FULL ARTICLES

CRITICSM OF THE GUARDIAN’S MIDDLE EAST COVERAGE

PART 1

War and pieces [First of two parts. Second part next Saturday]
The readers' editor on... criticism of our Middle East coverage
By Ian Mayes
The Guardian
May 18, 2002

This week I circulated Guardian staff, and not just the journalists, with the following questionnaire: Do you think the Guardian's Middle East coverage has been fair or unfair to the Israeli side? Has it been fair or unfair to the Palestinians? Has it been anti-semitic? Has it been anti-Islam (or anti- Palestinian). Do you think the coverage has changed in any way in recent weeks?

General comments were invited and many of the 30 or so who responded chose to give me their views entirely in this form and to ignore the questionnaire so I cannot give you tabulated results. The intention, in any case, was simply to let you in on some of the thinking inside the Guardian. I tried to put the questions in a way that did not suggest a particular response. The majority of those who answered believe the coverage has been good and generally fair.

First, here are the views of a non-journalist colleague who believes it has been unfair to the Israeli side, anti-semitic and indulgent to the Palestinians: "I am sure I will be the lone voice in criticising [the] treatment of the conflict, but without exception my friends (and not all of them are supportive of Sharon) feel the paper is virulently anti-Israel (and anti-semitic) and not one of them would consider buying it. My own family were loyal Guardian readers but stopped in the 1990s because of its relentless hostility towards Israel... [Now I] try very hard not to read articles about the conflict as they only succeed in disappointing me with their blatant anti-Israel sentiments and the plain inaccuracy of the reporting."

She lists examples, with Jenin at the head. "I was utterly disgusted at the front page headline 'Massacre' regarding Jenin. The newspaper has a responsibility, especially given how delicate the situation is, not to report such damaging accusations unless it has the proof to back it up. Where was the bold headline saying, 'Lies, there was no massacre'?"

The comments I have quoted strongly reflect complaints from Jewish, or pro-Israeli readers, which far outweigh complaints from pro-Palestinian or other sources.

In fact the Guardian has not at any time applied the word "massacre" to the events at Jenin. On Wednesday April 17, it carried the following headline across the front page: Israel faces rage over 'massacre'. The word was enclosed in single quotation marks – a subtlety lost in the passions generated. The accompanying report, beneath the bylines of three staff journalists, recorded the Commons debate in which Gerald Kaufman denounced Mr Sharon as a "war criminal". It did not attribute the term "massacre" to Mr Kaufman. It made it clear that it came from a leading Palestinian, Nabil Shaath. It also quoted an Israeli government spokesman dismissing the allegations as "ridiculous".

The sensitivity is easily understood. But it cannot be said too often that the coverage should be judged over a period. A senior correspondent and commentator, who believes the coverage in general has been "pretty good and pretty balanced", felt that the paper's overall reporting of Jenin showed its skill in getting the facts and "getting them from both sides". A piece featuring Palestinian anger and distress should be seen against a contrasting report "about Israel soldiers' anger that the restraint they showed in the Jenin operation was not recognised". He believes the Guardian made it clear from the start that "there was no real likelihood of a Jenin massacre and kept the larger picture in view better than other journals".

He made this point, however, about balance. "It does not mean what some insist on, namely that every time Sharon is criticised there must be a sideswipe at Arafat, or that every time Israeli operations are mentioned, the most recent suicide bombings must be recalled in considerable detail.

"Balance does not mean that blame must be equally apportioned – much of the American coverage that is, up to a point, critical of Israel suffers from this false symmetry... We do not normally fall into the trap of this deeply unbalanced balance." One colleague, not involved in the Middle East coverage said, "I am fed up with being reproached every time I tell any active member of the Jewish community that I work for the Guardian." He did feel there was cause for concern. He felt, for instance, that – to revert to Jenin – the use of the word "massacre", even in inverted commas, was "extremely prejudicial... A day later we were writing that there was no evidence of a massacre at all."

I shall continue this next week, with more comments and the views of the editor and foreign editor.

 

CRITICSM OF THE GUARDIAN’S MIDDLE EAST COVERAGE

PART 2

Open door: Balancing act
The readers' editor on.... charges that the paper has been anti-semitic
By Ian Mayes
The Guardian
May 25, 2002

Many of the Guardian journalists who responded to my invitation to give their views on the paper's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict commented on accusations, levelled in correspondence from Jewish readers, that it has been anti-semitic.

One or two thought there had been occasional lapses which might have encouraged an inclination to see it that way – a reference to "the comparative wealth and position of Britain's Jewish community", was one phrase cited and compared with a piece which referred to Jewish control of Hollywood and the media. (The latter was 18 months ago and I responded to it then by saying it contained statements which were understandably construed as anti-semitic.) Another journalist, citing similar examples, thought that a few months ago the coverage was "so anti-Israeli it was embarrassing".

There was a strong rejection by practically everyone of the suggestion that the coverage was permeated by anti-semitism, an impression that sometimes appears to have been formed remotely: "My Jewish family think we only publish pro-Palestinian pieces and opinions because that's what they read in the Jewish press." Many read only selected articles circulated to them by lobbies.

One of the paper's leading commentators believes the perception of anti-semitism among the Jewish readership derives more from tone and a sense that the Guardian sees humanity only on the Palestinian side, that it will explain Palestinian action in a way less readily afforded to the Israelis. Jewish readers, he said, "are telling us loud and clear an inconvenient truth: that they see Israel as a version of themselves, that an attack on the Jewish state is an attack on Jews, whether we like it or not.

"The Guardian is a progressive paper with a noble history: we were first in the British press to realise the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany and we were an early backer of the Zionist project. But now we are seen as a paper that is hostile to the Jews, one even liberal Jews cannot read any more."

One journalist insisted:"It is not anti-semitic to criticise the brutal and racist regime of Ariel Sharon... it is not anti-semitic to hear the voices of the Palestinians; it is not anti-semitic to see Palestinians as the victims of a situation in which they are overwhelmingly the underdog."

A senior Guardian journalist said: "One of the biggest problems for reporters [has been] to withstand the – clearly orchestrated – pressure to equate any criticism of Israeli government action with anti-semitism... The blackmail of making one feel ashamed to criticise Israeli actions... [can lead] to immeasurable damage."

A running criticism of the range of comment in the Guardian was, in fact, that it was short of articulate Palestinian and Muslim voices, some of which among the latter would be critical of the Palestinians.

The foreign editor believes that throughout the Guardian far more space has been devoted to the conflict than in other newspapers – some think too much, at the expense of other parts of the world whose problems seem devalued by disproportion. He thinks this may be partly because of the Guardian's role mentioned earlier.

"We were part of Israel's foundation and it is a part of our history... The problem for our Jewish readers is that this time round we are perceived as not supporting Israel. That is a misconception. We support Israel but we do not support this government... we are committed to telling the story, to showing the terror caused by suicide bombing but also to showing the oppression – I think that is the correct word – of the Palestinians. We will not be browbeaten into being bland."

The editor of the Guardian says: "The situation is very grave, very violent on both sides and the difficulties of reporting it are horrendous – your reporter being shot at by Israeli forces on the ground.

"The Israelis' information network and monitoring of the press is much more active and professional than the Palestinians'. We have a role in articulating their case – giving a voice to the voiceless is how I put it – but not disproportionately or uncritically.

"Our leader line has been very critical of the Sharon government which is, in our view, in a cul-de-sac. We think that to identify Israel with Bush's war on terrorism is a grossly simplified reading of the situation. We have also said that Arafat is a busted flush and criticised the surrounding Arab nations for their failure to play any constructive role. But, in the end, we think friends of Israel should not shy away from criticising the behaviour of a government which, in our view, is harming the cause of Israel itself."

Next week's column will be devoted to readers' responses to this and last week's column. Readers may contact the office of the readers' editor by telephoning 0845 451 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday (all calls are charged at local rate). Mail to Readers' editor, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Fax 020-7239 9997. Email: reader@guardian.co.uk

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES RESPONDS TO BOYCOTT

The New York Times responds to boycott
By Felicicty Barringer
New York Times
May 23, 2002

Intense public reaction to coverage of the violence of the Middle East conflict has prompted unusually harsh attacks on several news media outlets and has led to boycotts of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Broadcast news operations, including CNN and National Public Radio, have also been criticized. The general manager of one public radio station, WBUR-FM in Boston, said it had lost more than $1 million in underwriting and pledges this year nearly 4 percent of its annual budget because some supporters of Israel encouraged people not to give.

The criticism has come largely from supporters of Israel, and it reached a climax in recent weeks in the aftermath of the suicide bombing at a Passover seder in Netanya, which killed 28 Israelis, and the subsequent incursion by Israeli troops into West Bank cities like Ramallah, Bethelehem and Jenin, where the destruction of homes and loss of life among Palestinians was highly visible.

The swift communications of the Internet era apparently help fan the intensity of the criticism.

For instance, an account of supposedly anti-Israel remarks made by a CNN correspondent in Jerusalem was widely circulated, despite what Eason Jordan, the chief news executive of CNN, said were denials by the correspondent. Mr. Jordan said he could find up to 6,000 e-mail messages protesting coverage in his in-box in a single day.

The network, Mr. Jordan said, has as high a household penetration in Israel as anywhere in the world. It is being more closely watched right now, when, he said, Israeli sympathizers believe "that Israel is literally in a fight for its life." He added, "One of the only things that Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon have in common is they both think CNN is biased toward the opposite side."

The coverage by The New York Times has been condemned by rabbis in several congregations.

Pictures, headlines and photo captions have all been denounced, but the boycotters' most fundamental complaints are that in their view The Times creates a false equivalence between the sides in the conflict and gives disproportionate attention to Palestinian suffering.

Critics of The Times dispatched hundreds of e-mail messages and angry commentary earlier this month when it published a front-page photograph of the Salute to Israel parade in Manhattan that showed a small group of pro-Palestinian counterdemonstrators in the foreground and pro-Israeli marchers and their supporters in the background.

Since the pro-Israeli marchers and supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and the pro-Palestinian group in the hundreds, the photograph and a pair of related photographs in the Metro section reinforced the critics' impression that The Times was straining to create a sense of equivalence.

An editors' note the next day said, "In fairness the total picture presentation should have better reflected The Times's reporting on the scope of the event, including the disparity in the turnouts."

The boycott of The Times began on May 1 and is planned to last until the end of the month. Readers were urged by American Jewish figures critical of The Times' coverage to cancel subscriptions for a month.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, said the boycott had resulted in cancellations, but would not say how many.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who is one of the organizers of the boycott, said in an interview this week, "Pictures appeared in The Times day after day, especially during Operation Defensive Shield, of suffering Palestinians, with no comparative pictures about suffering Israelis."

He added, "Is it O.K. to keep writing things on suffering Palestinians who are suffering because of the terrorism of their colleagues and not to give sufficient attention to the victims of terror?"

Avi Weiss, the senior rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, said articles like the one detailing the lives of both a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber and the teenage Israeli woman who was her victim reflected a skewed moral equivalence.

"The Times may feel this is necessary to present balance," he said. "I would suggest there is no moral equivalence between cold-blooded murder and self-defense."

Howell Raines, executive editor of The Times, responding to the boycott, said: "We respect our readers' right to express their opinion. We are unhappy whenever we lose a single reader."

He added: "Our plan for future coverage is to continue it within The Times's traditions of fairness and balance. We feel that the coverage thus far has met our standards in this regard, and we will remain vigilant to make sure that continues to be the case."

Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week, is a critic of The Times's coverage. But in a May 10 editorial in his paper, which has tens of thousands of subscribers, he opposed the boycott.

"We need more constructive criticism, more marshaling of information, more voices speaking out for fair reporting," he wrote, "not a call to shut ourselves off from reporting and opinions we don't want to deal with."

Other newspapers face similar criticism. A portion of the Web site boycottthepost.org, which is encouraging a one-week boycott of The Washington Post in June, complained that the newspaper "presents both sides of the conflict as if each were equally valid and credible."

A brief boycott of The Los Angeles Times in April resulted in the one-day stoppage of 1,200 deliveries, according to Martha Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the newspaper.

At other newspapers, editors agree that the intensity of the criticism has steadily increased. James O'Shea, the managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, said: "It's not looking at coverage over all over a period of months and asking, 'Is there balance?' It's finding headlines, pictures, looking at the placement of a story and picking apart those elements."

While the the pro-Israeli Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, studies newpapers for evidence of bias, Palestine Media Watch has been monitoring the coverage of newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Like pro-Israeli critics, the pro-Palestian groups focus on issues of balance and equivalence and on common vocabulary. Ahmed T. Bouzid, the president of Palestine Media Watch, argued, among other things, that the word retaliation was often used about Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets, which, he said, "frames it as a reaction to something, not an action initiated by Israelis." He said he was pushing to eliminate mediocre journalism, not charging bias.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, echoed such criticism, but said he would not encourage a boycott. To do "what the Jewish community has done, to incite their members to boycott, to feel so injured that people work themselves into a lather over press coverage does damage to the possibility of discourse," he said.

 

“‘ISRAELIS KILL PALESTINIANS’ IS LESS OF A STORY THESE DAYS THAN ‘ISRAELIS DON’T KILL PALESTINIANS’”

Daily Telegraph diary item
The Daily Telegraph (London)
May 24, 2002

Douglas Davis, the London correspondent of the Jerusalem Post who writes in the Spectator of the BBC's "unchallenged diatribe" against Israel, is not the only one fuelling accusations of anti-semitism at the corporation. BBC staff are managing to do it themselves. As the Jewish Chronicle reveals today, Gareth Butler, the BBC's editor for live political programmes, e-mailed colleagues urging them to interview his girlfriend, a human rights activist visiting Jenin. "If you were interested in a couple of minutes of vivid reportage, she's right there on the front line," he said, concluding: "Then again, as I explained to her, 'Israelis kill Palestinians' is less of a story these days than 'Israelis DON'T kill Palestinians'." The BBC admits the e-mail was "poorly phrased" but says it has no reason to doubt Butler's "professional integrity".

 

LAWYER TAKES ON BBC OVER “BIAS”

Lawyer takes on BBC over 'bias'
By Joseph Millis
The Jewish Chronicle (London)
May 24, 2002

A London lawyer has compiled a 43-page report in support of a claim of anti-Israel bias in the BBC's Middle East reporting.

Trevor Asserson contends that the corporation has not followed its own policy guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, at times appearing to "invent material to suit its own bias."

The BBC, defending its coverage, said its journalists made great efforts, often under difficult circumstances, to present a balanced picture.

Mr Asserson, 45, head of commercial litigation at the law firm Bird & Bird, wrote the "critical study" with the help of an Israeli lawyer, Elisheva Mironi. While not citing specific BBC journalists or news items, it says that generally, by "selection or omission of facts," BBC reports can convey "the very opposite of the truth."

The study takes issue with the description of West Bank settlements as "illegal," and alleges that while Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon is often "treated with undisguised hostility" on the BBC, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat is portrayed as "a noble, dignified and courageous statesman."

In reply, a BBC spokesman said "great pains" were taken to present a balanced picture. He noted that BBC journalists worked at "considerable personal risk" in the knowledge that "any report they compile will be seen as one-sided or weighted for its lack of inclusion of a phrase, fact, or bit of history by a partisan viewer. And let us be clear – from that perspective, there are many truths."

Saying there were also complaints from "the other side," and rejecting Mr Asserson's claim policy guidelines had been breached, the spokesman said the BBC was "constantly reviewing Middle East coverage... with our very experienced team in the region, who are well aware of the sensitivity of some of the words and phrases they must employ."

Disappointed by what he termed the corporation's "blanket denial," Mr Asserson told the JC: "I have set up a group, BBCwatch, which will monitor the corporation over its clear obligation to be fair."

FULL ARTICLES

HOW DO YOU DEFINE A MASSACRE?

How do you define a massacre?
By Ramzy Baroud
Asharq Al-Awsat
May 18, 2002

A popular search term for Internet search engines must be "Palestinian massacres". Why not? There are many of them. Some old and unforgettable, others new, and some are yet to come to an end.

20 years later, thousands of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre victims are yet to be accounted for. Should we count them as dead or missing? How long will be for the missing be classified as dead? Now you know why when we refer to that infamous West Beirut carnage, orchestrated by Israel and carried out by its allies, we still say: ".. where 2,000 to 4,000 were killed," for thousands are yet to be accounted for.

"How do you define a massacre?" An angry reader asked me in a message where he defended Israel's killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp as self-defense. You have to be a Palestinian journalist to be asked that question.

How does one define a massacre?

I honestly never sat down with a dictionary, to search for a definition. Pretty strange for someone who wrote about massacres carried out against his people starting 20 years before he was born.

The word massacre is chilling, yet very telling, in a gruesome way that is. Little ones buried under the rubble of their homes, some burned and others decomposed. That's a massacre.

Men and women shot in their homes, near their homes, while opening the door for a crowd of angry soldiers, while closing the window to avoid the eyes of a sniper; while sitting down for dinner, no matter how simple; when gazing at heaven asking for mercy for the sake of the little ones. That's a massacre.

No, Palestinians are not quick to name Israel's killings massacres, but massacres name themselves, they come uninvited, they occupy sections of our collective memory, soon to be added to an ever expanding list of massacres, starting over 53 years ago and still flowing as the present becomes history.

An Arab journalist criticized Al- Jazeera recently. "I am just afraid that by showing images of massacres over and over again, people will become so accustomed to such tragedies," he noted. The man (I made little efforts to remember his name) received a rebutting question: "so should we stop reporting on Israeli massacres?"

How silly his question appeared with such a response, yet how frightening the idea is: Getting accustomed to such tragedies. Living in a refugee camp most of my life, witnessing the horrors of the occupation in Palestine; then disfigured bodies of frail Iraqi children dying from sanctions and leukemia, and reading and reporting on horrendous crimes committed against the most innocent of this world, the children, I still can hardly feel accustomed to massacres.

"A friend shared this photo with me. I am not sure if you viewed it yet," someone wrote me earlier today. Although I am hesitant to e-mail attachment with the numberless viruses lurking all over the Internet, I still viewed the image.

The attachment was titled "Angelic face."

It was yet another picture from Jenin. It was of a young girl, as old as mine, maybe yours. She was half buried in the sand. Dead. Her face reflected innocence. But the beauty appeared as if she was a fossil being excavated.

I couldn't help but wonder, did her mom sew that special dress for her? Was it a birthday gift she received while surrounded by refugee children in Jenin with a few candles and a cake - "Happy birthday dear."

But what's her name? How old was the "Angelic face"? Did her parents survive? How was she killed? Was she in so much pain? Did she suffocate under the sand?

Oh, I hope it was quick and painless. Is this all that I am capable of doing, of saying. Is this what I, we, the whole world, humanity, are able to come up with: Wishing that Palestinian children's deaths were quick and painless.

Those who overcome their hesitance and opened the attachment to see the Angelic face, must have deleted the photo a few minutes later. You know, no one likes a crowded e-mail box. But will the image ever be deleted from our memories? Will Jenin also be deleted, or will it remain? Remain as what? A massacre? But how do you define a massacre?

I still don't have the proper answer, and I am little interested to search for one. I was hoping that the United Nations would investigate and let us know, so that I could reply to that angry message. But they failed to do so, because Israel didn't grant the UN fact-finding mission a permit to reach the camp.

I guess that Jenin would only remain a massacre in the eyes of Palestinian school kids who will chant on an April day of every year under a wavering Palestinian flag, in some remote refugee camp, the name of Jenin, its martyrs, the Angelic face, the massacres, all of them, starting with the old, to the new, and to the ones that are yet to come.

 

CRISIS FOR AMERICAN JEWS

Crisis for American Jews
By Edward Said
Al Ahram Weekly
May 16-22, 2002

www.ahram.org.eg/weekly

Why is American Jewish support for Israel more fanatical than even anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis? Edward Said explains

(Caption of the photo which accompanied the article in Al Ahram: Edward Said in Lebanon Throwing Stones at Israel)

A few weeks ago, a vociferous pro-Israel demonstration was held in Washington at roughly the same moment that the siege of Jenin was taking place. All of the speakers were prominent public figures, including several senators, leaders of major Jewish organisations, and other celebrities, each of whom expressed unfailing solidarity with everything Israel was doing. The administration was represented by Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the Department of Defence, an extreme right-wing hawk who has been speaking about "ending" countries like Iraq ever since last September. Also known as a rigorous hard- line supporter of Israel, in his speech he did what everyone else did – celebrated Israel and expressed total unconditional support for it – but unexpectedly referred in passing to "the sufferings of the Palestinians." Because of that phrase, he was booed so loudly and so long that he was unable to continue his speech, leaving the platform in a kind of disgrace.

The moral of this incident is that public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil and fanaticism. Moreover, this refusal to see, much less hear anything about, the existence of "another side" far exceeds the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis, who are of course on the front line of the struggle in Palestine. To judge by the recent antiwar demonstration of 60,000 people in Tel Aviv, the increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the occupied territories, the sustained protest of (admitted only a few) intellectuals and groups, and some of the polls that show a majority of Israelis willing to withdraw in return for peace with the Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of political activity among Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States.

Two weeks ago the weekly magazine New York, which has a circulation of about a million copies, ran a dossier entitled "Crisis for American Jews," the theme being that "in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an issue of survival." I won't try to summarise the main points of this extraordinary claim except to say that it painted such a picture of anguish about "what is most precious in my life, the state of Israel," according to one of the prominent New Yorkers quoted in the magazine, that you would think that the existence of this most prosperous and powerful of all minorities in the United States was actually being threatened. One of the other people quoted even went as far as to suggest that American Jews are on the brink of a second holocaust. Certainly, as the author of one of the articles said, most American Jews support what Israel did on the West Bank, enthusiastically; one American Jew said, for instance, that his son is now in the Israeli army and that he is "armed, dangerous and killing as many Palestinians as possible."

Guilt at being well-off in America plays a role in this kind of delusional thinking, but mostly it is the result of an extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth that comes from education and unreflective nationalism of a kind unique in the world. Ever since the Intifada broke out almost two years ago, the American media and the major Jewish organisations have been running all kinds of attacks on Islamic education in the Arab world, Pakistan and even in the US. These have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Arafat's Palestinian Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and Israel, the virtues of suicide bombing, unlimited praise for jihad. Little has been said, however, of the results of what American Jews have been taught about the conflict in Palestine: that it was given to Jews by God, that it was empty, that it was liberated from Britain, that the natives ran away because their leaders told them to, that in effect the Palestinians don't exist except recently as terrorists, that all Arabs are anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews.

Nowhere in all this incitement to hatred does the reality of a Palestinian people exist, and more to the point, there is no connection made between Palestinian animosity and enmity towards Israel and what Israel has been doing to Palestinians since 1948. It's as if an entire history of dispossession, the destruction of a society, the 35 year old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of massacres, bombardments, expulsions, land expropriations, killings, sieges, humiliations, years of collective punishment and assassinations that have gone on for decades were as nothing, since Israel has been victimised by Palestinian rage, hostility and gratuitous anti-semitism. It simply does not occur to most American supporters of Israel to see Israel as the actual author of specific actions done in the name of the Jewish people by the Jewish state, and to connect in consequence those actions to Palestinian feelings of anger and revenge.

The problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not exist, that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society, sufferings and ambitions like all other people. Why this should be so for most but by no means all American Jewish supporters of Israel is something worth looking into. It goes back to the knowledge that there was an indigenous people in Palestine – all the Zionist leaders knew it and spoke about it – but the fact as a fact that might prevent colonisation could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist practice of either denying the fact or, more specially in the US where the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying about it by producing a counter-reality. For decades it has been decreed to schoolchildren there were no Palestinians when the Zionist pioneers arrived and so those miscellaneous people who throw stones and fight occupation are simply a collection of terrorists who deserve killing. Palestinians, in short, do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images. This is entirely the result of a distorted education, doled out to millions of youngsters who grow up without any awareness at all that the Palestinian people have been totally dehumanised to serve a political- ideological end, namely to keep support high for Israel.

What is so astonishing is that notions of co- existence between peoples play no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas American Jews want to be recognised as Jews and Americans in America, they are unwilling to accord a similar status as Arabs and Palestinians to another people that has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning.

Only if one were to live in the US for years would one be aware of the depth of the problem which far transcends ordinary politics. The intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of reality in which whatever Israel does it does as a victim: according to the various articles I have mentioned above, American Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival is at stake. This has nothing to do with reality obviously enough, but rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with a supremely unthinking narcissism. A recent defence of what Wolfowitz said in his speech didn't even refer to the Palestinians he was referring to, but defended President Bush's Middle East policy.

This is de-humanisation on a vast scale, and it is made even worse, one has to say, by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and debased the Palestinian struggle. All liberation movements in history have affirmed that their struggle is about life, not about death. Why should ours be an exception? The sooner we educate our Zionist enemies and show that our resistance offers co-existence and peace, the less likely will they be able to kill us at will, and never refer to us except as terrorists. I am not saying that Sharon and Netanyahu can be changed. I am saying that there is a Palestinian, yes a Palestinian constituency, as well as an Israeli and American one that needs to be reminded by strategy and tactics that force of arms and tanks and human bombs and bulldozers are not a solution, but only create more delusion and distortion, on both sides.

 

“I COUNT MYSELF AMONG THE JEWS WHO OPPOSE THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT”

A Jewish view of the Jewish state
By I. Heichler
Asharq Al-Awsat
May 21, 2002

As a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, I feel free to express negative views of the Zionist experiment, Israel's policies, and one-sided US support of Israel without fear of being instantly branded a Jew-hater. Jewishness, I insist, does not require I may belong to a minority, but I count myself among the Jews who oppose the Zionist movement. Perhaps it was in part because of Nazi insistence on defining me as a member of a different, "non-Aryan" race that already as a boy I came to regard Judaism as first and foremost a religious faith and community. As a young teenager in Nazi-occupied Austria, I was offended by what struck me as parallels between Nazi and Zionist definitions of the Jews as an ethnic group.

When I first read The Jewish State, the "bible" of the Zionist movement written by founder Theodor Herzl (comparable in its political influence to Uncle Tom's Cabin), I came across the naive, romantic slogan coined by this Austrian Jewish journalist, "People without land, come to the land without people!" That sentence alone persuaded me to regard the Zionist experiment in Palestine as based on a hopelessly unrealistic premise, doomed to create the tragic, insoluble problem which now confronts us daily in news, in order to keep the issue alive as a weapon to use against Israel. Today the population of the territories occupied since 1967 is growing much faster than that of Israel, and there is no obvious solution to that equation.

If I could envisage a reasonably quick and comprehensive solution to the crisis in Israel/Palestine, I would not have entitled this piece "The Insoluble Problem." I do believe that certain steps are possible to mitigate the crisis, but here, too, I am pessimistic that moderate or even drastic changes in American policy will improve our relations with the region, at least over the short term.

I advocate that we adopt a much tougher stance, using our massive assistance program much more effectively as leverage to insist on Israeli compliance with UN resolutions and our long- standing demands that settlement construction cease. Already existing settlements in the occupied territories should be dismantled. As for our dealings with the Palestinian side, ther to steady deterioration of Jewish-Palestinian relations and to a dead end. One could ask whether Israel might have done better to face the wrath of the world and openly annex the conquered lands back in 1967 rather than render their occupation irreversible through the back-door method of building all these settlements. Instead, Israel has succeeded only in creating three classes or, better yet, "castes" of people: Jewish citizens of Israel; Palestinians with citizenship rights in Israel proper; Palestinians living in the occupied territories without any apparent rights or protection against arbitrary measures taken against them by the Israeli authorities. Is it possible to imagine a surer recipe for anger, hatred and violence?

In the event of withdrawal, Israel must repatriate the settlers, daunting though the size of the problem (200,000 people) makes this task.* But they cannot be left behind without facing almost certain slaughter.

I am deeply skeptical that the Palestinians find not only the PLO, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, El Sendero Luminoso and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, guilty of terrorism, but equally so the government of Ariel Sharon with his brutal and futile efforts to impose "peace" on the Occupied Territories, equally guilty the increasingly brutal Israeli military which is harassing, maiming and killing innocent people, including women and children, wantonly razing civilian homes, tearing up their streets and roads, keeping people pent up and prevented from going where they need to go in order to earn a livelihood. Can there be a more cruel historical irony than Jews inflicting on Palestine's native population forms of harassment, suffering and horrors reminiscent of what their forefathers were condemned to experience at the hands of the Nazis half a century ago?

A plague on both their houses, I say-Arab and Israeli terrorists both in their pursuit of policies and actions which create no solutions but only more rage, more violence, m must be automatic, even at the expense of American interests in the Middle East and around the world. I fear that the consistent US "tilt" toward Israel, our unwavering support of Israeli policy, stems from fear by our elected officials of a specter called "the Jewish vote." I fervently hope that this "Jewish vote" is a political myth, that in reality there is no such bloc vote. Having suffered Nazi hatred and persecution at first hand, I am like the child "once burned, twice careful," and I worry that, fed by blind support of Israeli policies and actions by many American Jews, and by powerful lobbies like AIPAC (the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee) and even the terrorist gang known as the Jewish Defense League, Anti-Semitism may increase rapidly in America.

I fear that blind Jewish support of Israel will sooner or later give rise to suspicions of divided loyalty. It may seem absurd (for now), but as a retired US Foreign Service officer, I have nightmarish visions of Jewish state.

(The author of this commentary, a retired senior diplomat, was born in Austria in 1925 and lived under German rule there from 1938 to 1940. He then managed to escape with his immediate family to the United States. Mr. Heichler served in the US Army during World War II, becoming a US citizen in 1944. He entered the Foreign Service in 1954 and retired as a minister-counselor in the American Foreign Service in 1986 after serving at seven posts abroad, in addition to Washington DC.)

 

WORSE THAN CNN? BBC NEWS & THE MIDEAST

Worse than CNN? BBC News & the Mideast
By Paul de Rooij
Counterpunch
May 16, 2002

The news coverage of major international events varies considerably from country to country. Arguably, the news available in the UK is more diverse than in the US. One does find a greater breadth of perspective, as well as more accurate reporting. However the main broadcaster, the BBC, has a spotty record when it comes to the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Occasionally the BBC produces programs that are commendable for their depth and willingness to challenge the viewers. For example, it produced a laudable documentary about the Sabra and Shatila massacres that implicated Ariel Sharon in the war crimes. It is unlikely an American TV network would ever have produced such a documentary; it would be too worried about facing a barrage of criticism, possible litigation, and a loss of advertising revenue. A different dynamic is at play at the BBC since it doesn't depend on advertising revenue, and the pro-Israeli groups in the UK aren't as well organized as in the US. The pressures the BBC faces, instead, are intense lobbying and government direction – the UK Foreign Office has some say in the news coverage, the appointment of key staff, and even in its budget. But though different, these pressures are also having an effect, and it is increasingly evident that BBC coverage now favors an Israeli agenda.

The main problem with the BBC's reporting is not with the reporters on the ground. These are on the whole very good journalists who take considerable risks. Orla Guerin, John Simpson, and others report from the refugee camps, and witness and describe the violent aspects of occupation. The problem with the coverage resides primarily in the way this news is packaged in London or by the commentator in the Jerusalem studio, and how it is framed in the extended news program, Newsnight. The text versions of the news, BBC Online and TeleText news, offer an even clearer picture of the bias at work – therein the liberal use of quotation marks indicates that preferred version of events.

The coverage is always stripped of its historical context. Although Palestine was a former British colony and the UK bears a considerable responsibility for the calamity that affected the native population, one never hears any historical references to that. From the coverage, one would hardly know that Britain signed away Palestinian land to create a Jewish homeland virtually no one has heard of the Balfour Declaration. The subsequent disasters that overcame the Palestinians in 1948 are never offered as an explanation of current events; even the conquest in 1967 is seldom referred to. In contrast, current events from other former colonies do appear with some historical framework, e.g., Zimbabwe. During the crisis in Bosnia or Kosovo the BBC offered extended coverage and historical background it even lent airtime for humanitarian donation appeals. The message conveyed was clear: the Serbs were the bad guys.

The neglect of context has a lot to do with the pressures put on journalists to produce many reports within a limited time frame. They have limited time to prepare, and cannot become experts in the field. A 24-hour news service demands a constant stream of brief items that cannot afford to give any background. Standing up against such pressures is something that one would hope a non-commercial broadcaster like the BBC would do, but it appears to be more concerned with emulating CNN.

The BBC is also overly concerned with its ratings. These invariably compare its news coverage to the "factoid press". The constant drive to expand its market share makes it adjust its programs to appeal to the lowest common denominator not unlike the commercial media – and this requires context-less brief news items. Only shocking events make it into the factoid news.

Only when someone is killed is news obtained from the area. Unquestionably, Israeli deaths are deemed more important than Palestinian deaths; much more extended coverage is devoted to the suicide bombing casualties than to incidents where greater numbers of Palestinians are killed. Also, BBC TeleText and Online news refer to Israelis as having been "killed," thus denoting intent, whereas Palestinians invariably "die"; these media always enclose massacres and assassinations with quotation marks. Israeli killings and violent acts are always labeled "retaliation", thus justified. Increasingly, Palestinian violence has been labeled "terrorism" it has never been labeled "resistance". Although the term "terrorism" is often applied to Palestinian violence, the term "state terrorism" is never applied to Israeli acts of aggression.

Israeli war planners know the proclivity of the news media for reporting deaths, and they have tried to keep the death toll in check thereby reducing the flow of news – while increasing the number of injuries, literally into the tens of thousands. BBC programs featured the masses of injuries due to landmines in Angola and Cambodia, but it has never reported on the masses of maimed Palestinian youngsters.

The more mundane aspects of the violence engendered by occupation are never reported. The BBC has never reported that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are subject to arbitrary ID paper confiscation, thereby losing the right to residence in Jerusalem and losing their homes. Similarly, house demolitions, torture, or arbitrary imprisonment without charge, trial, appeal or representation are not the BBC's going fare.

The BBC obviously watches its language. Last year Robert Fisk (Independent, August 4, 2001) reported that the news editor had ordered journalists to refer to the assassination of militant leaders as "targeted killings". Although the editor Malcolm Downing denied issuing such a directive it is clear from the news output since then that the terms for Israeli assassinations parallel the Israeli rhetoric. During the recent Israeli incursions into the occupied territories, we witnessed an increase in the dosage of weasel words like, "alleged" and "unconfirmed". Initially, reports would indicate that women, children or bystanders were killed too – the so-called collateral damage.

However, this has given way to the generic terminology of "targets or militants" with no indication of the identity of those killed.

Israeli embassy staff is known to exert pressure on the BBC's choice of words. It usually comes in the form of a question like "isn't the word settlement wrong here?" Most senior journalists withstand this type of pressure, but inexperienced journalists may be susceptible to such tactics. Constant prodding of this type does have an effect.

It is rare for the BBC to refer to the West Bank or Gaza as "occupied territories". A clear litmus test of the bias of a news source on this subject is whether it uses the word "occupation"; in the case of the BBC it is virtually non-existent. Similarly the nature of the settlements remains ambiguous. When David Sells interviewed some settlers they were portrayed as a loving group of people having fun with the kids. The documentary ignored the settlers' usual daytime activities involving the violent confiscation of Palestinian land. The status of the settlements is seldom described as illegal under international law. The fact that since Oslo there are 43 new settlements, with a 45% expansion of land (excluding the "Jews-only bypass" roads), and a doubling of the number of settlers has never been mentioned on BBC news.

The comfortable terms balance and objectivity are often the justification to neuter news emanating from the area. For the BBC balance means that there must be some reporting of the Israeli side, some from the Palestinian, and some from either Americans or British officials. Furthermore, no reporting should offend the sensitivities of the Israelis. The end result is that the reportage is fraught with contradictions. It is not possible to connect the violence perpetrated against the Israelis with the violence and injustice of the occupation; since the latter is not acknowledged Palestinian violence is simply seen as criminal, whereas Israeli violence always has redeeming characteristics.

In BBC Online several articles dealing with Palestine contain a "Click here for a different viewpoint" all these point to articles written by Israeli embassy officials. In no other conflict does one find such an alternative view. This warped notion of balance irks the BBC journalists whose work has been so affected.

The constant reference to "cycle of violence" equates the Israeli violence to a response to Palestinian violence, diminishing the fact that Israeli violence is disproportionate and used to oppress the native population. This context-free reporting thus renders the violence unintelligible BBC coverage doesn't answer why there is any violence at all. Again, contrast this coverage with the coverage in Kosovo. Here the Serbs were condemned for oppression and violence, and the Kosovar response had a rationale. The Serb claims of Kosovar terrorism were ridiculed, and Serb violence was viewed as unprovoked and unjustifiable. The few times Serbian officials appeared on the BBC they were grilled about the latest outrage, and their claims of retaliation for terrorist acts were clearly rejected. It is therefore obvious that the BBC is using a different reporting handbook in the Middle East.

However influential, the Israeli PR machine faces a difficult task to defend its untenable position, and has been forced to adapt its strategy. Repeating a lie too often reduces its effectiveness over time, and therefore propaganda has to change its tune. There are distinct techniques used to deflect criticism and reinterpret events during the past few years. These are: "blame the victim", "reflective accusation", "parallel universe", "shades of gray", and "reaping the fruits". The defense of last resort is the "smear". These have been similarly reflected in the BBC coverage.

A few years ago the BBC repeatedly grilled Palestinian spokespersons about the cynical use of children to confront soldiers (blame the victim), accusing them of the deaths of many children. Kirsty Wark, a Newsnight interviewer, repeatedly questioned Hanan Ashrawi in an indignant tone. The consequence was that no topic other than this could be discussed. The enhanced version of this tactic is to accuse the victim for things that the Israelis themselves are doing (reflective accusation), e.g., during the Jenin incursion Israeli spokesmen were quoted as saying that Palestinians were "threatening Israel's very existence." The fact that it is the Palestinians who are being killed doesn't make the interviewers stop the Israeli spokesmen. No matter how ridiculous an Israeli statement it is never questioned.

We now witness a few more variants of these defenses. "Parallel universe" refers to reporting where the Israeli viewpoint is presented without any reference to the Palestinian reality. A good example is Kathryn Westscott's "Viewpoint: Were Israel's incursions a success?" (BBC Online, Mar. 15, 02). Israelis are interviewed, but no reference is made to the causes of Palestinian violence, e.g., the occupation. Thus Israelis are outraged at the suicide bombings, but no reason whatsoever is given for their cause.

The "shades of gray" defense pertains to the ploy indicating that reality is beyond simple solutions like ending occupation anyone taking such a position is ridiculed because they can't answer the demands by the reasonable Israelis seeking peace. Similarly, unpalatable aspects of Israeli occupation cannot be labeled as crimes because reality is so much more complicated. A good example of this is Barnaby Mason's "Analysis: 'War crimes' on West Bank" (the quotation marks are in the original) indicating that it isn't a black and white issue to determine if war crimes were committed. The usage of war crimes, without the quotation marks, is reserved for official enemies like Iraq.

Similarly, the "reaping the fruits" defense pertains to exploiting the fact that there hasn't been any reference to occupation for many months, and therefore the viewer may not know that the Palestinians live under occupation. (A survey indicates that about 90% of the UK's population is unaware of this.) Working on this premise Israeli PR can claim that any violence threatens their very existence the violence on the West Bank becomes violence against Israel. Violence is entirely stripped out of its context for the aims of the propagandist, which is reflected in the BBC coverage.

Common to all techniques is that lies and half-truths have to be planted repeatedly. It is usually more costly to disprove a statement than to put forth one's own message. So, a steady flow of lies bogs down the ineffective Palestinian message. In time these lies become accepted and can be exploited by the "reaping the fruit" tactic.

The defense of last resort has been to question the motives of the questioners or reporters, ultimately smearing them. Fortunately, BBC news, unlike CNN, hasn't debased itself to follow this line – until now primarily because the questions are already posed within the Israeli framework: they do the questioning. The smears that do occur are not evident to the viewer. Israeli embassy staff labels any journalist who has produced a piece with a balanced assessment of Palestinian issues as a "Palestinian spokesman." This sometimes attains the desired result that the journalist is advised to do a dedicated piece on Israeli issues.

Another source of bias is the sequence of interviewees on the extended news program, Newsnight. First, an Israeli spokesperson rattles off a series of accusations, like "Arafat is irrelevant." The interviewer then turns to a Palestinian spokesperson asking the question just posed by the previous spokesperson – the interview agenda is set by the pro-Israeli camp. A variation on this formula is to have the BBC offer an introduction, invariably with an Israeli point of reference, and then continue as in the previous version. If a pro-Palestinian source attempts to change the nature of the question, by stating that "this is not the issue", then the common rebuff is "answer my question."

In Newsnight or the main News, it is also important to note that the last word in an interview has been an Israeli or sometimes an official American or British one. The question is posed in the Israeli framework, the Palestinians are forced to answer this question, and the final word is that of an Israel spokesperson. It is a thankless task to attempt to explain the Palestinian situation to a British audience, let alone an American one.

The choice and handling of the spokespersons is another important issue. There are several polished Israeli spokespersons quickly rattling off their main points, and the BBC interviewers find it impossible to interrupt them. The most aggressive of them is Ranaan Gissin, who immediately takes control of the interview however objectionable what he has to say is. The choice of Palestinian spokespersons is rather limited, and not all of them are effective. Invariably they are interrupted and on occasion even shut off. In contrast, during the Kosovo crisis, academics and professionals in the area were brought on the program because their insights were useful. Given that it is difficult to secure access to some of the more eloquent Palestinian spokespersons due to the travel restrictions between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the BBC has yet to interview some of the eloquent academics, e.g., Edward Said, Riad Malki, or Arab-Israeli politicians, e.g., Azmi Bishara. Few attempts are made by the BBC to clarify the Palestinian message. The BBC also never refers to leading Israeli peace activists or critics, Uri Avnery or Michael Warshawski have never appeared on any of its programs.

Another curious BBC practice is to interview Richard Perle or James Rubin, ostensibly as American commentators. Perle is always described as a "former" Under Secretary of Defense. It is never revealed that he is a pro-Israeli right wing hawk lobbying for Israeli interests and advocating the demolition of Iraq. His commentary is hardly the American viewpoint, official or otherwise. Rubin, another "former," is also put forward in the guise of obtaining an unofficial American opinion, but the topic on hand is always Israel. His opinions are usually indistinguishable from Perle's.

The absurd has its place on BBC news too. During recent bombing in Gaza the reports stated that "a Palestinian naval installation" was destroyed – although they don't have a single boat. Similarly, the buildings of the "military" were bombed. It is rather odd to describe the police in military terms, intimating that Palestinians have an army perhaps capable of attacking Israeli tanks or helicopters. The description of the targets in this fashion has more to do with justifying Israeli action than objective journalism. It is easier to accept Israeli bombing if the opponent is seen as a military target.

The BBC would like to be known for its objectivity and high quality journalism. However, it is obvious that it is not impervious to the same pressures found in commercial broadcasting networks, and in the case of the Israel/Palestine issue its coverage has shown a definite bias. It is a dark blot on whatever reputation it claims to have.

But the BBC can take steps now to return to a proper journalistic role and apply a true sense of balance. First, given that the Israeli side employs a large body of capable and well-funded propagandists, the BBC should rectify this imbalance by seeking and even amplifying the voice of the more effective Palestinian spokesmen. Second, it should improve its contextual information and avoid jargon obviously tilted to the Israeli side. A litmus test of balanced interviews is to find its interviewers being as tough with the Israeli spokesmen as with the Palestinians. The BBC may once again deserve to be considered an objective news organization the day an interviewer questions an Israeli spokesman about the massacre at Jenin with the same indignant tone used to question Hanan Ashrawi.

FIGHTING DESPAIR

Israel on the edge
Fighting despair, Arabs, and the enmity of the world.
By Paul Johnson
April 25, 2002

In the current Arab-Israeli crisis, the Israelis appear to have forfeited the sympathy of much of the civilized world. Why is this? And what can Israel, and its allies, do about it?

Part of the explanation lies in the failure of Israel's once brilliantly efficient instrument of state to deliver. After half a century of embattlement with the Arab world, Israel has a tired and combat-weary look and seems to be asking, despairingly: "Where will it all end?"

Israel's case for its offensive against its neighboring terrorist enclaves is, in essence, excellent and unassailable. It is now clear that the Oslo accords were a mistake and have been used by Arafat – and his foreign backers – merely as a platform from which to launch indiscriminate suicide bombing against Israel's cities. But this case has been poorly presented by officials who seem to have lost heart. At any rate it has not got through.

When Colin Powell was in Israel, most of the horrifying facts presented to him by Ariel Sharon appeared to be news to him. And if Powell does not grasp the strength of Israel's case, how can millions of ordinary TV viewers across the world, who nightly see Israeli tanks trundling through Arab villages, be expected to understand why the Israeli army has had to conduct its campaign?

Second, there has been a manifest decline in the quality and energy of Israeli diplomacy, formerly one of the world's wonders. Israel's ambassadors in key capitals were handpicked for outstanding ability and high profiles, with a superb grasp of English forensic skills. They seized with relish on the smallest chance to provide "bites" for television audiences. Now they tend to be second-raters with limited fluency in English.

Third, and more serious, is the decline in the morale and effectiveness of the Israeli army, the overwhelming victor in four trials of strength with the Arab world over the last 50 years. This decline has been noted both by well-disposed military experts from the West and by critical Israelis themselves. Operations are less well planned, troops often inadequately trained, and individual soldiers, most of them conscripts, poorly motivated.

These factors lead to excessive use of heavy firepower, needless killing of innocent civilians, and painful delays, all of which the TV cameras magnify.

These weaknesses on the Israeli side could be removed if the will were there. But is it? Israel has some of the characteristics of a gerontocracy, a state run by old men who have forgotten nothing and learned little in recent decades. It is a genuine democracy – none better – but its multiple-party system makes for a deadly paralysis at the top, where old men never seem to die, or fade away either. The man who tried to break this impasse, Benjamin Netanyahu, was eventually rejected by voters (who are highly conservative too), but they now seem to be having second thoughts and it may be that a return of Netanyahu to power would be the first decisive step in putting Israel to rights.

However, there are some factors in Israel's present predicament that are outside her control. Here are the most important. First, there is no symmetry in the Arab-Israeli conflict. If the Israelis score a military victory, or a diplomatic one for that matter, the Arabs live to fight another day. Israel, by contrast, cannot afford one serious mistake. If Israel lost control of the air, and her army were overrun, there can be absolutely no doubt that the entire Jewish-Israeli nation would be exterminated. It would be Hitler's holocaust all over again, conducted not in secrecy and shame but in the open, in a spirit of triumphant exultation as the successful climax of a jihad. This is the nightmare – not distant but proximate – that every Israeli prime minister must face and for which he will be held posthumously responsible if he guesses wrongly and fails to use the necessary force in time. By one wrong decision, an Israeli leader cannot only lose the war in one afternoon, he can lose half the Jewish people too. This helps to explain why the Israeli elite are hag-ridden with anxiety, obstinate, and often closed to argument.

The lack of symmetry between the risks taken by Arabs and by Israelis is one result of a different view of the sanctity of human life. The Jewish faith was the first religion to preach this sanctity and to magnify the value of each individual human being in the eyes of his Creator – hence, equally, in other human beings. This is the main reason that Mosaic law differs so markedly in humanity and reason from all the other fiercely retributive codes of the ancient Near East. The value placed on human life by Jews has steadily increased over the centuries, as a response to persecution and, above all, to the Nazi attempt at extermination of the entire people. Israel itself was created as a refuge and fortress in which Jewish lives would be safe from annihilation. It is thus the physical embodiment of the principle that individual life is sacred.

By contrast, the Islamic-Arab concept of "the war of the martyrs" places no value on human life except as a sacrifice in the holy war. A warrior gains infinitely more by losing his life than by preserving it, for then he gains eternal life, and his status as a martyr is enhanced by the number of dead Israelis – "sons and daughters of Satan" – whom he takes with him.

It is very difficult for the Israelis to know how to straddle this complete lack of symmetry in warfare and to combat an enemy that has so few inhibitions about killing either opponents or its own people. There is, indeed, something Hitlerian about the implacable hatred Israel faces on its own borders. It should come as no surprise that Arabic translations both of Mein Kampf and of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that diabolic forgery, are best-sellers in the Arab world. We in the West would be well advised to appreciate the strength of the hatred the Israelis face, for it may soon be turned against us too. (We received a foretaste on September 11.)

However, for the moment, the world is unconscious of these deep underlying forces, and tends in its ignorance to see the Arab-Israel conflict as a war like any other, with the faults 50-50. From this perspective it is therefore the Israelis who appear to be guilty of a disproportionate use of force, an impression the nightly TV images seem to confirm.

Thus the Jews, not for the first time in their long and tragic history, are blamed for the persecution they suffer. Like the Israelis themselves, the world is tired of the endless antagonism of the Arabs and wishes that somehow or other the Jews and their state would simply fade away and allow everyone to have some rest. Thus, similarly, in wartime Germany, ordinary Germans, vaguely aware that countless thousands of Jews were being "sent east" – that euphemism employed for Destination Auschwitz – were furious at the rattling of vast trains of cattle-trucks packed with doomed Jews, which disturbed their rest throughout the night, and cursed "those damned Jews, never letting us get a decent night's sleep."

(Paul Johnson is a journalist and historian whose books include A History of the Jews and whose latest volumes are on the Renaissance and Napoleon.)

 

“WE NEED A PALESTINIAN MANDELA”

'We need a Palestinian Mandela'
Meet Omar Karsou, a moderate in a land of extremes.
By Robert L. Pollock
The Wall Street Journal
May 17, 2002

Just days ago conventional wisdom was that Israel's recent invasion of the West Bank had only strengthened Yasser Arafat's hand by forcing Palestinians to rally behind their leader. But as he ventured out of Ramallah this week, Arafat was met by sparse crowds, and he canceled plans to visit the Jenin refugee camp for fear of being heckled, or worse. Such discontent apparently led to Arafat's unprecedented speech Wednesday, in which he accepted blame for unspecified "mistakes," and promised reform of the Palestinian Authority.

"There's a lot of soul-searching, a lot of people asking what has he done," says a Palestinian named Omar Karsou. But Mr. Karsou remains skeptical that Mr. Arafat will ever give up his decades-long practice of dictatorial rule secured by rewarding cronies. "We're the only nonentity in the world with 28 ministers," he marvels.

Mr. Karsou, a 42-year-old banker from Nablus, has been a quiet advocate of democratic reform in the Palestinian Authority. Now he's about to become a public advocate, launching a movement--tentatively called Democracy in Palestine – along with a small group of Palestinian legislators, businessmen, academics, lawyers and journalists. Their mission: to promote a true "rule of law" in the PA; to promote national and local elections in the PA; and to demand a renunciation of the use of force in settling disputes. Mr. Karsou will make his first public appearance a week from today on a panel sponsored by Washington's Hudson Institute.

I first met Mr. Karsou last summer, shortly after he moved his wife and their four children to the U.S. to ensure their safety after the launch of the movement. At the time he assured me that a silent majority of Palestinians didn't understand why Arafat walked away from Camp David and didn't understand what the current violence was all about. A common joke, he said, was that "We had British occupation. We had Jordanian occupation. We had Israeli occupation. Now we have Tunisian occupation" – a reference to the long exile of Arafat and his PLO cronies in Tunisia. They now dominate PA institutions; locals have been largely frozen out.

But before Mr. Karsou could get the movement off the ground, Sept. 11 happened, and the world's attention moved elsewhere. Mr. Karsou used the delay to great effect, quietly making the rounds in Washington, where surprisingly – given his political inexperience and yet-unborn movement – he generated a lot of buzz.

A few months ago I even got a phone call about Mr. Karsou from Israel's deputy prime minister, Natan Sharansky. While Mr. Sharansky didn't specifically endorse the man or his group, he wanted to stress how important it was that such democratic movements be encouraged.

"We have no one but ourselves to blame," Mr. Sharansky said of the violence, arguing Israel had foolishly gambled that having a strong dictator like Yasser Arafat running the Palestinian Authority would help Israel crush groups like Hamas. As it turned out, legitimacy not won at the ballot box was maintained by keeping Israel an external enemy. That's why, Mr. Sharansky said, "It's much better to deal with a democracy that hates you than a dictator who loves you."

Mr. Karsou says the Palestinians aren't faced with a choice between a dictator and Hamas: "If we have a free and fair election, the moderates will win." Of his frank discussions with the deputy prime minister: "Sharansky believes in the land of Israel. But more importantly he doesn't want to rule over other people."

Mr. Karsou is a self-described "Palestinian nationalist" and no lover of Israel. (His Ramallah offices were ransacked by Israeli troops during the recent incursion.) Nor is he willing to compromise much in his vision of a future Palestinian state. He advocates something like the Saudi plan, a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and a just settlement of the refugee issue, though not necessarily the right to return to Israel proper. ("Officially I am a refugee" – his family fled Jaffa in 1948 – "but the West Bank is my home.") But he has apparently succeeded in convincing a number of pro-Israel hawks that with the right leadership and democratic institutions, such a Palestinian state needn't be a threat to Israel's existence.

Yet while some words of encouragement from Washington would help safeguard Mr. Karsou and his colleagues while they challenge Arafat's regime, the real test will be winning support back home. He says he isn't too concerned about being tainted by his contacts with Israelis and their supporters. Palestinians understand that "we negotiate with our adversaries, not with our friends. That the hawks are talking to us means there is some hope for this movement."

Mr. Karsou laments the fact that other would-be moderates like Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat have thrown in their lot with the PLO, and now spend more time denouncing the occupation than working to build the kind of Palestinian society that would make it easier to end the occupation. "Once the Israelis see some serious, peaceful leadership on the Palestinian side, they'll be willing to go out of their way to accommodate it," he says, citing a recent poll showing 57% of Israelis support the Saudi plan. "The way to end the Palestinian issue is by having a Palestinian Mandela. That's what we urgently need."

There are, of course, plenty of reasons to be cynical about the prospects for Mr. Karsou and his group. But then any revolutionary movement is a long shot at the outset. And, ironically, one of his biggest obstacles to international recognition might be the State Department, which has too often written off Arabs who speak the language of democracy – such as Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi – as unrepresentative and inauthentic. We joke that he might do better to leave the democracy rhetoric at home, and adopt a head scarf and "martyr" talk for his visits to Foggy Bottom. "If I say our cause has been hijacked by extremists some people find it strange," says Mr. Karsou. "Well, it is a fact."

Mr. Karsou has bravely abandoned a life and a home to do something about that fact. He deserves all the support he can get.

(Mr. Pollock is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal.)

FULL ARTICLES

ISREALI FAMILY SUES EU FOR PALESTINIAN ATTACK

Israeli family sues EU for Palestinian attack
The Associated Press
May 20, 2002

An Israeli family filed a 20.7 million dollars lawsuit against the European Union on Monday, alleging that EU grants to the Palestinian Authority indirectly benefited gunmen who carried out a deadly shooting attack on the Bloomberg family in August.

The family's lawyer, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, said the European Union was reckless in providing financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. She alleged that some of the EU money was being redirected by the Palestinian Authority to Palestinian militant groups, such as the one that carried out the attack on the British-born Bloomberg family, and that the EU was aware of the practice.

A European Commission official said the EU is investigating claims by Israel that the Palestinian Authority has used member states' money to carry out attacks against Israelis.

"We have yet to receive any evidence that the Palestinian Authority has misused our funds to fund terrorist activities. The Commission did say that they were treating these allegations made by the Israeli government very seriously and that it awaits any evidence to show that those funds have been misused," said David Kriss, a spokesman for the European Commission in Israel.

Techiya Blumberg, 35, was five months pregnant when she was killed in a Palestinian drive-by shooting in the West Bank on August 5. Her husband, Steven Blumberg, and 14-year-old daughter were also injured in the attack and remain paralyzed, Darshan-Leitner said in a statement.

Steven Blumberg and his five children are suing the EU over his wife's death. He and his injured daughter are also suing over their wounds.

Israeli security forces arrested two members of the Palestinian security forces last year and accused them of having participated in the attack on the Blumbergs.

"Without the EU's reckless provision of financing to the Palestinians, hundreds of Israeli terror victims would still be alive and thousands of others would never have had to suffer their tragic injuries," Darshan-Leitner said.

 

PARK HOTEL CHEF KILLED IN LATEST NETANYA SUICIDE BOMBING

Park Hotel chef killed in Netanya suicide bombing
By Celean Jacobson
The Associated Press

Arkady Wieselman, a hotel chef in the coastal resort of Netanya, escaped the deadliest suicide bombing in Israel when he walked into the kitchen freezer just before an explosion rocked the hotel dining hall, killing 29 Israelis.

More than six weeks later, he was killed with two other Israelis when another suicide bomber walked into Netanya's outdoor market dressed as a soldier Sunday and detonated explosives he was carrying.

Wieselman's death compounded the feeling of tragedy at the hotel as its staff struggled to recover from the March 27 attack.

"I thought it was impossible that something like this would happen again to the people at the Park Hotel," said Rina Hamamy, whose husband, Ami, was the manager of the hotel.

Ami Hamamy died of his injuries two days after a suicide bomber wearing 40 pounds of explosives walked into the packed dining hall and blew himself up as guests were sitting down to the traditional Passover seder meal.

Wieselman, who had worked at the hotel for more than 10 years, had prepared the meal. He was in a freezer in an upper-level kitchen when the explosion occurred.

When Rina Hamamy arrived at the hotel five minutes later, Wieselman was tending to the injured. "He helped save the people. He was so sad about what happened but so relieved he was alive," she said.

Following Ami Hamamy's death, Wieselman helped care for his family, cooking meals during the mourning period and providing emotional support.

"Arkady was with me, and now everything begins again," Rina Hamamy said.

The attack in March triggered a massive military operation by Israel in the West Bank, which greatly slowed the number of bombings in the country. The attack Sunday was the 11th time in two years the town, close to the border between Israel and the West Bank, was targeted.

Hamamy said Wieselman, a Russian immigrant, was a gentle man and a devoted father and husband who feared for his family's safety amid the violence.

"He was upset about all these terror attacks in Netanya. He has two children and he was afraid that it could happen at their school, anywhere," she said.

On Sunday, his day off, Wieselman was wandering through the market's rows of fruits and vegetables, shopping for his family, when the bomber struck.

"It is going to be hard for his family. We pray and hope that this will end," Hamamy said.

 

PFLP LEADER ORDERED NETANYA ATTACK FROM JERICHO CELL

PFLP leader reportedly ordered Netanya attack from his Jericho jail cell
By Ellis Shuman
Israel Insider
May 20, 2002

Security sources in Israel believe that Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Secretary-General Ahmed Saadat ordered Sunday's suicide bombing attack in Netanya's market, in which three Israelis were killed and 59 were injured. Saadat is being held in a Jericho jail under British supervision on suspicion of planning the assassination of Tourism Minister Rechavam Ze'evi last October.

The PFLP claimed credit for the Netanya attack, saying, "Despite the closure and the emergency situation in which the forces of the criminal Sharon are acting, a member of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades managed to penetrate deep into the Zionist areas and enact this sacrifice operation." The PFLP said that it would not reveal the name of the suicide bomber to prevent Israel from retaliating against his operators.

Security forces dismissed conflicting claims of responsibility issued by Hamas, and assume that the terrorist left for his suicide mission from the Tulkarm area. A few hours after the Netanya attack, IDF forces operated in Palestinian villages near Tulkarm, but no arrests were made.

Israel has charged that Saadat orchestrated Ze'evi's assassination in retaliation for the IDF missile strike which killed his predecessor Abu Ali Mustafa last August. Saadat took refuge with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in the Mukata compound in Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield. He was transferred to Jericho as part of the agreement that ended Arafat's confinement.

While the four PFLP members directly involved in Ze'evi's assassination are reportedly being held under strict guard, Saadat's supervised conditions are more liberal and allow him access to telephones and visitors. According to media reports, he shares a comfortable, air-conditioned room with Fuad Shubaki, suspected of masterminding the Karine A weapons shipment.

On Saturday, during an interview with Lebanese television station MBC, Saadat called on the Palestinian Authority to release him. PA officials have said that Saadat was never convicted of any crime, and he would be freed if a Palestinian court found no evidence to convict him. Arafat reportedly assured Saadat he would be released within ten days of the transfer to Jericho after a quick ruling by the Palestinian attorney general.

Israeli security sources believe that Saadat coordinated the Netanya attack through meetings with PFLP activists who met with him in the prison. Israeli officials passed on information regarding Saadat's continued involvement in terror activities to the Americans and the British, along with a demand to curtail his prison freedom, Maariv reported.

Government officials reportedly demanded that Saadat be placed in solitary confinement a full day before the Netanya attack, Ha'aretz reported. Officials said that Saadat was being held in an isolation cell, but they added that he might have been transferred there after issuing the orders to launch the suicide bombing mission.

 

ISRAEL DEMANDED ISOLATION OF SUSPECTED BOMBING MASTERMIND

Israel demanded isolation of suspected bombing mastermind
By Ha'aretz Staff
Ha'aretz
May 20, 2002

As early as the day before a suicide bomber killed three people and wounded scores of others Sunday in Netanya's open-air market, Israel demanded that the United States and Britain put Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Secretary-General Ahmed Sa'adat – now suspected of having ordering the bombing – under solitary confinement, Israel Radio cited government officials as saying Monday.

The PFLP, among other groups, claimed responsibility for the Netanya attack. Israel is investigating the possibility that the bombing was personally ordered by Sa'adat.

Israel has charged that Sa'adat was behind the December assassination of then-tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi, in retaliation for the earlier killing of Sa'adat's predecessor as PFLP secretary-general. He is being held in a Jericho jail under the supervision of British jailers as part of an agreement, which ended Yasser Arafat's IDF-enforced confinement to the Palestinian leader's office in Ramallah.

The officials said Sa'adat's wardens are presently keeping Sa'adat in an isolation cell. But they added that he may have been transferred there only after having had enough time and opportunity to orchestrate the Netanya bombing.

Government spokesman, Danny Shek, said Israel has information that Sa'adat "might have been instrumental in commanding and masterminding the bombing."

Shek said the circumstances of Sa'adat's detention should be looked at. However, Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelossof said Monday there was no conclusive proof that Saadat ordered the Netanya attack.

British diplomats supervising Saadat's detention had no comment.

"In blatant violation of the agreement [ending the siege], Sa'adat and his men have complete freedom of action," a senior defense source said. He said Sa'adat and his men are allowed to use both cellular and regular telephones freely, with no supervision from either the British or Palestinian wardens, and are also allowed to receive visits from other PFLP activists. Both of these enable the jailed activists to transmit instructions for attacks easily, the source noted.

 

HAMAS ACTIVIST: MOST GAZANS NOW OBJECT TO SUICIDE BOMBINGS

Hamas activist: most Gazans now object to suicide bombings
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz Correspondent and agencies
Ha'aretz
May 20, 2002

A Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip has told Ha'aretz that in his opinion, most of the Palestinian public in Gaza now objects to suicide attacks, fearing that the next IDF retaliation will be directed at the Strip. In his opinion, whoever was behind the Netanya suicide attack Sunday will lose his strength in the Gaza Strip.

It is difficult to gauge whether the attacks have lost their popularity in the eyes of the general public, amid indications that younger Palestinians in general support suicide attacks, while older Palestinians condemn them.

Speaking a day after a suicide bomber killed three people and wounded more than 50 in Netanya's open-air market, senior Hamas official Abdel Aziz Rantisi was quoted Monday as having said that suicide bombings were the "Palestinians' strategic weapon," and should continue.

But the Gaza Hamas activist, who has been expressing his objection to suicide bombing in internal discussions over the past few months, said he hoped that "those responsible are aware of these opinions," but admitted that it was still hard to publicly criticize suicide attacks.

Critics of suicide bombings are perceived as laying responsibility for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policies at the hands of militant Palestinian groups. The general public, by contrast, tends to regard the bombings as a response to Israeli policy.

The Palestinian leadership released an official statement Sunday condemning the Netanya attack, and calling upon the Palestinian public and political organizations to condemn suicide bombings that "endanger the Palestinian people, its just cause, its rights, and the future of its dream of a state."

It seems as if quite a few public figures recognize the fact that suicide bombings constitute a double-edged sword as a weapon in the Palestinians' struggle.

At a convention at the Bir Zeit university Saturday, under the title "Palestine at a crossroads" one lecture discussed suicide attacks and their effect on international attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The speaker was Mamduh Nofel, a former senior official in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine's military wing, and currently a supporter of the Oslo process and an advisor to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Nofel quoted in his lecture other Palestinian writers who have publicly demanded Hamas stop suicide attacks, and elaborated on the damage these bombings cause the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian Authority. He said the bombings made it easier for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to implement his plans for attacking the Palestinian Authority.

Those attending the convention "some of them lecturers at the university" joined the criticism on the attacks, and said that the Palestinian Authority's lack of a clear strategy created a void, which was taken over by organizations such as Hamas. Another claim was that Sharon was using every excuse available to widen attacks on Palestinian-controlled areas. Another the speakers said that the attacks should be condemned for moral reasons, not for utilitarian considerations.

However, another speaker reminded the audience that most of the Palestinian public supported suicide attacks, whereupon one of the younger members of the audience shouted "Praise God". This division was apparent in other public gatherings over the past few weeks: the younger Palestinians publicly support suicide attacks, while older people object to them.

 

SHOOTING ATTACK ON THE KARNI-NETZARIM ROUTE IN GAZA STRIP

Israeli press release.
(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)
May 19, 2005

A shooting attack was perpetrated today (Sunday), 19.5.2002, at an IDF and civilian convoy on the Karni-Netzarim route in the Gaza Strip. An IDF vehicle overturned during the attack, lightly injuring four soldiers.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took credit for the attack; the senior DFLP militant responsible for the cell which perpetrated the attack is Talal Khalil Muhammad Abu Zarifa, 52, from Abasan. Abu Zarifa is responsible for a series of attacks and attempted attacks which have been perpetrated during the current wave of Palestinian violence, including the 25.8.2001 attack on the IDF's Marganit outpost in which three Israelis were killed.

Abu Zarifa's name has been passed to the Palestinian security services several times, including recently, on the basis of information obtained in investigations that he was overseeing an attack. The Palestinian security services did not act to prevent the attack; Abu Zarifa continues to enjoy full freedom of action.

FULL ARTICLES

BARAK LASHES CRITICS

Barak lashes critics
By Aluf Benn
Ha'aretz
May 20, 2002

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, Israeli Arabs could become the "spearhead" of the Palestinian struggle "and that may necessitate changes in the rule of the democratic game... in order to assure Israel's Jewish character," former prime minister Ehud Barak says in an interview in the next edition of the New York Review of Books.

Speaking with historian Benny Morris, Barak says it is possible that in a future deal, heavily populated Arab areas inside Israel – like Umm al- Fahm – could be transferred to the sovereignty of an emergent Palestinian state. He says such a transfer "could only be done by agreement – and I don't recommend that government spokesmen speak of it (openly). But such an exchange makes demographic sense, and is not inconceivable."

In the interview Barak responds to articles by Susan Sontag in The New York Times, and by former White House official Robert Malley with Hussein Agha, who have written that some of the blame for the failures at Camp David 2000 must be laid on Barak and then-president Bill Clinton. He says Yasser Arafat wants a Palestinian state over all the land that is now Israel.

Barak says Arafat's aim is the elimination of Israel in stages, starting with "legitimate" demands that Israel become a "state of all its citizens," and then take over through "demographics and attrition" with the Palestinian refugees serving as "a political-demographic tool" for undermining the state's existence. The Palestinians don't plan to "kick out" the Jews, says Barak, but want to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. "I believe that is their vision," he told Morris. Using salmon as a metaphor, he said the Palestinians would continue seeking return until the last of the "salmons" that remember where they spawned is gone.

Barak attacks Arafat's mendacity. "They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie... creates no dissonance," says Barak. "They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian cultures. Truth is an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purposes and that which doesn't."

Barak says that after the articles appeared charging him and Clinton with partial responsibility for the failure at Camp David, Clinton called him while Barak was vacationing in Sardinia. "What the hell is this," said Clinton about Sontag's article. "Why is she turning mistakes we made into the essence? The true story of Camp David was that for the first time in the history of the conflict, the American president put on the table a proposal... very close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafat refused even to accept it as a basis for negotiation, walked out of the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism. That's the real story - all the rest is gossip."

 

ALL THE PEACE-PROCESSING THAT'S FIT TO PRINT

Friedman's follies – all the peace-processing that's fit to print.
By Martin Krossel
The Weekly Standard
May 27, 2002

Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times column of last February 17 reads like a bad B-movie script. Finding himself in Saudi Arabia on a press trip, Friedman explains he "took the opportunity" of a dinner with Crown Prince Abdullah to try out on the crown prince an idea he had floated in an earlier column.

What if the 22-member Arab League proposed a Middle East peace plan offering Israel diplomatic relations, normalized trade, and security guarantees in exchange for a total Israeli military withdrawal from the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War? Friedman characterized this as "full withdrawal, in accord with U.N. Resolution 242, for full peace between Israel and the entire Arab world."

An astonished Abdullah responded, "Have you broken into my desk?… This is exactly the idea I had in mind… I have drafted a speech along those lines.

My thinking was to deliver it before the Arab summit, and try to mobilize the entire Arab world behind it… I tell you if I were to pick up the phone now and ask someone to read you the speech, you will find it virtually identical to what you are talking about. I wanted to find a way to make clear to the Israeli people that the Arabs don't reject or despise them."

This piece of theater was scripted to disguise the fact that the crown prince had intended all along to have Friedman make his proposal public. Abdullah wanted a PR coup in light of September 11, which had tarnished Saudi Arabia's image. He got his wish. After Friedman wrote his column, the "peace plan" took on a life of its own. It was praised by statesmen and journalists; and it got the crown prince a summit meeting with President Bush.

Thomas Friedman has a knack for influencing both public debate and the words and actions of statesmen. Back in 1990, it was he who suggested to James Baker, then secretary of state, that Baker insult Israel by publicly declaring, "Everybody over there should know what the [White House] telephone is: 1-202-456-1414. When you're serious about peace, call us." Now, all these years later, his idea for inserting a NATO force between Israelis and Palestinians has picked up support inside the Beltway.

Friedman is a media star. "Tom's Journal" is now an occasional feature on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Friedman is a favorite foreign policy wonk of talk-show hosts from Charlie Rose to Don Imus. He recently won his third Pulitzer Prize, and he has received the National Book Award. His books "From Beirut to Jerusalem" and "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" are required reading on Friedman's favorite subjects, the Arab-Israeli conflict and globalization.

Why is Friedman so influential? Certainly people listen to anyone who writes for the world's most prestigious newspaper. But there is more to Friedman's stardom. Reacting to the Saudi peace plan column, New York magazine's media critic Michael Wolff described Friedman as "a Hollywood character – Mr. Smith goes to Riyadh… He's naturally anti-intellectual. In a sense, he's anti-Times. He's evangelical."

Especially in his books, Friedman shows brilliant storytelling and reporting ability. He is a master of the quip and the cute turn of phrase. He can make arms control entertaining. His earthy language seems engaging on radio and television. But Friedman is also popular on the talk-show circuit precisely because he rarely breaks from the views of the Times or expresses an opinion outside the journalistic mainstream.

Of course, being "anti-intellectual" has its hazards. It can make a columnist superficial – and wrong. So it is that events keep failing to bear out Friedman's dire predictions – about, for example, NATO expansion, U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty, and progress toward a National Missile Defense, all of which he said would ruin U.S. relations with Russia. Instead, last week's establishment of a new partnership between NATO and Russia shows

U.S.-Russian relations to be in fine shape. So it is, too, that Friedman, undeterred by experience in places like China, goes on preaching globalization as a means to force authoritarian regimes to create democratic institutions.

Similarly glib is Friedman's proposal to insert NATO troops into the West Bank and Gaza. He never says how many troops will be needed to stop terrorist infiltration of Israel or what exactly the troops are supposed to do. When Israelis are attacked, will the NATO soldiers emulate the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank, going house to house to arrest terror suspects? Or will they prevent Israel from retaliating? Friedman doesn't say.

Nor does he consider Israel's sad history with international forces. Before 1967, a United Nations force was supposed to prevent war between Israel and Egypt. But when, on the eve of the Six Day War, Egyptian president Nasser decided to attack Israel, he simply ordered the U.N. force to leave. It obeyed, and Egypt's attack proceeded unobstructed. Israelis are understandably reluctant to entrust their security to a foreign force.

Friedman is often critical of Arab leaders and Arab societies, but Israel is his main villain in the Middle East. For the most part, he draws little distinction between the region's only democracy and its authoritarian or totalitarian adversaries – except when arguing that Israel cannot stay Jewish and democratic while holding on to the West Bank and Gaza. And Friedman is clear: The chief obstacles to peace are Israel's refusal to withdraw from the territories and its unwillingness to dismantle Jewish settlements there.

His wrath has thus been directed at successive Likud leaders, Menachem Begin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon. In his April 24 column, Friedman wrote, "Mr. Sharon is so paralyzed by his obsession of eliminating Mr. Arafat, by his commitment to colonial settlements and by his fear that any Israeli concession now would be interpreted as victory for the other side, that he can't produce what most Israelis want: a practical non-ideological solution that says, 'Let's pull back to this line, abandon these settlements, and engage the Palestinians with this proposal, because that is what will preserve Jewish democracy, and forget the other stuff.'"

Of course, Friedman is not alone in making the "occupation" the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he is no less wrong for having company. Arab terrorism began long before Israel occupied the territories, and even long before Israel became a state. And it continued after Israel turned over the West Bank and Gaza to Yasser Arafat in compliance with the Oslo Accords.

When Palestinians rioted in Jerusalem in 1997, Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Weekly Standard, "Those Palestinians throwing stones and hurling firebombs are not living under occupation. The single most misunderstood fact about the Middle East today is that, of the 2,300,000 Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, 2,250,000 live under the rule of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Of the Palestinians who were formerly under Israeli rule, 98 percent now live under Palestinian rule."

For all practical purposes, the Palestinian Authority until recently had most of the attributes of statehood. A Palestinian police force maintained order. The Palestinians ran, and still run, their own schools, media outlets, and social institutions. The worldwide outcry against the recent incursion is proof that the international community admits Palestinian de facto sovereignty. Israel's promise to withdraw shows that it too effectively recognizes this.

By pretending that the Israeli occupation continued under Oslo, journalists like Friedman helped create the misunderstanding Krauthammer decried. The pundits have told us for decades that Palestinian sovereignty is the key to resolving the conflict. However, Palestinian violence targeting Israeli civilians increased markedly after Oslo. Suicide bombings, for instance, are a new phenomenon. How many Israelis would have joined Friedman in supporting Oslo in 1993 if he had told them that it would increase Palestinian violence?

How could anyone who knows how wrong Friedman was about Oslo ever trust his prognostications again?

It is true that, in some of his columns, Friedman comes close to conceding that the Palestinians and the larger Arab world are mostly responsible for the ongoing troubles. In early March, for instance, he admitted being puzzled by the intensity of Muslim rage against Israel. When large numbers of Muslims die at the hands of Saddam Hussein or in sectarian violence in India, the reaction in the Muslim media is muted. "Yet when Israel kills a dozen Muslims, in a war in which Muslims are also killing Jews," Friedman noted, "it inflames the entire Muslim world."

He saw the paradox as rooted in the "contrast between Islam's self-perception as the most ideal expression of the world's three great monotheistic religions... and the conditions of poverty, repression, and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live today." An American diplomat told Friedman that Israel – not Iraq or India – reminds Muslims of their own powerlessness. "How could a tiny Jewish state amass such military and economic power, if the Islamic way of life – not Christianity or Judaism – is God's most ideal religious path?"

Lately, Friedman seems to have become more sympathetic to Israel's security concerns. Since the suicide bombings began, he has been tougher on Arafat than many other pundits. He holds Arafat responsible for much of the violence of the last 18 months. He chastises Arafat for failing to prepare the Palestinians for a "historic compromise with Israel" and having no plans for running a Palestinian state. In recent weeks, Friedman was supportive of Israel's military actions in the West Bank, and he was silent on the most controversial aspects of the operation such as Jenin and the standoff at the Church of the Nativity.

But Friedman still refrains from asking whether the 1967 borders the Saudi peace plan demands are in fact defensible. Friedman similarly ignores the potential strategic significance of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

He never acknowledges that, wherever its permanent borders are set, Israel might need to maintain a defensive line along the Jordan River to prevent another Arab army from joining with the Palestinians to attack Israel.

True to form, after a telethon in Crown Prince Abdullah's kingdom openly raised money for suicide bombers, Friedman neglected to ask whether a country that shows such enmity toward Jews and Israel is really interested in peace with the Jewish state. Friedman told Charlie Rose that his purpose in serving as Abdullah's mouthpiece was "maybe bringing a glimmer of hope to this Arab-Israeli thing." Bringing hope is what ministers and preachers do. For analysts, it often encourages wishful thinking and ignoring of inconvenient facts. And that's what is found all too often in Tom Friedman's prize spot on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

(Martin Krossel is a freelance writer living in New York. This article appears in the current issue of "The Weekly Standard")

 

NO 'TIMES' FOR A BOYCOTT

No 'Times' for a boycott
By Gary Rosenblatt
The Jewish Week
May 10, 2002

Exhibit A: the color photograph, front and center, at the top of page 1 of The New York Times on Monday, was of the Salute to Israel Parade. In the background, marchers were coming up Fifth Avenue waving American and Israeli flags. More prominent in the foreground was a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators featuring a sign that read "End Israeli Occupation of Palestine."

Was this A) a sign of the Times' pro-Israel sentiments, giving the parade such prominent, front-page attention; B) an indication of the newspaper's anti-Israel sentiments, giving equal weight to 100,000 marchers for Israel and 600 protesters; or C) a sign of the paper's down-the-middle impartiality, showing both sides of the dispute in one dramatic photo?

A number of Jewish New Yorkers no doubt would answer B, incensed that the annual parade, which by all accounts attracted huge numbers of marchers and spectators in a peaceful but powerful statement of support for Israel, was less the focus of the photo than the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

(It seems the Times, in retrospect, agreed. An editor's note, though not a correction, the next day on page 2 acknowledged, "the effect was disproportionate. In fairness," it said, "the total picture presentation should have better reflected The Times' reporting on the scope of the event, including the disparity in the turnouts.")

As it turns out, the photo appeared on the eve of a planned 30-day boycott of the Times spearheaded by two local leaders, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, and Fred Ehrman, a businessman active in the Modern Orthodox community who said the page 1 photo Monday pleased him because it underscored his beef with the Times' coverage.

"I'm not a sha-sha [Yiddish for 'be quiet'] Jew," Ehrman told me. "We should have learned that lesson from World War II. Protests are part of a democracy and we feel a need to act."

The Times has seen "a small increase in cancellations due to editorial coverage," according to Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications. She added that the Times strives for "scrupulous impartiality" and "if occasionally the facts of a particular news situation seem likely to provide more satisfaction to one side than to others, our policy is to restore the balance promptly in our overall coverage."

I know and admire both Fred Ehrman and Rabbi Lookstein, and I understand the sense of anger and frustration that has led them to initiate this protest against the Times. I feel it too, at times, but I think their boycott, however temporary, is a mistake – in practice and in principle.

It's one thing to point out examples of incomplete, insensitive, misleading or untrue reporting to the editors of one of the world's great newspapers. Indeed, it is an obligation. In addition, raising funds for ads in the Times and other publications to highlight such inaccuracies might be educational. And I have long believed it is more fitting for Jewish organizations to place paid obituary and communal announcements in The Jewish Week, as Ehrman and Rabbi Lookstein suggest, rather than in the Times, not only because it benefits this paper financially but because we are the paper of record for the New York Jewish community.

But to advocate an economic boycott, even for a limited time, strikes me as the wrong message and a disturbing approach.

Even the leaders of this effort appear uncomfortable with the word "boycott," preferring to characterize their action as a "protest." But urging people to cancel subscriptions is a boycott, and it's a dirty word to Jews for good reason. We have suffered as a result of them. And if we Jews are prepared to initiate them now, we can't attack them as immoral when they are used against us, or Israel, as they have been in the past.

What's more, we who believe in and advocate for freedom of expression negate that value when we try to use economic power to squelch a point of view with which we may disagree. We should advocate fairness and truth, not the muzzling of a free press.

In practical terms, the proposed boycott can have a backlash effect, having less impact on profits at the Times than on its attitude toward the Jewish community, convincing editors and executives we are unreasonable and irrational. They may conclude, in their own frustration, that nothing they do in their newspaper can pacify us. We will be dismissed as less than serious, and the result could be less motivation to provide balanced coverage. In effect, end of discussion.

But unless we conclude The New York Times as an institution has no interest in providing balanced coverage (and I'm not there yet), it's to our advantage to keep the dialogue going because the facts are on our side. We need more constructive criticism, more marshalling of information, more voices speaking out for fair reporting – not a call to shut ourselves off from reporting and opinions we don't want to deal with.

"Nothing will bounce off the ear of a reporter like the charge of total bias," said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University. "It's a loser's word."

I also worry about the tendency in our community, born of annoyance and anger, to dismiss the media as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. Those are loaded phrases and we should use them with extreme caution. Don't apply them to The New York Times, for example, unless you're prepared to make the same charge against Haaretz and other liberal publications in Israel.

Here's my dilemma: As a supporter of Israel reading about the Mideast, I feel I know The Truth of the situation and become upset when I see media coverage lacking in the moral equivalency I am seeking. As a journalist, though, I appreciate the difficulties of trying to present a balanced picture of a bitter, complex conflict that to an objective outsider may have more than one truth.

As I've written here before, whether or not the Times (and the mainstream media in general) has an inherent bias, which I do not believe, there are certain journalistic traits that translate into negative coverage for Israel. For example, journalists tend to look for conflict, favor the underdog (in this case the Palestinians), present photo images that create empathy for the less-armed side and, most important, obsess on symmetry rather than history or context.

So in the name of objective reporting, Israeli retaliations against armed militants are juxtaposed and equated with terrorist attacks on women and children. Or as Mort Zuckerman, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, puts it so well, the press tends to equate the arsonist and the firefighter.

The lack of moral equivalency in the press – suggesting, as the Times does often in its editorials, that Sharon's use of military force is as wrong as Arafat's use of children as homicide bombers – is exasperating. But we need to respond, not turn away. Thoughtful letters of complaint should be written to the editors; phone calls, e-mails and, if possible, meetings with newspaper executives pointing out the immorality of balance serve a purpose, too.

It's difficult to keep perspective, especially when we are upset, but it's important. When I was in Israel last week, I participated in a symposium at Tel Aviv University on "Israel in the Eyes of the Media," and there was little outcry against the American press. And when I met with several top officials in the Foreign Ministry who monitor the world press, their response to American Jewry's complaints about press coverage was, "let them read just about any newspaper in Europe, any day, and they'll see real bias." By comparison, officials felt the American press was relatively balanced.

That's not to say we should accept coverage we consider to be unfair without speaking out. And if you're fed up with the Times, don't buy it, though you'll be missing important reporting, some excellent columnists and often positive editorials.

But boycotts are a desperate act, a signal that there's nothing more to talk about. I prefer the notion of a free and open press, of responding to inaccuracy with truth, and trusting the public to figure out the difference.

FULL ARTICLES

HAMAS SAYS ISRAELIS KILLED IN RISHON LEZION BOMBING WERE SOLDIERS

Hamas says Israelis killed in Rishon Lezion bombing were soldiers
IAP News
May 8, 2002

Occupied Jerusalem: The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, on Wednesday defended the martyr operation bombing at a pool hall in the Israeli city of Rishon Lezion (south east of Tel Aviv), saying the bomber killed soldiers.

"No Israeli children or women were killed, only soldiers and reserve soldiers were targeted," said a Hamas source in the West Bank Wednesday.

"We have every right to retaliate for Israel's genocidal massacres against our people. The world was utterly silent when Israel's terrorist army was murdering our civilians and destroying our cities."

Hamas has not officially declared responsibility for the bombing which comes in the aftermath the murder by Israeli soldiers of a Palestinian mother, her two children and a third child in the northern West Bank.

However, the Lebanese Islamic satellite Television station, al Manar, reported that it had received a telephone call from an anonymous person, who claimed to be speaking for Hamas, saying the movement's military wing carried out the operation.

In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Al-Zahar said the attack in Tel Aviv was a natural retaliation for a series of Israeli massacres in Palestinian towns and refugee camps in recent weeks.

Asked if he was not worried the attack would turn the world public opinion against the Palestinians, al-Zahar said the world did nothing to protect the Palestinians from Israeli crimes.

"Where was the world when (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon committed the carnage at Jenin? The world couldn't even send a mission to investigate Sharon's crimes at the refugee camp," said al-Zahar during an interview with the Arabic service of the BBC Wednesday.

 

PALESTINIANS IN LEBANON CHEER NEWS OF SUICIDE BOMBING

Palestinians in Lebanon cheer news of Rishon bombing
The Jerusalem Post Internet Staff and news agencies
May 9, 2002

Hamas followers in Ein al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp responded with cheers after hearing reports of the suicide bombing near Tel Aviv that resulted in the deaths of 15 Israelis, the Beirut-based Daily Star reported.

Cars equipped with loud-speakers toured Ein al-Hilweh broadcasting news of the attack alongside popular marches. Candy and Arabic sweets were handed out to passing motorists and students to celebrate Tuesday's attack.

One Palestinian refugee shouted during the celebration: "Long live Hamas - it is our only salvation."

Meanwhile, in the neighboring Sidon fruit and vegetable market, television screens were provided in order to keep the market's customers on top of "the latest reports on the successful operation."

 

VICTIMS OF THE RISHON LEZION POOL HALL ATTACK

Victims of the Rishon Lezion pool hall attack

* Nir Lobatin, 29, was married and his wife is expecting twins. He owned a cleaning service. His wife collapsed on hearing the news of his death and had to be hospitalized.

* Edna Cohen, 61, was celebrating her 44th wedding anniversary at the club when she was killed. Her husband, Avraham, 63, was seriously injured. Edna is survived by four children and 11 grandchildren.

* Rahamim Kimche, a taxi driver, who had already lost a leg in a previous attack. On Tuesday night, he had gone to pick up a fare from the pool club. When the customer did not come down, Kimche went to look for him and was killed by the blast. He leaves a wife, three children and two grandchildren.

* Pnina Hickri, 63, a Tel Aviv housewife and mother of four children.

* Sharuch Rassan, 60, owned a store that sells Jewish religious articles. He was born in Iran and immigrated to Israel in 1974 with his wife, Shaku, who was injured in the Rishon bomb attack.

* Shoshana Magmari, 51, worked as a caregiver, but was on vacation after having completed treatment for cancer. She is survived by her husband, three children and five grandchildren.

* Rafael Haim, 46, worked in a wholesale market, where he unloaded fresh produce that he delivered by truck. A Jewish refugee from Iraq, he arrived in Israel aged 11. He is survived by his wife, six children and 16 grandchildren.

* Dalia Massa, 56, worked as a cook at the WIZO youth village outside Rishon Lezion. She became a widow two years ago. She is survived by her daughter, a student at Tel Aviv University.

* Yisrael Shikar, 49, is survived by his parents, wife, three children, a grandson and two brothers.

* Avi Baiz, 26, was a coffee shop manager in a shopping mall located near the Rishon Lezion pool hall. His friend, Tomer Sasson, was seriously injured in the attack. Baiz is survived by his parents and three brothers.

* Anat Tremporush, a mother of three. Her husband, Danny, her mother, Hannah Almasi, 62, and her sister, Batsheva, were all injured in the attack.

* Yitzhak Bablar, 57, and his wife, Esther, 54, of Bat Yam

* Nawa Hinawi, 51, of Tel Aviv

* Malka Regina Boslan, 62, of Jaffa.

* 32 other victims of the bombing remain hospitalized. Two of the injured women have since died.

FULL ARTICLES

"EU CASH 'FUNDED' SUICIDE BOMBERS"

"EU cash 'funded' suicide bombers"
By Ian Cobain in Jerusalem
(London) Times
May 6, 2002

The Israeli Government has accused Yassir Arafat of using aid from the European Union to finance terrorist attacks.

As pressure increased steadily on the Israelis to negotiate with Mr. Arafat, officials maintained that documents seized during last month's military raids across the West Bank provided "damning evidence" that European Union money was indirectly funding suicide-bombing missions.

The European Union provides ten million euros (£6.25 million) each month towards the salaries of staff at Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Much of that money comes from British taxpayers. According to the Israeli authorities, "vast sums" have been covertly channelled from the monthly EU grants to Fatah gunmen and members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

"What is happening here isn't the fault of the Europeans," said Dani Naveh, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs in the Israeli Cabinet.

"But it is the way the Palestinians have decided to use EU money – for terror. There are hundreds of terrorists who get their monthly salaries from the Palestinian Authority and, indirectly, from the European Union."

The Israeli Government says that papers seized during its West Bank operation also demonstrate that Mr Arafat "was personally involved in the planning and execution" of terrorism.

The allegations are among a series of claims made by the Israelis in a dossier based on captured Palestinian documents that was published by the Israeli Government yesterday.

A row between the Israeli authorities and the European Union has been simmering for more than a year. The EU is now the biggest single donor to the Palestinans, and members of Mr Sharon's Government say that millions of euros which have flooded into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are being used in part to finance attacks on Israeli civilians.

 

MINISTER NAVEH PRESENTS EU ENVOY MORATINOS WITH PROOF THAT PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY USED EU FUNDS TO FINANCE TERROR

Minister Naveh presents EU envoy Moratinos with proof that Palestinian Authority used EU funds to finance terror
Press Release
From: The Israel Government Press Office
May 7, 2002

Minister Danny Naveh met today (Tuesday), 7.5.2002, with European Union envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos and presented the report regarding Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's involvement in terror, as well as new findings that prove that the PA used EU aid funds for terror activities. These documents reveal the way in which the PA used Europe funds to finance the salaries of hundreds of Fatah terrorists.

Minister Naveh called on the EU to take action to prevent the use of Europe funds for terror and the murder of Israelis. He added that Europe representatives may study all the original documents in Israeli hands.

 

MARTYDOM DAY CELEBRATED IN SYRIA

Martyrdom Day Celebrated – President Assad doubles salaries of daughters and sons of Palestinian martyrs as Syria celebrates Martyrdom Day
SANA (Official Syrian News Agency)
May 6, 2002

http://www.sana.org/english/headlines/6.5/martyrdom_day_celebrated.htm

President Bashar Assad lauded highly Monday the heroic operations of the Palestinian resistance men against the Israeli occupation, which shook the Israeli occupation and the sacrifices of the Syrian forces in the battles waged in defense of the homeland and the nation.

In a meeting with the sons and daughters of the Syrian Martyrs here today, President Assad recalled late President Hafez Assad's special attention and care attended for the martyrs family members and issued orders as to double the salaries of the daughters and sons of martyrs in all their educational and academic years.

"One the Palestinian decided to be a martyr in Jenin, the Israeli troops waited for 9 days till they were able to enter this tiny camp after they killed the civilians there and destroyed their houses over their heads," the President noted.

Other words delivered at the luncheon in honor of the martyrs sons and daughters, spoke of the sublime and noble meanings of martyrdom in defense of the homeland and Arabs' just causes.

President Assad earlier in the day laid a wreath of flowers on the Unknown Soldier Monument on the blessed occasion of Syrian Martyrs Day.

Syrian Armed Forces and all Syria's 14 Governorates celebrated this occasion today with a pledge to continue the march of struggle under the leadership of President Assad till the liberation of the occupied Arab territories.

The speakers blasted the ongoing Israeli aggressions and massacres against Palestinians and criticized the US blind support to Israel.

 

JORDAN FOILS ATTEMPT TO SMUGGLE ARMS TO PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

"Jordan foils attempt to smuggle arms to Palestinian territories"
By Jamal Halaby
The Associated Press
San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2002

Jordanian authorities arrested four men on suspicion of trying to smuggle Soviet-made arms to the Palestinians, officials said Monday.

The four – all Jordanians of Palestinian origin in their 20s and 30s – were arrested in possession of Soviet-made rockets, launchers and machine guns at Jordan's Red Sea resort of Aqaba, 210 miles south of Amman, the officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The men were allegedly trying to smuggle the weapons by sea to Egypt, apparently for storage and later delivery to the Palestinian territories, the officials said. The men were believed to be arms dealers with no links to any particular group, the officials said.

They declined to provide other details.

The Gulf of Aqaba, a popular tourist resort, is shared by Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Jordan has often been used as a transit point for smuggling arms and drugs.

Officials say arms smuggling has increased since the latest Palestinian-Israeli conflict erupted in September 2000, with at least two attempts foiled last year.

Last week, a Jordanian military court convicted four Palestinian Authority members on weapons and explosives charges and sentenced them to up to 15 years in prison. In a separate case, an Iraqi was convicted on the same charges and sentenced to 71/2 years in prison.

FULL ARTICLES

PALESTINIANS STAGING FAKE BURIALS

IDF films Palestinians staging fake burials
By Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Defense Correspondent
Ha'aretz
May 4, 2002

The Israel Defense Forces has documented Palestinians staging fake burials in Jenin, with the army charging they were part of a Palestinian propaganda effort in advance of the now-canceled UN fact-finding mission to the refugee camp. The fake burials, the IDF says, were an attempt to "prove" that there were many more Palestinians killed than actually were in the fighting there last month.

Yesterday, Colonel Miri Eisen, head of field intelligence for land forces in the IDF, presented a film shot from a military drone on April 28 and showing a group of Palestinians carrying a man on a stretcher. The man was covered with a shroud, as if he was a corpse, and among the group accompanying him was a cameraman.

But the film shown to the foreign press clearly shows how the stretcher falls and the "corpse" gets up on his own, and then gets back on the stretcher as it advances. After the second fall, the "corpse," apparently disgusted with the incompetence of the stretcher bearers, walks off in a huff.

"The film speaks for itself," Eisen said. "They tried to fabricate evidence of funerals to inflate the number of their dead."

Eisen said the "funeral" had taken place in the area between the destroyed section of the Jenin refugee camp and the local cemetery. She said that even before the drone had captured the staged funeral on film, the IDF had been certain that the Palestinians were staging funerals. "But nobody believed us," she said. "Now we have the proof."

According to Eisen, during the fighting, the IDF destroyed 130 buildings in Jenin, some 10 percent of the buildings in the camp, or an area slightly larger than a soccer field

 

THE REAL WAR CRIME

The real war crime
By Ralph Peters
The New York Post
May 3, 2002

A terrible war crime has been committed in the West Bank. It will have far-reaching and heartbreaking consequences. But it has nothing to do with lies about an imaginary massacre in Jenin. The war crime - committed brazenly before a global audience - is the occupation of the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, by Palestinian terrorists.

Where is the outcry? International law forbids the parties to armed conflict from using churches, as well as hospitals, museums and monuments, for military activities. The Laws of Land Warfare are even stricter.

The United Nations, which is ever quick to condemn Israel, has been silent about this violation, even though the Palestinian actions violate the UN's own rules. The church is even under UNESCO designation as a protected site.

Even the ancient tradition of murderers, thieves and other criminals seeking sanctuary on holy ground denies them the right to take weapons into the sacred precincts. Under every single applicable code of law, as well as the custom of nations, every Palestinian who carried a gun into the Church of the Nativity, turning it into a fortress, is a war criminal.

Not one voice has been raised to condemn them.

Why? The fact is that, beyond Europe's reflexive anti-Semitism, liberal racism plays a role. Despite widespread criticism of Israel as inhumane, the world holds Israel to a much higher standard than it does any of Israel's mortal enemies.

Bluntly put, this is just a left-wing version of the pathetic old notion that "our little brown brothers" aren't really as capable or as responsible as "we" are. The motivations of Israel's critics are as disgraceful as their one-sided condemnations are unjust.

The Palestinians did not decide spontaneously, by telepathy, to gather in the Church of the Nativity as the Israelis approached. The action was planned well in advance, as any veteran would recognize. The church had been predesignated as a rallying point for hard-core terrorists and others who feared Israeli retaliation - doubtless with Yasser Arafat's blessing.

The immediate and well-organized occupation of one of Christianity's holiest shrines was an illegal, cynical gambit.

The Palestinians knew they could count on several things:

* First, the Israelis do observe international law, and they respect religious and cultural monuments. Unless savagely provoked, they would not even fire in the direction of the church, so the terrorists were safe from immediate capture.

* Second, despite the level of provocation from inside, any Israeli action could be portrayed as an attack on a Christian shrine.

* Third, any damage to that shrine would be blamed on the Israelis, on their tanks and firepower, by those portions of the world anxious to paint Israel as a land of devilish aggressors. In that regard, we should be prepared for an orgy of destruction on the part of the church's occupiers.

The Palestinians stole a lesson from, of all people, Gandhi, though they corrupted it hideously. Despite his litany of complaints about British inhumanity, Gandhi knew the British courts in India would never hang him, and he turned London's sense of decency and fair play - as well as the rule of law - against the British themselves. So, too, the Palestinian terrorists count on Israel's sense of decency and morality, as well as its laws, to save them from the justice they deserve.

Why does this matter to us? Apart from our emotional and spiritual ties to the site, if we are Christians? And our respect for the sanctity of the shrine, no matter our religion?

It matters because the Palestinian terrorists in Bethlehem just set a precedent. They broke all the laws and rules - and got away with it. Instead of condemning them, the world "community" has shown a tragic, nearsighted tolerance for their deed. By turning the Church of the Nativity into a gangsters' hide-out, the Palestinians placed themselves on the same level as the Taliban savages who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. Instead of expressing its outrage, this time the world showered the criminals with sympathy.

The result will be future occupations of churches and synagogues, the military use of hospitals, the betrayal of symbols such as the red cross and red crescent, and the inevitable destruction of cultural monuments in the name of one deluded cause or murderous movement after another. The Church of the Nativity has just been turned into the Golgotha of the remaining rules of armed conflict.

Welcome to war in the 21st century.

Ralph Peters is a retired military officer and the author of the soon-to-be-released "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World" (Stackpole).

 

PRESIDENT KATSAV TO VATICAN EMISSARY: CHURCH OF NATIVITY CANNOT SERVE AS REFUGE FOR TERRORISTS AND MURDERERS

President Katsav to Vatican emissary: Church of Nativity cannot serve as refuge for terrorists and murderers
Israel Government press release
May 2, 2002

(Communicated by the President's Spokeswoman)

President Moshe Katsav met Thursday, 2.5.2002, at his Jerusalem Residence with special Papal emissary Roger Cardinal Etchegaray, who has come to the region on a special mission regarding the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; Vatican Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Pietro Sambi also attended the meeting.

President Katsav told his interlocutors that the holy places and houses of worship must not become part of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, and added the break-in to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by armed terrorists is both a war crime and a violation of international law. The President said that the terrorists must leave the Church since nobody has the right to exploit it as a refuge or place for blackmail. Terrorists who flee into houses of worship cannot be immune from the law. While Israel has no interest in remaining in Bethlehem, it cannot allow Palestinian terrorists to go free.

President Katsav criticized the Christian world for criticizing the Israeli position regarding the Church and added that such criticism should be directed at the Palestinian Authority.

President Katsav said that he saw two possible solutions. The first would be for the Palestinians to leave the Church of the Nativity. Following short checks, they would all be released except for those terrorists who are known to have taken shelter in, seized control of, and looted it, and turned the clergy and innocent Palestinian civilians inside into hostages. The second would be for the terrorists to concentrate in one area of the church while all the other Palestinians and clergy would be released; this is so that the hostages – clergy and innocent civilians – who have been in the church under harsh conditions, will be released first.

Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Pietro Sambi equated with a miracle the fact that the Israeli soldiers positioned around the Church of the Nativity have supplied food and aid to the residents of the area, and mainly to children. "You have soldiers who exhibit the highest human values", the Archbishop said.

At the end of the meeting President Katsav asked Cardinal Etchegaray to convey to Pope John Paul II his concern over the dramatic increase in anti-Semitism throughout the world in general, and in Europe specifically.

President Katsav expressed the wish that the Pope will act against expressions of anti-Semitism with great determination, and warned him that whereas we know how anti-Semitism begins, we do not know how it ends.

DARKNESS ENCROACHES

Darkness encroaches
By Michael Gove
The Times (of London)
May 3, 2002

There aren't many book festivals where every visitor's bags are searched. On the way in. But, then, there aren't many literary events where the participants, and spectators, run the risk of a racist attack.

We did at the Jewish Book Festival in March. I was there to take part in a panel discussion on anti-Semitism. Was it increasing and, if so how much should it concern us? As the only non-Jewish participant in the debate, I could afford a certain detachment. But the level of security for the event meant that, for all of us, the matter was far from academic.

Since that evening, the question that we sought to explore has been answered in the most emphatic, and appalling, way. The growth in anti-Semitic argument, which I argued was approaching menacing levels, has been chilling. Tom Paulin, a tenured Oxford academic and a regular on the BBC's Newsnight Late Review, has argued that Jews on the West Bank of the River Jordan should be shot. The Saudi Ambassador to the Court of St James's, Dr Ghazi Algosaibi, has published a poem praising the terrorist bombers who have massacred Israeli civilians. Every Saturday the street opposite the Israeli Embassy is blocked by protesters supporting the terrorist campaign against the Jewish state and carrying placards that equate Israel with Nazi Germany, and the Star of David with the swastika.

Actions have consequences.

Orthodox Jews, their dress marking them out, have been attacked across London during the past few weeks. Two were viciously assaulted outside Harrods in broad daylight. Last week the pupils of the Jewish Hasmonean School in North London presented a petition to Iain Duncan Smith attesting to the intimidation, and threats, they now encountered in their daily lives. Most horrifically of all, a synagogue in Finsbury Park, North London, was desecrated earlier this week, just streets away from the mosque where the militant Muslim cleric Abu Hamza has been preaching hate against Jews and the West amid UN Security Council accusations of involvment in the financing of terrorism. The synagogue's interior was wrecked and the front of the rabbi's lectern daubed with a swastika.

The level of concern within Britain's Jewish community, already articulated by the Chief Rabbi and such distinguished commentators as the music critic Norman Lebrecht, the historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore and the columnist Melanie Phillips, has led to increased demands for action. This Bank Holiday Monday a rally will take place in Trafalgar Square, where upwards of 20,000 Jews from across the nation will be addressed by speakers from Left and Right, including Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's former Prime Minister; Peter Mandelson, the former Cabinet Minister; Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Israeli Labour politician; and the Tories' Foreign Affairs spokesman, Michael Ancram.

Britain's Jewish community has traditionally been reluctant to draw attention to itself. Grateful in the past for the general tolerance, sense of opportunity and respect for difference that has characterised British society, there has been little need to do so. When it has spoken on matters of communal concern it has usually been with different voices, Left and Right, liberal and conservative, taking very different positions. But the Jewish community now, whatever the background of individuals, feels the need to assert itself. The reason is simple: the security of the Jewish people has not been so comprehensively threatened for half a century.

A variety of factors has combined to create an atmosphere in which anti-Jewish feeling has grown, and taken appalling form. The most salient factor, of course, has been the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Israel's actions in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority have provoked criticism of Ariel Sharon's Government. But what makes contemporary comment on Israel worryingly different, both for Jews and democrats such as myself, from the normal run of foreign commentary is the biased nature, dangerous underlying assumptions and wickedly intemperate nature of the criticism. Loaded phrases are used, truths obscured, parallels invoked or ignored and coverage slanted to apply the oldest anti-Semitic technique of all, the double standard. Jews and the Jewish State are judged in a way that no other peoples would be – and found wanting even before any evidence is adduced.

A vicious circle of assumptions is at work here. Among many in the left-wing media, political and cultural Establishments there is already a prejudice – personal, ideological or structural – against the Jewish people and their State. These prejudices have helped to encourage and facilitate those seeking to undermine the collective security of the Jewish people. When the latter take steps to assert their collective right to self-defence, be it on the ground in the Middle East or on the airwaves of the world, they encounter an already hostile Establishment that refuses to treat them as it would any other people. The condemnation they thus receive for seeking to defend themselves only feeds further hostility towards an Israel only trying to defend itself and a Jewish Diaspora whose massive contributions to their varied nations are twisted into the "purchase of influence".

The belief that there is widespread anti-Jewish prejudice on the Left, in Britain and the West, is contested by many within the Establishment. But it is a recognition of its pervasive nature that will bring thousands on to London's streets on Monday.

Even before Sharon's military operations in the West Bank, anti-Jewish prejudice had manifested itself in a number of ways. The Jewish State was deliberately delegitimised by repeated, and unjustified, comparison with apartheid South Africa. Jewish lives, even those of children, were held to count for less than others because of their State's security policy. The Jewish people's right to live securely in their own country has been questioned as it would be for no other people. Even ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes have been invoked to invite condemnation of Israel, its actions and citizens.

The "apartheid" comparison seeks to reduce Israel to the position of pre-Mandela South Africa – a racist, pariah state whose inhabitants can be demonised and whose legitimacy constantly called into question. Anyone who remembers the Spitting Image sketch and song, I've never met a nice South African, or recalls the way in which unfashionable minorities such as Ulster's Unionists are compared with the Boers, will see how this process of delegitimisation seeks to suggest that the people complained of do not deserve to be treated with the same respect as others.

The fact that Israel is a multi-party democracy, all of whose citizens enjoy equal rights and whose Parliament and Supreme Court are graced by Arab citizens, is not allowed to impinge on this view. It did not prevent Alan Rusbridger, the Editor of The Guardian, from saying that he found "quite so many echoes of the worst days of South Africa in modern Israel". Nor did it prevent The Guardian's Liz McGregor from comparing Israel to the apartheid State last year and arguing for the dissolution of its Jewish identity.

These arguments are not made in a vacuum. Islamic societies on British campuses have won student support for boycotts of "apartheid" Israel. Indeed many academics, including such distinguished Oxford names as Richard Dawkins, have lent their support to boycott campaigns. And the level of intimidation and harassment felt by Jewish students rises.

The progressive delegitimisation of Israel has led other writers to argue that the State itself should not exist. In The Guardian, Faisal Bodi has said that the Jewish people "simply have no right" to their own homeland. The Evening Standard commentator A.N. Wilson has also questioned Israel's right to statehood. The Observer headlined one article critical of Israel "an affront to civilisation".

Israel's policies are certainly open to criticism. But where else does criticism of a nation move smoothly into calls for its eradication? Are there any commentators writing in the British press calling for the end of France, Syria or even Iraq as a state? Once you accept and legitimise calls for the removal of a state, you not only deny a people the basic democratic right, and security, of self-determination, but you also move into a morally dangerous zone when it comes to the survival of people themselves.

Take The Independent's coverage of the murder of two Jewish boys bludgeoned to death by Palestinians in the settlement of Tekoa. The reporter who chronicled their deaths concluded: "The fact remains that the two boys were living in a Jewish settlement illegally built on occupied land." Did The Independent run reports after the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot a juvenile burglar in the back concluding that "The fact remains that the boy was illegally trespassing on someone else's property"? Of course not, for the newspaper to have concluded that would have been to mitigate murder. But why, then, in a world where the "legality" of those settlements is still an open issue, provide an excuse for the killing of young Jews?

There are several reasons why so many in the media and political Establishments, especially on the Left, are prejudiced against the Jewish people and their State. The success of Jewish citizens in Western societies undermines the Left's claim that ethnic minorities need state intervention and the dismantling of traditional cultures to prosper. The corrupted romanticism of campus politics leads the Left to glamorise those whom they can cast in the tradition of Che and Fidel and resent any bourgeois society, such as Israel, that stands in the revolutionaries' path. New Left internationalism and cultural relativism is also hostile to the Jewish State's recognition that secure borders are a precondition of harmony and freedom as well as the Jewish people's belief in tradition, family and hard work.

These specific Left-wing attitudes are also mixed with deeper European resentments. Guilt at complicity in the Holocaust, commercial calculations that Arab nations offer richer pickings than Israel, mixed feelings about a colonial legacy that has done so much to complicate the Middle East, an appeasing stance towards militant Islam,and resentment that one small nation should be fighting terror with greater resolution than bigger ones such as Britain and France ever have, all combine to make Europe an increasingly cold house for Jews. In the past month the underlying anti-Semitism of much Left and European discourse has been given its head with reactions to the battle of Jenin. In Parliament, Labour MPs talk blithely of "atrocities" and in the press journalists routinely accept Palestinian claims of "massacres" when more scrupulous study of events on the ground shows that Israeli forces have been at great pains to limit civilian casualties in their pursuit of terrorists by proceeding, from booby-trapped house to booby-trapped house, at considerable risk to their own lives.

This reflexive desire to believe the worst of Israel reflects a deep, and worrying, hostility to the notion of Jews defending themselves. The Jewish people, it seems, should not be so uppity as to claim for themselves the same right to self-defence against suicide bombing that the West granted America after September 11. The Jewish people must, as they did in the Europe of the last century, know their place.

The historic test of a society's freedom, from Renaissance Italy to 17th-century Holland, Edwardian Britain and modern America, has been its attitude to the Jewish people in its midst. The greater its security, the freer, richer and more advanced the nation. The more tenuous and contingent the freedom of Jews in a society, the more certain, from the Spain of the Inquisition to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, that darkness is encroaching.

It is growing darker across Europe this spring – which is why I will light a candle for the 20,000 who will be gathering in Trafalgar Square on Monday.

 

"THERE IS NO SHAME IN DEFENDING ISRAEL"

The danger of this 'fashionable' hatred of Israel
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
(London) Evening Standard
May 3, 2002

There is not a day that I do not wake up and thank God that I was born a Jew in Britain – but now, there is also hardly a day when I do not find myself uneasily on guard against libels against Jews. Such comments, under the guise of commentaries on Israel, have become the new media orthodoxy. These calumnies are never uttered without being accompanied by the "anti-Israeli safety warning" which says that it is in very bad taste to whine that an attack on Israel is anti-Semitic. I do not regard every attack on Israel as anti-Semitic, indeed there is plenty to criticise – but, nonetheless, the attack earlier this week on the Finsbury Park synagogue suggests something sinister stinks about the sheep-like lynchmob mentality of " fashionable" anti-Zionists.

Of course, there will be those who claim that Israel is causing anti-Semitism, an argument akin to blaming immigrants for BNP racism. This argument is stated so often that one would have thought that anti-Semitism must have been unthinkable before the creation of Israel.

I believe, like most Israelis, there should be a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Former prime minister, Ehud Barak essentially offered this deal. Its rejection by Yasser Arafat and the resulting war and suicide bombings against Israel suggest that some Palestinians do not wish to co-exist. Faced with suicide murders of children and old people, with 400 dead, which would be the equivalent of 4,000 proportionally in Britain, any country in the world, including this one, would fight back – as America did after 11 September.

Coverage of Israel's incursion includes the sort of irresponsible writing that leads to violated synagogues. The claim that there had been a Jenin "massacre" was, it turned out, a lie (though I mourn Palestinian civilians killed), as was the so-called Bethlehem "sacrilege". Every dead Palestinian is a tragedy just as is every Israeli. The Israeli exclusion of western journalists was precisely the same sort of decision made by the British-Americans in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan. Journalists are embittered by Israeli manners: a top CNN reporter whined recently: " Palestinians are charming, Israelis just shout." So the Israelis have bad manners? So is it anti-Semitic to criticise Israel? No, and just to prove it, I would give up most of the settlements tomorrow.

But there is a strong strain of anti-Zionism that is repugnant-and it has crept into our media and our drawingrooms. It is not just acceptable to hate Israel among a certain class, it's a must – the most fashionable cause around. It is the political equivalent of having a Nick Hornby book or eating in The Ivy. It is what you do if you want to be part of the Zeitgeist. It-Girls and blonde TV presenters do it. It is the Botox of international diplomacy.

One can hardly go to a Notting Hill dinner party without some po-faced blonde TV presenter lecturing you about the wickedness of Israel. Firstly, shame on those sheep for embracing the conventional wisdom with such ignorant enthusiasm. But then comes the vile, truly wicked insinuation that begins: "Isn't it ironic that they went through the Holocaust and now..." This is unconscious anti-Semitism which is like a child playing with a gun not realising it's loaded. This is the modern version of the blood libel, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It might be ironically symmetrical but it is not true.

There is no parallel. It is a profoundly evil libel to suggest that there is even the slightest symmetry, or moral equivalence, between Hitler's industrial slaughter of innocent, unarmed Jews, gipsies and Slavs, and a tiny country lashing out against terrorists who have planted bombs that had dismembered old people and children. It is evil because it approaches Holocaust denial by belittling the situation so colossally – and lying so viciously about what is really happening.

One newspaper called Israel's operation a " blitzkrieg". Historically, militarily, politically and ethically, the slow and clumsy Israeli move towards Jenin couldn't possibly be called a "blitzkrieg". No newspaper would dream of using the word to describe, say, the Gulf War or Afghanistan, both of which were militarily-speaking blitzkriegs. No, the word was used only because Israel is the Jewish state – and, isn't it ironic? Israel's enemies claim it's time it was treated like a normal country. I agree because if it was treated as a normal country, it would be understandable for it to defend itself against suicide bombings, just as it was for America. The essential reason for the outrage against Israel is that the sight of Jews defending themselves like everyone else makes some people uneasy. But to paraphrase David Ben-Gurion, Israel has Jewish truck drivers, hookers – and Jewish offensives against terrorists.

We British Jews are privileged to live in Europe's most tolerant country. I have little time for British Jews claiming anti-Semitism: my father's family were Moorish-Italian immigrants who were welcomed here in the 1790s; my mother's family were Russian-Lithuanians who escaped pogroms early last century - and have produced two Lord Chief Justices almost in a row. But as happened with the Blackshirts in the Thirties, the big lie can sometimes poison a minority – and violate a synagogue – even in tolerant Britain.

Unfortunately, fashionable causes like anti-Zionism attract exhibitionists like TV critics and obscure politicians. Gerald Kaufman, who has finally found prominence as a Jewish critic of Israel, wrote that he had faced anti-Semitism but was now ashamed of Israel, two things that are clearly linked. He then claimed to be vilified by fellow Jews. Apart from his mountainous, deluded selfregard, it emerged that he had received "rather fewer e-mails than I expected" – or hoped for. He has every right to criticise Israel, but he added that "since Israel's government emphasises its Jewishness... the same Jewishness inevitably arouses criticisms". That is a weasel statement, if ever there was one.

But to those Jews who now feel ashamed of Israel, they should toughen up a little. There are times and places when Jews should defend themselves like other nations. There is no shame in that.