The New York Times · 15 March 1982

CP-1982-062

Looking the Other Way

By Anthony Lewis

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, March 14 — Ory Bernstein, an Israeli poet and lawyer, urged his countrymen recently to do what in fact few of them do: face the reality of military rule in the occupied territories. They should stop averting their eyes, he said, from the way Israel deals with the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. Mr.

Bernstein made the point in an article about book-banning in the occupied territories. And he gave some extraordinary examples of books that at various times have been forbidden by the military authorities. Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” in Arabic translation has been on the list. That can presumably be explained by the character of Shylock.

But it is a little hard to understand why the authorities should have prohibited Orwell’s “1984.” Even more mysterious is the banning of “The Soviet Union in the Middle East” by Walter Laqueur, a critic of Communism who has also written powerfully about the world’s failure to rescue Jews from the Holocaust.

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