- Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the
Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish
host of KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading
some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in America.
Each one left the people in the church , - Muslims, Jews, Christians ,
- in a state of shock. "You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish
piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your
parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God
willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"
-
- Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's
invasion of Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated
the killings that took place there , - including Phil Reeves and Justin
Huggler of The Independent , - for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's
grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence but
neither his family history nor his origins spared him. "Read this
and weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail
told Bernstein. "God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your
wife and slash your kids' throats." Yet another: "I hope that
you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American
cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of
suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is also Jewish, the executive director
of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but
now one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse.
-
- Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how
brave this small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first
to acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative
Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion of
Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US. "Everyone
else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones who begin
to open their mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid,
I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a government
representing a country that we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's
defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line behind
Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they give the lie to the charge
that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite."
-
- Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for
their beliefs. He is a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer
with the International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser Arafat's
headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid. After telling
CNN that the Sharon government was acting like "terrorists" while
receiving $3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family were savaged
in the New York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban"
and demeaned his family as "traitors". Israeli supporters publicised
his family's address and his parents were forced to flee their Brooklyn
home and seek police protection. Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school
teacher and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired
from his job. His brother receives regular death threats.
-
- Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance
with the Christian right. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their
own in Israel's favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently
when I was about to give a lecture on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, part of a series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans.
A right-wing Christian "Free Republic" outfit posted my name
on its website, and described me as a "PLO butt-kisser" and asked
its supporters to "freep" my lecture. A few demonstrators turned
up outside the First United Methodist Church in Sacramento where I was
to speak, waving American and Israeli flags. "Jew haters!" they
screamed at the organisers, a dark irony since these were non-Jews shrieking
their abuse at Jews.
-
- They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. "Nothing
to worry about, Bob," one of my Jewish hosts remarked. "They
can't even spell your name right." True. But also false. "Stop
the Lies!" the leaflet read. "There was no massacre in Jenin.
Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to spin [lie] for the Arabs..." But
the real lie was in that last sentence. I never take any payment for lectures
, - so that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to give the views of others.
But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor did the content of my
talk , - which began, by chance, with the words "There was no massacre"
, - in which I described Arafat as a "corrupt, vain little despot"
and suicide bombings as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this
was relevant. The aim was to shut me up.
-
- Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: "Any US
journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public
official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately
report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an
anti-Semite." In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks
than pro-Israeli groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against some
of the most pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming that The New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were
biased in their coverage of the Middle-East conflict. Just how The New
York Times , - which boasts William Safire and Charles Krauthammer, those
giants of pro-Israeli bias, among its writers , - could be anti-Israeli
is difficult to see, although it is just possible that, amid its reports
on Israel's destruction in the West Bank and Gaza, some mildly critical
comments found their way into print. The New York Times, for example, did
report that Israeli soldiers used civilians as human shields , - though
only in the very last paragraph of a dispatch from Jenin.
-
- None the less, the campaign of boycotts and e-mails got
under way. More than 1,000 readers suspended their subscriptions to the
Los Angeles Times, while a blizzard of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers
to cancel their subscription to The New York Times for a day. On the East
Coast, at least one local radio station has lost $1m from a Jewish philanthropist
while other stations attempting to cover the Middle East with some degree
of fairness are said to have lost even more. When the San Francisco Chronicle
published a four-page guide to the conflict, its editors had to meet a
14-member delegation of local Jewish groups to discuss their grievances.
-
- According to Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle
East strategy committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues, Jewish anger hit "boiling
point" when the Chronicle failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San
Francisco. Needless to say, the Chronicle's "Readers' Representative",
Dick Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating apology. "The
paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally," he wrote. "This
wasn't fair and balanced coverage." Another objection came from a
Jewish reader who objected to the word "terror" being placed
within inverted commas in a Chronicle headline that read "Sharon says
'terror' justifies assault". The reader's point? The Chronicle's reporting
"harmonises well with Palestinian propaganda, which tries to divert
attention from the terrorist campaign against Israel (which enjoys almost
unanimous support among Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to
the 10-year-old who dreams of blowing himself up one day) and instead describes
Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics."
-
- And so it goes on. On a radio show with me in Berkeley,
the Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross, tried to laugh off the influence
of the pro-Israeli lobby , - "the famous lobby", he called it
with that deference that is half way between acknowledgement and fear ,
- but the Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation in campaigning
against the Chronicle, describing a paper largely docile in its reporting
of the Middle East as "a professionally and politically biased, pro-Palestinian
newspaper".
-
- The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on the Middle East
was, in fact, a soft sell. Its headline , - "The Current Strife Between
The Israelis And The Palestinians Is A Battle For Control Of Land"
, - missed the obvious point: that one of the two groups that were "battling
for control of the land" , - the Palestinians , - had been occupied
by Israel for 35 years.
-
- The most astonishing , - and least covered , - story
is in fact the alliance of Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionist fundamentalists,
a coalition that began in 1978 with the publication of a Likud plan to
encourage fundamentalist churches to give their support to Israel. By 1980,
there was an "International Christian Embassy" in Jerusalem;
and in 1985, a Christian Zionist lobby emerged at a "National Prayer
Breakfast for Israel" whose principal speaker was Benjamin Netanyahu,
who was to become Israeli prime minister. "A sense of history, poetry
and morality imbued the Christian Zionists who, more than a century ago,
began to write, plan and organise for Israel's restoration," Netanyahu
told his audience. The so-called National Unity Coalition for Israel became
a lobbying arm of Christian Zionism with contacts in Congress and neo-conservative
think-tanks in Washington.
- In May this year, the Israeli embassy in Washington,
no less, arranged a prayer breakfast for Christian Zionists. Present were
Alonzo Short, a member of the board of "Promise Keepers", and
Michael Little who is president of the "Christian Broadcasting Network".
Event hosts were listed as including those dour old Christian conservatives
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who once financed a rogue television station
in southern Lebanon which threatened Muslim villagers and broadcast tirades
by Major Saad Haddad, Israel's stooge militia leader in Lebanon. In Tennessee,
Jewish officials invited hundreds of Christians to join Jewish crowds at
a pro-Israel solidarity rally in Memphis.
-
- On the face of it, this coalition seems natural. The
Jewish Anti-Defamation League felt able to run an ad that included an article
by a former Christian coalition executive director Ralph Reed, headlined
"We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel". Christians, Reed
claimed, supported Israel because of "their humanitarian impulse to
help and protect Jews, a shared strategic interest in democracy in the
Middle East and a spiritual connection to Israel".
-
- But, of course, a fundamental problem , - fundamental
in every sense of the word , - lies behind this strange partnership. As
Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom, the most courageous Israeli peace
group, pointed out in a typically ferocious essay last month, there is
a darker side to the alliance. "According to its [Christian Zionist]
theological beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish
a Jewish state on all its territory" , - an idea that would obviously
appeal to Ariel Sharon , - "so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus
Christ possible." But here comes the bad bit. As Avnery says, "the
evangelists don't like to dwell openly on what comes next: before the coming
[of the Messiah], the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don't
will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is
basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, so long as they support
Israel?"
-
- The power of the Israeli lobby in the United States is
debated far more freely in the Israeli press than in American newspapers
or on US tele- vision. There is, of course, a fine and dangerous line between
justified investigation , - and condemnation , - of the lobby's power,
and the racist Arab claim that a small cabal of Zionists run the world.
Those in America who share the latter view include a deeply unpleasant
organisation just along the coast from San Francisco at Newport Beach known
as the "Institute for Historical Research". These are the Holocaust
deniers whose annual conference last month included a lecture on "death
sentences imposed by German authorities against German soldiers... for
killing or even mistreating Jews". Too much of this and you'd have
to join the American Israel Public Affairs Committee , - AIPAC , - to
restore your sanity. But the Israeli lobby is powerful. In fact, its influence
over the US Congress and Senate calls into question the degree to which
the American legislature has been corrupted by lobby groups. It is to an
Israeli voice , - Avnery again , - that Americans have to turn to hear
just how mighty the lobby has become. "Its electoral and financial
power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress," Avnery
writes. "Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the
help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish
lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing
the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at
once. This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence
to Israel."
-
- Avnery could have looked no further than the Democratic
primary in Alabama last month for proof of his assertion. Earl Hilliard,
the five-term incumbent, had committed the one mortal sin of any American
politician: he had expressed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians.
He had also visited Libya several years ago. Hilliard's opponent, Artur
Davis, turned into an outspoken supporter of Israel and raised large amounts
of money from the Jewish community, both in Alabama and nationwide. The
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that among the names of the first list
of contributors to Davis's campaign funds were "10 Cohens from New
York and New Jersey, but before one gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams,
Ackerman, Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein
and Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. It's
highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama..." The Jewish
newspaper Forward , - essential reading for any serious understanding
of the American Jewish community , - quoted a Jewish political activist
following the race: "Hilliard has been a problem in his votes and
with guys like that, when there's any conceivable primary challenge, you
take your shot." Hilliard, of course, lost to Davis, whose campaign
funds reached $781,000.
-
- The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while the Conference
of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations (CPMAJO), made up
of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates on the executive
branch of the US government. Every congressman knows the names of those
critics of Israel who have been undone by the lobby. Take Senator J William
Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
detailed how five million tax-deductable dollars from philanthropic Americans
had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution
to organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel;
this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State. He was defeated in
the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli money poured into the campaign
funds of his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a statement by the
AIPAC that Fulbright was "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters
in this country". Paul Findley, who spent 22 years as a Republican
congressman from Illinois, found his political career destroyed after he
had campaigned against the Israeli lobby , - although, ironically, his
book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out was nine weeks on The Washington
Post bestseller list, suggesting that quite a number of Americans want
to know why their congressmen are so pro-Israeli.
-
- Just two months ago, the US House of Representatives
voted 352 to 21 to express its unqualified support for Israel. The Senate
voted 94 to two for the same motion. Even as they voted, Ariel Sharon's
army was continuing its destructive invasion of the West Bank. "I
do not recall any member of Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting
Israel on the back..." James Abu Rizk, an Arab-American of Lebanese
origin, told the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee afterwards.
"No one else, no average American, has been asked either. But that
is the state of American politics today... The votes and bows have nothing
to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything to do
with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli
lobby. My estimate is that $6bn flows from the American Treasury to Israel
each year." Within days, 42 US governors turned up in Sacramento to
sign declarations supporting Israel. California governor Gray Davis and
New York governor George Pataki , - California has the largest Jewish
population of any state except New York , - arranged the meeting.
-
- Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists in Congress
turns into farce. Tom Delay , - reacting to CNN founder Ted Turner's criticism
of Israel , - went so far out of his way to justify Israeli occupation
of the West Bank that he blurted out on MSNBC television that the Palestinians
"should become citizens" of Israel, an idea unlikely to commend
itself to his friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard Armey went
the other way. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank.
I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave... to have those people
who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other area."
Do the people of Texas know that their representative is supporting "ethnic
cleansing" in the Middle East? Or are they silent because they prefer
not to speak out?
-
- Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai Sagi and Ram
Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who refused to serve in the
West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to debate their decision at Sacramento's
Congregation B'nai Israel in May, their appearance was cancelled. Steve
Meinreith, who is chairman of the Israel Affairs Committee at B'nai Israel,
remarked bleakly that "intimidation on the part of certain sectors
of the community has deprived the entire community of hearing a point of
view that is being widely debated in Israel. Some people feel it's too
dangerous..."
-
- Does President Bush? His long-awaited Middle-East speech
was Israeli policy from start to finish. A group of Jewish leaders, including
Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz , - who said recently that the idea of
executing the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was a legitimate
if flawed attempt at finding a balance between preventing terrorism and
preserving democracy , - and the AIPAC and CPMAJO heads all sent clear
word to the President that no pressure should be put on Israel. Wiesel
, - whose courage permeates his books on the Holocaust but who lamentably
failed to condemn the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut in 1982
at the hands of Israel's Lebanese allies, said he felt "sadness",
but his sadness was "with Israel, not against Israel" because
"after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill" , - took out a
full page in The New York Times. In this, he urged Bush to "please
remember that Ariel Sharon, a military man who knows the ugly face of war
better than anyone, is ready to make 'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict."
Sharon was held "personally responsible" for the massacre by
Israel's own commission of inquiry , - but there was no mention of that
from Wiesel, who told reporters in May that he would like to revoke Arafat's
Nobel prize.
-
- President Bush was not going to oppose these pressures.
His father may well have lost his re-election because he dared to tell
Israel that it must make peace with the Arabs. Bush is not going to make
the same mistake , - nor does brother Jeb want to lose his forthcoming
governorship election. Thus Sharon's delight at the Bush speech, and it
was left to a lonely and brave voice , - Mitchell Plitnick of the Jewish
Voice for Peace , - to state that "few speeches could be considered
to be as destructive as that of the American President... Few things are
as blinding as unbridled arrogance."
-
- Or as vicious as the messages that still pour in to Dennis
Bernstein and Barbara Lubin, whose Middle East Children's Alliance, co-ordinating
with Israeli peace groups, is trying to raise money to rebuild the Jenin
refugee camp. "I got a call the other day at 5am," Bernstein
told me. "This guy says to me: 'You got a lot of nerve going and eating
at that Jewish deli.' What comes after that?" Before I left San Francisco,
Lubin showed me her latest e-mails. "Dear Cunt," one of them
begins, "When we want your opinion you fucking Nazi cunt, we will
have one of your Palestinian buddies fuck it [sic] of you. I hope that
in your next trip to the occupied territories you are blown to bits by
one of your Palestinian buddies [sic] bombs." Another, equally obscene,
adds that "you should be ashamed of yourself, a so-called Jewish woman
advocating the destruction of Israel".
-
- Less crude language, of course, greeted President Bush's
speech. Pat Robertson thought the Bush address "brilliant". Senator
Charles Schumer, a totally loyal pro-Israeli Democrat from New York, said
that "clearly, on the politics, this is going to please supporters
of Israel as well as the Christian coalition types". He could say
that again. For who could be more Christian than President George W Bush?
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- http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=313235
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