Tony Blair, in his new role as the Quartet’s envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian front, was in Israel and the Palestinian Authority last week to prepare for his task of “institution building” in Palestinian society. The Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers were also in town, ostensibly as emissaries of the Arab League at the same time that Saudi Arabia renounced its “peace initiative.” Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday, and George Bush has proclaimed renewed optimism and called for a conference this fall between Israel, the Palestinians, and various parties.

The road was smoothed by Ehud Olmert’s “gesture” to Mahmoud Abbas of freeing 250 Fatah terrorists from prison and pardoning almost 200 others. And on Thursday Israel allowed the delivery from Jordan to PA security forces of a reported 3000 rifles along with hundreds of thousands of bullets and other ammunition. Yes, optimism runs high.

Apart from cynical (appeasing Saudi and other Arab oil power) and realpolitik (trying to concoct a Sunni coalition against Iran) motives, all the Western bigwigs could not invest so much time and prestige in this issue without some genuine belief that it is resolvable. If the Palestinians’ problem is not Israeli occupation (totally removed in Gaza and partially in the West Bank) or settlements (totally destroyed in Gaza), then it must be weak institutions, or not enough guns for Fatah, or not enough Arab states present at the latest convocation with Israel.

An article recently posted online summarizes evidence that the Palestinians’ problem runs much deeper than these levels and that its persistence is not so mysterious for those willing to look a bit further than the surface.

The physician and researcher Daphne Burdman, writing in the Jewish Political Studies Review, says the Palestinians’ ongoing aggression toward Israel and Jews results from Koranic and Hadith teachings, the PA’s own brand of systematic indoctrination and incitement, and “psychological processes arising from Arab childrearing practices.” The first two factors are more familiar than the third, which requires much more attention from people concerned about this conflict.

In the West, Burdman notes, “the connection between child abuse and the eventual criminal, often violent adult is. . .well documented,” and she quotes “‘a consistent finding in the childhoods of extremely violent criminal recidivists . . . of severe abuse.’”

But what if there was a society where the violent and sexual abuse of children did not just occur in isolated cases but was, instead, the norm? Such societies do exist—in the Arab world, and the Palestinian Authority is a particularly virulent case where the pathological patterns are fused with especially intense inculcation of Jew-hatred.

In Arab childrearing, Burdman points out, “the incidence and severity of corporal punishment are much greater than in the Western world.” A noted psychohistorian says this “extends to whipping, thrashing, and worse.” Meanwhile “a recent survey of Palestinian society indicated child sexual abuse to involve 50 percent of boys and 31 percent of girls aged six to twelve, in a study involving 184 subjects. The author [noted] the unusual predominance of boys among the victims. . . .”

Burdman’s article gives further details of a nightmare world that is difficult for Westerners to imagine:

Circumcision without anesthesia is a prime trauma performed from ages four to twelve or thirteen. Older boys are usually aware, but younger ones are unprepared for the surgery, only having been told about celebration aspects. Bravery is emphasized; expressions of pain are disdained....

Breastfeeding of boys continues until age two or three and is permissive, with demand feeding, but termination is abrupt. This constitutes a massive perceived rejection with consequent emotional trauma. . . . 

Also significant is the effect of a mother who has been beaten or degraded by male relatives, and who may have undergone female genital  mutilation. . . . Such violence renders these mothers depressed, apathetic, and emotionally unavailable, or hostile and angry. . . .  

Why, then, do these horrors not just produce criminality on an individual level, and why is so much Palestinian, and other Arab, aggression so collectivized in nature? For that too there are reasons, again rooted in vast cultural differences that many Westerners do not begin to grasp.

“In individualistic Western societies,” Burdman writes, “the affected individual may rebel against family and society, frequently with criminality.” But because of Arab society’s “strongly collectivist and patriarchal nature, the individual characteristically does not criminally act out against the mores of family and society.” Instead the suppressed rage gets directed at “a socially endorsed target—in this case, Jews and Israel.”

This “authoritarian nature of Arab society” is manifested in teaching methods involving rote learning and the disallowance of disparate opinion, in schools and in the patriarchal home where  absolute obedience and corporal punishment are norms, and in societal pressures for conformity of thought and deed, both personal and political. Bernard Lewis . . . affirms that “immunity from critical comment or discussion is accepted as normal even in ostensibly secular and democratic Muslim societies.”

With such realities in mind, the fact that intensified diplomacy, aid, and Israeli concessions in the Palestinian sphere since the early 1990s have only produced more drastic Palestinian hatred and violence starts to make sense. The now popular dichotomy between Hamas and Fatah—most of the latter being less religiously observant but both a product and engine of the same societal pathology—is revealed in its stark irrationality and irresponsibility. Indeed, the fact that Israeli and other Western politicians, in every new set of “sweeteners” for the Palestinians, make sure to include massive releases and pardons of terrorists along with weapons deliveries, suggests at least a subconscious awareness of whom they are really propitiating along with an appalling bad faith and cowardice.

As Burdman puts it, “only fundamental changes in education and childrearing will change the predisposition of such a national culture.”