These specialists know Arab societies well, having studied them for years, acquiring their language and a knowledge of their customs. Yet three years ago, most of them failed to predict the eruption of the intifada.
Excepting a more cautious but largely unheard minority, Mideast experts talked of the "pragmatization" of the PLO during the Oslo Accords: Arafat's Fatah faction had abandoned terror and would not demand the "right of return," understanding that it was a prescription for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. There would be some sort of symbolic resolution on that point, and the two peoples would live side by side in pragmatic harmony.
Today - after Arafat's insistence on the right of return and nearly three years of terror attacks - these experts will increasingly be called upon to comment on the current negotiations. So if we don't I want to be surprised again, we should try to understand why they sometimes err.
Primarily, it seems that in their continual efforts to understand and come close to a culturally distant people, researchers develop sentiments toward it. The people they study are their life's work, and as often happens to parents, proximity fogs the judgment.
Captivation by the subject of one's work is hardly a new concept - it's at least as old as Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion falls in love with an ivory statue he has sculpted – "a maid so fair, as Nature could not with his art compare." (Significantly in our context, the statue is actually an upgraded version of reality.) Pygmalion comes to believe that it is a real-life maiden – that the beautified version is real. To Pygmalion's good fortune, Aphrodite intervenes and be-stows life on the statue.
This type of love may account for the defensiveness one often encounters when challenging a Mideast expert's theories. I remember asking such a figure during a lecture how he knew that the Fatah had abandoned terror for good (this was post-Oslo, pre-intifada); he was offended by the question and retorted, "Believe the Hamas! Hamas has criticized Fatah for abandoning the armed struggle." After hesitantly asking why one should trust Hamas (then, at least, it was Fatah's rival and might have been expected to criticize it), I was promptly shushed with "you just don't understand the Hamas." Throughout three years of studies no hard facts were offered to support such widely accepted views, nor a serious explanation for Arafat's comments to the Arab press that showed quite the contrary. I was resigned to the belief that the experts probably knew better. Today, after Fatah has perpetrated over 30 percent of the past three years' terror attacks, I understand that many of these experts, in a way, knew too much of the culture, history and language of the people they were studying, and they were too fond of them, to be able to reach objective conclusions.
The media could have compensated for this distortion. A few Middle East experts such as Prof. Moshe Sharon of Hebrew University warned that violence would erupt, but the main media outlets failed to inform the public that these people existed. Such unpopular views, unless spoken by an extreme rightist who wouldn't be given credence by the public anyway, were rarely aired. Thus the media fueled the public's optimism, feeding it what it wanted to hear, instead of fulfilling its role as purveyor of the facts. And, like many Mideast experts, the media hasn't carried out anything like the soul-searching necessary to ensure that it doesn't make the same mistakes again. It is continuing to erode its own function as a major democratic tool.
Witness the discussion of Abu Mazen's 40-year past in Fatah, which he founded with Arafat in the 60s. It touches only on the "positive" points and not on his role in the numerous Fatah terrorist attacks over the decades, including the murder of Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympic Games. We mainly hear of the past two years, in which Abu Mazen argued against the ineffectiveness of the intifada. Sometimes, the media mentions his participation in the Oslo Accords and other negotiations. It's almost as if the PLO, where he was No.2, never had a history of terror.
It's a combination that's doomed to lose - Middle East experts, whose record is flawed, and a media determined to ignore opinions that we don't want to hear and it doesn't want to believe. And so, opinions coming from academic ivory towers as related by the media will continue to provide a flawed context for understanding the next twists and turns of our relations with the Palestinians - unless, of course, Aphrodite resurfaces and pours life into Middle East experts' ivory maidens.
Nofit Milstein is a graduate in Middle Eastern studies and law, who works as a science writer for the Weizmann Institute.