My Thoughts On Israel Acting A Little Crazy

Reading a book called "The Strong Horse: Power Politics and the Clash of Arab Civilizations." The book is all about how we took 9/11 too personally. His point - political/tribal violence is the norm for Arab tribes/countries who have been fighting amongst themselves for political power for thousands of years. There are no institutions set up for any type of peaceful transfer of power. Politics is a death-match and when you lose, your head gets chopped off and so you kill, torture, coerce, and sick bad dudes on your near and far enemies. 9/11 brought what is fairly standard-Arab political violence to the shores of America and we did not understand it. We interpreted it as an act of war and have made an attempt to distinguish between moderate and fundamentalist Muslims and state and non-state actors and those regimes who support terror vs. those who don't, etc.

Lee Smith argues, this is a backwards way of looking at the conflict and entirely American-centric. In fact, we need to understand how Arab political culture values the "Strong Horse" and how strong tribes lead until a stronger tribe seizes power violently from them when they get to fat or caught with their pants down. 9/11 was just one little spec on the map of inter-Arab violence designed to empower Al Queda in relation to their inter-Arab enemies - the House of Saud, the Northern Alliance, etc.

What does this have to do with Israel? Israel understands the nature of Arab political culture - if not totally - certainly a lot more than we do. When Israel acts all crazy, I give them a pass, because when dealing with crazy, you gotta be a little crazy. There ain't no other way to see it. There is no hand holding, kumbaya, let's all get along solutions in the Middle East. All those people's heads were chopped off ages ago.