http://www.commondreams.org/views/102000-102.htm
Toughest Foreign Story
By Rick Salutin,
The Toronto Globe & Mail,
October 20, 2000
For half a century, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the most
distorted area of our foreign news coverage. Yet it's not that
confusing; no more so than, say, South Africa during apartheid. It,
too, was complicated, but the political and moral issues involved
seemed clear. Not so with the Mideast. Let me give some examples.
War. As in, "Is this war? It certainly feels like it." (Marcus Gee in
The Globe and Mail). No it doesn't. Wars occur between countries with
armies. Here you have one country and one army: Israel. Palestinians
run local government and police; they have no tanks, army or air
force. They don't even control the airport. Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak said what Israel has done so far "doesn't amount to
anything. It is not one in a million of what we can do if we are
really at war." Exactly. His "nothing" is incomparably more than the
best Palestinian effort. The equation is absurd. The National Post
said "Israel could easily win an all-out war with the Palestinians."
They could easily win an all-out war with my local Starbucks, too.
Ceasefire. As in endless calls for. Between who? Kids throwing stones
and helicopters firing rockets?
Geography. An audience member on CBC's Counterspin asked why
Palestinian parents let their kids out on the streets, implying
Israeli parents wouldn't. But, hey, the reason you don't see Israeli
kids throwing stones at tanks is that no streets in Israel are
occupied by a foreign army. The more than 100 deaths have been on
Palestinian territory.
The UN. American columnist George Will sums up the United Nations as
"that nest of anti-Israeli regimes" because, I suppose, General
Assembly votes on the Mideast tend to run about 150-2, the two being
Israel and the U.S. The National Post says "the Palestinians prefer to
deal with the UN . . . while the Israelis trust only the Americans."
That's another weird equation: One country equals the whole UN? The
very notion of the U.S. as mediator is bizarre. When the recent
violence broke out, both presidential candidates robotically declared
support for Israel.
Whose point of view? CBC Radio's Dick Gordon asked an Israeli, "Do you
ever think it might get out of control?" But for Palestinians, it's
always out of control. The New York Times' David Shipler said Arab
leaders "reportedly" make "private remarks" disputing historical
Jewish ties to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which "touches the deepest
Israeli fear." About being seen as legitimate inhabitants of the land
in Arab eyes. That doesn't equate, either: anxiety over having your
emotional attachment questioned versus actual daily checkpoints,
expulsions, kidnappings, demolitions . . .
Peace. As in the Oslo accords, or Camp David. This is peace in a very
narrow, negative sense. Even after many years of bloody
intifada,Palestinians did not get a state, or the right to return to
their homes, or restitution for property. They got "the mere scrap of
a sham state" (Edward Said); a Bantustan, like the puppet black states
South Africa set up to try to retain control, "cantonized" into four
or five parts with Israeli land and forces in between, controlling
movement, borders and water resources; with Israeli colonists
remaining on the best land. Still, most of them accepted this mingy
peace and even rejoiced: It was a victory, and could lead to something
better. But the follow-up to the initial agreement was grim. Under
governments both left and right, Israel sent hundreds of thousands of
new settlers, delayed withdrawals or reneged and confiscated more
land. The element of hope that underpinned a crappy peace eroded.
Concessions. As in "Can Barak make any more concessions than he
already has?" (CBC Radio's Michael Enright), or "the superlatively
generous offers made by Mr. Barak" (National Post). This is the most
imaginative and distorted term in recent coverage. It's true at the
end that Israel offered concessions on Jerusalem, but they were minor:
a few suburbs, one of which could be called Palestine's capital,
instead of Israel's earlier insistence on an utterly "undivided" city.
It's as if Palestinians had first demanded all of Jerusalem, then
"conceded" to Israel a few neighbourhoods. He gave in, in some small
measure, on Jerusalem, but in the context of a hideously one-sided
"peace" to start with, followed by years of Israeli reneging, then
reneged a bit on the reneging, and is hailed as the great conceder. It
would have taken something at least a little grander to swallow all
the rest. The last straw, wrote a Palestinian, was not Ariel Sharon's
visit to the Temple Mount on the anniversary of the 1982 Beirut
massacre for which he was responsible, but the huge Israeli force that
fired on those protesting against his visit. They weren't even allowed
to voice their anger. At a certain point, nothing, with hope intact,
becomes preferable to something, with all hope foregone.
So: no war, no peace, no ceasefire, no real concessions. You can see
why it's a hard story to follow.
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