File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0108, message 46


Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:23:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: An Article by Eric Alterman


 
1. I disagree with Alterman's Israeli centered
analysis. The Palestinians are an object to observe
and maybe to humanitarianly sympathize with. But when
they dare to speak, in this article through Said, they
are academically praised and politically silenced.

2. Alterman is wrong when saying "Since a majority of
Israelis supports a freeze in the provocative practice
of settlement-building". there is no such majority.
Not only settlers are now at the heart of the Israeli
Jewish consensus against the Palestinians, including
their "fellow citizens", but the settlements never
faced a serious challenge from a majority of Israeli
Jews, even not by those who suffered economically 
from developing the settlements: the Mizrahi Jews. The
latter's main political representation, the shas
party, is a fierce supporter of settlers long before
the current intifada. 

3. In Addition, Sharon was elected by an overwhelming
Israeli Jewish majority. A recent pole among Israeli
Jews showed that a vast majority supports Israel's
assassination policy.   


The Nation
September 3, 2001 

by Eric Alterman  
West Bank Dreamin'

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010903&s=alterman

Last night I had the strangest dream... 

All of America's wealthy, conservative and safely
belligerent pundits had been delivered by a just and
beneficent Almighty Power to a Palestinian refugee
camp, following the bulldozing of their
homes--including vacation homes--and the expropriation
of all their possessions. Instead of pontificating
between beach walks and vodka tonics in Vineyard
Haven, these armchair bombardiers were treated to
rivers of open sewage and hopeless lives of beggary.
Those who resisted were arrested, tortured and
selectively assassinated. Meanwhile, editorial pages
across America cheered the "restraint" of their
tormentors. 
  
In extremely lengthy articles, the New York Times and
The New York Review of Books recently demonstrated
beyond any doubt that the Israelis (and the Americans)
shared in the blame for the breakdown of peace
negotiations and ensuing cycle of violence that now
tragically appears to be engulfing the region. To the
punditocracy, however, these dispassionately argued,
extensively reported stories amounted to an
existential insult of near biblical proportions. Marty
Peretz's New Republic published a vicious attack on
the articles by Robert Satloff, executive director of
a pro-Israel think tank. William Safire got so
excited, he denounced his own newspaper in a
hysterical fit of ad hominemism: "Do not swallow this
speculative rewriting of recent events," he warned
readers. "The overriding reason for the war against
Israel today is that Yasir Arafat decided that war was
the way to carry out the often-avowed Palestinian
plan. Its first stage is to create a West Bank state
from the Jordan River to the sea with Jerusalem as its
capital. Then, by flooding Israel with 'returning'
Palestinians, the plan in its promised final phase
would drive the hated Jews from the Middle East." 

Mortimer Zuckerman, in his capacity as chairman of the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American
Organizations, insisted, "This is just revisionist
history.... There is one truth, period: The
Palestinians caused the breakdown at Camp David and
then rejected Clinton's plan in January." The baldest
comment came from the Zionist Organization of
America's president, Morton Klein: "Whether their
account is accurate or not is irrelevant.... I reject
any discussion of what happened." 

In the wake of the suicide bombings, three different
Washington Post pundits demanded war three days in a
row. Michael Kelly, recently seen complaining about
too many fatsoes at the beach, advised the Israelis to
unleash "an overwhelming force...to destroy, kill,
capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces." The
more moderate George Will called only for a "short
war." (Charles Krauthammer did not specify a length.)
To read these would-be warriors, you would think the
Palestinians were summering in Edgartown. A reader
would never guess that a regional superpower is
carrying out a brutal military occupation, coupled
with a settlement policy that directly contravenes
Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. 

No one with any sense would argue that Arafat and his
corrupt cronies do not bear considerable
responsibility for the collapse of any hope of peace
in the Middle East in the near future. And suicide
bombers against civilian targets in Israel are as
counterproductive as they are immoral (though those
who settle in occupied territory are knowingly putting
themselves in harm's way and hence share some
responsibility when their families are forced to pay
for this fanaticism with their lives). Nevertheless, a
conflict where "our team" engages in terrorism,
assassination and the apparently routine torture of
teenagers to defend a cruel and illegal occupation is
one in which neither side holds a monopoly on virtue. 

Since a majority of Israelis supports a freeze in the
provocative practice of settlement-building, the
mindless hysteria of the American punditocracy must
have other sources than mere logic. It's dangerous to
draw firm conclusions without any special knowledge
about the psyches of those involved, but much of the
materially comfortable American Jewish community has
had an unhappy history of defending the principle of
Jewish sovereignty over captured Palestinian lands
right down to the death of the last Israeli. Because
of the sacrifices they demand of others, many American
Jews feel they must be holier than the Pope when
defending Israeli human rights abuses. The New
Republic's Peretz is a particularly interesting
specimen. He reflexively defends everything Israel
does and routinely slanders its critics. Peretz, who
owes his prominence to money, in this case his
(non-Jewish) wife's fortune--which allowed him to
purchase his magazine--has never published a single
book or written a significant piece of scholarship,
reportage or criticism. It's not hard to imagine that
his self-appointed role as Israel's American
Torquemada--seen in his obsession with smearing the
world-renowned Palestinian scholar and activist Edward
Said--is inspired as much by guilt and envy as by more
rational motivations. (I say this as a supporter of
the peace process who has respectfully disagreed with
almost all Said has said about the conflict in recent
years.) 


 
Whatever the reason, the net result is the same. For a
brief moment in recent history, when Israel had a
government that was dedicated to finding a way to make
peace, the warrior pundits were placed on the
defensive and the Palestinians received a reasonably
fair shake from the nation's elite media. More
recently, a review of leading editorial pages by the
ADL found that "the major newspapers across the
country are viewing the situation in the Middle East
in a realistic and objective manner." The authors of
the study helpfully defined their terms. To the ADL
"realistic and objective" means "critical of and
hostile to Arafat...directly blaming him for the
continuing violence and creating a climate of hatred"
along with the dismissal of all Palestinian peace
overtures as "calculated tools for his goal of gaining
further concessions from Israel." 

In a rational world, the ADL report would at least
complicate efforts by Safire, TNR and others to charge
the media with "pro-Arab" and "anti-Israel" bias.
Alas, I'm betting bubkes...


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