NT (London)13 December 2000
Robert Fisk
'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticize Israel is
reaching McCarthyite proportions'
In the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and
stones. A Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog
(fit, of course, for extermination), and Cairo's most lickspittle
columnist called me " a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt" .
But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone
- academic, analyst, reporter - who dares to criticize Israel (or dares
to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching
McCarthyite proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian
academic who is a professor at Columbia University.
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of
America, which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern
Language Association and which now demands on an almost daily basis his
dismissal from his professorship at Columbia - solely because he points
out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy
of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued
occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo " peace" agreement. Columbia
University has issued an unprecedented public defence of Said and " the
fundamental values of a great university" , quoting John Stuart Mill and
adding that to give way to the Jewish lobby's demand would be " a threat
to us all and to academic freedom" .
Too true. Noam Chomsky - himself Jewish - is one of the most profound
philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli
occupation and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn
him ever more ruthless abuse. In the United States, he wrote recently, a
whole population is kept in ignorance of the facts because " the economic
and and military programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US support,
which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes
were known."
Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that
only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of
view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well
by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel - note the
boondocks location - when he wrote that " Palestinians won't get their
independence until Americans get theirs" .
But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now
international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians
(rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are
responsible for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal
victims), that Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he was
offered just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that
Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the
Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).
Israeli ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never been such frequent
visitors to European newspaper offices, to complain about reports or
reporters, sometimes in a quite disgraceful manner. The Johannesburg Star
- a sister paper of The Independent which carries my own Middle East
reports - was confronted by one pro-Israeli group this year which
claimed that I was in some way assisting the right-wing historian David
Irving - someone I have never met and never wish to meet. They
subsequently withdrew their allegation.
Then an odd thing happened in Ireland - at a prize-giving ceremony in
memory of a Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin,
had been invited to talk about reporting in conflict zones to journalism
students under the auspices of Co-operation Ireland, a charitable movement
dedicated to North-South relations. But at one point he chose to use the
opportunity to attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to suggest that
it should not be read or believed. Mr. Sofer is, of course, entitled to his
views - but not to air his prejudices in a charitable forum without
allowing a right of reply. The charity has since announced that it "
totally dissociates itself" from the ambassador's remarks. So it should.
And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in Europe, in Australia - I still
treasure the five pages of abuse in an Australian lobby group's magazine
headlined " The Ignoble Scribe" and accusing me of a " stupor of
self-deception" . Oddly, you can now learn more from the Israeli press
than the American media. The brutality of Israeli soldiers is fully
covered in Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number of US
negotiators who are Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier
described in an Israeli newspaper how his men had looted a village in
southern Lebanon; when the piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the
looting episode was censored out of the text.
So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors and lobbyists
behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen to them?
Would we respect them? Would we run for cover and print only one side of
the story? Would we hell.
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