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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Setting the Record Straight on the Middle East
Wednesday 19 June @ 10:54:40 |
 by David Goldstein, Pulse Sales Director
“It all seems so very unfair.” Such is the conclusion reached by Pulse publisher/editor Ed Felien at the end of his review of two films about Israel at the U Film Society in last week’s issue of Pulse. I have to agree with Ed, generally speaking; it does seem very unfair. However, I think Ed and I have different reasons for viewing the situation as unfair. Most notably, I find Pulse’s coverage of the Middle East to be unfair. The overall message in last week’s Pulse – from the Hot Tickets, to the letters to the editor, to the “special report on Jenin,” to Ed’s aforementioned film criticism – is that Israel is an unjust state that wantonly bullies, terrorizes, and even massacres the Palestinians with no regard for their rights or humanity. This is a canard, a lie repeated often enough that the more gullible members of our society will begin to believe it is true. So many sweeping and unfounded charges against Israel have been made in Pulse in recent months that it is beyond the scope of one opinion piece to address all of them. However, I’d like to point out some of the specific untruths (let’s just call them what they are: “lies”) put forth in recent Pulse articles, and also discuss some more general disagreements I have with Pulse’s Middle East commentary.
First and foremost, there was no massacre in Jenin. On April 10, Newsday’s reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote “There is little evidence to suggest Israeli troops conducted a massacre…” and Molly Moore of the Washington Post reported “No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions.” British Reserve Major David Holley, an adviser to Amnesty International, dismissed the Palestinian allegations of a massacre and predicted that no evidence would be found to substantiate them. The Boston Globe reported that allegations of a slaughter “appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle.” Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, declared “There is simply no evidence of a massacre.”
Jenin was a pitched battle between the Israeli army (which was attempting to root out a terrorist stronghold which the Palestinians had unfortunately chosen to headquarter in a residential neighborhood) and terrorist thugs who had booby-trapped the entire refugee camp and were behind some of the most ruthless and bloody suicide bombings in history. Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat first claimed that 3,000 Palestinians had died in Jenin; then 500; then came a curious silence from Mr. Erekat as the facts emerged and it turned out that less than 60 Palestinians had been killed in Jenin, most of whom were armed men (combatants). Palestinian officials have recently corroborated this information. And witness this testimony reported in the leading Egyptian newspaper “Al-Ahram” in an interview with a Palestinian bomb maker identified as Omar – in Omar’s own words: “We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the [Jenin] camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them…We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the houses—in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas…the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving. The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area.”
Israel made valiant attempts in Jenin to limit the number of civilian casualties, and in doing so, lost 23 of its soldiers in the battle there. Contrary to what you may have read in Pulse, the Israeli soldiers instructed the Palestinian civilians to get out of any building they were about to bulldoze, and the bulldozing was done only to houses that were widely known to be epicenters for bomb-making or other terrorist activities. The Palestinians and their apologists in the press have tried to paint what happened in Jenin as “genocide,” but when you look at the facts—60 Palestinians (mostly armed fighters) and 23 Israelis killed—the true picture emerges; that Jenin was a fierce and ugly battle, forced into a residential neighborhood by the fact that the terrorists had decided to base their operations there.
Now that these indisputable facts have emerged about Jenin, where are the retractions from those who casually accused Israel of atrocities? Doesn’t an unfounded allegation, once disproven, merit an apology, or at least some semblance of a public correction?
And let’s address another issue: why was Israel not eager to let the United Nations send in a “fact-finding” investigative team into Jenin? Could it be because one of the members of the proposed Jenin fact-finding team had recently compared the Star of David to the swastika, and thus the Israelis feared he could be, um, a tad biased against Israel? Could it be because, in September of 2001, the U.N. Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa turned into a Goebbels-like display of anti-Semitic vitriol and propaganda? Could it be because, over the years, the U.N. has shown overwhelming bias against Israel at every juncture and has been hijacked by Arab nations seeking Israel’s destruction or, failing that, worldwide ostracism for its attempts to defend itself? Could it be because, in the past year and a half, the U.N. never sent anyone to investigate the deaths of over 500 innocent Israelis in terrorist attacks?
Plenty of journalists have been inside Jenin since the battle there. There is no way that Israel could cover up the facts on the ground. Yet the Pulse and other media publications have rushed in to condemn Israel for a “massacre” without any substantiation whatsoever for this claim. Pulse writers condemn Israel for turning away Palestinian ambulances, but never mention that those same ambulances have been used to transport explosives into Israeli cities. Pulse writers condemn Israel for its response to terrorism but are curiously silent when 28 Israelis are murdered at a Passover Seder and Yaser Arafat goes on television to ask Allah to grant him the martyrdom of the suicide bomber who perpetrated this disgusting attack.
Where is the U.N. commission to investigate the cultural infrastructure that makes terror possible – the Palestinian textbooks that exclude Israel from the map of the Middle East, the Palestinian media that publishes copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and other rabidly anti-Semitic texts and engages in Holocaust denial, the Palestinian mosques where preachers invoke Allah’s blessing for those who kill innocent Israelis? Where is the U.N. to investigate the indoctrination of Palestinian children into the culture of suicide bombing and “martyrdom”? This is the same U.N. that allows Syria, a country known to imprison political opponents, sanction the mass murder of its own citizens (in Hama, in 1982, President Assad had his troops murder over 20,000 civilians), and harbor and support terrorists to sit on its Security Council and Human Rights Commission. Where was the U.N. when Serbs were truly massacring the Bosnians? Where was the U.N. when Hutus were committing genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda? Where was the U.N. when Egypt’s Nasser ordered the U.N. troops in Sinai out of the region in 1967 (even though their presence had been guaranteed as part of the 1956 accords ending that war in the Sinai) so that he could freely attack Israel? The U.N. troops who were stationed partly to provide security for Israel departed without so much as a whimper of protest! Where were the voices of dissent in the U.N. in 1975 when former Nazi Kurt Waldheim declared “Zionism is Racism”? Why has the U.N. never condemned the “death to Israel” clause in the PLO charter?
Israel is a nation surrounded by enemies, who foment Jew-hatred in the official press and give millions of dollars to terrorist organizations who perpetrate suicide bombings that kill and maim innocent Israelis day after day. Saddam Hussein pays $25,000 to the family of every suicide bomber. The Arab papers compare Israel to the Nazis (while simultaneously denying the Holocaust, a curious contradiction if there ever were one), allege worldwide Jewish conspiracies, and even repeat the ancient “blood libel” (the ridiculous and ugly claim that Jews use non-Jewish blood to make ritual foods for the holidays of Purim and Passover). Iran and Syria arm Hebzollah, which shells Israeli villages full of women and children. The same Saudis who offer up a supposed “peace plan” hold telethons to raise money for suicide bombers. These same Saudis broadcast “news” programs like the one recently uncovered by the Middle East Media Research Institutes (MEMRI) which showed an interviewer coaxing a 3-year old girl to refer to Jews as “apes and pigs” and reminding her that the Koran says so (it doesn’t, of course). The Arab press (and even some in the U.S. and Europe) like to compare Israel to the Nazis and Ariel Sharon to Hitler.
This is beyond obscene. As columnist James Lileks so eloquently put it “When the citizens of Israel are told daily by their press and TV that the Arabs are subhumans who must be destroyed, then Sharon will be like Hitler. When Arabs must wear crescents on their shirts, Sharon will be Hitler. When stadiums full of Jews bay for the blood of the Arabs, and pour out in a torchlight parade to kick and beat and shave the beards of devout Muslims, Sharon will be Hitler. When the mosques are burned and the minarets topped and the babies thrown in the air and speared on bayonet point, Sharon will be Hitler.”
No, criticism of Israel is not equivalent to anti-Semitism, but the anti-Semitism surrounding much of the criticism of Israel is what is most disturbing. And this anti-Semitism is becoming all the more apparent in the Arab/Muslim world, from the state-sponsored media variety noted above to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose killers forced him to state “I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew” and other remarks about his religious background before beheading him and then creating a widely distributed “snuff film” about the murder, interspersed with footage of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
Let’s take up another issue now, the statement – often repeated and rarely examined – that “three Palestinians are killed for each Israeli killed.” This appeared in the Hot Tickets section of last week’s Pulse (by the way, when did Hot Tickets cease to be a forum for promoting worthy local music and arts events and turn into yet another Israel-bashing section? Another question for another day, I guess). As reported in the Village Voice on June 5, the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel has taken a closer look at those figures. Their findings? In the last 20 months of fighting, 55 percent of Palestinians killed were combatants (armed and dangerous), versus 25 percent of Israelis killed. Less than 5 percent of Palestinian casualties were female, whereas 30 percent of Israeli casualties were female. 132 Israeli female civilians were killed, compared to 40 Palestinian female civilians, making for a familiar ratio, 3 to 1, except in this case, the “3” represents the Israelis and the “1” represents the Palestinians. It pays to examine the facts a bit more closely, doesn’t it?
But let’s look at the biggest issue of all here: will the Palestinians, and the Arab world in general, ever agree to peacefully coexist with a Jewish state of Israel? Let’s get right to the historical facts. After suffering thousands of years of persecution, Jews began to return to their native homeland (where they had thousands of years of history and a small but uninterrupted presence in the area since Biblical times) as part of the Zionist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s. To make a long story short in 1947, the Arabs rejected a U.N. partition of the land that gave the Jews just a small portion of the land and gave the Palestinian Arabs 90 percent of the original Palestine Mandate. Five Arab armies invaded the newly declared independent state of Israel with the aim of destroying the Jewish state. Many of the Jews were recent Holocaust survivors and, having seen their family and friends murdered by the Nazis, simply refused to be defeated in the Jewish homeland. While some Arabs were forced out, which is indeed one of many tragedies in the history of the Middle East, a great many of the Arabs fled Israel of their own volition, believing that the Arab nations would push the Jews “into the sea” and end the dreams of a Jewish state in the region.
In 1950, Jordan annexed the West Bank, and in the ensuing years, Israel proceeded to welcome 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries while maintaining its own Arab population, who to this day have among the most rights and highest standards of living of any Arab population in the world (they can vote and serve in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset…can you imagine an Arab nation allowing Jews to serve in its parliament? Oh, I forgot, Arab nations, not being democracies, don’t even have parliaments.). Over the years, the continued efforts of the Arabs to destroy Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars convinced Israel that it needed a territorial buffer against hostile neighbors. When Egypt was willing to make peace, Israel made peace with Egypt at the Camp David accords in 1979. Israel has largely made peace with Jordan. But the drive by certain Palestinians and other Arab nations to destroy Israel continues unabated to this day. Repeated terrorist attacks threaten Israel’s security, and demands for a “right of return” would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state (not to mention the fact that 90 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza today never lived a day of their lives in territorial Israel). Where is the outrage against the 22 Arab nations, who have refused to grant any rights to their Palestinian “brothers” or absorb any Palestinians into their borders and have kept them in squalid refugee camps, fomenting their hatred against Israel and prodding them to fight a proxy war against Israel?
Pulse writers frequently deride Israel for security measures such as checkpoints and blockades that inhibit the free movement of the Palestinians. Might there be a reason for such measures? Has anyone read a newspaper or seen a TV news report lately showing how the latest Palestinian suicide bomber entered a pizzeria or disco or café and blows him or herself up, sending the heads, arms, and legs of Israeli men, women, and children flying, splattering blood and guts onto adjacent buildings, sending nails flying into human flesh to purposely maim? Is Israel supposed to stand by idly and watch as its citizens are brutally murdered day after day?
The “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967, yet the murderous PLO has existed since 1964. Thus, how is one supposed to believe that ending the “occupation” will end the terrorism, especially when the Oslo accords which provided near-complete Palestinian autonomy over the West Bank and Gaza only increased the number of suicide bombings? In the summer of 2000, Israel offered a total end to the “occupation,” ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to form the first Palestinian state ever. Arafat summarily rejected this generous offer (yes, it was generous, don’t believe the revisionist hype to the contrary – read any of the accounts of the negotiations by U.S. Special Envoy Dennis Ross, who thoroughly blames Arafat for the collapse of the talks) and launched an unprecedented wave of suicide bombings.
The hatred must stop. The name-calling must stop. The unfounded accusations must stop. For months, I’ve been lobbying to see both sides presented fairly in Pulse, and this last issue of Pulse was so blatantly biased and one-sided that I felt compelled to respond. Let’s talk rationally. Let’s acknowledge that at virtually every juncture in Israel’s history, the Arab world has rejected Israel’s existence and responded to peace overtures with violence. Yet, amazingly, poll after poll continues to show that the majority of Israelis favor an independent Palestinian state. Until the Arab world also truly democratizes and decides to live alongside the Jews rather than kill them, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
Publisher’s Response: Pulse never described the Israeli Defense Force invasion of Jenin as a massacre.
Ed Felien, Publisher
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