Oftentimes we can learn more about Israel’s Arab enemies from a good novelist than from a political scientist that specializes on Arab affairs and serves as an adviser to political decision makers.

Novelists don’t have to follow political correctness

One reason for the disparity is that unlike the typical political scientist, novelists have a license to write candidly about ugly things.

The disparity becomes very serious when one thinks of Israel’s self-destructive quest for peace with the PLO-Palestinian Authority. Not only did Israeli political scientists such as Y. Harkabi champion statehood for that terrorist organization, but so have renowned American political scientists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski. I’d put my money on a novelist like Leon Uris.

In The Haj, author Leon Uris has the famous Orde Wingate say:

… every last Arab is a total prisoner of his society.  The Jews will eventually have to face up to what you’re dealing with here.  The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them.  They don’t how to really love.  But hate!  Oh G-d, can they hate!  And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you [Jews] have jolted them from their delusion of grandeur and shown them for what they are–a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition … except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep.  You [Jews] are dealing with a mad society and you’d better learn how to control it.

Can you imagine a political scientist advising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bear this Arab profile in mind when dealing with Mahmoud Abbas? Uris would deem Netanyahu an abysmal fool to negotiate with Abbas on the basis of “reciprocity.”

Is this a literary villain? Or a real-life wild donkey?

In The Haj, Uris has the novel’s central character, Haj Ibrahim confide to a Jewish friend:

During the summer heat my people become frazzled…. They are pent up.  They must explode.  Nothing directs their frustration like Islam.   Hatred is holy in this part of the world.  It is also eternal…. You [Jews] do not know how to deal with us.  For years, decades, we may seem to be at peace with you, but always in the back of our minds we keep up the hope of vengeance.  No dispute is ever really settled in our world. The Jews give us a special reason to continue warring.

Contrast Netanyahu continuing quest for peace in dealing with Abbas.

In The Haj, Uris has the cultured Dr. Mudhil elaborate:

We [Arabs] do not have leave to love one another and we have long ago lost the ability.  It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century.  The return of the Jews has unleashed that hatred, exploding it wildly …  In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness.  We cannot live with ourselves … we  never have.  We are incapable of change.

(Actually, Dr. Mudhil is only elaborating what Genesis 16:12 tells us about the descendants of Ishmael.)

Later in the novel, Mudhil says:

Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone…. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail.  We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts.

Seal of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2008 Original author: User Monotheist on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License

Some left-wing pundits may call Uris a “racist.”

They lack the novelist’s sensitive and clear-headed understanding of Arab culture.  Unlike maudlin peace enthusiasts, Uris appreciates the tragedy of a few insightful Arabs who know they are trapped in the savage and Janus-faced nature of Arab-Islamic culture. Abbas, like his mentor, the arch-villain Yasser Arafat, is a creature of that culture, something beyond the comprehension of Secretary of State John Kerry and his boss Barack Obama.

America under the mentality of Obama is too effete to deal effectively with the barbaric Arab-Islamic world, whose pathological hatred of the West prompts the leaders of that world to use children as decoys and human bombs.