Azmi Beshara analyzes 'what went wrong' in a new book

Azmi Beshara disclosed an unprecedented criticism of the Arab society in his new book which is by far, the best book one could read over the past few years.

Theses about the Handicapped Renaissance, which was Released in March by Ryad El-Rayyes Publishing House, came down heavily on the Arab society highlighting the individual and collective Arab anomalies.

According to Beshara, Arab debates are characterized by a loud tone and a meaningless content. He ridiculed those debaters who think of discussions as verbal battles and therefore start citing non-content clichés instead of presenting well thought-of arguments.

The book reflects Beshara’s deep understanding of the sociopolitical anomalies that, in his opinion, are obstacles to an Arab renaissance.

In terms of style, the book is loaded with terminology that would seem hardly comprehensible to an average reader. But this might have been Beshara’s intention for he believes that an Arab renaissance should be based on broadening the intellectual spectrum instead of employing poetic phrases that only deepen popular ignorance.

“Politicians and so-called intellectuals fake their ignorance and try to market it as part of an imagined genuine Arab tradition,” wrote Beshara arguing that while such an emotional rhetoric might rally the Arab masses, it obstructs progression.

The 47 year-old Arab-Israeli professor, who was first elected in 1996 to the Israeli Knesset and was reelected twice in 1999 and 2003, also defamed conspiracy theory that dominates the thinking of both Arabs and Jews.

His recent book, his seventh, gives an adequate picture of the sociopolitical situation of what he describes “the Arabs of the interior” in reference to the Arab-Israeli community. In its first chapters, the book briefly highlights Israel’s discrimination policies against its Arab citizens.

Afterward, Beshara succeeded in criticizing the Arab society at large through dissecting and analyzing the behavior of Palestinians. Perhaps it would have been more beneficial, though, if Beshara had put his criticism in a comparative manner as his writing reflected his knowledge of the details of other Arab communities was minimal.

Yet Beshara rightly focused his criticism on the tribal behavior of the patriarchal Arab society. In an unprecedented manner, Beshara attacked the ego problem inhibiting most Arab individuals.

“The D with a dot after it,” Beshara wrote in reference to the Arab way of citing the title of a doctor or a PhD holder “is particularly problematic.” He said that such people who attain high academic degrees do not necessarily contribute to the Arab renaissance.

“Such people come back home and join regression. They either run for the mayor’s position or assume the tribal leadership of their family,” he intoned.

Beshara stressed the difference between education and culture saying that while the first was abundant in the Arab world, the second was scarce.

He denounced Marxist and Islamist fundamentalists saying that these militants usually misinterpret their ideologies and transform them into another form of tribal fundamentalism.

Theses about the Handicapped Renaissance goes far beyond disapproving of the Arab tribal and illogical behavior that hinders Arab progression as it condemns several other Arab social habits.

“This is the society of taboo where one half of the society stares at the other half and where middle-class women bored of their consumerism are consumed by non-content discussions, should learn to differentiate between nudism as an art and pornography,” he commented.

Beshara also belittled crimes of honor saying that these are meant to reinforce the manly and tribal feeling of Arab males. “Two neighbors who lost vast land (because of the Israeli occupation) fight with knives over a meter space in their garden.”

Beshara’s work should not be treated as a sociology textbook, however, since it is a record of the observations of a critical person who has been deeply immersed in the lives of both the Jewish and the Arab communities living in historic Palestine.