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In Support of Israel
Prof Richard Landes
08/02/06
 D.J. Deeb represents a good example
of a commentator who pretends to impartiality even as he
delivers a warmed-over plate of Palestinian propaganda:
Israel, the aggressor, is to blame; the Palestinians (and
the Lebanese) are blameless (democratic!) victims; stop
Israeli aggression now.
The problems with this text are so numerous that I have
fisked them at my website: The Augean Stables; here I
will just focus on some of the more egregious
misrepresentations.
One would not know from Deeb’s description of
Lebanon that, as a nation it never came out of its
catastrophic civil war, remains rent by armed factions
and de-facto occupied by one of the most brutal
dictatorships in the West. Here is the comment of a
Lebanese “citizen”:
Before the Israeli attack, Lebanon no longer existed, it
was no more than a hologram. At Beirut innocent citizens
like myself were forbidden access to certain areas of
their own capital. But our police, our army and our
judges were also excluded.
That was the case, for example, of Hezbollah’s and
the Syrians’ command zone in the Haret Hreik quarter
(in red on the satellite map). A square measuring a
kilometer wide, a capital within the capital, permanently
guarded by a Horla army [1], possessing its own…
government.
Among the multitude of errors in his article, let one
stand for the whole in revealing how misleading
Deeb’s presentation: the refugees in Lebanon fled in
1948 and were confined to camps, refused citizenship and
human rights, and generally treated far worse than Israel
treated the Arabs who stayed.
The refugees who came after 1967 were driven out of
Jordan by King Hussein who could not tolerate the
“state-within-a-state” behavior of the PLO and
drove them out in a bloody massacre in “Black
September” 1970. These brave warriors fled to
Israel to escape their brother Arabs’ wrath, and the
Israelis, in an unfortunate gesture of clemency,
permitted them to go to Lebanon, where they created so
much tension as to trigger the civil war (1975-82) in
which over 150,000 civilians died.
With the remarks about the Israeli response to
Hizbullah’s attacks we come into Deeb’s
full-fledged partisanship. The cry of
“illegal” and “crimes against
humanity” is a favorite recourse of
anti-Zionists.
The issues are complex and problematic, and get at the
heart of the ability of democracies with commitments to
law and morality to survive in struggles with enemies
(like Hizbullah) who have no hesitation about killing
civilians both among their enemies and – especially
if the media will give them the PR victory – among
their own.
If, as Deeb would have it, the Israelis have killed
“countless civilians,” that leaves us with no
language to describe the number of civilians killed in a
civil war where the monthly rate for seven years exceeded
by a factor of three or four the victims of the current
conflict.
Nor is this difference by accident: Israel does
everything it can, even at the cost of endangering their
own soldier’s lives, to avoid civilian casualties;
Hizbullah does everything it can to increase its
enemies’ and its own civilian casualties, in part
because it embraces a genocidal ideology, in part so that
ideologues like Deeb can fight their propaganda battles
in the West.
But it is when he tells us about the
“complicated” Israeli-Palestinian
conflict,” that we have Deeb at his best. His
explanation in fact shows no sign of complexity; on the
contrary he treats us to a one-sided account.
No mention that the homes destroyed are those of suicide
terrorists who have blown themselves up among Israeli
civilians as the result of hate-teaching systematically
sponsored by the Palestinian Authority; no mention that
the legal status of the land “confiscated” is
neither Palestinian nor was it settled; and pure
misrepresentation in claiming that the prisoner exchange
is for — again that word —
“countless” women and children.
Predictably, Deeb trots out the classic Palestinian
propaganda claim about 22% of the land. Palestine
as defined by the Balfour Declaration included
Trans-Jordan which the British split off in 1922 to form
an Arab nation (Jordan) on 77% of Palestine (now by a
large majority, Palestinian), where Jews could not
settle. Jews at partition in 1947 were offered 16%
of the original Palestine which they accepted; the Arabs
refused the opportunity of ruling over 84% and went to
war.
Continuing this disastrous policy of sacrificing his
people’s good for the sake of Arab honor, Yasser
Arafat walked out on Camp David, and rejected the
negotiations much to everyone’s — including
President Clinton’s distress.
Nor was this unpredictable: From the very beginning of
the Oslo Process, Arafat and others made clear (in
Arabic) that the concessions the PLO made were a Trojan
Horse permitting them to prosecute the war of liberation
of all Palestine — “from the river to the
sea.” It was he who set off the “Al Aqsa
Intifada” in response to extensive offers of
statehood and the vast majority of the West Bank and
Gaza.
As for the UN resolutions Deeb refers to repeatedly, they
call on Israel to withdraw from territories (not
“the areas”) it occupied, and this in exchange
for peace and recognition.
The Arabs (Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat
included) rejected these conditions immediately (Three
No’s of Khartoum, September 1967), and have never
showed any sincere commitment to revising that position
since. When Egypt did, the Israelis promptly
returned Sinai, and would have returned the Gaza Strip
but Egypt refused.
The notion that Israel’s withdrawal would lead to
peace has to be one of the sillier and more dangerous
claims around these days. Perhaps back in the
1990s, liberals everywhere could hope that such a move
would lead to peace, as long as they didn’t consult
the websites that translated Palestinian statements in
Arabic.
But in Deeb’s world, the Palestinians are
democratically minded folks just waiting to compromise
with an aggressive imperialist neighbor who arbitrarily
murders, imprisons, and humiliates them.
The Palestinian David against the Israeli Goliath.
It’s an appealing morality tale with an equally
appealing solution: Israel stand down!
But what if, as the evidence Deeb does not see fit to
mention suggests, the real problem is not Israel, but the
Arab nations’ refusal to recognize the UN’s
creation of the state of Israel (an attitude which
predates by 19 years both the “occupation” and
the “illegal” settlements)?
What if Arab elites have, for over half a century now,
been victimizing their own people in pursuit of Arab and
Muslim honor, sacrificing their own people (especially
the Palestinians) in their effort to destroy the
“Zionist entity” which has humiliated them by
its very existence?
What if it’s the Israeli David against the Arab
Goliath, and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon right now come
from Israeli withdrawals that Arab leaders have treated
not (as Deeb would have us expect) as signs of
conciliation and generosity, but rather as signs of
weakness and invitations to further aggression?
Then Deeb’s adoption of the “Palestinian Victim
Narrative” blaming Israel actually strengthens the
very people whom Deeb pretends to defend, the Palestinian
victims of Arab irredentism.
Then all of Mr. Deeb’s passionate policy proposals
become recipes for disaster – for Israel, for the
Palestinian people, for Western democracies and any hope
for a decent life for Arab people in the grip of ruthless
ruling classes.
How strange and tragic that a progressive would side with
such retrograde forces!
Professor Landes teaches History at
Boston University and has set up a website to monitor the
Mainstream Media at The Second Draft. He also
maintains a blog, The Augean Stables, at which this
article appears in expanded form with links to further
literature.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The August, 2006 Edition
of the Valley Patriot
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