During the event I attended Saturday at the Arab arts center in New York, Eitan Bronstein, the visiting Israeli activist, made a crucial point regarding the American conversation about Israel/Palestine.
He and his tour had been in Chicago when he heard a one-minute radio ad from some local Jewish committee saying that Palestinians were being taught in their schools to hate Jews. The ad echoed the recent front-page story in the Times saying that the Palestinian children are taught to think of Jews as apes and pigs, also the many campaigns by CAMERA and MEMRI and others to make this a big issue.
Bronstein was shocked to hear the ad. "I cannot believe that this is taken seriously," he told me later. "This could not be published in Israel on the radio. Maybe on a right wing website, yes. But this kind of rightwing Zionist incitement, it is not something that’s been so popular or accepted. I think this kind of thing feeds more to a parody show or satirical show in Israel, but not serious discussioin."
As Bronstein explained–and Leon Hadar made a similar point to me last week–Israel is becoming a country like other countries, a normal place where people live and try to imagine their futures. They are in a miserable war, but they don’t delude themselves about the causes of that war. It is not about ideology, anti-semitism, racism; it is a dispute over land going back 60 years. Israelis understand this. Of course Hamas is teaching hatred. That is epiphenomenal–relating to the primary cause, a war over land and resources.
In America we are not allowed to have this understanding. Yes Democratic politicians encourage us to think this way about Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq–they hate each other because it is a good oldfashioned struggle for power–but god forbid Israel and the Palestinians can be portrayed in this realistic light. No, in Israel it is good versus evil, and we are on good’s side.
I told Bronstein that Tony Kushner had once told me that American Jews, most of whom have never been to Israel, have a view of Israel that is a fantasy based on a delusion. Exodus and Entebbe. Bronstein agreed. "Here there is still kind of outspoken– the very conservative messages of Zionism. Like to say openly, The Arabs are bad guys. That is a very naive position. In Israel that attitude exists but even on the right it is more sophisticated and implicit than the ways you hear it here." It is related, Bronstein went on, to the shameless use of the Holocaust in political messages re the Arabs. Yes one hears this in Israel. But mainstream Israelis don’t generally go in for this stuff; in the U.S. it happens all the time.
This is tragic. It reminds me of the statement in Ambassador Kurtzer’s book that the U.S. position at Camp David in 2000 was "manipulated" by pro-Israel views, forces. Our media also are manipulated. This is what Jerome Slater described in his important paper in International Security saying that Haaretz is informing its readers about true Palestinian conditions and the New York Times is keeping them ignorant–and thereby Americans are confined to a false state of awareness that is damaging policy-making and public opinion and in the end the American interest. I try not to be self-pitying about the fact that after a lifetime of journalism, sometimes making $25,000 per article, I can’t make a dime exploring the issues I care most about these days–for the blogosphere is something of a cure for those feelings. But my case is a data point underlying the true pity, the state of our democracy. On a fundamental issue involving American security and ideals, Americans are getting a fake story. We are imbibing propaganda night and day. This is about to change.
