Honor/shame culture: The worse you lose, the louder you declare victory

Islamic Jihad is holding a large rally today to celebrate its great victory in the Gaza fighting earlier this month. Here's a video featuring victory music and children with the same kinds of rockets that killed many of their friends:

There's only one problem: Islamic Jihad lost. Badly.

Their military leaders were killed. They didn't convince Hamas to join the fighting. Most Gazans didn't support the fighting, which they understood correctly to be risking Gaza lives only for Islamic Jihad's glory.  The prisoners that they claimed Israel would release are still in custody. 

Islamic Jihad cannot credibly point to a single accomplishment.

But they don't have to. They just declare victory!  And the worse you lose, the louder you claim to have won.

We see a similar dynamic with the recent examples of Arabs withdrawing from sports competitions, or even purposefully losing matches, when they would otherwise be competing with Israelis.

Forfeiting a match is about as far from victory as possible. Quitting instead of competing is the most cowardly thing imaginable.  But look how this columnist in Al-Binaa spins it:

There are resistance heroes who did not carry a rifle, did not fire a bullet, and did not undergo military courses, who were able to defeat the arrogant Zionist entity with all its techniques, tools, military arsenals...Youths in sport defeated the Zionist enemy by refusing to confront its representatives, so they became lions and resistance heroes. They may have lost medals , but they won the medal of the nation that crowned them fighters and liberators. With their blows, they brought down the legitimacy of the occupying Zionist entity of Palestine.

No, they just lost. 

There is a simple reason for this bizarre twisting of total defeat into massive victory: the Arab honor/shame culture. 

Losing is shameful. Losing to weak, dhimmi Jews is unforgivable. Living with this shame is unbearable. Better to fool yourself and claim you won, and try to confidently convince everyone else of your "victory."

There is a secondary benefit of declaring victory after a loss. It is difficult to recruit people to your cause when you are viewed as a loser, but Gaza terror groups never admit defeat. On the contrary, their media is filled with stories about how inevitable and total their ultimate victory over  the Jews will be. 

As long as Palestinians and their supporters twist reality, and refuse to learn from their mistakes that they deny ever making, Israel has little to worry about.

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