Muhammad Al-Daya, a longtime bodyguard of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, told an interviewer on BBC Arabic last week that his boss’s condemnations of terror were insincere and issued only in response to pressure. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated a segment of the interview dealing with Arafat’s reputation as a liar.

MEMRI translated Al-Daya’s response to the question as to whether Arafat, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Ammar, lied in his presence.

Abu Ammar? Yes. When there was a bombing in Tel Aviv, for example, he would say… This would happen due to pressure, especially by President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak would call Arafat and say to him: “Denounce it, or they will screw you.” Arafat would say to Mubarak: “Mr. President, we have martyrs. The [Israelis] have destroyed us. They have massacred us.” But Mubarak would say to him: “Denounce it, or they will screw you.”

Then Arafat would condemn the bombing in his own special way, saying: “I am against the killing of civilians.” But that wasn’t true.

In the interview, Al-Daya asserted that lying in politics is acceptable in politics.

In her June 2013 essay for The Tower Magazine, If Peace Never Comes, This Will Be the Reason, Deborah Danan provided a context for Arafat’s duplicity and Al-Daya’s justification of it. She noted that the Palestinian national identity was a collectivist one, as opposed to an individualist one. The implication of that collectivist identity, Danan observed, is that everything is justified to preserve the collective identity.

In a collectivist society built on the idea of victimhood, struggle—rather than peace—is the ultimate motivating factor. Peace, moreover, may actually threaten collective identity: If struggle is a prerequisite for peace, then any action that serves the struggle, even terror and incitement, is likely to be perceived as legitimate. Peace is sacrificed to the collective.

[Photo: Andrei Stoe / WikiCommons ]