Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Tribal disputes

I have published an article entitled "The Middle East conflict in the context of tribal disputes" in the journal Group Decision and Negotiation, that was solicited by the editor for a special issue on Conflict Resolution. It is my thesis that "understanding and hence resolution of the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs could be better served by considering it a tribal dispute." The full article is attached, but I will give a summary of the salient points here.

The history of the conflict has three distinct phases, first a tribal conflict between Jews who were inhabiting the area when the Arabs arrived and conquered Jerusalem in 638 ce and killed and persecuted the Jews almost out of existence, but not quite. Then there was the modern conflict that involved the new State of Israel and many surrounding Arab States (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) that then expanded to become part of the Cold War between the USA and USSR. Finally, after the 6 Day War of 1967, when the Arab armies were defeated, the conflict returned essentially to a tribal conflict between the Jews (inhabiting Israel and the West Bank) and the Palestinian Arabs.

I contend that the Jews are a "tribe," which is defined as a group of people with common cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, historical and/or geographical ties. It is important to note that not all of these factors are required for a tribe to be defined or self-defined, but at least several of them are required. For example, the Jews obviously do not have a linguistic (not all Jews speak Hebrew) and/or geographical commonality. But, there are enough factors (ethnic, cultural, religious) to constitute a common tribal identification, as well as the historical and geographical origins. It is the drive by the tribe to conquer and settle its own territory that leads to the formation of the nation-state. Europe is a good example of this, with a patchwork of tribal states, Germany, France, Hungary, Romania, Spain, and the history of the 20th century was mainly a chronicle of the competition of these tribes for dominance. Artificial states incorporating large ethnic minorities often do not work, such as Yugoslavia or the USSR.

Are the Palestinians a "tribe"? Even if they were "invented" by the Arabs as a counter to the formation of the Jewish State of Israel, and even if they only "imagine" themselves as a tribe, that is enough to provide them with the necessary self-definition as a tribe. They do have a distinct recent history and geographical distribution compared to the surrounding Arabs, with whom they share common linguistic, religious and cultural affiliations. One tribal aspect of the Palestinians is that they have local clans that control certain towns or cities, such as the Nashashibi and Husseini in Jerusalem or the Tawil and Barghouti in Ramallah. They also have local "notables" or leaders who control the destiny of the clan. In fact, these feudal characteristics have led to the exclusion of the Palestinain "refugees' from integration into other localities and have resulted in weak and ineffective central government rule.

The US is supposed to be the antithesis of such "balkanization" because it is an immigrant country. Yet this "melting-pot" hypothesis was exploded by the watershed 1970 book "Beyond the melting-pot" by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their analysis of the ethnic (tribal) groups of New York City. However, one aspect of democracy that garners little attention is the tolerance that a dominant tribal group needs to extends to other minority groups. While Israel has mastered this aspect of tolerance (with a 10% Arab minority), the Palestinian Arabs have not. They still insist on a Jew-free (Judenrein) State of their own.

I also compare the Middle East conflict with the Irish conflict, but there is not enough space to consider this here, except to say that the idea of putting arms "beyond use" is a complete non-starter in the context of the Middle East.

The current paradigm for Middle East conflict resolution is the "two-state solution". Given the distinct tribal characteristics of the two groups vying for control of the area of Israel/Palestine, such a solution is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

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