Buying the Night Flight (37 page)

Still, my first day in Tel Aviv, when I walked into Beit Sokolov, the government news agency, the officer in charge looked at me. "We've been watching you as you went around the Arab world. You certainly are an Arab lover."

I was stunned. Didn't a person have the right to go to the Arab world? Shouldn't the Arab world be covered by the press? For the moment I put it aside, but they would not let me be; I was already dubbed an "Arab lover" only because I had written objectively about the Arab countries. It resounded deep in my soul, along with the "Jew lover" and "nigger lover" from my youth. But, no, I did not believe that this kind of prejudice existed in Israel. Certainly not.

Then I began to read the history and found more surprises. Not even half of the very basic "history" that Israel and its friends had so carefully propagated throughout the world, and in particular the United States, was true. I believed -- and fervently believe today -- that the Jewish people have a total right to their state and to its security. But what about the five million Kurds, the scattered Armenians, and the four million Palestinians displaced by the Israeli state?

When I looked into history, I found that in 1918 there had been about sixty-five thousand Jews in what was then Palestine, up from only two hundred families in 1883. The Arab population, which had lived there for thirteen hundred years (long enough, one would think, to accrue some rights) was roughly six times that many. By 1948, when the
UN
divided Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the Jewish population had risen to 600,000, compared with 1,200,000 Arabs. Then, in the Palestine wars of 1947-48, all but 200,000 of the Arabs fled Israel proper in the ensuing war started by the neighboring Arab states against the Israelis. They were later moved a second time, from the West Bank and other areas. And here is where the conundrum begins.

What is true is this: Part of the Arab population fled out of terror of the fighting; part of it fled in response to the calls by Arab leaders to flee in order to return once the war was over; and enormous numbers also fled because they were brutally murdered and driven out by Jewish groups like the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi of Prime Minister Menachem Begin or the Stern Gang of Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. They were never allowed to return, and their properties, which were substantial -- for Palestine was not at all a poor area -- were simply taken over by Israeli Jews. All of this is very important, for the Israelis' claim to total purity and their claim to having no responsibility for the "Palestine question" rests on whether or not they drove the Palestinians out. They did.

From the beginning I was torn by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seeing good and bad, guilt and innocence, suffering and overcoming, very balanced on both sides. But in the Middle East you were not permitted by either side to see both sides. This bothered me more in Israel than in the Arab world simply because they lay claim to moral superiority as the basis of their national life and our extravagant support is based on that. When you do this, then you must accept being judged by your own standards.

I came to the Middle East as I come to most areas, in a basically non-ideological frame of mind. I have always felt that sentimentality is the graveyard of the journalist, who has to know and always remember that today's guerrilla or victim can well be tomorrow's totalitarian. There are not -- or should not be -- any final chapters in the journalist's life, not if she believes (as she should) that life is process.

What's more, most stands against oppression are all too fashionably late. Journalists and others must not be always fighting the last moral war but the new one. (Avoid the cliché of your time.)

Retroactive guilt -- a dangerous thing. It is so very easy to say you will never again let happen something that already has happened, and that you cannot do anything about, and that will never happen again. In effect we were being asked to live for and write against "the Holocaust," and ignore the present sufferings of the Palestinian Arabs, who were the new oppressed people: the "New Jews."

As I went through this torment, I kept asking myself, "Is it enough to hate the evil done forty years ago and not have to do anything about the evil going on now?" I had always abhorred racism, sexism, ethnicism, tribalism -- everything that cut person off from person--so how could I in conscience avoid writing about the Palestinian question?

But that came to mean criticizing Israel's policies, which were to ignore the Palestinians and to do anything necessary to keep them down on the West Bank. And that meant constant and bitter accusations of "anti-Semite." I truly loved and believed in Israel, and the Arabs were quite capable of doing any number of stupid and feral things. But as the years went by and I continued to cover the Middle East, I could only come to agree with the early Zionist Theodore Herzl, who said, "We have one right against another right."

Most of my friends in the Labor Party agreed with this, for that party was based on the idea of the two peoples living together and also of the "normalization" of the Jewish people. But it soon became clear that the Israel of Menachem Begin, the old super-terrorist, would have no truck with such rational solutions. Rather the Begin people looked upon the Arabs in much the same way, as a despised people and "vassal state," that the Germans and the Poles and the Russians had looked upon the Jews.

As the seventies passed and I visited Israel regularly and saw the changes occurring, I grew sadder and sadder about what was happening to this once idealistic and revered state. One night, for instance, I sat in the cozy apartment of Eliah Ariev, one of the founding fathers of Israel, the former powerful secretary-general of the Labor Party under Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and one of the finest total human beings I have known anywhere. We were talking with a friend of his, Yigal Elam, a young professor of history at Tel Aviv University.

Yigal cared deeply, as did "Lova" Ariev, about the original universalist vision of Zionism as the Jewish idea of justice for all, and he was deeply troubled. For as he went around to the kibbutzes to lecture on the origins of the movement, he found deep changes.

"It is obvious," he told me soberly, "that the early kibbutzim were idealists. But today when I say this, even in some of the socialistic kibbutzes, I always find some of the elders shouting something at me like, 'You dare to tell us it was not for the security and boundaries of Israel?'" He shook his head sadly. "Even the elders have forgotten," he went on. "I always bring old documents showing what the original concept was, and I always win the argument. But they never forgive me."

What I was finding in Israel during the seventies was a country that had totally changed -- and I started to analyze it. By 1978, for instance, it was clear that the "new Israel" of Begin was annexing the West Bank, thus driving the Palestinian Arabs out of still another part of their land (most families already had been driven out two or three times, first from parts of Israel, then from other parts of the West Bank). I wrote:

Approximately one-third of all the land in the formerly Jordanian West Bank, occupied by Israel in 1967, is already in Israeli hands. In the crucial Jordan Valley, about 80 percent of the land is estimated by specialists to be owned by Israel, thus encircling the highlands still in Arab hands....

In the years that will come, with more of "no war and no peace," the Israeli government, using "security" to cover anything it does, will go on to create more new "facts" until this hopeful moment is past and the West Bank effectively is Israel. It may already be.

Then in the spring of 1981 I wrote an analysis of the passing of power from the Ashkenazim or European Jews who founded the state to the Sephardic, or Oriental, Jews who came later and who had totally different values. Now I wrote:

... Congress is dealing with an Israel that no longer exists. The special American relationship with Israel is based on a moral premise of support for the people who suffered the Holocaust. Yet the Israel of Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- and the negative twist he has brought to the original Zionist mission -- is now a state with a majority of Sephardic, or Oriental, Jews who know neither Europe nor the values of Central and Eastern European Jewish culture.

The Sephardim have no personal experience of the Holocaust, but do have a great deal of personal experience with Arabs. They like and support autocratic leaders such as Begin. Their hatred for Arabs is legendary, and the most brutal treatment of Arabs and of Arab prisoners on the West Bank virtually always turns out to be from Sephardic soldiers or prison officials.

It is the Sephardim, too, who are the strongest supporters of Begin's "Greater Israel" policy, which would annex the Arab West Bank as part of Israel. There is virtually none of the moral questioning among them that there is among the original Ashkenazi founders of the state over these matters. Nor, at heart,
is
"security" really their major concern -- expansion of the state and the use of power are.

In all of this I remained a staunch supporter of Israel. But I could simply not accept the fact that I could not criticize another country when I freely criticized my own, particularly when that country was not only totally dependent upon us but when our foreign policy and its were closely interwoven. But I soon discovered that to the Begin people and thus to the professional American Jewish community, which followed Jerusalem totally, I could not criticize anything about Israel. I could not criticize anything about policy or any government of Israel at any moment, or even anything that they did that impinged upon American policy, which was clearly expected to follow the Israeli lead.

The moment I wrote the slightest thing suggesting that Israel was not totally right, I began to get dozens and then hundreds of letters. Though I'd never so much as permitted an anti-Semitic (any more than an anti-black or an anti-female or an anti-Arab) remark to be made in my presence, these letters called me a "vulgar anti-Semite." Others, encouraged by American Jewish leaders who never budged overseas, wrote, "I hope you die of the most painful kind of syphilis." Though I tried in my reporting to work toward a real peace for everyone in the Middle East, I was told by American Jewish leaders, whose directions came straight from Jerusalem, that I was not writing in the "American" interest. There was no way that a person of conscience could not but grow more and more disturbed -- and finally disgusted.

Then in 1978 I attended an "Arab-American Dialogue" conference in Tripoli, Libya, sponsored by an American Arab committee and the Libyan government. I gave a paper, which was a great deal of work, on the American press and the Arab world, in which I was extremely critical of the Arabs but in which I also tried to offer them ideas about how to open up more -- legitimately -- to the American media. For this I received two thousand dollars, about what I get for a speech in the U.S. I wrote two columns about Libya and in each one clearly and honorably specified that I was a "guest" of the government and a paid speaker. I was extremely critical of Qaddafi and carefully outlined his terrorist connections. Different American Jewish lobby groups peppered my papers with letters saying I was a "Libyan agent." My publisher at the
Los

Angeles Times
was embarrassed at a publishers' conference by papers circulating that implicated the
Times
with Libya. Even today, four years later, every few months I get a letter from some concerned person at one of my papers because some "nut" has again accused me of "taking money from Libya." When I spoke at Georgetown University, on something quite different, there was a vicious letter in the student paper. When a young woman student went through all the letters, from very different places, she found all of them included exactly the same points and phrasings.

Yet, unlike some self-styled friends of Israel, I was the one who really tried to help. In the spring of 1973, after spending weeks in Cairo and "listening" to what the Egyptians actually were saying, I had the instinctive and informed feeling that they were going to attack Israel. I wrote this and said this in an interview. When I was in Jerusalem, I told this to Moshe Sasson, the very intelligent Israeli diplomat who then headed the Foreign Ministry.

He roared with laughter. "My dear," he kept saying, "my dear girl, you just don't know our Arabs."

Later that year in October, when the Egyptians rushed across the Suez in one of the most startling attacks of military history -- and, caught totally by surprise, the Israelis even brought out their atom bombs in desperation -- I wondered how well they knew
their

Arabs, or who was really their friend.

In the ensuing years I also tried to tell them that Egypt's President Sadat was totally changing; that he wanted to make peace; that the Egyptian people themselves were pushing Sadat toward an end to all the righting. Again all the Israeli officials I spoke to scoffed at this. Had they "listened" then, they would not have been so surprised when Sadat sprung his trip to Jerusalem upon them that fall of 1977 -- and they would have been far better prepared to benefit from it.

To make the whole Israeli situation even more painful, my Jewish friends at home would not usually criticize me but I could see their hurt. Meanwhile, incongruously, friends in Israel, many of them leading Laborites, would openly urge me to criticize the Begin policies, which relied upon the original moral reputation of the Israeli state, while carrying out the most immoral policies. They couldn't criticize them, they said -- and they didn't want to urge the American Jewish leaders to criticize them.