Allergic to Tribalism: Why 'the West' Fails in the Middle East
The West must reduce its arrogance and accept that the Middle East is a tribal region. Western politicians lack the right framework to understand it, hence why the West habitually endangers it.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/embracing-tribalism-to-understand-middle-east
The so-called “international community” has swallowed so many of its own lies about Israel being a “White” colonialist enterprise — that they fail to appreciate Jews are a Middle Eastern people, not quintessential Westerners.
This misconception, along with old-fashioned Jew-hatred, is why Western leaders pressure Israel to prosecute its wars the way Western states claim they would.
This is a bad idea.
Israel has an exemplary record of winning wars. By contrast, since World War Two, the West’s approach has been to invade foreign lands, get stuck in a quagmire, run out of money, lose all political capital, retreat in shame, and then rinse and repeat in a few years when everyone has forgotten that it did not work the last time.
This is the playbook that the West has pressured Israel to follow in Gaza. Had Israel gone in harder and faster — and I acknowledge the IDF has its reasons for doing it the way it has — and sought a devastating and decisive victory, it would have been better for all parties, except Hamas.
Israel bears some responsibility. Jewish emancipation and nationalist expression will not be complete as long as Israel aspires to play by anyone’s rule book, or anyone’s values, other than its own. That is the point of Jews living in a Jewish state. Israel must not go down the West’s path of meekly abandoning its values.
Unlike post-colonial nation-states which are modern constructs that do not reflect how the region’s people think, Israel needs to act like what it is: a heavily armed ethno-religious minority tribe surrounded by other tribal cultures. Arab cultures are likewise tribal.
In the Middle East, strength equals respect. A tribe that looks after its own, fights hard for its people’s security and interests, and stands its ground at all costs, is what garners respect from other tribal groups that think similarly. Respect is what brings peace.
Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel when they begrudgingly accepted that Israel was strong and deeply committed to defeating them in war as necessary. By contrast, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Gaza, and parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) have been met with further aggression. Europe’s surrender-at-every-opportunity approach and America’s appease-at-every-chance approach are always guaranteed to fail in the Middle East.
Besides the Israel-Palestinian conflict being more about religion than territory — specifically Palestinians’ refusal to live with Jews — the West’s obsession with a two-state solution shows its lack of understanding. It rests on the odd belief that transient modern political structures are the solution in a region when people think in centuries.
While Western leaders cannot think beyond the next election, the Muslim Brotherhood, the crazed Islamist Egyptian terror group that spawned Hamas, has a 100-year plan to bring down the West. A Palestinian state is just a stepping stone on that path. It changes nothing. This 100-year plan looks to be progressing nicely, given the Islamist hijacking of Western universities, Western youth, and the surreal alliance they have formed with the now mainstream Far Left.
Jews, however, fully grasp the long game. Israelites, Judeans, and Israelis have been building, defending, losing, and regaining temples in their homeland for millennia.
A reason that the West cannot accept the Middle East’s tribal nature is because they look down on it. They see tribalism as something primitive. This reeks of colonial arrogance.
It is the year 5784 in the Hebrew calendar. The Jews have 3,700 years of civilized history. Western civilization, just out of the gates, is already falling off a precipice. Islamist mobs maraud European streets unopposed, calling for Jewish blood and death to the West.
The arrogance of Westerners thinking they know how to survive in a region better than the indigenous people is staggering. The Jews are still around. That cannot be said of the Ancient Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Crusaders, the Nazis, the British Empire, and the Soviets. I am sure I have missed quite a few.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies will go the same way. The West’s slow-motion capitulation to Islamism suggests it will be on that list, too, mainly due to unprincipled cowardice and denialism.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to tell the Jews, with our record, how we should approach surviving in a deranged neighborhood of despots, theocrats, and warlords. Israel would have to be meshugah (Hebrew for “crazy”) to listen to the advice or instruction from nations that have no understanding of the region or its peoples, and certainly do not have Israel’s best interests at heart.
Palestinians are tribal, too. Whereas Arabian power was (and still is) divided among powerful houses such as Saud and Hashemite, modern Palestinians operate the same way. Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others are tribes currently not fighting each other only because they are fighting Israel. This is one reason the so-called two-state solution is anything but obvious.
Rather than looking down on the region’s tribalism, Western leaders should seek to understand it. Consider Israel’s settlers in Judea and Samaria, and formerly in Gaza. They do not see themselves as encroaching on Arab land. They see themselves as Jews living on Jewish ancestral land and having to fend off violence as their ancestors have done for three-and-a-half millennia.
Understanding this tribalism, rather than denying it, is necessary to understand what the foundations of peace might look like. Jews living proudly on Jewish ancestral land, and Arabs living proudly on Arab ancestral land, is the principle that the world should recognize and help them achieve.
This is what underpins the Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020. The Islamic Republic of Iran used its Palestinian proxy terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to attack Israel in order to derail Israel-Saudi normalization as the next phase of these accords.
So far, the Abraham Accords have been resilient enough to get through the Israel-Hamas war, and that is because the various tribes see them as being in their interests.
A big part of that interest is countering Iran, a Shia tribe, for dominance in the Middle East. The West’s belief that it could appease Iran has been a historic failure. It has allowed the Islamic Republic to be on the brink of developing nuclear weapons.
The Biden administration currently negotiating a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, adjoined by Israeli-Saudi normalization, is a desperate attempt to play catch-up in a game that Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, effectively invented.
Prospering Tribes
Any constitutional or treaty arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians, such as the fabled two-state solution, that does not give any party what they want, is unlikely to succeed. Polls show that most Israelis and Palestinians do not want two states.
Polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that 64 percent of Palestinians oppose it, while a Pew Research Center survey shows that only 17 percent of Israelis think it can work peacefully. The West sees neither side getting what it wants as a compromise. In the Middle East, that is failing your tribe.
The West’s approach of making peace as a goal to which everyone should aspire shows a lack of understanding. The goal should not be peace for peace’s sake. The endgame is for Jews and Arabs to be strong, living side-by-side in their respective homelands, and working together for the Abrahamic region to thrive.
This is why the Abraham Accords were not just a big step forward, but illustrative of what the way forward should look like. Strong Jewish and Arab states building a better future and countering Iranian militarism.
Hapless and corrupt international bodies such as the United Nations, and its attendant kangaroo courts, will never succeed in imposing peace on tribes that are pursuing their own interests. For any solution to work, it must be clear to Israelis and Palestinians that the solution is to their tribe’s benefit.
The international community and the West require a mindset shift, and maybe a few anthropology lessons. Looking at a problem correctly is essential to solving it. There is little reason to be optimistic. The West, true to form, still does not get it. It persists in recycling and peddling ideas that have failed repeatedly and will fail again.
Israel must keep fighting as the Jewish tribe, like it has done for millennia, because Jews have learned a few things while outlasting history’s greatest empires.
Hopefully, the Western world will not take too long to catch up.
Super interesting and well done. Funny, because I recently explained my feelings about Israel by saying that it is "my tribe." And I feel that the West, as a product of the French Enlightenment is also my tribe -- the two tribes have many points of intersection, although this essay perfectly points out where they diverge. Having read Herari's "Sapiens" gave me idea of "tribe". I think we all function in a tribal way. It's in our DNA. For some it may be religious, for other political, etc. etc. The problem with the West is, tolerance is a huge tribal characteristic. That's dangerous. We cannot tolerate the intolerant. We have to be able to exercise tolerance when it is safe to do so, and revert to crushing the enemy when that is required. That's a tall order, but it's the one we have to deal with.
At this point Israel would be insane if it accepted a two state solution. Palestinians have been screwing them selves for a century now, so I say bleep them.
I used to lean towards the Palestinians until I dug into the history. I’m amazed how Putin bombs civilians and Dubya killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians & Israel is under a microscope, held to a far higher standard.