For more than 2,000 years, the handshake has been a sign of friendship, peace and unity. Whether used in diplomacy, sportsmanship or on informal occasions, it signifies trust and respect, although history can rescind it.
Ancient worshippers of the Sun god Mithras, more than 2,000 years ago, would clasp hands as part of their ritual.
As the cult spread across the Roman Empire, the handshake was adopted by the Yazidis, a little understood and much persecuted religion with Zoroastrian roots, now struggling to survive the depredations of ISIL in northern Iraq.
For the Yazidis, the handshake – seen around the world as an act of greeting – remains a mystical symbol of unity as others seek to destroy them.
But even in a secular setting, a simple shaking of hands between two people can often acquire immense symbolic significance.
Witness the moment this week when Prince Charles, heir to the throne of the United Kingdom, came face to face with Gerry Adams, the leader of the Irish republican party Sinn Fein.
The Prince of Wales’ trip to the Irish Republic included a visit to the village where his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb in 1979.
At the time of the murder, Mr Adams said: “What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people.”
Whatever mixed emotions were below the surface of the two men when they met for the first time on Tuesday, their public handshake was a sign that disagreements over Ireland had retreated back from violence.
In these instances, the handshake often forms part of a carefully choreographed script. Nowhere has this been more obvious in the Middle East.
In March 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, clasped hands with United States president Jimmy Carter on the White House lawn, after signing a peace treaty. Nearly 15 years later Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli prime minister, repeated the gesture in front of US president Bill Clinton at the Oslo Accords.
Peace came neither to the region or the participants. Sadat and Rabin were both assassinated for their efforts, while Arafat was to die in still-disputed circumstances, in 2004.
Perhaps better things will come from the encounter between US president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro.
After a series of handshakes, which the White House insists were unscripted, a remnant of the Cold War that has lasted more than half a century now seems to be coming to an end, with the resumption of diplomatic relations expected within weeks.
In other instances, a simple handshake has thawed, at least partially, the Cold War between the West and the communist powers.
The most dramatic came hundreds of miles above the Earth in 1975, when Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov threw back the hatch of his Soyuz spacecraft to grasp the outstretched hand of Apollo commander Thomas Stafford after their two ships docked in orbit.
The gesture was as carefully choreographed as the docking manoeuvre, captured by a waiting camera.
So was another historic meeting, this in April 1945, on a broken bridge over the River Elbe at Torgau, Germany, as American and Russian infantrymen met for the first time after fighting their way to victory over Nazi Germany. While neither gesture represented lasting peace, they perhaps avoided a worse conflict.
Some hatreds run so deep that even the offer of a handshake is not enough. Oddly, these mostly occur not on the field of war, but on the field of play.
Only last month, Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard refused to shake the hand of her Romanian opponent, Alexandra Dulgheru, before play began. She then went on to lose in straight sets.
Famously in 2012, then-Liverpool player Luis Suarez refused to take the hand of Manchester United’s Patrice Evra before their Premier League game. Suarez had previously been banned for eight games for racially abusing Evra. He later apologised for refusing the olive branch.
Some handshakes might have been better left unclasped. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain taking the hand of Adolf Hitler of Germany in 1938 has become a symbol of failed appeasement towards one of the greatest tyrants and mass murderers of the last century.
It is also unlikely that the former British prime minister Tony Blair finds space on his mantlepiece for a framed copy of his warm handshake with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in 2007.
Still, sometimes it is the only polite thing to do. At Pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005, Prince Charles found himself one seat away from a man widely regarded as an international pariah.
As Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, leaned towards him with an outstretched palm, it seemed only basic manners to take it.
As a spokesman for the Royal Family explained afterwards, the prince “was not in a position to avoid shaking Mr Mugabe’s hand”.
plangton@thenational.ae
