Video of the week - Africa: Through the Eyes of an
Israeli 8 year old http://tinyurl.com/y7nffp4m
by Gary C. Gambill
4-9-2017
I was staunchly pro-Palestinian when I
arrived at Georgetown University to begin studying for an MA in Arab Studies in
the fall of 1995, or at least I thought so.
I had read Thomas Friedman's From
Beirut to Jerusalem in college a few years earlier and accepted the basic
conclusion that Israel's unwillingness to compromise had become the primary
obstacle to Middle East peace.
If any place might have been expected to
shepherd this eager young mind into accepting "progressive" orthodoxy
on Israel, it would have been Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
(CCAS).
There I received a solid grounding in
post-colonial theory, revisionist historiography of Israel, and so forth.
Radical though their views may have been,
I don't recall many CCAS faculty caring much what I thought of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, and few were involved in the kind of campus activism that is de
rigueur among academics today. The roster of guest lecturers hosted at
CCAS's spacious, elegantly appointed boardroom was another story, however, and
notices for anti-Israel events throughout the Washington, DC, area were
routinely advertised on the center's bulletin board. Going to them was the cool
thing to do, and I attended more than I care to admit.
However, while I remained sympathetic to
the Palestinian experience, I found interacting with other sympathizers
increasingly intolerable. My immersion into the anti-Israeli movement brought
me face to face with peer antisemitism for the first time, primarily
among European and American students who shared much the same liberal outlook
as myself.
Oddly enough, I don't recall any
disparaging talk about Jews (albeit plenty about Israel) from Arab students at
Georgetown, some of whom went out of their way to befriend Jewish students and
faculty. It was Western students who said the darndest things.
The final straw came when I arrived with
friends at an Israeli embassy protest during the September 1996 Western Wall
Tunnel riots, when organizers led the crowd in chanting "Bibi, Hitler,
just the same / Only difference is the name." I left in disgust, then sent
an email to CCAS students and faculty inviting anyone who felt Hitler was no
worse than then (and current) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join
me on a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the other side
of town. There were no takers, though several students – including two who had
enthusiastically participated in the rally – privately applauded the letter.
Truth be told, though, the biggest
problem with the pro-Palestinian movement wasn't so much the antisemitism as it
was the varying degrees of willful blindness displayed by its foremost
advocates both to the suffering of other ethno-sectarian groups in the region
(particularly Kurds and Christians) and to Palestinian suffering at the hands
of villains other than Israel, particularly those seen as leading the fight
against the Jewish state. There was more than antisemitism at work here.
This blindness owed much to the fact that
CCAS and other Middle East studies departments were becoming increasingly
inundated with lavish grants from Arab governments.
Having fed their own citizens a steady
diet of propaganda blaming all the region's ills on Israel, Mideast autocrats
now promoted this narrative abroad very effectively.
This was painfully evident when Lebanese
human rights attorney Muhammad Mugraby traveled to the United States in
November 1997 for a short lecture tour at the invitation of Human Rights Watch.
As it often does when hosting guests from the Middle East, HRW asked if CCAS
would be interested in hearing Mugraby speak.
Yes, the answer came back from a CCAS
administrator failing to see why a Muslim discussing Lebanon in the wake of
Israel's devastating Grapes of Wrath campaign the year before would be a
problem, so Mugraby was scheduled to speak at the center.
That was, until the day of the talk, when
(I'm guessing) CCAS faculty learned that Mugraby was speaking about the
abduction and incommunicado detention of Lebanese and Palestinians by Syrian
forces then occupying all but a sliver of Lebanon (with the blessing of most
Arab and Western governments). The location was abruptly changed from the CCAS
boardroom to on ordinary classroom outside the center. No faculty were in
attendance.
At that time, I was doing freelance web
development work (a little html knowledge went a long way back then) for, among
others, an NGO stridently critical of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the
Palestinians, and got to know its Jewish-American director.
When I mentioned the Mugraby story, he
confided in me that a longtime Palestinian friend of his had been imprisoned
incommunicado for many years in Hafez Assad's Syria, which then held far more
Palestinians in its prisons than Israel, and under far worse conditions.
Then why focus on Israel, I asked.
"I can't do anything for him," he explained.
Alongside the antisemitism and the money,
this idea of Israel as the low-hanging fruit for do-gooders wanting to improve
the Middle East was the third foundation stone in what became a vast conspiracy
of silence about how the region works during the 1990s.
The well-intentioned flocked in droves to
the belief that Israeli-Palestinian peace was achievable provided Israel made
the requisite concessions, and that this would liberate the Arab-Islamic world
from a host of other problems allegedly arising from it: bloated military
budgets, intolerance of dissent, Islamic extremism, you name it.
Why tackle each of these problems head on
when they can be alleviated all at once when Israel is brought to heel? Twenty
years later, the Middle East is suffering the consequences of this conspiracy
of silence.
I don't have a particularly rose-colored
view of Israel's history (or that of any other nation-state, including my own),
nor do I put much stock in the religio-cultural attachments that make many
Israelis resistant to sweeping concessions.
I just don't buy into the "theory of
everything" where Israel is concerned. The particulars of when and how
Israelis and Palestinians work out their differences don't matter that much,
and insofar as they do Netanyahu is among the least of the complications
getting there.
That makes me a hardline Zionist, liberal
friends tell me.
All right, I guess.
