinds of technology to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, a way of improving ties, even rendering these states dependent on relations with China, which, in turn, depends on their energy supplies. The logic of my argument is that China might also aid Iran with its internal security. All of which suggests a final question for consideration: If we already speculate that nuclear weapons will embolden Iran and increase its coercive power, what ought we to expect from a nuclear Iran in receipt of Chinese aid and support?

Jacqueline Newmyer delivered these remarks at a symposium on “Iran: Threat, Challenge, or Opportunity?” convened by MESH at Harvard University on April 30.

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It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a Jewish plot. Egyptian and Syrian state media have turned the Protocols into television series, trying to modernize the plot and bringing it forward into the 20th century.

Iranian TV has beaten them hands down with “Harry Potter and the Ziono-Hollywoodist Conspiracy.” (If you cannot view the clip embedded above, click here.) J.K. Rowling, that English (and no doubt, fully Aryan) rose, as avatar of the globe-encircling Jewish kraken? Yes, though the evidence is a bit disjointed as the clip unfolds on YouTube. The basic visual argument is hardly as compelling as the original Protocols which, after all, have real-life Jews who have real faces and names, working out complicated plans to conquer the world and pollute the race. You only get Harry and his buddies and professors flitting in and out of the picture while the voice-over proclaims a story line that actually has nothing to do with Messrs. Voldemort and Dumbledore.

It is “Witchcraft and Brainwashing” that spreads the “evil essence of Zionism.” This is how the logic apparently works: Since Harry Potter movies are all about W ‘n’ B, they are a Zionist tool. Along with “devil worship,” W ‘n’ B will corrupt “innocent children and youth” around the world. Why is this a Zionist tool? Because witchcraft was invented by the “rabbis of ancient Egypt.” Now we get a few seconds from the Order of the Phoenix even though it does not contain witchcraft-mongering rabbis. But wait. Aren’t those longbearded faculty at Hogwarts kind of Jewish-looking? Didn’t we see Jewish symbols in every Harry Potter movie? I swear, the kids were playing with dreidels in The Philosopher’s Stone. And when they assembled for a meal in The Order of the Phoenix, they were actually celebrating Passover. You thought the matzohs were crackers, eh? Whenever the kids joust and fight, they are actually preparing for the Last Battle that will do in or enslave all the Muslims.

As we hop along this warped path of Iranian TV logic, we also learn that the world faces a “cultural crusaders’ war” that is more powerful than any military assault the West has engineered in, say, Afghanistan and Iraq. How will the Jews attain world domination? By hastening Armageddon, the “End of Days,” which will deliver a kind of Jewish endsieg, the Nazi term for “final victory.”

What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Well, because in the next volume, Iranian TV intones, he finally wants to face down Voldemort. That will be the mother of all battles, to coin a phrase—a secret metaphor (and call to arms) for Armageddon.

Personally, I find this insulting to the Jews. Previously, the Iranian propaganda line painted the “Little Satan” as mighty regional superpower. Now, this TV clip puts down Israel/Jewry as a bunch of losers who no longer have the will and wherewithal to subjugate the Muslims directly and by force of arms. Now, they have to rely on a bunch of kids—on Harry and Hermione—to execute their evil designs.

What has the Jewish Conspiracy come to? This member in good standing feels so dissed that I will enroll in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the fall to learn how to turn Mr. Ahmadinejad into a toad.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

In Israel, there is a political lobby group called “Peace Now,” as if peace were a circumstance that could be brought into being by the political will of one party. The same sentiment was expressed, somewhat less arrogantly, by Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when he famously (or infamously) said that Israelis were tired of fighting and beating their Arab neighbors. The assumption appears to be that peace is normal and war is anomalous, and thus if war is present, someone must be doing something wrong.

But the historical and ethnographic evidence suggests that it is peace that is anomalous, and war that is normal. Even desiring peace, as opposed to desiring victory, is anomalous.

Nothing is more normal in tribal life than hostile attack against one’s neighbors. In fact, usually there was a normative graded scale of conflict according to distance: those closest to one were fought with more restrictions, and those more distant fought more freely. For example, among the Nuer of the southern Sudan, within settlements men fought with only clubs; between settlements men fought with spears, but did not kill women or burn housing, and Nuer could not be taken as slaves; outside of the Nuer, fighting the Dinka, not only were the men fought to the death, but the very young and elderly were murdered and settlements were burned, with youths and nubile females taken as slaves. The same was true among the Bedouin: in raiding among the camel-herding tribes, camel herds were taken, men were fought, but women were not interfered with, and families were left a few milch camels to support their subsistence needs (William Irons, “Livestock Raiding among Pastoralists”). But in raids among non-tribal peoples, no such provisions were made, and women and men were taken as slaves, to provide household labor and sexual services.

In tribes, all men are warriors, a few ritual specialists excepted. Responsibility for social control and defense is diffused throughout the group. Each man must hone his fighting skills and be ready to fight, whether against neighboring groups, other tribes, or more distant peoples. It is common that rights of passage for young men involve fighting and returning with a trophy. Raiding between tribes for livestock and other valuables is a constant sport and means of production. We have to keep in mind that in labor-intensive subsistence economies, under constant threat from adverse environmental cycles, increased production, even reliably maintained production, is arduous and chancy. By far the easiest and most exhilarating (if not the least dangerous) way to increase income is by predatory raiding of what others have sweated to produce. Among Bedouin, raiding and warfare were endemic. Furthermore, prestige rested upon success in raiding and generosity in distributing the captured camels among one’s kinsmen.

Emir Nuri Sha’alan of the Rwala Bedouin produced, through a long series of multiple marriages, thirty-nine sons. Of these, thirty-seven died violently, mostly in raids, seeking fame and fortune before they married, and the thirty-eighth was killed after he married but before he had children. “The [camel] economy was booming,” wrote William Lancaster, “the inner desert was still inviolate and raiding and warfare extremely bloody.” The Hamawand Kurds are described as “adapting their whole society to an economy based on war and looting.” Charles Lindholm has described the “continuous and fruitless struggles for power” characteristic of segmentary tribal societies, which in some cases extended to conquering and ruling settled societies.

Among the Baluch of the Sarhad region of Iranian Baluchistan, until 1935 when the tribe fell under the control of the Iranian crown, raiding of Persian caravans and villages was not only common, but regularly organized on a tribal basis, with raids twice a year led by the Sardar, chief, in addition to raids initiated on a more spontaneous basis anytime during the year by any tribesmen who cared to undertake the venture. Livestock, grain stores, carpets, and other valuables were seized, as well as captives to be kept as agricultural slaves, or married (with no bridewealth required), or to be sold. When I did my ethnographic field research among the Yarahmadzai Baluch, the matriarch of the Dadolzai lineage was a woman who had been captured forty years earlier from a Persian village by a fourteen-year-old raider, now long her husband. If anything, the Yomut Turkmen of northeastern Iran were even more assiduous raiders. They viewed the racially distinct Persians as free game to be captured at will and sold into slavery at markets in Central Asia. When not slave-raiding in Persian villages, the Turkmen preyed on Persian caravans. At the same time, they also pursued intratribal feuds and intertribal wars among the several Yomut tribes.

If tribes are notoriously bellicose, can the same be said for other forms of societal organization? Hunters and gatherers have come to have a reputation for peacefulness. After all, they live off of the plenty of the land and have no possessions to speak of; what would they have to fight about? And yet fight they do. A worldwide ethnographic survey indicates that 64 percent of hunters and gatherers had warfare at least every two years, while 26 percent had warfare less often; only 10 percent were described as warring rarely or not at all. Even among the peaceful 10 percent, homicides, executions, and vendettas were common, at a much higher level than in industrial societies. Agrarian societies usually produce sufficient goods for a surplus to be skimmed off by the dominating clergy and military, who use their powers primarily to control the populace. But these are static societies, and increase of riches requires expansion, commonly territorial and military. For the military elite and their priestly allies, conquest and empire bring new recruits and new dependents, new glory and new wealth. Once again, war provided the means that production did not.

Only in the 17th century, with the development of science and technology, was a dynamic of ever-increasing production initiated. For the first time, in the increasingly industrial societies, riches did not depend upon expropriating wealth from others. The military became less dominant, and more under the control of civil authorities. Fewer people were involved in the military, and non-military virtues came to the fore. Industrial societies internally were and are the most peaceful in history, with stunningly low rates of physical conflict and intentional death. And yet, wars for expansion continued, for glory and for wealth, success enabled by industrial capabilities. No amount of wealth attained is, it appears, ever sufficient. And glory, status, and honor, while universally desired, must be, by their natures, differentially distributed and thus inevitably scarce and awarded only to the most successful.

The Middle East, not yet industrial and still to a degree tribal, enjoys neither dynamic production nor a demilitarized public. Governments tend to be predatory and individuals’ security rests largely with kinship groups. Such groups contest for status conceived as honor, as well as for economic resources and benefits. Governments look beyond their borders for expansion, as well as for enemies to frighten their “citizens” into solidarity and support. In such societies, when a gain appears possible, it is normal to engage in armed conflict. It is only when such a gain appears undeniably impossible that a temporary period of peace seems attractive.

As members of industrial, civil societies, we are ill-prepared to appreciate the nature of non-industrial societies. Each man and woman makes the world in his and her own image. It is normal for us to universalize our particular cultural norms and expectations to the world at large and all peoples in it. But such projection is unavoidably misleading, and acting on our assumptions guarantees major contusions as we bump into reality as constructed by the “other.” Anyone who convinces himself that he must have peace at all costs, probably does not understand what “all costs” means, and shall end up paying on the other’s terms. A “solution” at any cost to conflict may well be considerably worse than the conflict itself. If we feel compelled to pursue peace, we might more realistically call our group “Peace, If Possible,” and consider how to generate the conditions necessary, beyond our hopes, both for the establishment and maintenance of a peace, if inevitably only a temporary one. The main condition for peace, I would suggest, is that gain from conflict appears to one’s opponents undeniably impossible

Illustration: Georges Washington, “Retour d’une razzia: Oued R’hir, Afrique,” 1876. The painting depicts a raiding party returning home to the walled city of Oued Rhiou, located between Algiers and Oran.

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There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second half of the 20th century.

That lesson is “culture matters.” If we want to understand people, to grasp what people are doing and why they do it, we have to examine their own perspective. As Geertz said, we have to see things “from the natives’ point of view,” whether the natives are from Brooklyn or Calgary, Palermo or Bucharest, Baghdad or Quetta.

The reason that we must understand things “from the natives’ point of view” is that people act according to how they perceive the world; according to what they value, what they disdain; and according to what they hope for, and what they fear. If we want to understand how people will act, we must understand the world from their perspective.

If we want to engage with people, to influence their actions and to win them over, to bring them into a counter-insurgency effort, to engage in economic exchange, to encourage development, to block their initiatives, or to fight them, we must understand why and how they act as they do. And thus we must know how they see the world.

When I say that we must grasp the natives’ point of view, I am not saying that people are the prisoners of the norms and rules of their society, hemmed in by the “cake of custom.” Cultural anthropology has moved beyond such an overly normative view of mankind. Rather, following the lead of Max Weber, and latterly, Fredrik Barth, we understand that people are goal-oriented, making decisions, choosing one alternative over another in order to advance their own goals. In other words, everyone, everywhere, acts strategically, at least in part. An anthropological approach to “strategic studies” is to study the strategies of people and peoples in the world as they pursue their goals. We had better know the strategies of other folks before we formulate our own.

Of course, culture, ways of understanding and evaluating the world, or, once again, as Geertz says, culture as “models of” the world, and “models for” action in the world, is not the only thing in the world. People may not just pursue their own visions, but must cope with the constraints of institutional limitations. British social anthropologists have stressed the ways in which societal institutions—such as chief, markets, descent groups, exogamous marriage patterns, ancestor worship, etc.—are constrained by their interconnection with each other. One consequence of which is that some institutions or patterns of action are incompatible. For example, sharing and mutual welfare in a large kin group, on the one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other hand, tend to be in conflict.

As well, people everywhere must cope with other populations and cultures, and their goals and strategies. Peoples and cultures often intrude upon one another, interfere with one another, and consequently every group must have a “foreign policy.” Everyone is constrained one way or another by other peoples and other cultures.

And, of course, people, whatever their culture, must cope with the challenges and constraints of their physical and biological environments. Culture, to some degree, incorporates strategies for dealing with the environment, to adapting to the environment while pursuing their other goals.

Once we have some idea of others’ cultures and the bases of their strategies, we are in a strong position to consider our own. Recently I received an inquiry from an Army major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Currently he is a graduate student at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School , and was assigned my book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, for review. In that book, I stress the tribal foundation of Arab culture, and discuss its implications for state formation.

One question that this major raised was what I thought, in the light of my analysis, of the U.S. Army’s counter-insurgency manual’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government.

In the light of my analysis—that there were no legitimate governments in the Middle East, and that in many regions, including urban areas, only tribal or sect-based organization was regarded as legitimate by the local population—I replied that the counter-insurgency handbook’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government was a rationalization meant to justify our intervention in our own eyes according to our own values.

The emphasis on a legitimate government might not be a rational response to our practical interests in a particular region. For example, if we want to counter an insurgency, we might need to collaborate with non-governmental, even anti-governmental organizations, such as tribes. This is what happened in al-Anbar province of Iraq, where the U.S. Army gave support to the Sunni tribes when they rebelled against the impositions of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in turn the Sunni tribes gave the Americans support as the Americans pursued Al Qaeda. If our interests and ambitions are to block an anti-American or anti-Western initiative, we might be wise to be satisfied with that result, once achieved, and allow local folks to carry on according their vision, rather than try to impose ours.

Another way to put this is that our culture matters in how we see the world. In trying to act upon the world, we must consider whether and to what extent our interests and desires coincide, or whether our interests are more limited than our desires. This question underlies some of the disagreements between foreign policy “idealists” and “realists.”

The al-Anbar case is an interesting one for the general argument I am presenting here. No one needed a good cultural anthropologist more than Al Qaeda in Iraq. Mostly non-Iraqis, the Al Qaeda fighters and functionaries pushed around local Iraqis, not realizing or appreciating that they were members of tribes, or the significance of that fact. They did not consider how the local Iraqis would receive their impositions, or understand that the Iraqi tribesmen had the capability to mobilize militarily in support of their own autonomy and self-determination. As a result, local Iraqi tribesmen rebelled against Al Qaeda, fought them, and turned for the first time to ally with the Americans. If Al Qaeda had had a good cultural analysis of al-Anbar, they might have acted with more restraint and respect, and might have advanced their cause rather than being crushed, as they have been.

In sum, one contribution of cultural anthropology to strategic studies is to urge pre-strategic studies of peoples’ presuppositions, values, goals, and strategies—those of other peoples and those of our own—before moving to formulating strategies to act on the world. For to act effectively in the world requires that we know our own biases and that we know other people’s trajectories.

Philip Carl Salzman made these remarks to a working session on strategic studies and the disciplines, convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.

That Israel’s leadership can’t figure out what to do when faced with the challenge of ransoming kidnapped Jews is excusable. That much of that leadership seems to be ignorant of the fact that Jews have given two thousand years of thought to exactly that problem, however, isn’t.

A few weeks ago, in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers taken captive by Hezbollah two years earlier, Israel released to that organization five prisoners, including one, Samir Quntar, who stands out for his brutality in the annals of terrorism against Israelis. Of all Arabs captured by Israel with “blood on their hands,” this one was one of the most despised. Yet, in order to obtain the bodies of the Israelis taken captive by Hezbollah, Israel released Quntar and the four others.

Israel engaged in this prisoner release as part of its tradition of doing everything possible to get Israeli soldiers out of the hands of Israel’s enemies—and in response to pressure, utterly understandable, from the families of the kidnapped soldiers and from many other Israelis. But Palestinian leaders immediately announced that Israel’s willingness to give up prisoners in order to obtain even the bodies of kidnapped Israelis showed that kidnapping is a tactic that works, and that should be used again. For example, Abu Mujahid, a spokesman for the umbrella terror group Popular Resistance Committees, said that the exchange “proves that kidnapping soldiers will continue to be the most efficient, favored and ideal way to release Palestinian prisoners, particularly those defined by the enemy as having blood on their hands.” In a valuable post on this site, Robert O. Freedman, reflecting the views of many in Israel, sharply questioned the wisdom of Quntar’s release.

So the psychological insight that such exchanges could encourage more kidnappings did surface in Israel’s debate. But it is hardly new. Indeed, it’s an insight that has been discussed at length by Jews since Roman times. And it has been discussed not for theoretical reasons but because paying ransoms for kidnapped Jews has punctuated the experience of the Jews throughout that long period.

The problem of paying ransom for Jewish captives was raised in the Mishnah some 2,000 years ago, and was frequently discussed in the Rabbinic literature in the centuries that followed. In the Middle Ages, families and communities often paid enormous sums, sometimes impoverishing themselves, in order to ransom kidnapped Jews. This occurred throughout Europe but also in Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. The Cairo Genizah—a collection of some 200,000 documents found in the 19th century in a Cairo synagogue that included materials from as far back as the 9th century CE—includes some ransom receipts.

One of the most famous cases emphasizing the danger of rewarding kidnapping involved Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, known as the Maharam of Rothenburg, who lived in 13th-century Germany. The Maharam was held captive by Emperor Rudolf of Germany, who demanded a large ransom from the Jewish community for his release. According to various sources, the Maharam forbade his fellow Jews from paying it, since he feared that such a payment would encourage further kidnappings. He spent seven years as a prisoner, and died in captivity.

The purpose of this brief excursion into Jewish law and history is to point out that this dilemma has been discussed extensively for at least twenty centuries by Jews throughout the world. The circumstances have been different: the old kidnappers sought money rather than the humiliation and ultimately the destruction of a Jewish state. And in Europe and elsewhere the Jews had no army, whereas in modern Israel they do. But the psychological dilemma—the problem that ransoming kidnapped prisoners is likely to encourage more kidnappings—is similar.

What’s disheartening is that so many Israeli leaders, both civilian and military, seem ignorant of the long experience of the Jews in trying to cope with this dilemma. Now, following the Quntar exchange, the debate within Israeli society has become more focused than ever before. One hopes that Israeli leaders will take this debate seriously, and develop a policy that will help the country deal with the kidnappings that are surely yet to come. They could do worse than take Jewish history, and even traditional Jewish texts, as their point of departure.

Of course, antisemitism cannot be amusing. How could it be? This darkest of creeds has spawned million-fold death, not to speak of its less murderous forms like discrimination, persecution and expulsion.

But here is a rare instance that might bring at least a bittersweet smile to your face. Then, further below, we’ll get serious again.

Let’s listen to Captain Sayyed Shahada, a member of the Egyptian Unique Mustache Association, who opined as follows on Egyptian TV on July 11, 2008 (the clip may be viewed at the end of this post):

I respect the mustache of this Hitler, because he humiliated the most despicable sect in the world. He subdued the people who subdued the whole world—him with his ‘11′ mustache.… The generation of this Hitler… When I was little, my father, may he rest in peace, grew that kind of mustache, and so did all his classmates. They all had this ‘11′ mustache. That was in the days of Hitler.

Funny, isn’t it? Here are some salt-of-the-earth Egyptians who take pride in sporting “unique” mustaches and who have formed a club to promote this harmless pastime. Yet another little beacon of “civil society” which we cherish so much, isn’t it?

But the problem in the Arab Middle East is a civil society that is by no means civil. Indeed, as this Egyptian example shows (add Jordan), there is an inverse correlation between governmental policy and societal attitudes. For the government, it has been peace with Israel for almost 30 years. Down below, it is deeply rooted and pervasive antisemitism.

Aren’t we exaggerating a bit? No, and this is why these mustachioed Egyptians deliver such an interesting example. What could—normally—be farther away from a facial hair artist’s mind than Jews? Who would worry about this “despicable sect” while clipping his bristles?

Well, Captain Shahada does, and if he does, who does not? Classical European antisemitism—blood libel, world domination and all—has migrated to the Arab Middle East. Interestingly, it got there way before the founding of Israel, let alone the taking of the West Bank. And so did the admiration of Adolf Hitler, as the good captain recalls.

And so this semi-funny little story reveals a truth that is much larger than Hitler’s No. 11 mustache. Antisemitism, like any “anti-ism,” is not about its object (the Jews), but about the obsession in the anti-ist’s head. An obsession, your shrink will tell you, is the compulsive recurrence of images and ideas over which you have no control. The obsession consumes you, and it spreads relentlessly—all the way to mustaches, wax and clippers.

Think stubble and you think Hitler, Jews and world domination.

The Israelis have vacated Gaza, they might yet pull out of the West Bank, but how will they, qua Jews, ever manage to escape from the obsession-filled mind of Captain Shahada and millions of his kind?

It will be easier to re-divide Jerusalem than to remove this deepest of “root causes” from the collective psyche of Israel’s neighborhood.

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If you do not see an embedded clip, click here.

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After modest initiatives in recent days by the Lebanese government to restrict the independent operations of Hezbollah, fighters of Hezbollah and Amal flooded into the streets of west Beirut, attacked and dispersed government fighters, set up road blocks, and occupied government and media offices. The Druze and Christian militias did not act, and the Sunni militia limited itself to minor engagement. The Lebanese Army remained on the sidelines, respecting “neutrality.”

On May 8, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah gave a speech in which he said: “…whoever declares, and starts, war against us, be it a mother, a father, or a brother—we have a right to counter him and defend our rights, our weapons, our existence, and our resistance.” The other militias take the same view. The overall pattern is a set of quasi- or fully independent political corporations, based on identity and fierce loyalty, each armed and maintaining the right to act militarily in its own interests and those of its constituents. Each political corporation seeks dominance over the others, or, if that is not possible, a balance in which its interests and those of its constituents are not violated by the others. “National” institutions are weak, undermined by partisan loyalties and the independent corporations. Consequently, there is no overarching, inclusive loyalty, no rule of law, and no peaceful procedures for resolving basic conflicts.

How can we understand this factional pattern of institutionalized fragmentation and oppositional conflict? My suggestion is that this pattern reflects the “tribal spirit” of Arab culture, manifested in self-help corporations for defense and the advancement of interests, and for which men have a primarily obligation to engage in military action. Each man has a duty to be a warrior, and most take pleasure in the glory of it. In the view of the members of a corporation, there is no presumption of rights for members of other corporations, and there is no recognition of legitimate authority outside of the corporations and above them.

In Lebanon, of course, these corporations are primarily defined by sect—Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Druze—as are some of the corporations found in Iraq, such as Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” Shiite militia, while others are ethnic, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga. These sect- and ethnicity-defined corporation-militias are often found in Arab cities—Beirut, Bagdad, and Basra are those most recently in the news—but descent-based corporations, actual tribes, are prevalent in rural trouble spots, such as Anbar Province of Iraq, throughout Afghanistan, in the mountains and deserts of Pakistan, and in currently quiescent places, such as Libya, in both town and country. The sect-based corporations have inherited presumptions and structures from the descent-based tribes, applying them in corporations based upon a different principle of identity: religion rather than descent. The same, of course, applies to Islam in general, in its militant opposition of the dar al-Islam to the dar al-harb.

Politically stable countries in the Arab world, such as Iraq under Saddam and Syria under the Alawites, demonstrate the factional opposition at a different phase, one in which one corporation has succeeded in establishing dominance over the others, using the state as a weapon to suppress any opposition. As we have seen in Iraq, remove the successful oppressor, and factional opposition ignites with fury. All of which is highly reminiscent of the tribal wars throughout Middle Eastern and North African history.