The Distortions of NPR on Palestine

The fact is that as the much-touted "window of opportunity" - the elections - opens, the IOF, at the orders of Ariel Sharon, is very busy slamming it shut as Israeli soldiers continue mowing down Palestinian civilians, demolishing their houses and seizing their land. If Palestinians had similarly murdered Israeli children, the entire US press would run bloody photographs on its front pages, the Israel lobby would be calling for all-out war against the Palestinian population, and Israeli demonstrators would be shrieking "Death to the Arabs." But of course the US press now finds Abbas suspect, another potential "failed partner," while Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government remain blameless.

Israel has a very poor record in the matter of the few "free" elections it has permitted its occupied subjects. In the early 1980s when I was reporting from the region, it exiled two of four moderate (and pro-PLO) West Bank mayors returned in 1976, the only free elections Israel permitted in the territories before Oslo. The exile added insult to literal injury: the year before, assassination attempts by Jewish extremists maimed two mayors who weren't sent into exile, and killed the bodyguard of another. (See Robert I. Friedman's excellent Zealots for Zion for more details about the crime and its perpetrators.) Meanwhile Israel promoted a quisling regime called "the Village Leagues," an effort to (so to speak) "Palestinianize" its occupation and secure mass submission Palestinian to its Greater Israel settlement program. The Village League predictably failed; in 1987 the first intifada erupted. Next came Oslo, and Yasser Arafat's election to head the Palestinian fledgling government. At that time the US and Israel backed him because they hoped he'd govern a docile population while Israel continued annexing the West Bank's most valuable land and water resources. And indeed, Arafat agreed to cede all but 22 percent of former Mandate Palestine to Israel; he signed an agreement (Oslo) which didn't address settlement-building. But he failed to become a "Village League" kind of partner, and while his government was hardly more corrupt than, say, George W. Bush's, he was weak. So he was banished, persecuted, demonized, and finally died, much to the lugubrious delight of Israel, the US, and its press pundits. Now comes Abbas. Will he be the docile partner Israel has long fantasized? Will the Palestinian population, which continues suffering the unchecked assaults of the Israeli army and the unrestrained seizure of ever more of its land, now submit to the Bantustan project that Israel has long sought and that - given the "separation wall," Jewish-only bypass roads, settlements encircling all Palestinian living centers including Beit Lahia - is all but complete? (Of course unmentioned in this week's program or in any NPR discussions of the elections is the famous statement by Sharon's adviser and spokesman, Dov Weisglass, that the famed "Gaza pullout" is simply a mask for embalming the "peace process" in "formaldehyde." )

Most of the world understands the contexts I have just sketched - contexts that are critical for the current elections. The press in most of the world isn't bludgeoned into conformity by the pressures CAMERA, AIPAC, the ADL and their ilk bring to bear on ours. In much of the world journalists interview experts like Dr. Barghouti, Dr. Haider Abd el-Shafi in Gaza, Professor Ilan Pappe in Israel, Professor Avi Schlaim in England, and others. They run photographs of children and adults slaughtered by the Israeli army and give the act a name: murder. They show their audiences old men and women, mothers, fathers and children, weeping in the ruins of their demolished homes. To understand the current elections, Israel's and the US's stake in them, and why many Palestinians may feel they are irrelevant, one must understand all of this.

But the US press alone reports the "conflict" in such a way that many Americans actually believe Palestinians are occupying Israeli land rather than vice-versa. Calling territories that are occupied "disputed" and settlements "Jewish neighborhoods" as NPR including Mr. Ashrook does, supports this appalling misconception. It would be refreshing if, for once, "On Point" interviewed experts like the ones mentioned above. In the past "On Point" did interview Raja Shehadeh, the West Bank lawyer and memoirist who founded the West Bank human rights organization, Law in the Service of Man. But since then your reporting has kept strictly to the "middle road" delineated by those in US power. Never a good thing for journalism to do, certainly not in the terrible times we live in now.

Ellen Cantarow lives in Medford, MA.

http://www.ccmep.org/2005_articles/palestine/010805_ellen.htm