One of the unspoken psychosexual allures of Arab Muslim culture is precisely its polygyny along with its permissible socially sanctioned horrendous treatment of the female, including honor killing.
What does womanizing have to do with the current disastrously violent situation on the Temple Mount, Har HaBayit and Al Aqsa formerly called Haram al-Sharif?
Much ink has been spilt over the recent violence regarding the Status Quo. All of it has focused on the parameters and what went wrong during the initial hammering out of the agreement and its arrangements.
It is well known that Moshe Dayan played the key role in acquiescing to the Ummah and its Waqf, the Islamic Endowment. However, there has never really been a “status quo” because the situation has always been fluid and dynamic on the ground. Indeed, since the 1967 war and its implementation much has changed. For a review see.
In addition, nothing really has been written about the Status Quo’s possible unconscious psychodynamics that may have played out to the detriment of Israel which has lost real control in real time over this “royal” piece of real estate. To this day Jews are not permitted to pray on the Temple Mount. This is something that should have been asserted from the get-go in 1967.
How did Moshe Dayan screw upon on the Temple Mount? Could it have been because he was a womanizer? A womanizer is “a man who engages in numerous casual sexual affairs with women” (google)
While this post is a kind of post-mortem with 20/20 hindsight, the connection between womanizing and the Waqf is worth exploring.
Womanizing has such good fit with Arab Muslim culture due to its shared indulgence in polygyny that a discussion begs to take place. Women are objects in this shared realm. How may a womanizing attitude have influenced such critical political negotiations?
First – A Lack of Psychological Self-understanding Coupled with Poor Emotional Intelligence
A womanizer lacks psychological understanding of himself and hence has virtually no emotional intelligence. This is certainly a red flag for someone who is supposed to be an advisor or negotiator. Such behavior has been minimized and socially condoned as being part and parcel of Middle Eastern machoism, making it acceptable. Womanizing has gone unquestioned. In some instances, it has even been construed as sexy and virile.
Second – Lack of Inner Peace:
Yet Ruth Dayan did divorced Moshe Dayan after 36 years of marriage precisely because of her husband’s womanizing. Dayan devalued his own wife. Unconsciously, this also signaled that he had impoverished relations with all other females, that he was actually terrified of intimacy and could never achieve inner peace and yet he found himself tasked to negotiate peace on the Mount.
Third – Poor Object Constancy and Lack of Boundaries
One can imagine the degree to which Moshe Dayan experienced anxiety, an affect which is routinely missed by many therapists. Womanizers are known to have poor object constancy which is the lack of an ability to create stable relationships and have appropriate social bonds. They don’t understand boundaries because they have none as they remain fused to their mothers in a maternal symbiosis. They have never gone through an individuation-separation stage. This is why they feel emasculated and have to act out their machoism. Isn’t this reason enough and cause for concern to have a negotiator and/advisor who is a womanizer? After all the Status Quo has to do with social bonding and having good social boundaries.
Dayan went from woman to woman, never feeling fulfilled. His feelings shifted from initially having a kind of “honeymoon high” to then flipping over into unconscious rage against the female as the relationship deepened, thereby he had to exit and move on to the next. As objects women could simply be tossed away. Womanizers struggle to relate to a woman as a person in her own right. Womanizers cannot trust. They cannot put all their “eggs” in one basket.
Fourth: Slipping into the Role of Dhimmi who is perceived in Arab Muslim culture unconsciously as the female
Dayan was said to have understood Arab Muslim culture. Nevertheless, it would seem that he unwittingly and unconsciously slipped into the role of being a dhimmi, a non-Muslim subject who occupies the feminized subjugated class in status in Islam. Dayan as dhimmi would have formed an unconscious identification with the aggressor — the Arabs even though they had lost – at some level they continued to terrify him. Dayan surrendered, “submitted,” to the Waqf in order allegedly to avoid violence and maybe even to save face. Think of shame.
Was Dayan a bit like El Lawrence of Arabia in fantasy trying to fend off his own terrors by selling out? Becoming like them, he engaged in a political polygyny of sorts. His womanizing dovetailed neatly with the enemy culture with whom he was negotiating. This sort of identification is like a judge needing to recuse himself on a case because he is too emotionally involved. However, Dayan didn’t do that.
One of the unspoken psychosexual allures of Arab Muslim culture is precisely its polygyny along with its permissible socially sanctioned horrendous treatment of the female, including honor killing. This unspoken terrain had to have been functioning behind the scenes when Dayan led Israel into making the Status Quo agreement. In reality it failed because it has led to even more violence. No real boundaries were ever set early on. Violence breeds violence.
Womanizing, misogyny, polygyny, honor killing, etc. fit like hand in glove. It is a lethal combination. A culture which endorses violence against women, also fosters, promotes and advances political violence. To wit — the Temple Mount. The Status Quo has proven to be anything but. There is a lesson here. Turning a blind eye on the treatment of women only strengthens the bully – unleashing violence. The question remains – How many more Moshe Dayans will there be who advise and negotiate poorly on issues with regard to the Temple Mount? And where are the women negotiators and advisors?
We hear little from them if there are any at all.
