Israel and Palestine, Choosing Sides

September 24, 2004 3:20 AM

Pressure Groups and Censorship in Israel/Palestine."I suspect that the causes are complicated and multi-factorial. I suspect that I and others like me – who remained ignorant and negligent on this issue for so long – bear much of the guilt. I suspect that others whose emotional ties to Israel served as blinders on this subject share in our culpability. I suspect that still others who knew the truth and refused to speak of it, or who participated in its cover-up, bear a significant portion of this awful responsibility. I suspect that the career damage and death threats that often result when one begins to speak out on this issue played a part."
posted by acrobat (33 comments total)

This post serves as a great multipurpose boilerplate : substitute "Israel/Palestine" with "The Bush Administration/Iraq" and it makes sense too.

I wonder why ?

Call me a negative ninny.
posted by troutfishing at 3:55 AM on September 24, 2004

I thought the article had enough links to support its reasoning, as Israel's relationship to the US, as well as Israel's role in many things Middle East have often been debated between MeFites.
posted by acrobat at 4:26 AM on September 24, 2004

I am ashamed to say how little I knew of this. Although I support the right of Israel to exist, I do not think that the atrocities detailed here are justified by that principle. Atrocities need to be publicised - no matter who commits them.

Sheesh. I am speechless now.
posted by dash_slot- at 4:45 AM on September 24, 2004

the occupation forces chose a less reported form of violence to subdue the rebels – soldiers held them down and broke their bones. [...] One episode was caught on film, and can be viewed in various documentaries. The Israeli cameraman was later killed by Israeli forces.

Woah.

I would really like to hear Project Censored's rebuttal to this heavily footnoted piece. Hell, anyone's rebuttal.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:07 AM on September 24, 2004

Behind the current temporary ascendant triumphs of PR - in glossing over cruel, savage, bloody ground level realities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Iraq, and elsewhere, lie the eternal perogatives of wealth and power.

[ So it has always been, but never has the veil of self deluding shop talk, whether churned out by convertible driving, corn fed boileroom Midwest communication majors, english speaking Indian graduate students, or computers, hung as such a thickly ubiquitious, obfuscatory pall - reminscent of the great age of coal burning but instead this time emitted by ravenous cash burning D.C. think tanks - which imparts a stench that recasts lucidity and moral clarity in a new light - as negativity and needless had wringing.

Adolf Hitler, Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, smirking on low amidst the sulphur, dance a little, joyous jig - and join Coue, Eddie Bernays, and Ivy Lee in a gaseous, oily clusterfuck. ]

I apologize in advance for my off color derail.
posted by troutfishing at 5:07 AM on September 24, 2004

Civil_Disobedient - I imagine the Bush Administration would like to perfect the same methods in Iraq. But, that sort of quiet brutality takes time, extensive military intelligence and deep cultural familiarity, immense manpower, and - well, errr - intelligence.....

All currently lacking on the aforementioned runaway train.
posted by troutfishing at 5:12 AM on September 24, 2004

"needless hang wringing", that should have been.
posted by troutfishing at 5:14 AM on September 24, 2004

I knew some of this - if there's any benefit at all to our obsession with Israel on MetaFilter, it's that it caused me to seek out a better understanding of the history of the I/P conflict and not rely on the conventional American wisdom of "Israel gooooooood, Arabs baaaaaaad..." If America knew, indeed...

It's a sick and deplorable second chapter in the story of Zionist Jews whose first chapter ended with the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust, a second chapter no real American would tolerate if they were better informed. Nothing, no matter how barbarous or genocidal, not even their holy Holocaust, justifies the behavior American and the entire West has turned a blind eye to since 1948. By all rights, we should at the very least leave all of them, Israeli and Arab alike, to their own devices. It is, after all, the billions and billions of dollars of free American aid every year that pays for this oppression. If Americans were truly the frontier ranger champions of the opporessed they fancy themselves as, we'd have long ago taken a more active course and bulldozed the entire mess into the eastern Mediterrannean and had done with it.
posted by JollyWanker at 6:07 AM on September 24, 2004

This all could have been avoided if we'd just given them Bavaria instead.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:40 AM on September 24, 2004

Thing is, civil_disobedient, we were never really giving them anything. The way it looks, the Israeli right has somehow found a way to just take anything they like from America. Not just money and guns, but its silence as well.
posted by acrobat at 7:15 AM on September 24, 2004

This all could have been avoided if we'd just given them Bavaria instead.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:40 PM GMT on September 24

What does that mean? Is that just a pointed, unfunny snark at the right for Israel to exist at all? Or that a Jewish homeland could have been anywhere - in Germany? East Africa? An island in the Indian Ocean?

The case for a Jewish state seems unarguable to me: one where jewish ethnicity is a norm, not considered an aberration, where a people with connections to the land that go back millennia can be safe in the knowledge that they will never be evicted, ejected, deported, persecuted, blacklisted, neglected, exterminated, denied tenure, refused education, experimented upon, attacked , raped & murdered just for their race and/or religion. I remember when that was a totem of the Left.

I say that in the fervent hope that we will lose, eventually, our attachments to tribe and cult, to ancestor and skygod, to myth and superstition. We will, one day, also lose that spiritual connection to our land of birth - and feel welcome wherever we tread. But until then - jews need a place where they know they will be defended by their own compatriots: because they, too, are jews. Most of the european nations failed the forebears of todays Israelis, so they have taken responsibility for their own survival. I can understand that. I hate the existence of a state based on race or ethnicity - but I see it as the least worst option, presently. I do not want to see another jewish holocaust, and imho nor do most readers here. The existence of Israel precludes that possibility.

Just to reiterate: none of that apology for Israel absolves Israelis from responsibility for crimes against their local rivals and - in many cases - prior landholders. I believe - like many Israeli peaceniks - that peaceful co-existence is possible between the warring tribes in that region. It won't come about in my generation, nor as long as Iranian mullahs are weaponising uranium, nor as long as the IDF are committing atrocities like those which [back on topic] are covered up, ignored and blind-eyed by our press. The Mid East will settle for mutual, savage attrition or peaceful co-existence.

It sometimes seems like all our futures depend on getting our client states to take that last option.
posted by dash_slot- at 7:38 AM on September 24, 2004

Oh, and yes: I realise that some of that seems like personal guilt over the events in europe in the 30's & 40's. It's not all about that - but there is something in it. W emust defend & protect Israel, whilst holding it accountable for it's brutality.
posted by dash_slot- at 7:42 AM on September 24, 2004

"where a people with connections to the land that go back millennia can be safe in the knowledge that they will never be evicted, ejected, deported, persecuted, blacklisted, neglected, exterminated, denied tenure, refused education, experimented upon, attacked , raped & murdered just for their race and/or religion."
Shoot me, dash_slot, I thought you were talking about the Palestinians just then.
posted by acrobat at 7:58 AM on September 24, 2004

What does that mean?

It means that most of the Jews that filled Israel after the 2nd WW were European, and that, culturally, Bavaria would have suited them much more than, say, an area already so rife with Islaamic interests as to make a Jewish state all but impossible.

Impossible, you know, without serious military intervention.

The case for a Jewish state seems unarguable to me

The case against theocracy seems pretty unarguable to me.

I remember when that was a totem of the Left.

Since when?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:18 AM on September 24, 2004

On a side note:

Extirpation

God's vanguard is anxious. It is contemplating the prospect of historical failure. Its erstwhile savior, Ariel Sharon, who seems finally to have been impressed by the strategic threat to Israel that is posed by Palestinian demographics, and perhaps also to have advanced in his understanding of the relationship of peace to security, is preparing to withdraw from the hell that is Gaza, and he has conceded that a resolution to the conflict will require not only the creation of a Palestinian state but the renunciation of Jewish settlements in Palestine. Infamy! Reason! And so the settlers and their patrons are beginning a battle, so far only of ideas. Their fury is useful, since it reveals the extent to which they have departed from the moral and historical good sense of their society.

The evacuation of settlements on the West Bank a "crime against humanity"? Jews should not be so wanton with the term. We have more than a rough idea of what a crime against humanity looks like. The end of Ofra and Elon Moreh and Itamar and Bracha and Tappuah would be a crime only against the plans and the fantasies of the men and women, giants in their own eyes, who live there; and worse things can be imagined, much worse. These "victims" flatter themselves when they virulently liken their opponents to the agents of radical evil; but eschatology and narcissism go back a long way. And when they warn of "a crime against the nation," they employ the idiom of nationalism at its very rankest. The implication is that it is treason to differ with them. This is linguistic violence...

"To defend against the enemy and not to operate against Jewish citizens": these are xenophobic definitions, according to which the enemy can never be Jewish citizens. The IDF is not the "army of the people," it is the army of the state. But the state of Israel has never been as vivid to the settlers as the land of Israel. In the historiosophy of the dirt-worshippers, 1948 was just a step toward the climax of Jewish history that they represent, and the secular and sensible (and securityobsessed) heroes of 1948 were just the messiah's useful idiots. The signatories' care for their own kind is evidenced also in their admonition to the settlers not to hurt "anyone of their own nation." This is supposed to establish their ethical delicacy. The impression is somewhat dispelled, however, by their distinction between "national conscience" and "human conscience": were national conscience to contradict human conscience, it is not hard to guess which they would obey. Extirpation and expulsion is what some of them have in mind for others. For the radicals in the territories, some lives have always been worth more than other lives. Jewish lives trump Arab lives, and it is considered a sign of weakness to show a scruple about the justice of such a discrimination, the mark of a girlie Jew. But the truth is that the radicals are even crueler. They do not love all members of their ethnos equally. Some Jewish lives are worth more than other Jewish lives. The life of the Jewish man who wants to keep the Sabbath in a sea of Palestinians is more valuable than the life of the Jewish soldier who dies to protect him. Why else would the settlers allow so many fellow Israelis to perish in their defense? It is hard to look at the falsely meek, Torah-clutching Jews of Gush Katif without despising them as the most selfish Jews of their time.

No, the settlements are not the sole obstacle to peace; but they are an obstacle, and they are "our" obstacle. No, the Palestinians are not yet keen for diplomacy, too many of them are still betting on bombs and babies, but this suits the Israeli right fine. Under cover of Palestinian folly, it proceeds with its folly. Netanyahu says that a referendum must be held before Israeli disengagement from Gaza, but I do not recall that a referendum was held before Israeli engagement in Gaza. Then, as now, policy was made by a democratically elected government. But these days the head of such a government is denounced as "the dictator" in the streets and menaced by Kabbalistic curses and extremist plots. Extirpation and expulsion: You would think that Ariel Sharon were Hadrian, or Ferdinand, or the Czar. There are grounds for dread.

Leon Wieseltier is is the literary editor of The New Republic and a signatory of the Project for a New American Century.
posted by y2karl at 8:29 AM on September 24, 2004

not even their holy Holocaust

That's pretty harsh.
posted by callmejay at 8:33 AM on September 24, 2004

Gee. Seems to me that Israeli deaths are the underreported ones. (As well as nd that the torture and human rights abuses elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world....hmmmm.
posted by ParisParamus at 8:56 AM on September 24, 2004

That's pretty harsh.

It wasn't intended to be, nonetheless it's true.

I personally reject this pervasice belief that because six million Jews were exterminated by a single, mad dictator and his equally mad personal army, Israel may do as it pleases - against the Palestinians and to Americans - with impunity. I know from experience here and in real life that to even question this is heresy, the Holocaust-as-Excuser-of-All-Wrongs having been raised to a level of incotrovertible canon. "How can you even question Israel's genocidal history against the Palestinians?! How can you even question the right of Israel to billions of dollars of free American aid? Are you not aware that six million Jews died before and during World War II?" Just as two wrongs do not a right make, how much death, oppression and highway robbery must the world endure before the holy Holocaust is atoned for, and we're all allowed to hold Israel responsible for its behavior in the here and now?
posted by JollyWanker at 9:00 AM on September 24, 2004

"Under cover of Palestinian folly, it proceeds with its folly."

I agree that settlement expansion is a stupid idea; one that caters to extremist elements in the Israeli electorate (not all settlements, but new ones in areas that are likely to be given up in the West Bank and Gaza). But really, as long as the controling Palestinian voices speak of erasing Israel, how much does it really matter?
posted by ParisParamus at 9:04 AM on September 24, 2004

I personally reject this pervasice belief that because six million Jews were exterminated by a single, mad dictator and his equally mad personal army, Israel may do as it pleases - against the Palestinians and to Americans - with impunity.


Please point out anybody who believes this "pervasive belief." Specifically.
posted by callmejay at 9:25 AM on September 24, 2004

six million Jews were exterminated by a single, mad dictator and his equally mad personal army....and the collusion of literally millions of poles, lithuanians, germans, greeks, italians, ukranians, french, hungarians, citizens and militia and soldiers alike. And it was your neighbours doing the extermination.To blame the holocaust on a man, his army and even one nation is shortsighted indeed. Even the Americans & the Brits knew what was going on: we failed to prevent it.

Look at the anger and vengeance felt by many, many americans since 9/11. Imagine if it weren't 3,000 victims, but 2,000 times 3,000 victims. Or imagine it wasn't c. 0.000015% of your population, but all, or nearly all, or 90% of your kith & kin.

We cannot comprehend what our soldiers went through - let alone the trauma of survivors. This has a long, long way to go before it is played out. Some people think in terms of epochs, not eras.

And you'll note that I have already agreed that accountability is key: however, I guess some would say survival trumps even that. Could you live in a world without jews, or any other ethnic group?
posted by dash_slot- at 9:29 AM on September 24, 2004

Preacher and choir. Bigoted, unconvincing, and self referential.
posted by semmi at 10:00 AM on September 24, 2004

Gee. Seems to me that Israeli deaths are the underreported ones.

Paris, give us a break. Now that I know you're a fellow Mets sufferer, I'd like to defend you against the automatic attacks you get for saying anything, but dumbass remarks like this make it hard. Don't even try to tell me you honestly think Arab deaths get more coverage than Israeli (Jewish) ones in the American media. (Did you even read the linked article?) Isn't there enough lefty silliness for you to poke fun at without this crap?

Like others, I was generally aware of the imbalance in coverage but shocked by the specifics so abundantly documented here. The entire American journalism profession should be ashamed of itself.

By the way, I know this is a hopeless cause and in some sense it "doesn't really matter," but as someone doggedly devoted to getting facts out -- not an irrelevant goal in the context of this article -- I have to mention that the most thorough investigation of the numbers involved in the Holocaust, by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews, came to the conclusion that five million Jews were killed, not six. Trust me, Hilberg was not trying to diminish Jewish suffering. You may now return to your regularly scheduled mistaken but never questioned figure.

On preview: semmi, any actual rebuttal to go with the smear?
posted by languagehat at 10:25 AM on September 24, 2004

Bigoted, unconvincing, and self referential.

The media? Yea, that's what I think too.
posted by iamck at 10:33 AM on September 24, 2004

"Don't even try to tell me you honestly think Arab deaths get more coverage than Israeli (Jewish) ones in the American media."

I think they do, or they get about the same. In any case, I think most of the Arab wounds are societally, and religiously self-inflicted.

In any case, it's now 2004. The Palestinian Arabs keep getting offers, and then turning them down, and getting even less offered the next time around.

On this erev Yom Kippur, lets hope all the Hamas terrorists have gone to meet their maker, and that civilized, sensible people can come to prevail on both sides.
posted by ParisParamus at 10:39 AM on September 24, 2004

that civilized, sensible people can come to prevail on both sides.

Amen to that.
posted by languagehat at 10:56 AM on September 24, 2004

ParisP wrote: Seems to me that Israeli deaths are the underreported ones.

Don't really want to feed this troll, but since other folks reading this thread might be misled by the loaded language in the first few paragraphs of the linked article (if not by ParisP's usual baseless suppositions) into thinking that the article was lacking in solid and illuminating evidence, here are a few relevant paragraphs from further along:

We discovered, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle had prominently covered 150 percent of Israeli children’s deaths—i.e., many of the deaths were the subject of more than one headline in the paper—and five percent of Palestinian ones. In other words, Palestinian deaths were rarely accorded headline coverage even once.

In the first three and a half months of the current Palestinian uprising against Israel’s continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and suppression of human rights, Israeli forces killed 84 Palestinian children. The largest single cause of their deaths was gunfire to the head. During this period, not one Israeli child was killed. Not one suicide bombing against Israelis occurred.

Of these 84 Palestinian children, only one received headline coverage in the Chronicle – Mohammed al-Durra, the little boy whose murder while he was cowering with his father was recorded for all the world to see by a French TV crew.

Was the Chronicle alone in such unbalanced news coverage?

No. A study of National Public Radio that Seth Ackerman conducted for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) showed that NPR had reported on 89 percent of Israeli children’s deaths and 20 percent of Palestinian ones. In other words, NPR, which has been accused of being “pro-Palestinian,” reported Israeli deaths at a rate four and a half times greater than Palestinian deaths.

Two studies we conducted of the San Jose Mercury News – for a total of twelve months of data – also revealed enormous distortion in coverage. For example, we discovered that front-page headline coverage of all deaths (adults and children) had so emphasized Israeli deaths over Palestinian ones that the newspaper had, in effect, reversed reality – and then widened the gap. While 313 Israelis and 884 Palestinians had been killed during this period, Mercury News front-page headlines had reported on 225 Israeli deaths, and only 34 Palestinian ones – 72 percent of Israeli deaths and 4 percent of Palestinian ones.
posted by gompa at 11:01 AM on September 24, 2004

I prefer to examine the present rather than the past. But if you must dip into the past, Jews lived in that area before there was a Muslim faith...Jews lived there throought history. Now if you assert that it is Muslim or even arab land, then show me the lyrics to a national athem that dates back before 1947 or a flag that dates back before that year. And show me now any map by any Palestinian or arab country that depicts the state of Israel.

But moving on: Here is what is going on now with the jolly lads http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD78904 oh, killing and driving out Christians and not just interested in Jews or Israelis. Or http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_10.html Hamas, terror Palestinian group helping to kill Americans in Iraq...or does that not matter either?

As for granting Jews a homeland elsezwhere rather than where they had lived throughout time, why not tell the Pakistanis to move or the white man to leave America? And Ireland? How many nations voted to establish the state of Israelin the UN? do you know? Which was the one non-arab state that voted against establishing Israel? In other words, begin with history and then move on to current issues.
posted by Postroad at 12:39 PM on September 24, 2004

On preview: semmi, any actual rebuttal to go with the smear?

languagehat: any actual rebuttal to go with calling my view a smear?
posted by semmi at 1:00 PM on September 24, 2004

As for granting Jews a homeland elsezwhere rather than where they had lived throughout time

The last time the Jewish people called Israel home was in 63 B.C. For the next 18 centuries it was Arab land. Here's a little timeline, Postroad.

The Middle East in the Sixth Century
The Ottoman Sultanate
First Zionist colony in Palestine, 1878
Survey of Palestine, 1944
Palestinian And Zionist Land Ownership Per District as of 1945
Distribution of population (Palestinian and Jewish) by subdistrict, 1946
Map showing the massive destruction of Palestinian towns after al-Nakba in 1948
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:22 PM on September 24, 2004

languagehat: any actual rebuttal to go with calling my view a smear?

I think that would be called "the linked article," maybe you should give it a quick read.
posted by iamck at 2:13 PM on September 24, 2004

killing and driving out Christians and not just interested in Jews or Israelis

The Israeli state bears the lion's share of the guilt for the depressing status of Palestinian Christians—who are a good reminder of the fact that, just because you speak Arabic doesn't mean your ancestors weren't in the land a long time before the Arab conquest & the Islamic faith arrived.

I recently read From the Holy Mountain, a travelogue of a journey through the lands of Byzantine Christendom. One of the really depressing things that emerges from this book—something that would surely shock a reader of the caricatured American media—is how the fate of Israeli Arab Christians under their government resembles so closely the persecution Christians face in Turkey. (One interesting aspect of the picture is how Christians and other minorities are thriving in "evil" Syria, while ancient Christian communities are about to go extinct under government oppression in neighboring "not evil" Turkey and Israel.)

Of course Christians are suffering under Israeli policies. To speak only of the present, more than 90% of the land is illegal for them to own—they are second-class citizens just like all other non-Jewish citizens of Israel, regardless of how ancient their family histories on the land may be. If you want to go to the past, read Dalrymple's book and give me your straight-faced answer to the pathetic Christians of Kafr Bir'im, who are so cowed today that they are grateful to be allowed back into the bombed-out remnants of their village twice a year (for example, on Easter) to visit their old church (the only building the Israelis didn't obliterate in 1948).

(Kifr Bir'im is just one of the hundreds of obliterated villages listed in Civil_Disobedient's link.)
posted by Zurishaddai at 2:45 PM on September 24, 2004

languagehat: any actual rebuttal to go with calling my view a smear?

I think that would be called "the linked article," maybe you should give it a quick read.

iamck: I actually did, and that's why my response. A publication that sets out to find faults with one side only will find them, no matter what, in context or otherwise (I remember Jenin well).
When you take your views from David Horowitz, I'll take mine from Muhammad Ali Khan (Chief Editor & Founder of where this comes from), and Al-Jazeera. When the tightly controlled Palestinian media says one thing, and the Israeli another, I opt to go for the Israeli's word to get a reasonably balanced view.
Take the article on tear gas/poison gas. The first paragraph establishes an armed Israeli response, "after soldiers were shot at by Palestinian gunmen." The rest of near 8000 words are amountain of hearsay, bait and switch, insinuations, accusations, obfuscation and wild questions without any material evidence from any legitimate source, or International organization. The very lack of evidence is written up as proof of Israeli deviousness. Check out the footnotes. I did not find a single relevant and evidentiary piece of corroborating information. General articles on chemical weapons, on the Iraq-Iran war, analysis of Israel’s potential to have them, etc., all speculations, unconnected with the oblique charges.

languagehat: I don’t know how to rebut false charges besides saying they look biased, unconvincing, self referential, undocumented propaganda to me. It’s like asking Kerry to rebut the Swiftboaters. How do you do that? We have become a faith based society, believe what pleases our prejudices, and chuck worrying about truth.
posted by semmi at 8:02 PM on September 24, 2004