For the Diffusion of Arab Responsibility

In 1964, Catherine Genovese was murdered in New York City. For thirty
minutes she was continually pushed and stabbed while screaming for
help. But none of the forty or more people who witnessed the ordeal
stepped in to lend a hand.

This incident prompted two psychologists, Latane and Darley, to run a
large set of experiments to figure out why no one helped Genovese. At
first they asked a number of unsuspecting people to participate in a
bogus scientific survey to determine their individual preferences for
games and puzzles. But while filling out the relevant questionnaires
in the testing room, the psychologists staged a fake emergency situation
in the adjacent room. A tape recorder played the noises of a crash then
a woman was heard crying out: “Oh, my God, my foot..I..I..can’t move..it.
Oh..my ankle..I..can’t get this .. thing .. off me” (source: Social
Psychology, by Robert Feldman, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1995, pages 18,
22-24, and 247). The psychologists then observed and studied the
participants reactions.

After dozens of experiments, what they ended up discovering gained the
authority of a scientific law, confirmed by several hundred replications
over the following decade. People did help in an emergency situation
all right, but much more so when they were alone than when they were
with others. In one experiment, when there was only one bystander and
a “victim”, bystanders rushed to help in 85 percent of the cases. When
there were two bystanders and a “victim”, 62 percent of bystanders
tried to help. But when the number of bystanders rose to five, only 31
percent wanted to provide the “victim” with aid (Ibid, p.247).

Of course, the setting, the culture, the risk, and the trouble
involved in the aid required can all affect the particular
percentages cited above, but the basic principle which is referred
to as the Principle of Diffusion of Responsibility would probably
still hold either way.

According to the book I quoted earlier “diffusion of responsibility
is the tendency for people to feel that responsibility for acting is
shared, or diffused, among those present. The greater the number of
people who are present in an emergency, then, the lower is any one
individual’s sense of responsibility- and the less likely it is that
a person will feel obligated to help”.

Now if we change the name of the victim from Catherine Genovese to
Palestine, and if we change the bystanders from forty to twenty-something
Arab states, would the same principle still hold in that case?  Would
that application be relevant and does the situation sound familiar now?

Our modern history shows that it does!!!  It seems that if we can hold
other political variables constant, the more Arab states there are, the
more likely Palestine or South Lebanon may be raped violently in public
without any one of them lending a hand.

Mind you, this is not about the strategic political and military
weakening that befalls us as a result of having Arab division.
This is about division, as in the state of having too many, as a
defeatist psychological device in the struggle against the Zionist
movement:

division allows each Arab state to pretend before itself and its
people that Palestine is everybody else’s business but its own.
Its sense of responsibility can thus be easily shifted unto others,
and its obligation to get involved will therefore be diluted.
Why are you looking at me when there are so many others around?!!

This inaction would be impossible to get away with if there was
but one Arab or even one Muslim state. For example, Abdul Hamid,
the last Ottoman Caliphah, refused to give away Palestine to the
Zionist movement at the behest of colonial powers, in spite of his
many other faults, perhaps because he could have never gotten away
with that. Palestine was his state’s responsibility alone. He could
not have pretended that some other Islamic state gave away Palestine.
There was no other state in charge of Palestine!!

Note as well that the excuse given by the official media to the
Egyptian public before the Camp David treaty was for years that
Egypt was tired of bearing alone the burden of the Arab-Zionist
conflict.  Similar voices are heard by every other advocate of
peace with “Israel” in his respective Arab state today, including
the leadership of the PLO, which uses the claim that ‘Palestinians
are all alone’ to justify Oslo and other treasonous deals with
“Israel”.

This is because thinking purely Palestinian is NECESSARILY defeatist.
Because when one thinks in Palestinian terms only, one will certainly
get overwhelmed by the math of political power between us and “Israel”.
Then shoddy deals like 242 or Oslo would seem reasonable. On the other
hand, thinking in terms of Arab potential is necessarily anti-defeatist.
A Palestinian revolutionary must henceforth be necessarily pan-Arabist.

If this analysis is true however, it provides another vicious linkage
between Arab division and the existence of “Israel”, i.e., between Arab
provincialism (Qutrriyah) and the occupation of Palestine. Furthermore,
the same defeatist attitude towards Palestine as a result of Arab
division has also been adopted by Arab states regarding their
responsibilities towards the murderous siege on Iraq, the sanctions on
Libya and Sudan, the strike on Ash-shifa factory in Sudan, and many
other examples. If there had been but one Arab state, or even a looser
Arab confederacy, that state would not be able to shirk those national
responsibilities then look skyward as if it is but one among many
strangers crowded in a tight elevator.

But whether we are divided or not, those with a political conscience
will always ACT as if they were the only bystander when it comes to
grand issues like Palestine, South Lebanon, the siege on Iraq, the
sanctions on Libya or Sudan, or even Arab unity itself. Naturally in
these overwhelming situations one person alone cannot do it all, and
the kind of aid in need might be long-run and varied. Yet the very
fact that none alone can do it all is precisely why, if we want to
be effective, ALL of us have to act as if each of us is the only
bystander around. Maybe then we won’t feel as justified in making
ridiculous concessions to old and neo-colonialists when we get so
besieged from every wound by the wolfness of this world, as the
by-standers turn one by one into victims.

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