Jewish support of Israel can get people fired for taking a courageous stand

http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020522074320545

American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key
positions in all areas of our government where decisions
are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case,
is there any hope of ever changing U.S.policy?

President Bill Clinton as well as most members of Congress
support Israel-and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic
to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers. .

The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East
policy might lie elsewhere-among those who support Israel
but don’t really know why.

This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are
well-meaning, fair- minded Christians who feel bond ed to
Israel-and Zionism-often from atavistic feelings, in some
cases dating from childhood. I am one of those. I grew up
listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual
Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the
same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday
School and watched an instructor draw down window-
type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed
stories of a Good and Chosen people who fought against
their Bad “unChosen” enemies.

In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my
living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East
rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge
regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had
learned in Sunday School.

And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered
a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews
persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual,
mystical Israel I heard about as a child.

When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to
write about the three great monotheistic religions and
leave out politics. “Not write about politics?” scoffed one
Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe in the Old Walled City.
“We eat politics, morning, noon and night!”

As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the
co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who
have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started
arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By
living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians
and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police
state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians.

My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem.
My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards
Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder,
understanding of my own country. I say sadder
understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East
politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but
rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical
of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was
“free” to print news impartially.

“It shouldn’t be published. It’s anti-Israel.” In the late
1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that
editors could and would classify “news” depending on who
was doing what to whom.

On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed
dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related
stories of torture. Israeli police had come in the night,
dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their
heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation,
besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung> them
upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals.

I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn’t it
news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply
didn’t know it was happening.

On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to
Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station
WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians
who had been brutally tortured. And I’d make them
available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone
calls. Eventually I was put through to a public relations
person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I
wrote again.

In time I began to realize what I hadn’t known: had it
been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be
news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were “lost” at
WETA.

The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem
published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who
signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan
Publishing Company, was a former Roman Catholic priest.
He assured me that no one other than himself would edit
the book. As I researched the book, making several trips
to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin,
showing him sample chapters. ”Terrific,” he said of my
material.

The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went
to visit MacMillan’s. Checking in at a reception desk, I
spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His
secretary Margie came to greet me. In tears, she
whispered for me to meet her in the ladies room. When we
were alone, she confided, “He’s been fired.” She indicated
it was because he had signed a contract for a book that
was sympathetic to Palestinians. Griffin, she said, had no
time to see me.

Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William Curry.
“I was told to take your manuscript to the Israeli
Embassy, to let them read it for mistakes,” he told me.
“They were not pleased. They asked me, ‘You are not
going to publish this book, are you?’ I asked, ‘Were there
mistakes?’ ‘Not mistakes as such. But it shouldn’t be
published. It’s anti-Israel.”

Somehow, despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses
had started rolling. After its publication in 1980, I was
invited to speak in a number of churches. Christians
generally reacted with disbelief. Back then, there was little
or no coverage of Israeli land confiscation, demolition of
Palestinian homes, wanton arrests and torture of
Palestinian civilians.

The Same Question

Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same
question, “How come I didn’t know this?” Or someone
might ask, “But I haven’t read about that in my
newspaper.” To these church audiences, I related my own
learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S.
correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed
out that I had not seen so many reporters in world
capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris.

Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980 population of
only four million warrant more reporters than China, with a
billion people?

I also linked this query with my findings that The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post-and
most of our nation’s print media-are owned and/or
controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was for this
reason, I deduced, that they sent so many reporters to
cover Israel-and to do so largely from the Israeli point of
view.

My learning experiences also included coming to realize
how easily I could lose a Jewish friend if I criticized the
Jewish state. I could with impunity criticize France,
England, Russia, even the United States. And any aspect
of life in America. But not the Jewish state. I lost more
Jewish friends than one after the publication of Journey to
Jerusalem-all sad losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest
of all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle East, I
had written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled
Soul Sister, and the plight of American Indians in a book
entitled Bessie Yellowhair, and the problems endured by
undocumented workers crossing from Mexico in The
Illegals.

These books had come to the attention of the “mother” of
The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Her
father had started the newspaper, then her husband ran
it, and in the years that I knew her, her son was the
publisher. She invited me to her fashionable apartment on
Fifth Avenue for lunches and dinner parties. And, on many
occasions, I was a weekend guest at her Greenwich,
Conn. home.

She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak for
the underdog, even going so far in one letter to say, “You
are the most remarkable woman I ever knew.” I had little
concept that from being buoyed so high I could be
dropped so suddenly when I discovered-from her point of
view-the “wrong” underdog.

As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious
Connecticut home when she read bound galleys of Journey
to Jerusalem. As I was leaving, she handed the galleys
back with a saddened look: “My dear, have you forgotten
the Holocaust?” She felt that what happened in Nazi
Germany to Jews several decades earlier should silence
any criticism of the Jewish state. She could focus on a
holocaust of Jews while negating a modern day holocaust
of Palestinians.

I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was ending.
Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to her home
to meet her famous friends but, also at her suggestion,
The Times had requested articles. I wrote op-ed articles
on various subjects including American blacks, American
Indians as well as undocumented workers. Since
Mrs.Sulzberger and other Jewish officials at the Times
highly praised my efforts to help these groups of
oppressed peoples, the dichotomy became apparent: most
“liberal” U.S. Jews stand on the side of all poor and
oppressed peoples save one-the Palestinians.

How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend to
diminish the Palestinians, to make them invisible, or to
categorize them all as “terrorists.” Interestingly, Iphigene
Sulzberger had talked to me a great deal about her father,
Adolph S. Ochs. She told me that he was not one of the
early Zionists. He had not favored the creation of a Jewish
state.

Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to
Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many as
a religion. While the ethical instructions of all great
religions-including the teachings of Moses, Muhammad and
Christ-stress that all human beings are equal, militant
Zionists take the position that the killing of a non-Jew
does not count.

Over five decades now, Zionists have killed Palestinians
with impunity. And in the 1996 shelling of a U.N. base in
Qana, Lebanon, the Israelis killed more than 100 civilians
sheltered there. As an Israeli journalist, Arieh Shavit,
explains of the massacre, “We believe with absolute
certitude that right now, with the White House in our
hands, the Senate in our hands and The New York Times
in our hands, the lives of others do not count the same
way as our own.”

Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak,
“are not basing their religion on the ethics of justice. They
do not accept the Old Testament as it is written. Rather,
religious Jews turn to the Talmud. For them, the Talmudic
Jewish laws become ‘the Bible.’ And the Talmud teaches
that a Jew can kill a non-Jew with impunity.”

In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from such
Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to
comfort the downtrodden. The danger, of course, for U.S.
Christians is that having made an icon of Israel, we fall
into a trap of condoning whatever Israel does-even
wanton murder-as orchestrated by God.

Yet, I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in the
United States represent the last major organized support
for Palestinian rights. This imperative is due in part to our
historic links to the Land of Christ and in part to the moral
issues involved with having our tax dollars fund
Israeli-government-approved violations of human rights.

While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters know
they have the president and most of Congress in their
hands, they worry about grassroots America- the
well-meaning Christians who care for justice.

Thus far, most Christians were unaware of what it was
they didn’t know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by
U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and when
they traveled to the Land of Christ most all did so under
Israeli sponsorship. That being the case, it was unlikely a
Christian ever met a Palestinian or learned what caused
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is gradually changing, however. And this change
disturbs the Israelis. As an example, delegates attending a
Christian Sabeel said they were harassed by Israeli
security at the Tel Aviv airport.

“They asked us,” said one delegate, “Why did you use a
Palestinian travel agency? Why didn’t you use an Israeli
agency?” Obviously, said one delegate, “The Israelis have
a policy to discourage us from visiting the Holy Land
except under their sponsorship. They don’t want Christians
to start learning all they have never known about Israel.”

Grace Halsell is a Washington, DC-based writer. She is the
author of 14 books, including Journey to Jerusalem and
Prophecy and Politics. The Jerusalem Times (Jerusalem).
This news item is distributed via Middle East News Online