President Bush and his chief foreign policy advisers ponder whether to take tougher measures against Yasser Arafat by cutting ties with his organization, including the closing of the PLO office in Washington. They delay the return to the region of Anthony Zinni, the US Middle East envoy, until the PLO chief meets demands to "vigorously" crack down on militants and "account" for a recent attempt by Palestinians to ship "smuggled arms" to the occupied territories. (In diplomatic-speak, them are fighting words.) And the State Department utters nary a word of criticism about the house arrest of the Palestinian leader imposed on him by Israeli occupation forces in Ramallah.

Humiliating, no?

Is this another display, you ask, of American double standard? Lack of even-handedness? Hypocrisy? Could be. And who cares.

I prefer to go beyond all that today, and look at a more profoundly significant, and more devastatingly telling, truth here. This is the truth about how, at this moment in history, we have become so dependent a people that we expect our political destiny in Palestine to be determined for us by capricious rulers in foreign capitals.

Last time I checked, Arabs comprised 22 sovereign states that had gained their independence well over half-a-century ago. So what has gone wrong? Have we, in every historical sense of the word, been left by the wayside and become irrelevant in the global dialogue of cultures? What kind of future are we building for our children, and these children’s children?

It is incumbent upon us to ask these, and other, questions. It is crucial, in other words, that we not shy away from constructive self-criticism, for if we ourselves are at fault — and trust me on this one, human beings are known be at fault sometimes — then let us locate, isolate and address that with courage and commitment.

When Arnold Toynbee, the macro-historian whose 12-volume "A Study of History" spanned the civilizations of the entire globe, discussed the classical world of Arab culture, he attributed its vitality to what he called "assabiyeh" a sort of life-giving force derived from intellectual inquisitiveness and the free, vigorous flow of information and knowledge in society, unimpeded by restrictions from above. (Toynbee, incidentally, credits the concept of "assabiyeh" to Ibn Khaldoun, from whose work, "Muqaddimah," a systematic study of the philosophy of history, he appropriated the term.)

If you are not convinced that we have lost that "assabiyeh" in the modern age, then consider this statistic: Aside from oil, exports from all the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa are about the same as those from tiny Denmark, a country with less than one-fiftieth of the population. And if we lost it, as many would agree, soon after the collapse of the last Arab civilizational stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, then the date is particularly ironic, not to mention galling. For that year marked the West’s discovery of the New World and its march toward ascendancy as a conglomerate of imperial powers.

That was the very West whose civilization we had rightly viewed as less advanced than ours, yet a West that now turned around to colonize us and, around the beginning of the last century, to brazenly foist one of its settler-outposts in the heartland of our world — in effect saying, "So there, what are you gonna do about it?"

The mind dizzies at the enormity of what has befallen our world in the modern age.

To ask what has gone wrong here is to return to the issue of "assabiyeh," and whence a human community, a nation or a civilization derives its strength, indisputably more from cultural elan than military hardware.

The Soviet Union, you will recall, was a military colossus in its heyday. That didn’t help much, for it took but a nudge for this empire to collapse in a heap. It did so because while it built arms, it destroyed minds. Opting to be a society based on coercion, violence and deception, it ended up dissolving itself of its own accord well over a decade ago because nobody, not even its own leaders, believed in it anymore.

Our Arab world has become stultified, helpless at meeting the challenges of modernity, because in Arab society (and please accept my generalizations here) the individual is raised on the ethic of fear — fear of authority, fear of innovation, fear of originality — and encouraged, at times compelled, to embrace orthodoxy and uniformity.

Thus socialized to believe that he is not master of his destiny, once a young Arab is ready to join society, he is broken in spirit, his contribution to the community nebulous at best.

A society, Arab or otherwise, that dumps a citizen in jail for 30 years because he dissed a leader, or that silences, incarcerates or tortures to death an intellectual because the authorities disagree with his views — in the process indirectly but perversely paying tribute to the power of ideas in human affairs — cannot achieve progress.

Not much.

This would be a community whose political values, popular culture and socialization norms are collaboratively engaged in mounting an assault directed at those processes by which an individual seeks to affirm his self-definitions, to hear the echo of his national being, to escape the brutalities and monotonies of state-imposed conventions of statement, and find, finally, the clearing where he could gather his identity into some kind of inviolate order. This would be an infirm, rent community whose members are left mortally wounded, lashing out at shadows, with no way round, through or out of their existential fears.

Why blame the US for double standard, lack of even-handedness and hypocrisy? The US is a big power, and no big power in history, from ancient Egypt to ancient Rome, and from imperial Rome to imperial Britain, has ever conducted its foreign policy with a politico-moral impulse.

The US a moral paragon? Sorry, it’s not going to happen.

And why blame Israel for its unspeakable brutalities in Palestine? Zionism, as a colonial enterprise, transplanted itself there from Europe with the express and declared intention of robbing the native people of their land and subjecting them to the rule of the gun. Why, in this case, blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey? Blame us, and us alone, for preventing ourselves, deliberately as it were, from finding a way to recapture the ethos of the "assabiyeh" that, at one time in history, had formed the very foundation of our civilizational core.

In those days, we did not depend on rulers in some foreign capital to solve our problems in Palestine. Rather, we stood in our corner, waited for the bell, and came out swinging. And did we swing! For check out how, in 1187, the Crusader Kingdom in Jerusalem was made to kiss canvas.