Terrified of Trump

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Arab nation moves from terror to terror, waiting on the results of others’ elections. Only yesterday we were struck with terror over Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory and his formation of the Israeli government, and we began calculating what he would do to us, the insults he would inflict upon us, wondering whether he would accept our surrender, our submission, and our relinquishment of the Palestinian people’s rights and the Muslims’ holy sites.

Some of us shed tears of disappointment and dashed hope, and others nearly held a wailing ceremony. It was striking that one leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization said he would withdraw from political work if Netanyahu won, as an expression of his “sulking” — but he died before he ever saw Netanyahu crowned on the throne.

The scene is no different now, after Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential election. I do not know who we were counting on, or what exactly we wanted from the American election, but the results have plunged us into a maze, a sea of speculation about what Trump’s policy will be.

Now, ever since Trump’s victory, Arab media has been flooded with talk of what United States policy might look like, and most articles and television interviews show a fair share of pessimism about what Trump will do to us.

A Deficient Nation

Had we not been a deficient nation, we would never have pinned our hopes and expectations on others’ elections. For decades, the Arab nation, at both the popular and official levels, has awaited the results of Israeli and American elections, hoping a president might come along who takes pity on us, whose sympathy we might draw out, deciding to preserve some of our dignity and grant us fairness in some of our rights.

We decided, long ago, not to insist on our rights, whether in Palestine, in our wealth, or in independence and the right to self-determination, but we have not yet reached the total surrender that would place us at the brink of extinction. All that was left for us, over the years, was to request registration on the American and Israeli electoral rolls, to tip the scale toward one candidate or another.

We have seen, over the years, that our hope and expectation were doomed from the start, because every electoral competitor looks at us with contempt and mockery, knowing in advance that the Arab nation is too weak to have any echo in shaping electoral popular moods.

Because of our excessive interest in our enemies’ elections, we give every candidate a firm impression that we are far weaker than our size, area, and number of states would suggest, too incapable of defending ourselves, of solving our own problems, or addressing our own concerns. Preemptively, we give a poor impression of ourselves, and if an electoral candidate holds any respect for us, he abandons it in favor of contempt and mockery instead.

And if he holds any vision for finding solutions to what we suffer from, he reconsiders it, since he becomes certain we do not deserve it, that we remain forever on the margins of history and the shaping of events. No one fears us, and no one thinks we could ever rise to become even a fragile number on the international stage.

Quite simply, Zionist and American voters could ask why the Arabs wait on the results of their elections, when the Arabs themselves hold no elections — and if they do hold them, they do not respect their results. This means their hopes are pinned on others’ freedom to choose, while they do not recognize their own freedom to choose.

So why do they not hold free and fair elections and await their new champion, chosen by the people? What would we say? That we are tribal, and our political system rests on a ruler by divine mandate who knows everything and makes no mistakes. We stand ready to argue that our political system is more elevated than theirs, resting on moral foundations different from their own moral collapse, embodied in the absence of head coverings on their daughters’ and women’s heads.

The Inferiority Complex

Because of our incapacity and weakness, feelings of inferiority and lowliness have developed within us, before ourselves and before other nations. We do not feel pride and honor before other peoples, usually overcome instead by a feeling of dwarfism before others, and signs of submission to the other appear on us, on the premise that he is more understanding, more capable, more knowledgeable.

This is clear when some mediocrity from a Western country comes to us bearing the title of “expert,” and we carry him on our shoulders, dancing for him, while we have experts and knowledgeable people of our own, far more accomplished than him, yet we do not trust them or their capabilities. The other is the possessor of knowledge and innovation, while the Arab is a mere consumer, feeding off whatever knowledge and expertise the other discloses.

We feel that others are the ones who possess the capabilities and energies to bring about change and advance along the path of progress, because we have proven our failure across the various fields of life for decades. We have not advanced productively or humanly, and science and technology have remained consumer items we import from others, and we have rarely tried to contribute to human civilization. Some say: no, we constitute an important number on the international stage, we are active and vital, we are decision-makers — this is largely untrue, and whatever truth it holds is only slight.

We are not speaking here of buildings, streets, acquiring modern cars, and wearing precious jewelry — we are speaking of productive capacity, food production foremost among it, of manufacturing, scientific progress, and technical advancement that we produce with our own hands, and of contributing to human civilization in the fields of science, arts, letters, and sports.

The Arabs, all together, do not win as many gold medals as Cuba alone wins at the Olympic Games, and we are still not pioneers in football, volleyball, or basketball, not pioneers in winning the Nobel Prize, not pioneers in the military field, quick to turn our backs before the enemy. Our defeats before Israel alone are enough to earn us the world’s scant respect.

Recently, we have perfected the arts of destroying our own homes and killing our own sons for the sake of transient power and possessions, becoming a model of savagery, barbarism, and stupidity before the world. The world has reached elevated levels of ethics and human esteem, while we still pursue the spoken word, repress intellectuals and thinkers, and take care to venerate the greatness of the supreme inkwell-holder who leads a nation as a beast of burden leads a caravan of camels — perhaps worse.

A Feeling of Alienation

It is no surprise, then, that we are alienated from ourselves, that we feel like strangers in our own homeland, strangers to our own families, our homes, our political, social, and economic systems. It is no surprise that the individual feels he has no value among his own people and in his own homeland, that he is a mere tool or beast of burden driven by others according to their own whims and interests. Alienation is a negation of the human self, and whoever suffers it suffers an absence of self-confidence and self-affirmation, turning into a mere tool in others’ hands.

The person alienated from himself is marginalized, feeling nothing of himself, unaware of himself, his society, or his homeland, and always liable to be used against himself, his own family, relatives, supporters, sympathizers, and those trying to liberate him. The alienated person’s awareness has been erased — he is unaware of himself, his worth, his energies, or his own strength, which could achieve a great deal for him, and whatever awareness has accumulated in him is mere indoctrination, read to him by whoever enslaves him, instilled in his mind as saturation and branding, not thought and understanding.

We Arabs suffer acutely from alienation, because others have dominated us in various forms — politically, intellectually, culturally, socially, and so on. We do not own ourselves, do not chart our own policies, do not decide for ourselves, and there is always someone deciding for us, charting our paths, methods, approaches, and means, and we have no choice but to wait to see what the other will do to us, or for us. It is no wonder others’ elections constitute a historic turning point for us, since it is they that will bring whoever commands and drives us, charting our future, or most of it at least.

The American elections produced Donald Trump, and we knew little about him, and the world did not know much about him either. We wait to see his policy toward Israel, Syria, Iraq, Russia, oil, and the Gulf states. We have not, in years, resolved to gather and decide how we ought to act to become masters of ourselves, capable of making decisions suited to us.

We have remained on the margins, and have punished everyone who criticized that marginalization and demanded human freedom, and the nation’s advancement toward progress, activity, and giving. All that remains for us is to pray that Trump take mercy on us, that he not tighten our bonds, that he loosen the rope around our necks even a little, and we do not ask him to reverse his decisions, only to be gentle with us.

In Harmony with Impotence

Anyone following Arab media notices it has been greatly preoccupied with Trump’s election victory, holding many discussions on television screens, with specialists, academics, and opinion leaders taking part, on what we should expect from Trump. Newspapers and magazines have published many analytical articles on future horizons tied to Trump, and radio stations have done the same.

There is not a single Arab media outlet that has not hosted discussions on how Trump will handle Arab problems and concerns. In contrast, we have not found a single media outlet holding discussions on what the Arabs themselves ought to do to confront the challenges Trump might impose, or on the policies Arabs should pursue to influence Trump’s decisions and policies.

The media has assumed — as millions of Arabs assume, at both the popular and official levels — that Arabs have neither power nor strength, that they are not important players on the international stage, that they do not possess the elements that could place them among the policy-makers, that they are mere consumers, dependent on others. The media assumes Arabs are mere tools, surrendering its own affairs, and the Arabs’ affairs, to whoever manages to dominate and control.

In this, the media does not deviate from a popular impression held by millions of people that America is the one who decides, the one who conspires, and that nothing will happen in our Arab region unless America wills it. America has ready-made plans to manage matters, and action begins when the appropriate time comes, for it.

So until when will we continue lamenting our luck, our poor fate, and the squandering of our energies? I do not know, but our condition will remain wretched as long as the political gangs currently in place are the ones ruling. There was an Arab movement on which people pinned great hopes, but it did not rise to those aspirations, and all we reaped from it were ugly images before the world of Arabs and their thirst for killing and bloodshed.

Al Jazeera

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الرعب من ترمب” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.