Americans Too Quick To Side With Israel
By AMY PAGNOZZI, The Hartford Courant November 03, 2000
"If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States. Its development and settlement of the West bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-administered `bantustans,' with `whites' monopolizing the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs - flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending - would be recognized as scandalous, too." -- From the lead editorial in The Observer, Published in the United Kingdom on Oct. 15 by Guardian Newspapers Limited.
The perception in America is that Israel is a civilized island of democracy in the midst of a Middle East rich with oil, yes - but rife with Arab terrorists and Muslim extremists who have shattered all hopes for peace.
These fanatical zealots persist in their lawless uprisings, no matter what concessions Prime Minister Ehud Barak offers because "The Palestinians ... did not want peaceful coexistence; they wanted war, and they wanted the Jews dead or gone," as says Washington Post's Michael Kelly. An entire population, hell-bent on genocide. Interesting theory, and popular, too.
Intifada 2000 is "about ousting Jews from the Middle East. Every square inch. And every last Jew," stated the New York Post.
As for words such as "brutal," "barbaric" and "savage," they flew so freely you couldn't keep track of them all - but they never flew toward the Israelis.
Not the soldier-killers of children. Nor the mob of 1,000 religious settlers who in early October attacked Palestinians, killing two, then burned and stoned Palestinian businesses and homes, according to the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom.
The torture killings of two Israeli agents you saw on television were terrible to behold. Equally inexcusable: a killing that preceded them. Israeli settlers had abducted Issam Joudeh Hamad, smashing his skull and several bones and covering his body with cigarette burns, according to Agence France Presse.
Later, the Israeli agents, disguised as Palestinians, infiltrated a protest march in Ramallah on the day of Hamad's funeral. After the crowd recognized them, Palestinian policemen tried to protect the Israelis from the mob but could not.
Very similar crimes. The first was condemned by the Ashkenazi Jews chief rabbi, the second by Palestinian Authority officials. Except the footage of Hamad's death didn't run on television, nor was it used to justify retaliation against Jews in general.
So, innocent Arabs were killed in the retaliatory Israeli aerial attack. What of it?
The U.S.-Israel alliance is to the Palestinian resistance as the lion is to the lamb: They say and do what they want.
So the Israelis blame the victims, suggesting, for instance, that Palestinian parents put their kids out to die in order to score points with the media and that when schools close down during periods of army violence the kids are being released in order to riot.
Americans believed it, even if nobody else did. But then, everybody else knew about Mu'ayyad al-Jawarish, 12, shot in the family garden and 18-month-old Sara Abdel-Athim Hassan, shot in the back seat of her father's car.
If the American media serve up U.S.-Israeli government spin to us as glibly as Pravda did in the former Soviet Union, it doesn't mean there's a conspiracy.
We're not that well-organized. We are, however, biased.
Most of us have many more Jews than Arabs in our circle of friends, if we aren't ourselves Jewish. Many of us have met Holocaust survivors professionally, if not personally.
We can never forget the incomprehensible ferociousness of that atrocity for which nothing can ever make amends.
The state of Israel - that's the one good thing that came out of it. If Israel's not good we don't even want to know about it, let alone pass it along.
Plus, the American public is provincial and intellectually lazy.
We could log onto the Internet to find out what the rest of the world says about the Palestinians, to see how Agence France Presse, the U.K. newspapers and media outlets in Russia and China spin this story.
Ha'aretz, for example - a prestigious liberal daily founded in Jerusalem in 1919 by Zionist immigrants - ran a piece that said Americans dehumanize Arabs, headlined: "Our victims are stories, theirs are mere numbers."
We could similarly track down the notes from the UN Security Council's 14-0 vote (America abstained) condemning Israel's "excessive use of force against Palestinians."
Ditto, the press release from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, which castigated us for virtually ignoring the UN resolution.
And Amnesty International's Oct. 19 report on its first fact-finding mission to the war-torn areas: "Since Sept. 29, more than 100 Palestinians, including 27 children, were killed by the Israeli security forces," it said.
But that stuff's depressing, compared to downloading porn and surfing for stock tips.
Besides, as Jewish dissident Noam Chomsky says, we must be "kept in ignorance" because American-Israeli "economic and military programs rely crucially on" public support and are unpopular already without our knowing what the money's really for.
I mean, how do you think it would play domestically if we found out the U.S. supplied money, machine guns, tanks, missiles and attack helicopters to the British government, so they could use them to police the border between Northern and Southern Ireland?
We might have to do something about that.
Geez, maybe the Israelis should be using "police trained in crowd control" instead of "military tactics ... yes, thousands of young conscripts ... to wipe out or dominate the enemy" - that was the determination of Amnesty International delegate Dr. Stephen Males, a specialist in sensitive public order policing.
Of course, he was in Israel when, in almost every case in which Palestinians were killed, "only stones had been thrown," and the few Arabs who had wielded firearms had been members of the Palestinian Authority.
Whereas this week, private citizens began taking up arms. In the words of Israeli foreign minister Schlomo Ben-Ami, what began as a simple uprising of grievances against Israel is now a "miniwar" that is also claiming Israeli lives.
"We have to deal with it not as a civilian uprising but as a military confrontation," he said.
Hmmm. Given the army already brought out the big guns and tanks and missiles for use against innocent Palestinian citizens and their kids, you have to wonder what they - whoops, I mean, we - still have in store.
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