Today’s Globe has an editorial on the violence embodied in the suicide terrorism of yesterday’s attack in Tel Aviv. See Squaring the Globe for an analysis of the full range of the Globe’s mishandling of the incident. My specific interest is in a curious sentence imbedded in an effort to explain the “cycle of violence” from the angle of honor-shame culture.

It is in the nature of a vendetta that both sides try to justify as retaliation acts that otherwise would stand as sheer murder. The code of the blood feud assumes that every member of the enemy’s camp may be slain in the name of avenging the honor of one’s own clan, tribe, or nation. Whether innocent civilians are murdered by states, by their proxies, or by stateless terrorist groups, the threat is the same. The murders rip away at the civilized conventions that protect the innocent.

The editorial then goes on to urge Israel not to retaliate since that would lead to still further bloodshed:

The worst response to yesterday’s bombing in Tel Aviv would be to accede to the regressive rules of a vendetta. The crime must be denounced — as it was by governments around the world, by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Those who boasted of the crime or rationalized it as resistance to Israeli aggression — as did Islamic Jihad, the Hamas movement that now governs the Palestinian Authority, and Iran — must also be denounced as murderers or accessories to murder.

Having called for such verbal adherence to the code of civil society, the Globe then goes on to present its solution to the cycle of vendetta violence:

Nevertheless, the only way to prevent a descent into the inferno of a vendetta is to pursue a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. In the near term, this means that Israel, the United States, and the European Union should not cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. An economic blockade of the Palestinian people is almost certain to magnify the rage and despair that the terrorist factions feed upon.

Etc. I’m sure most readers can imagine the final paragraphs… ending in:

If there is no progress toward a negotiated peace, there will be regression toward the barbarism of the vendetta.

Since I am teaching a course on honor-shame this semester, and part of it focuses not only on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also on the lack of the use of honor-shame culture as an analytic tool in understanding the conflict, I must applaud the Globe’s effort to bring this kind of consideration to bear in their analysis.

But even if they get an A for effort, they get an F for product.

1) Both sides do not engage in the “vendetta” mentality. Anyone attentive to the discourse in Israel knows that even the slightest hint of behavior that sounds like revenge rather than preventive retaliation provokes howls of opposition from the press and talking heads. And anyone who compares the retaliation of the Israelis with the retaliations of the Palestinians (especially given the disparity of means of violence) knows the asymmetries of this conflict. On the contrary, if Israel were to engage in the kind of vendetta behavior characteristic of the Palestinians (two eyes for one, indiscriminate killing of civilians in retaliation for targetted killings of terrorists), then a) the conflict would have long been over, and b) the Palestinians would have some justification in accusing the Israelis of ethnic cleansing. To try and pin vendetta mentality on the Israelis is a classic case of even-handedness (a variant of moral equivalence), in which one dares not criticize the Palestinians without also criticizing the Israelis… lest one be accused of “taking sides.”

2) It is most decidedly not in the nature of vendetta to view anyone on the other side as a legitimate target. No honorable man engaged in a vendetta attacks women and children, and the rules of vendetta are quite strict about the acceptable proportions of retaliation. The Palestinian behavior embodied in suicide terrorism does not adhere in any way to the honor-code of vendetta, but rather represents a pathological form of behavior driven not by honor but by a rage at unbearable humiliation. This pathological behavior links up with some of the worst kinds of genocidal holy-war ideologies to produce attacks on civilians like the one the Globe editorial is supposedly trying to understand. So double error: misrepresenting pathological Palestinian vendetta behavior as the norm, and then trying to pin that norm on “both sides” when even the norm doesn’t apply to Israelis.

3) The Globe’s predictable solution: more negotiations and (you guessed it) don’t stop aid to the poor Palestinian people. I won’t go into a lengthy analysis of what’s wrong here. For those who want some background, consult our discussion of the Politically Correct (Globe) paradigm vs. the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm. What the folks at the Globe still don’t seem to get is that when you try to push negotiations between a pathologically demonizing honor-shame culture and a pathologically self-critical integrity-guilt culture, you get the kinds of back-firing that Oslo brought us, and that multi-cultural Europe is bringing us.

But to figure that out, the Globe’s editors would have to get at least a C+ in honor-shame culture. And given their learning curve as evidenced by their still pushing negotiations after the devastating results of that policy with the Oslo process, I’m not holding my breath.