The other day Ashraf Khalil wrote about how hard it was for him to publish an account of the mistreatment of Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer in the LA Times last year. Khalil's story reminded a reader of the story that Ken Silverstein wrote in Harper's two years ago, describing his ordeal in trying to publish a story explaining Hezbollah's political appeal in Lebanon:
After submitting my story, though, I ran up against insurmountable
editorial obstacles. It was clear that I was deemed to have written a
story that was too favorable to Hezbollah, even though any article
seeking to examine its popularity would, by necessity, require some
focus on the group’s more attractive aspects. After the story was near
completion, a new editor was called in to review it because, I was
told, Hezbollah had a history of inviting reporters to Lebanon and
controlling their agenda. The obvious implication was that this had
happened in my case—despite the fact that, outside of my interviews
with Hezbollah officials, I had had no contact with the party. I had
hired my own driver (who turned out to be sympathetic to Hezbollah,
like most Shiites, but not connected to the movement) and translators
(all Christians), with no restrictions placed on where I went or who I
met with; and in fact I had spent significant time with the group’s
critics.
The primary problem, it soon became clear, was fear of
offending supporters of Israel. At one point I was told that editorial
changes were needed to “inoculate” the newspaper from criticism, and
although who the critics might be was never spelled out, the answer
seemed fairly obvious. I was also told in one memo that “we should
avoid taking sides,” which apparently meant omitting inconvenient
historical facts. Over my repeated objections, editors cut a line that
referred to “Israel’s creation following World War II in an area
overwhelmingly populated at the time by Arabs.” That, I was told in an
email from one editor, David Lauter, was
the Arab view of things. Israelis would say, with
some justification, that much of the area wasn’t overwhelmingly
populated by anyone at the time the first Zionist pioneers arrived in
the first part of the 20th century and that the population rose in the
mid-decades of the century in large part because of people migrating
into Palestine in response to the economic development they brought
about.
But that argument, which in any case doesn’t refute what I wrote,
was long ago rejected by serious Mideast scholars, including many in
Israel. It also avoids confronting a root cause of the conflict.
According to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the original Zionist
governing body in what was to become Israel, there were roughly 1.1
million Arab Muslims living in Palestine at the time of partition—twice
the number of Jews. “Perspective is everything,” I replied in an email
to the editors. “If my name was Mostafa Naser and I grew up in the
southern suburbs of Beirut, I seriously doubt I would be an ardent
Zionist. If we can’t even acknowledge that Arabs have a legitimate
point of view—and acknowledge what the numbers show—we caricature them
as nothing more than a bunch of irrational Jew haters.” As I noted in a
conversation with one editor, religious hatred, on both sides, is an
element in the conflict, but it is fundamentally a struggle over land
and national identity. If an Eskimo state had been created in Palestine
in 1948, one suspects that anti-Eskimo feeling would have increased
markedly in the Arab world. When I asked [Nawaf] Musawi [foreign affairs chief for Hezbollah] about the Holocaust
denial that has been espoused by some Arab leaders, and suggested it
reflected an unwillingness to acknowledge Jewish suffering, he replied,
“We are not denying that European racists persecuted an entire people
or belittling the suffering of the Jewish people, and we say this with
utter frankness and without compliment. But Europeans committed those
crimes, and then we were made to pay for them with our land.” After
days of unfruitful negotiations, and a final edit that in my view
gutted the story, I decided to pull the piece rather than “inoculate”
it to the point of dishonesty.
A few comments. Wonderful account. Note that Lauter subscribes to Joan Peters's discredited From Time Immemorial thesis.
The only thing missing from this piece is an understanding of the Israel lobby. Why is this censorship taking place? Three reasons: empowered Jews in the media who feel loyalty to Israel and exercise that loyalty; Jews and non-Jews in the media who are aware of their colleagues' feelings and have absorbed them; Jews and non-Jews who are afraid of offending powerful sentiments in the community. When will the Arab narrative gain any nobility? Soon, friends. I believe that Silverstein is Jewish. The inroads that progressive Jews are making into Israel-centered Jewish identity is nothing short of a liberation.
