Some Israeli faithful offended by ‘ignorance’ of Mideast, ‘fascist Sharon’

Holger Jensen

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For the past two months, the Denver Rocky Mountain News and other papers that run my column have received a heavy flow of mail criticizing my views on the Palestinian uprising and Israel's response to it. By way of balance, I would direct them to the words of Robert Fisk, a respected colleague who has devoted 30 years to covering the Middle East.

This is what he wrote for Britain's Independent newspaper: “The degree of abuse now being directed at anyone — academic, analyst, reporter — who dares to criticize Israel, or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising, is reaching McCarthyite proportions. “Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who is a professor at Columbia University.

The Zionist Organization of America now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from 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 defense of Said and the fundamental values of a great university, saying 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 military programs (of Israel) rely crucially on U.S. 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 United States 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 Charl[illegible] Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel 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 percent of his land, not 94 percent), and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).”

I would also direct my critics to this open letter from Jewish artist Selma Waldman in Seattle: “We are Jewish activists here in Seattle who agree with the United Nations indictment of Israel, that Ehud Barak's government has committed war crimes in this time of The Second Intifada, when the Palestinian people are in a life-and-death struggle for their independence.

“Because we are Jews, we suggest that if a State did not want to see atrocity against captured soldiers, it should never have sent its sharpshooters to murder children, nor its tanks, helicopters, mortars and automatic weapons to kill stone-throwers, nor its massed security to protect a bloated old fascist like Sharon in his arrogant act.

“We support the shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, and the Israeli Gush Shalom demands to end all demolitions of Palestinian homes, all Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, and all occupation of the territories that are rightfully Palestine.

We further demand that the Israeli government put an end to settler vigilantism and terror raids against the Palestinian-Israeli people in their villages in Israel. “To make a more appropriate use of Barak's farcical expression, we would suggest that now, if ever, is the time for the U.S. to declare a ‘time out’ for all U.S. aid to Israel.

As for the Israeli government, it is out of time to end its grotesque military mobilization against the Palestinian people, a final aggression which we protest as a murderous disgrace to Jewish history.”

Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported last week that a growing number of Israeli soldiers are beginning to wonder if they are indeed guilty of overkill against the Palestinians. American supporters of Israel would do well to ask the questions that Israelis are asking of themselves.

How this transcription was made

Single scan, six columns of page C4. Transcribed from 9–22x crops of each column. — PAGE DISAGREES WITH MARIA'S LABEL. The running head reads “Page C4 — THE ALBUQUERQUE TRIBUNE / INSIGHT & OPINION — Wednesday, December 20, 2000.” Verified at 12x; the day name and the digits are unambiguous, and Dec. 20, 2000 was indeed a Wednesday. Maria's slide label says Dec 7 2000. The page wins: the date is 1985-style corrected to 2000-12-20, not 2000-12-07. — Column 3: the given name of the Orlando Sentinel columnist — “It was put very well by Charl[?] Reese”. The word is a five-to-seven letter form of Charles; at 22x with unsharp masking the final letters will not resolve on this compressed scan. Left as [illegible] rather than guessed.

Cite this clipping

"Some Israeli faithful offended by ‘ignorance’ of Mideast, ‘fascist Sharon’," Albuquerque Tribune, 20 December 2000, p. C4. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2000-073. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2000-073