Part
Two. The Cover-Up
X Terror:
The Double Standard
And so, to the end of
history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of
right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood
and create a race that can understand.
- George Bernard Shaw. Caesar
and Cleopatra
IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to pick out the one particular
subject of Middle East reportage the media has most slanted
and distorted. But certainly the manner in which the use of
violence has been presented probably has had the most
influence in formulating American public opinion.
The media has succeeded in getting
Western man to accept a double standard: one, that Jews and
Zionists have been freedom fighters in pursuit of a moral,
legal, historical imperative, namely, the establishment of
their own state, Israel. On the other hand, the media has
stressed that when Palestinians resorted to armed violence
to regain their homeland, they were terrorists. Whereas the
Hitler experience was readily invoked to condone Zionist
intemperate acts, the desperate frustration of being
deprived of their homes for thirty years, and any hearing
for their grievances, was deemed no excuse for Palestinian
excesses.1 The choice
of words and pejorative adjectives, the shadings, the
explanatory material spelling out the particular incident,
and the amount of sympathy employed in describing the
victims were all instrumentalities in applying this double
standard.
As an example, few voices were allowed
to be heard in dissent of the totally accepted Zionist
labeling given the October war. One of these appeared on
WEEI, the CBS outlet in Boston, three days after the
fighting erupted. Following four callers, who were to
varying degrees pro-Israel, the moderator introduced a
soft-spoken voice unmistakably Indian or Pakistani, who
complained of the use of slanted language by the reporters.
He stated that the moderator had no right [357] [358] to
call the war an act of aggression when all Egypt and Syria
were trying to do was get back their own territory.
Moderator Howard Nelson tried unsuccessfully to rebut the
gentleman by reading the dictionary meaning of the word
"aggression," totally refusing to take into consideration
the initial 1967 Israeli seizure of Arab lands. The
persistent questioner countered by pointing to the
persistent media slanting. "Why is it, when Israelis hijack
a Lebanese plane and force it to land in Israel, newscasters
call it a 'diversion,' but when the Palestinians engage in
air thievery, it is called 'hijacking.' Why," he asked
again, "is there this double standard?"
A study 2 made of U.S. press reportage showed
that although all acts of terrorism were generally bemoaned,
Israeli actions were usually justified as responses to
'intolerable situations." The Washington Post, for example,
justified the 1973 Israeli assassinations in Beirut as "the
best kind of terrorism," since they killed "the worst kind
of terrorists."3 In
editorials dealing with the commandos, 95.2 percent of the
coverage by the New York Times, 91 percent by the Washington
Post, and 100 percent by the Detroit Free Press was against
commando terrorist activity. While condemning the commandos,
the Times did manage to publish three features indicating
sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees as
refugees. The Washington Post had three editorials and one
feature on the refugee problem.
Under rules of the media, the Israelis
are "freedom fighters" and the Arabs are "terrorists," the
Israelis "make reprisals" while the Palestinians "commit
atrocities," the Arabs constantly stand vilified, the
Israelis glorified. As stated in an October 1968 "Letter to
Christians" signed by sixty-six ministers from nine
denominations:
Westerners in general are already aware of
what the Israeli feels: pride that he is once more, after so
long, master in Palestine, where he no longer need apologize
for being Jewish. But Westerners are not so aware of what
the Arab feels: resentment at losing his land, humiliation
at military losses, frustration at being unable to make his
claims understood to the rest of the world....... Westerners
should understand that the Arabic term for the underground
fighters,fedayeen, means "those who sacrifice themselves,"
and that the Arabs compare them to the underground fighters
in Europe during the Nazi occupation.4
This double standard came into play long ago and slowly
permeated reporting from the outset of the struggle in
Palestine, helping to mold the popular impression of events
there. Most people became conditioned to believe that it was
the Arabs alone who resorted to [359] violence. But the
record of the Zionist use of violence in behalf of their
cause, carefully blacked out from public surveillance,5 is a lengthy one that
could be traced back to the days of the British mandate.
Violence was often used against their
own, as on November 25, 1940, when the S.S. Patria was blown
up in the Haifa harbor, killing 276 illegal Jewish immigrant
passengers. At the time of the incident these deaths were
attributed to the British, and it was not until ten years
later that the responsibility for this disaster was placed
at the door of the Zionists. David Flinker, Israeli
correspondent of the Jewish Morning Journal (the largest
Yiddish daily) described what had happened:
It was then that the Haganah General Staff
took a decision at which their leaders shuddered. The
decision was not to permit the Patria to leave Jaffa. The
English must be given to understand that Jews could not be
driven away from their own country. The Patria must be blown
up. The decision was conveyed to Haganah members on the
Patria and in the hush of night, preparations had begun for
the execution of the tragic act. On Sunday, November 26,
1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they
were being returned to sea. The Jews remained silent, save
for a whisper from man to man to go "up the deck, all up the
deck." Apparently, the signal did not reach everybody, for
many hundreds remained below-never to see the light again.
Suddenly an explosion was heard and a panic ensued.... It
was a hellish scene; people jumped into the water, children
were tossed into the waves; agonizing cries tore the
heavens. The number of victims was officially placed at 276.
The survivors were permitted by the High Commissioner to
land.6
Fifteen months later the S.S. Struma exploded in the
Black Sea, killing 769 illegal Jewish immigrants. The Jewish
Agency described it as an act of"mass-protest and
mass-suicide," and the U.S. media once more placed the
responsibility for these deaths at the door of the British
and their Palestine immigration policy.
There followed the assassination in
Cairo on November 6, 1944, of Lord Moyne, the British
Minister Resident; the Irgun's blowing up of the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one and injuring
forty-five British and Arabs (subsequent evidence indicated
the involvement of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency), and
the 1947 dispatch of letter bombs to British Cabinet
Ministers and the bomb attacks of December 11, in and near
Haifa, killing eighteen Arabs and wounding fifty-eight
others. In subsequent years the Arab-owned Semiramis Hotel
in Jerusalem was blown up, killing twenty persons, among
them the Viscount de Tapia, the Spanish Consul. The Haganah
admitted responsibility for the outrage. 360
In 1948, following the adoption of the
U.N. partition resolution but prior to the May 15
promulgation of the Israeli state, Irgun, Stern Gang,7 or
Haganah terrorists repeatedly struck with bombs, loads of
explosives, or even armed forces at Arab civilians in
villages, towns, and cities. The grossest outrage, of
course, was the April 9 massacre at Deir Yassin of 254
women, children, and old men.
On September 17, 1948, U.N. Palestine Mediator
Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of Swedish King Gustav V, and
his aide, Colonel Andre Pierre Serot, were assassinated by
members of the Stern Gang while driving in the
Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. American Ambassador
Stanton Griffis, convinced that the identity of the assassin
was well known to the Israeli government, commented in his
memoirs: "The murder of Bernadotte will remain forever a
black and disgraceful mark on the early history of
Israel."8
During a February 1977 press conference
marking the publication in Israel of a new book on David
Ben-Gurion, The Secret List of Heinrich Roehm, it was
definitely admitted by author Dr. Michael Bar Zohar (writing
in the U.S. under the name of Michael Barak) that the late
Prime Minister had the names of the three who had carried
out the assassination; one of them, Yehoshva Zeitler, was
one of Ben-Gurion's best friends.9 Zeitler explained that "we executed
Bernadotte because he was a one-man institution who
endangered the status of Jerusalem by his declared intention
of turning her into an international city. He was hostile to
Israel from the moment the state was established and
actually laid the foundation for the present U.N. policy of
supporting the Arabs." The decision to kill Count Bernadotte
had been taken by three Stern Gang leaders, Nathan
Yelin-Mor, Dr. Israel Eldad-Scheib, and Zeitler, commander
of activities in Jerusalem and an intimate friend of the
first Prime Minister.
In 1950 Zionist agents in Baghdad threw
bombs at a synagogue and at other Jewish targets in order to
pressure Jews into emigrating to Israel. In 1953 the small
Jordanian hamlets of Kibya and Nahalin, and the UNRWA
refugee camp at Bureij in the Gaza Strip, were attacked; 102
villagers and refugees were killed. Between 1952 and
September 1956, prior to the first Suez war, the Arab
villages of Beit Jalu, Falame, Rantis, Bani Suhaila, Baheya,
Gharandal, Wadi Fukin, and Gaza were shelled on raids,
killing 118 civilians.
A few hours after the Israeli army
began its march into Sinai on October 29, 1956, a curfew
from 5 P.M. to 6 A.M. was imposed on Kafr Kassem and other
villages of the Little Triangle within Israel. This curfew
advance of one hour was transmitted at 4:45 P.M. to the
Mayor of the village, who informed the Israeli officer in
charge that a large number of villagers were working in the
fields and could not be notified of the change; forty-nine
villagers returning after 5 P.M., including fourteen women
and small children in the arms of their mothers, were mowed
down without any warning whatsoever by machine guns as they
came in from their work.
These facts, suppressed for a long
time, seeped through when the border policemen were finally
brought to trial. The proceedings lasted more than two
years, and the Israeli High Court passed light sentences:
one officer received seventeen years, another fifteen years,
three were acquitted, and five constables received sentences
of seven years. All were set free one year later by
government amnesty. And from the ever intensely active
libertarian-human rights movement in the U.S., only silence.
Identical reaction followed the 1966 Israeli armed force
attack, including tanks and armored cars, practically wiping
out the small Jordanian village of Es-Samu'a, killing
eighteen and wounding fifty-four others.
By 1972, with the emergence of the PLO
movement, Israeli espionage agencies concentrated their
attention on individual Palestinians, who were struck down
by letter bombs, regular bombs, and machine guns in
Beirut,10 Los
Angeles,11 Rome,
12 Tripoli ,'8 Stockholm, 14 Copenhagen,15 Paris,16 Cyprus,17 and in Oslo.18
The task of seeking out and destroying
Palestinians known to be connected with recurring fedayeen
attacks on Israelis rested with the Mossad, the Israeli
version of the CIA, known familiarly as the "Institute." A
special branch within Mossad, set up in 1972, had been
responsible for the April 10, 1973, raid on Lebanon and the
assassination of the three PLO leaders, Kamal Nasser,
Mohammed Yusuf Najjar, and Kamal Adwan. The meticulously
executed operation was part of a plan, "Operation: God's
Wrath," under the command of Prime Minister Meir's Special
Adviser on Security Affairs, General Aharon Yariv, whose
goal had been the elimination of the 1,000 Palestinians
capable of providing leadership to the movement. The
elimination of this select number, it was thought, would
liquidate the movement itself. And the outbreak of fierce
fighting in Lebanon's civil war in the spring of 1975
facilitated other raids by the Israeli secret service, which
soon added twenty-three victims to its roster.19
Starting with the December 28, 1968,
helicopter raid on the Beirut Airport, Lebanon was the
continuous site for Israeli attacks on civilians and
civilian targets, most of which occurred in the south of the
country. These commenced with a number of small raids in
1969 and 1970,[362] reported to the U.N. but generally
ignored. In 1972 the Israeli armed forces began their
serious raids with an attack on the Arkoub region, in which
two civilians were killed; on the Nabatiyeh refugee camp, in
which ten were killed; on Nahr al-Bared and Rafed and
Rashaya-al Wadi camps, causing the deaths of sixteen; on
Baddawi and Nahr-al Bared, killing twelve.
In April 1974 six South Lebanese
villages were attacked by Israeli armed forces, and in May
the village of Kfeir was bombed with four persons killed,
including a woman and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleven
days later Israeli planes again raided the refugee camp of
Nabatiyeh and that of Ein-el-Helweh as well, killing fifty
and wounding 200, and completely obliterating the former
Palestinian site. On the 19th of the same month, Israeli
naval units bombarded the Rashidiyeh refugee camp, killing
eight civilians. The next month the Israeli planes returned
to bomb three U.N. camps, killing seventy-three and wounding
159. In July Israeli naval units raided Tyre, Sarafund, and
Saida, sinking twenty-one fishing boats. The aerial bombing
and ground raids of Lebanese towns and U.N. refugee camps in
the south of the country continued into 1975.
The idealization of Zionist terror, far
beyond mere condonation, assumed its inexorable course when
twenty-two-year-old Egyptian Jew Eliahu Betzouri and his
seventeen-year-old friend Eliahu Hakim slew Lord Moyne in
1944. Years after the conviction, David Ben-Gurion admitted
"his reverence for the dedicated patriots who were hanged in
Cairo" for this assassination of Great Britain's Resident
Minister. (Israel's first Prime Minister also referred to
terrorist Abraham Stern, the poet who founded the group
bearing his name, as "one of the finest and most outstanding
figures of the era.")
The reportage on the trial by such
illustrious newsmen of the day as the Times' C.L.
Sulzberger, AP's Relman Morin, and UP's Samir Souki featured
the defense counsel and the defendants' condemnation of the
British administration for graft, anarchistic rule, and acts
of injustice. Popular sympathy was established in the U.S.
with the young "heroes," even though in his House of Commons
eulogy of the slain British Minister of State, Prime
Minister Winston Churchill referred to "the shameful crime"
and boldly declared: "If our dreams for Zionism are to end
in the smoke of assassins' guns and our labors for its
future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi
Germany, then many like myself will have to reconsider the
position we have maintained so consistently and so long in
the past." No wonder that political adviser to the Jewish
Agency Leo Cohen, after listening to the Churchill BBC
broadcast, stated: [363]
When I think how proud we have been that
Zionism could come before the world with clean hands as a
creative movement of the highest order, and when I think of
what those boys have been led to do... it is something so
exasperating, so awful and dreadful.
But Churchill's reassessment never reached fruition, and
the Western world's honeymoon with Zionism continued. Chaim
Weizmann had written at the time to Churchill: "I can assure
you that Palestine Jewry will, as its representative bodies
have declared, go to the utmost limits of its power to cut
out, root and branch, this evil from its midst."20 Two years after that
assurance, the Anglo~American Committee of Inquiry in its
report was still requesting the Jewish Agency "to resume
active cooperation with the Mandatory Authority in the
suppression of terrorism and of illegal immigration and in
the maintenance of that law and order throughout Palestine
which is essential for the good of all, including the new
immigrants."21
Author Gerold Frank, who ghosted
Bartley Crum's Behind the Silken Curtain and Jorge
Garcia-Granados' The Birth of Israel, both extremely
pro-Israel books, had the final word to say in his elegy to
the Moyne assassins in his book, The Deed: 22
Here in the remote corner [the cemetery of
Bassatin which contains the bodies of such great Jews as
Moses Maimonides], amid the debris and neglect of ages one
finds a single square stone, not large~two feet high, three
feet wide-no names on it, but in Hebrew "pray for their
souls." Beneath it, Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Betzouri sleep
together, as they were buried in one coffin, curled in each
other's arms as children. They lie curled together like
sleeping children under the eternal stone. No one guards
their grave now. The sands of the desert blow, nothing grows
there, and no weeds, no foliage. Only the sifting, creeping
yellow dust over everything, and in the cloudless sky a
molten sun. In the ancient earth in the nameless grave they
lie together under the imperishable stone. Few remember them
now.
This is how the people have been prepared to accept
Zionist acts of violence and to judge the continuing
conflict. Thus when the Irgun led by Menachem Begin 25 blew up the King David
Hotel and some of his followers were apprehended, the
compassionate but often misled Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to
Lady Reading, a friend in England: "If these young people
are killed, there will be without any question a sense of
martyrdom and a desire for revenge which will only bring
more bloodshed. A generous gesture will, I think, change the
atmosphere."
A special variation on the double
standard is to be seen in the handling of espionage
activities by the Israelis and their Arab counterparts.
[364] [365] As to the Israeli cause, the end always
justifies the means. The Zionists and Israelis are admired
no matter what dirty tricks they use, often by the very
people who are the first to condemn the use of "dirty
tricks" at home, by the CIA or other American
intelligence-espionage agencies. The Zionists and Israelis
are allowed to break all the rules of international law, and
to make their own. The kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann from
Argentina was only the best publicized of many instances of
how the Israelis have been able to get away with defying
international edict. Imagine if the CIA were to kidnap some
wanted criminal for crimes against the American people!
Imagine if the Arabs were to abduct an Israeli for crimes
against the Palestinians! Yet so long as it is Jews,
Israelis, Zionists - everything goes.
This has long been true in the
attitudes toward Israeli spies. One of the major instances
of this, now forgotten by most of the few people who ever
knew about it, was the Lavon Affair that once rocked Israel
to the very core.
After the Egyptian revolution of 1952,
relations between the U.S. and the new Gamal Abdel Nasser
government steadily improved. Cultural and economic
agreements between Egypt and other Arab states and the U.S.
were being discussed, and it was sincerely hoped that the
U.S. would aid the projected Aswan Dam development program.
By 1954 American Ambassador Henry Byroade's personal
friendship with Nasser seemed likely to produce results. A
U.S. aid program of $50 million had been started.
The situation was viewed in high
Israeli quarters as a grave threat to the continued flow of
American dollars into Israel from public, if not private,
sources. A direct severance of relations between Egypt and
the U.S. was deemed desirable. An Israeli espionage ring was
sent to Egypt to bomb official U.S. offices and, if
necessary, attack American personnel working there so as to
destroy Egyptian-U.S. relations and eventually Arab-U.S.
ties. The creation of simulated anti-British incidents was
calculated to induce the British to maintain their Suez
garrison. Several bomb incidents involving U.S.
installations in Egypt followed.
Small bombs shaped like books and
secreted in book covers were brought into the USIA libraries
in both Alexandria and Cairo. Fish skin bags filled with
acid were placed on top of nitroglycerin bombs; it took
several hours for the acid to eat through the bag and ignite
the bomb. The book bombs were placed in the shelves of the
library just before closing hours. Several hours later a
blast would occur, shattering glass and shelves and setting
fire to books and furniture. Similar bombs were placed in
the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Theater and in other American owned
business buildings.24
In December two young Jewish Egyptian
boys carrying identical bombs were caught as they were about
to enter U.S. installations. Upon their confession, a
sabotage gang of six other Jews was rounded up. Five more
were implicated in the plot. The conspirators, who received
sentences ranging from fifteen years to life, were the
objects in the U.S. of multifold sympathetic editorials and
articles. Nothing appeared in print at the time to refute
the image that this had been but another Nasser conspiracy
to unite his country against Israel. The cry "anti-Semitism"
widely reverberated.
In 1960 an investigation in Israel
called attention to the forgery of an important document in
what had been announced as a "security mishap" that had
precipitated the resignation of Pinhas Lavon as Minister of
Defense in 1955. Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of
Defense, and Moshe Dayan had, with the forgery, attempted to
place the legal responsibility for the unsuccessful 1954
sabotage attempt at Lavon's door. Ben-Gurion had fought the
reopening of the case, but a subsequent rehearing revealed
that Lavon had been an innocent victim of the machinations
of Peres, Dayan, and Brigadier Abraham Givli.
Even though the army, through
censorship, attempted to cover up its own blunders, the
affair led to a Cabinet crisis and the resignation of the
Ben-Gurion government in 1961. As late as December 29, 1960,
the Times was still referring to the scandal only as "a
disastrous adventure in 1954." As the already abnormal ties
between Israel and the U.S. grew stronger, scant attention
was paid to the disclosure in Israel of this blatant attempt
to torpedo U.S.-Arab relations.
In 1971 one of the spies who figured in
the Lavon Affair, Marcelle Ninio, broke into the headlines
of Israel and of the satellite Israeli press in the U.S.
Ninio, the only woman involved in the affair that so rocked
the political life of Israel, had been exchanged for
Egyptian prisoners of war after the June 1967 war, along
with Victor Levy, Robert Dassa, and Philip Nathanson, her
cosaboteurs, and "Champagne Spy" Wolfgang Lotz, who had been
apprehended in 1965 after four years of spying in Egypt.
According to a five-paragraph story in the New York Times of
November 16, 1971, Premier Golda Meir was to attend the
wedding of a girl "who at the age of 16 was convicted of
espionage for Israel and spent 10 years in an Egyptian
jail." The Lavon Affair was referred to as a "mysterious
sabotage mission inside Egypt" in 1954, about which "full
details remain a secret." [366] [367]
The entire tone of the article
suggested innocence on the part of Israel and of the
bride-to-be. It had been just another case of those "hating
Egyptians" trying to put a spy rap on a nice Jewish girl.
The New York Post carried a four-column story on page 4,
"Israeli Heroine to Marry," and referred to the "dark-haired
woman who spent fifteen years in a Cairo prison for alleged
sabotage activities."
Both newspapers slanted the reportage,
withholding undisputed facts in this true spy story.
Although the so-called "heroine" had been deeply involved in
proven espionage, seventeen years later the same "editorial
papers" were compounding the felony they had originally
committed. To avoid presenting the established facts of
Israeli sabotage against the U.S., which had involved
Israeli Cabinet ministers Dayan and Peres, the Times covered
up the affair in this fashion: "The mission quickly was
shown to be a far-fetched idea."
When Israeli spy Elie Cohen, alias
Kamal Amin Tabas, was uncovered by Syrian intelligence and
hanged in Damascus, an angry hue and cry arose in the West,
led by the media with photos (front page of the New York
Times) of the condemned's body hanging in the public square.
Two popular books, Our Man in Damascus 25 by Eli Ben-Hanan
and The Silent Warriors 26 by Joshua Tadmor translated from
the Hebrew by Israeli Ha'aretz. U.S. correspondent Raphael
Rothstein, made a martyr of the spy (the latter tome was
dedicated ironically enough to Elie Wiesel, the godfather of
anti-anti-Semitism) and attacked the lack of a fair trial to
which the press was not admitted. In the course of their
glorification of the Israeli superspy, the authors
unwittingly further proved his guilt. Cohen had been
arrested in Egypt as part of the Lavon Affair spy ring but
held only for two years, released, and then had joined
Israel's Secret Service as a trained espionage agent with
Damascus to be the base of his operations. As an Oriental
Jew he was fluent in Arabic and was scarcely distinguishable
from any Muslim or Christian Arab. Most of the important
Israeli spies were Arab Jews.
Cohen cleverly worked his way into
affluent social and political circles in Damascus, even
becoming acquainted with General Amin el-Hafez, who was to
come into power in March 1963. Through his contacts Cohen
was able to ascertain the number, type, and placement of
MIG-21 planes, T-54 tanks, and other Soviet armament, which
Syria was receiving from the Soviet Union, as well as
Damascus plans for the construction of a canal as
counterdiversion of the Daniyas, one of the principal
sources of the Jordan River.
The incalculably invaluable information
smuggled out to Israel until his apprehension was an
important factor in his country's success in the six-day
war. This was never alluded to in any way by the American
press in their accounts of the "martyred" spy. But author
Rothstein sharply pointed this up: "Now the peaceful Golan
Heights, where Russian tanks lie rusting and concrete
fortifications are piles of rubble, is a tourist attraction,
and much of the credit for this turn of events belongs to
Israel's silent hero, Elie Cohen."
In the fall of 1972 the major capitals
in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. were rocked by a
spate of letter and package bombs. This phase of the
lethal-letter war opened with the letter-bomb killing of an
Israeli diplomat in his London office. Coming on the heels
of the Munich tragedy, biased world public opinion was only
too ready to believe that these acts had been the
responsibility of the Palestinian Black September group,
although the strict security watch at the Israeli Embassy
had intercepted seven other letters, only one of which
contained a leaflet boasting Black September sponsorship.
Upon close examination it remained very much of an open
question who had been sending what bombs to whom.
According to neutral observers in
Britain, while the popular press tended to lean
sympathetically toward the Israelis, "the serious press was
more objective. After the thirteen letter bombs intercepted
in London in November, British Jewry was talking of
retribution, but so far as can be seen, there is no evidence
to support the theory that Black September is behind the
current wave of incidents." British writers, including those
of the London Times, viewed evidence of the Palestinian
complicity as "uneasy." Yet in the U.S. there was no
indecision. The minds of the public were made up for them by
the American press and the politicians, although a New York
City episode took on the aura of a Hitchcock movie gone
awry.
In October, letter bombs addressed to
two retired officials of Hadassah (Women's Zionist
Organization) were discovered when they failed to detonate.
Mrs. Rose Halprin, who had not been president since 1952,
allegedly received one at her East Side home. There were
fifteen Halprins in the 1972 Manhattan telephone directory,
eighteen in the edition a year earlier. There was no listing
for Rose Halprin. It was difficult to understand how a group
of Palestinians 5,000 miles away could ever have obtained
her name let alone her address.
The second letter had been addressed to
a one-time executive director (one newspaper referred to her
as Hannah Goldberg and another as Mrs. Hannah Rosenberg) and
was opened under police supervision without it
exploding.27
Following the apprehension of the letter bombs addressed to
the New York women, Mayor John Lindsay [368] [369] released
this statement: "Terror by mail is the latest, and in some
ways, the most vicious technique yet devised by conspirators
against Israel. To direct it at two outstanding ladies of
Hadassah here reaches a low in the politics of terror."
At the same time a number of letter
bombs sent to the Israeli Mission to the U.N. were also
intercepted. (One of these was supposedly addressed to a
diplomat not even as yet listed in the U.N. directory.) A
spokesman for the Israeli Embassy was quick to be quoted:'
The letters sent to New York show that the terrorist
organization is not just anti-Israeli, as they claim, but
anti-Jewish throughout the world." And to further this
impression that the Palestinians posed a threat to all Jews,
two letter bombs, also mailed from Penang, appeared in
Rhodesia, sent to residents of Bulawayo. One had been
addressed to prominent young Zionist leader Colin Raizon,
another to the mother of Rhodesian Olympic weight lifter
John Orkin. Both were intercepted by the police.
Was it more than a coincidence that the
letter bombs, sent to the Hadassah and to the Israeli
Mission, all of which were intercepted, were received at a
time when Israel was doing its best to coordinate its
efforts with those of the U.S. in forcing the Legal
Committee of the U.N. to adopt an antiterrorist pact with
muscle as a means of further restraining the operations of
the Palestinian guerrillas?
This alleged introduction of bombs into
the U.S., following in the wake of the Munich Olympics
incident, played a major role in moving federal authorities
to initiate a "dragnet" investigation and interrogation and
surveillance of Arab residents and students in the country.
Cracking down on Arabs and restrictive measures against all
travelers passing through the U.S. was the inevitable
result.
On October 26, on page 2 in a
five-column headline, the readers of the New York Times were
told: "Israel Intercepts Letter Bombs Mailed to Nixon,
Rogers and Laird." The story pointed out that the latest
letter bombs were "similar to those mailed to Jews in
various countries from Amsterdam last month by the Arab
guerrilla organization known as the 'Black September.' One
letter bomb killed an official in the Israeli Embassy in
London."
Two days later a UPI story, carried on
certain radio stations, revealed that an American tourist,
twenty-two-year-old Dennis Feinstein from Stockton,
California, had been arrested by the Israeli police as he
attempted to cross over into Lebanon. He was being held on
suspicion of mailing letter bombs to top American officials.
The story appeared in some papers, including the Washington
Post.
The Times News Summary and Index of the
city edition on October 28 listed for page 3 under
"International": "Israel holds American in mailing of letter
bombs." But not one line of the story appeared in that
edition. In the later edition the listing was deleted from
the Index. In page 3 of the earlier edition there had been
an unclear, meaningless photo of "men with opposing views
scuffling on a Santiago, Chile, street," which appeared to
have been dropped in as a last-minute filler replacement in
a spot where the Israeli story might have initially been
intended to go. New copy replaced this photograph on page 3
in the later edition.
It took the Sunday Times of December
24, 1972 in a lengthy article, "How Israelis Started the
Terror by Post," to place the responsibility for the spate
of bombs. As noted by other European observers, it was out
of character for the Black September not to have claimed
"credit" for these incidents, as they had done
instantaneously at the time of Munich and invariably on
other occasions.
With the exception of the first London
bomb, which just missed detection, the bomb in the Bronx
post office, and the one mailed from India, which injured
jeweler Vivian Prins in London, all the other numerous
letter bombs sent in Europe and the U.S. to Jews and Jewish
organizations were somehow intercepted or proved to be duds.
In contrast, almost all of the bombs addressed to Arabs and
Palestinians worked successfully. The device for these bombs
is very simple, and they have been generally termed to be
uniformly deadly. In the words of the police in New York
regarding the Hadassah letters: "They failed to detonate
even though the trigger was lying directly against the
blasting cap." And the Palestinians proved on many occasions
their ability to handle infinitely more sophisticated
weapons than these.
While the invention of the letter bomb
went back to a brilliant but unbalanced Swedish chemist,
Martin Eckenberg, who killed himself at the age of forty-one
in a London prison in 1910, Zionist terrorists, the Stern
Gang and the Irgun, had brought the weapon to the Middle
East. In 1947 letter-bomb campaigns were directed against
prominent British politicians believed to be unsympathetic
to the Zionist goal of establishing a state in Palestine,
and figured in the internationally publicized incident in
which the brother of a British officer, Roy Farran, who had
been acquitted of murdering a Jewish youth in Palestine, was
killed by a parcel bomb admittedly sent by the Stern Gang.
The Zionist apparatus literally
exploded when a Times front-page story headlined an excerpt
from Margaret Truman's book alleging a 1947 letter-bomb
attempt by the Stern Gang on the life of her father.
[370][371] The Anglo-Jewish press across the country
reverberated with criticism, one newspaper going so far as
to make the familiar charge of "anti-Semitism." In a New
York Times Letter to the Editor, Benjamin Gepner, who
identified himself as the U.S.-Western Hemisphere leader of
the "Stern Group," insisted that it was absurd even to think
that there could have been such a plot against the
President. The letter-bomb attempt apparently had taken
place at a time when the Chief Executive was urging Zionists
to be more restrained in their demands and to become more
sensitive to the Palestinian plight. Aside from the fact
that the authoress had little reason to pull this
assassination attempt out of the air, the Stern Gang's own
long record of terror supported the plausibility of the
story.
Explosive devices were widely used by
the Israelis in a broad campaign directed against German
scientists working in Egypt in 1962 and 1963. A bomb placed
in a gift parcel exploded, killing scientist Michael Khouri
and five others with him, and an attempt was made on the
life of Dr. Hans Kleinwachter, another scientist. Another
package addressed to a West German scientist working in
Cairo blew up when opened, blinding his German secretary.
The daughter of German scientist Dr. Paul Goerke was
threatened with a similar fate.
The Israelis succeeded in their reign
of terror. Almost to a man, the West German scientists
working on the development of rockets for President Nasser's
army quit their Egyptian positions and returned home. This
is recounted in detail in The Champagne Spy,28 authored by Israeli spy Wolfgang
Lotz, who boasted of having sent messages out of Cairo on
the wireless hidden in his bathroom scales to his chief,
saying that he was "sure we can induce additional German
scientists to leave by dispatching more threatening letters
and seeing that they are published in the German press."
After a public reprimand by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion,
Israeli Security Chief Iser Halprin resigned in an admission
of Israeli complicity in the campaign against the Germans.
There were still other bomb varieties
in which the Israelis excelled. Prior to the June 1967 war,
the Chief Intelligence Officer in the Gaza Strip and' the
Egyptian Military Attache' in Jordan were both killed by
book bombs. In the wake of the 1972 Lydda Airport massacre,
the Palestine Popular Front's spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani,
was blown up when a plastic bomb attached to the exhaust of
his car exploded. And a series of booby-trapped letters,
sent that fall, killed or badly injured a dozen senior Arab
guerrillas and prominent Palestinians in Beirut.
Following the Kanafani death, Ma'ariv
the Israeli daily, wrote: "The terrorists' statement linked
the death of Kanafani to Israel and accused her of mounting
this operation. Israel does not deny this or confirm it."
Some eleven days following this incident, Anis Sayegh, a
Director of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut,
received an envelope ostensibly addressed to him from the
Islamic Higher Council. When he opened it, it exploded,
causing him partial blindness and the loss of three fingers.
Within the same time period, another mail parcel exploded in
the hands of the Director of a Beirut bank and the security
officers of the Fateh in Beirut. (One had to closely scan
the small print and the back pages of the Times to find a
line or two, if that, about these incidents.)
In putting together all the pertinent
bits of this tragic history, this observation is very much
in order: The terrorists of yesterday have since become
Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Generals, and other VIPs
of the Israeli state of today, and the armies that brought
Israel its "liberation" and widely employed terror-the
Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang-have become the
victorious armies of Israel today. While letter bombs and
other forms of terrorism have been used by both sides, it
was the Israelis who introduced them into the Middle East
and made, as usual, the perfect propaganda use of the deadly
explosives. For it was the exploitation of terror, above
all, that continued to provide the public excuse for the
adamant Israeli refusal to recognize the PLO, which for so
long was supported by the Nixon, Ford, and Carter
administrations and greatly complicated the task of reaching
a Middle East settlement.
No single act so totally equated the
Palestinians with terror than the killing of the Israeli
athletes at the Olympic games in Munich. In the early
morning of September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian guerrillas
(newspapers more often referred to them as "Arabs" because
that word evoked stronger sparks of hatred) invaded Olympic
Village in Munich by climbing over a fence and forcing their
way into the dormitories of the Israeli team, where they
killed two athletes and took nine others as hostages. The
guerrillas demanded the release of two hundred of their
compatriots held in Israeli jails and an airplane to take
them to an unspecified Arab capital. Israel, consistent with
her longstanding policy, refused to negotiate with the
Palestinians, but high German authorities attempted to do
so, offering to pay unlimited ransom and even to substitute
four of themselves for the hostages.
After lengthy parleying and three
extensions of the original noon deadline, the Arab
guerrillas and their Israeli hostages were flown fifteen
miles by helicopters from Olympic Village to the NATO
Fuerstenfeldbruck Airport, [371] [372] where they had been
told they could board a Lufthansa jet for an Arab airport.
Five German sharpshooters backed up by police waited to
confront the eight Palestinians. Two guerrillas left the
helicopter to inspect the Boeing 727 on which they planned
to head for Tunisia. The Germans opened fire. One of the
three helicopters was set afire by an exploding grenade
thrown by one of the Palestinians as he jumped from the
helicopter. But a German government spokesman reported that
the hostages were all safe. Three hours later the Olympics
Committee announced that all the hostages had been killed.
In the course of the official
government inquiry into the airport shootout, Police Chief
Manfred Schreiber admitted he had lost control of the
situation during the shooting.29 The original police announcement
claimed that the guerrillas had fired first, but most
eyewitnesses agreed that the sharpshooters had opened fire.
Under dispute, until today, was how the Israeli hostages
died: Was it when the Arabs blew up the helicopter, or had
they already been killed by Arab machine-gun fire? It also
was not beyond the realm of possibility that some had died
at the hands of German bullets intended for the guerrillas.
It has never been established that the
airport battle was necessary. All discussion of this very
moot point was summarily dismissed by Police Chief
Schreiber-and by the U.S. media-with the unsubstantiated
allegation that the Arabs would have murdered the hostages
en route had they been allowed to leave the airport. This
presumption was in no way supported by the meticulous care
and consideration shown their hostages by the Palestinian
hijackers of the U.S. and European planes in the September
1970 incident in Jordan (or by the treatment accorded in
other later hijackings up through Entebbe in the summer of
1976).
Five and a half months later, on
February 21, 1973, a Libyan Boeing 727 with 113 civilians
aboard was callously clawed out of the sky by Israeli
fighter planes over Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory of
the Sinai, about twelve miles from the Suez Canal. Some 102
passengers and 8 crewmen were killed immediately or later
died, including 27 women and children. The plane had
overflown Cairo, losing its way in a terrible sandstorm,
when it was intercepted by Israeli fighters, whom the French
pilot mistook for a friendly escort of Egyptian MIGs. The
aircraft had already turned around and was headed toward
Cairo, nine minutes away, when it was shot down.
The Israeli version, supported by Moshe
Dayan press conferences, insisted that the plane had
penetrated "probably the most [373] sensitive area held by
Israel," that warnings had been given, that instructions to
land had been ignored by the pilot, and that the 727 was not
shot down but crashed after landing. The Defense Minister
contended that the Israeli fighter pilots had signaled the
Libyan plane pilot for fifteen minutes (in that time the
plane would have been past Israel and well over the
Mediterranean). And from the outset this Israeli fairy tale
was accepted - even embroidered upon - by the American
press, radio, and television.
If the media had indulged a bit more in
research and study and less in generating hysteria and
hatred, they would have discovered a perfect precedence in
Israel's 1955 stand when an El Al plane, which had strayed
into Bulgarian airspace, was shot down and fifty-eight lives
were lost. In a lawsuit brought in the International Court
of Justice at Geneva, Israel successfully argued:
It is the duty of any person who seeks to
interfere with the normal flying of civilian aircraft by
ordering it to land at a designated airport not to
deliberately and unreasonably increase the inherent risks
and certainly not to provoke completely new and unwarranted
hazards inevitable when modern armaments were intentionally
brought into play. The Bulgarian admission shows that these
safeguards were not discharged. The heart of the present
case is that fire was opened on the 4XAK which in the space
of a few minutes was callously clawed out of the sky and
destroyed. The Israeli government contended that no rule of
law, not the liberal interpretations of any provision of the
Chicago convention governing international aircraft, nor the
rules of general international law, would permit such a
degree of violence.
The generally accepted practice is to try to "box" the
plane in and lead it in the correct direction. And the
Libyan Boeing was already moving out of the danger zone when
it was blown to smithereens.
The language used in page-one headlines
of the New York Times the day after the incident carefully
concealed what had taken place: "Israelis Down a Libyan Air
Liner in the Sinai, Killing at Least 74 - Say it Ignored
Warnings to Land... Jet Crash-Lands." The Times, the Post,
and other big-city presses avoided the use of the words
"shot down," trying to give an impression that the jet
crashed on its own after warnings to land.
The media's obvious aim was to
exculpate Israel of any possible guilt and place the guilt
on the French pilot, who had been on loan to Libyan Airways,
for his refusal to listen to the warnings. Varied types of
the art of slanting went into the reportage to the American
people. There was, for example, slanting by
placement-whatever the Arabs [374] [375] said, including
Cairo and Libya, was relegated to unimportant positions;
whatever Israel said went into headlines. In other previous
air tragedies the papers invariably showed pictures of
pretty stewardesses; There were no pictures of the Libyan
airline stewardesses in this instance. In fact, there was no
picture at all of survivors, which might have evoked some
sympathy for the Arab victims. All one saw or read was
condonation and excuse of the Israelis.
At the time of the Munich killing of
Israeli athletes, banner headlines carried "the expression
of horror by leaders around the world." Bold headlines ran:
Head of UN Condemns Raid as Dastardly." But
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's statement that he
"deplored" the fact that a civilian plane had been shot
down, and his expression of shock, concern, and condolences
on the shooting down of the Libyan airliner, were reported
only in the early editions of the New York Post and buried
away, the seven-line account obscured under a tiny head:
"Waldheim [his name without his title is not familiar]
Expresses Shock."30
The quoted Israeli fear that "the Israelis could not
guarantee that it was not a kamikaze plane loaded with
explosives headed for an Israeli city" was featured
prominently and made to sound plausible. And the only
mention of the terrible blinding sandstorm, which caused the
Libyan plane to lose its way, was as an incidental reference
to the more than two-hour delay to Israeli helicopters
taking off with wounded survivors.
The front page of the Daily News in New
York 31 carried this
bold headline: "Israelis Down Arab Jet." The readers had to
turn to page 2 to discover that it had been a civilian
airliner. The New York Post headlines were also of interest.
The first was: "Israel Forces Down Libya Jet-70 Die." A
little later in the day: "Israel Downs [never "shoots"]
Libya Airliner; 70 Killed." And then in the continuation off
this first page, they reverted to the original headline of
the earlier edition: "Israel Forces Down a Libyan Jet; 70
Die."
Where the Times' story on the Israeli
emergency Cabinet meeting featured the Israeli claim that
the pilot had acknowledged the warnings and interception
signals, the New York Post even went further into the realm
of the fanciful, quoting an Israeli newspaper account that
the pilot had radioed his pursuers: "We cannot obey your
orders because of the political situation. This area does
not belong to you." While this yarn was being spread through
the combined wire services across the country, the
correspondent of Israeli journal Ha'aretz was spreading
other propaganda on a two-hour talk show over New York radio
station WMCA. Under the usual "fair" media arrangements, the
former [375] President of the Zionist Organization of
America, another articulate Israelist, and this Israeli
writer were pitted against the editor of Middle East
Perspective. The "moderator" of this program three days
later was among the six commentators of the same station who
interviewed prominent guests from Israel, representatives of
Israeli-oriented national and international organizations,
and their American counterparts in a continuous
twenty-five-hour broadcast tribute to Israel's first quarter
century.
The Times which scarcely waits minutes
to execute moral judgment editorially, remained silent the
day after the plane shooting, although the tragedy had been
known in the U.S. before noon the day before. On the third
day the editorial page spoke out under the title: "Tragic
Blunder." Its words, "horrifying blunder" and "act of
callousness," like slapping a child on the wrist for eating
too much candy, could be contrasted to those used in its
editorial six months earlier on the Olympics tragedy,
"Murder in Munich": "Arab fanatics... homicidal hatred...
indiscriminate murder... innocent lives snuffed out."32 The editorial
reluctantly conceded that the tape of the pilot's exchange
with the Cairo control tower "lent credence, though not
conclusive evidence" that the pilot had no idea that he
would be subject to an air attack if he did not land. The
publication's principal concern appeared to be the effect
the incident would have on Israel's image and its case
before the U.S. public.33
The murder in Khartoum on March 2,
1973, by the Black September movement of one Belgian and two
American diplomats was as sickening an act as the shooting
down of the Libyan plane and in no way condonable. As the
author of The Game of Nations, 34 Miles Copeland, noted in National
Review, "The Palestinian movement is a breeding ground, as
is any homeless, idle and hungry population, for what we
might call 'unstructured rebellion'-that is, rebellion
against things in general, toward no clear goal."35
Whereas the Times waited three days to
publish its editorial on the Libyan incident, less that six
hours after the Khartoum deaths had been announced, the
editorial page was attacking the act as "lunacy at
large."36 Bias was
shown not only in the speed with which the paper reacted but
in the words of its editorial: "The Palestinian extremists
made their move just as Arab propaganda machinery was
spinning forth outrage against Israel for the shooting down
of an unarmed Libyan airliner . . . Such talk now is even
less appropriate than ever " (Italics added.)
Where the plane had been obviously shot
down on what was still [376] [377] Egyptian territory but
occupied by Israel, not a single news program on the three
major television networks mentioned this fact. CBS' Walter
Cronkite declared the plane had been shot down over Israeli
territory. 37
After the Israeli government
reluctantly admitted that the crucial black box, recording
communications between the Libyan plane and the ground
control tower and conversations among those in the pilot's
cockpit, had revealed that the French pilot had actually
thought he was surrounded by friendly Egyptian MIGs showing
him the way home, the New York Times continued to cover up
Israeli guilt. The front page of February 24 contained two
six-column photos, one captioned "Five Israeli military
chaplains read psalms as the coffins [crude, unpainted fruit
crates with crooked nails protruding and shrouds showing] of
victims of the downed plane are placed on a boat." The
other, "A military cortege on the Egyptian side of the Suez
Canal waiting for the first boat." The glowing headline,
"100 Bodies of Jet Victims Taken Over Suez to Egypt," the
reportage, and the publication of the Dayan offer of partial
compensation endowed the Israelis with great acts of
magnanimity.
The sole headlined reference to the
important revelations of the flight recorder was ambiguously
set forth in this manner: 'Israel Confirms Cairo Data." This
admission only followed the substantiation by U.S.
intelligence sources, which had also monitored the
conversation. One had to read well into the article to
discover that the important black box had confirmed the
control tower tape, played at the press conference two days
earlier, the authenticity of which the Times had then
questioned.
In his endeavor to exculpate the
Israelis from the guilt the International Civil Aviation
Organization had voted 105 to 1 to fasten upon them, the
Times' Robert Lindsey, in a June 7 article headlined: "Sinai
Crash Study Notes Confusion," unwittingly blew up another
Israeli myth widely circulated at the time of the tragedy by
his paper: that the curtains of the windows of the Boeing
had been closed and therefore the Israelis could not see
that the plane carried passengers.
As on so many other occasions, the
Times proved to be more Israelist than the two leading
Israeli papers, Ma'ariv and Ha'aretz. One Israeli columnist
noted that the downing of the plane had been kept secret for
three or four hours before publication of any announcement,
which in itself created at the outset a number of question
marks. It was the first time in the history of civil
aviation that a plane had crashed in an area easily
reachable and yet, for twenty-four hours, it was impossible
to get a picture of the wreckage. Requests to visit the site
were rejected without explanation. Emergency arrangements
for the press were refused. Nor was the spokesman for the
Israeli defense forces available for any queries or
questions until twenty-four hours later, when reporters had
a right "to ask themselves what had taken place and what had
been erased in the interim."
Further, according to Israeli accounts,
it was only three days after the incident that General David
Elazar, the Chief of Staff, spoke to the public. He had,
according to the official version, received the report on
the Libyan plane "after some minutes of contacts between the
planes-apparently between 14:03 and 14:05, and the contact
was finished at 14:11 when the flaming Libyan plane touched
the ground." Actually, as revealed by the all-important
little black box, the contact ended at 14:09 when the
bullets were fired at the wings of the Boeing to force it to
land. Therefore the contact had not lasted more than from
four to six minutes. As one Israeli newspaper saw it, "the
reception of the information from the air force commander
and his pondering, as well as the decision, were all
executed within a single three minute connection. Why, they
ask, was not more time given for the decision? Why did the
Chief of Staff hear, think, and decide almost
simultaneously?"
Perhaps the excuse made by the Israeli
fighter pilot at a press conference sheds some light. "When
I hit him, he was at a minute's flight distance from the
canal." This fear that the plane might have crossed back
safely into Egypt was in line with the Chief of Staff's
remarks that he had "to decide immediately." If the latter
had waited to contact Defense Minister Dayan, the Libyan
plane could have slipped away, which apparently would have
been contrary to his instructions.
Air Force Commander Mordechai Hod, who
had directed the June 1967 air strikes against Arab
airfields, claimed that the Libyan pilot could see the
airport but had disregarded all signals. Hod ascribed
certain words to the pilot that were totally disproved,
again by the black box. There was no basis, according to the
Israeli press accounts, for the Chief of Staff's statement
that the Boeing pilot saw and understood the signals made by
the Israeli Phantom pilots, disregarded and stubbornly
refused to follow them. The pilot's words of confusion, as
recorded, directly contradicted such a version.
The first signal to land was given by
the Israeli Phantom jets two minutes after the Libyan plane
was identified. The first warning shots came a minute and a
half later. In this briefest interim, Hod came to [378]
[379] the conclusion that "there is no doubt that the Boeing
crew understood what we were asking from them and that the
crew saw the airport and refused to land there." But again
according to irrefutable evidence, the Libyan crew did not
see any airport. The first warning shots were fired at a
time when the plane was moving away from the airport in a
westerly direction toward the Suez Canal and Egypt. And Hod
talked to his Chief of Staff after the plane had turned away
from the Bir Gafgafa Airport, where the Israelis wished it
to land, and perhaps even before the first warning shots
were fired.
It was established that the Chief of
Staff had acted only after it was clear that the Boeing had
not-and could not cause any harm in its mistaken course into
Sinai. Fears that the plane had aggressive intentions were
groundless. Aggressive intentions are carried out while
moving toward a target and certainly not while going away,
back to one's home base. Yet the Times continued to allude
to this repudiated contention that the destructive design of
the Libyan plane was a genuine possibility. Because of the
impossible weather conditions, Israeli suspicion that the
enemy might be taking air photos was likewise totally
unjustified.
While a Daily News editorial called the
incident "a wantonly brutal downing, which shocked and
horrified Israel's warmest friends,"38 in the four days following the
wanton attack on the Libyan plane, not a single columnist in
any of the New York papers carried a single reference to the
incident. Moralists such as Peter Hamill, who spouted every
time someone was killed in Vietnam or Israel, were glued to
their chairs in total silence. Where Tom Wicker had written
about the seeds of terrorism on the previous September 7,
nothing now came from his fertile pen on Israeli brigandage.
This U.S. reaction was in marked
contrast to the hysteria that raged for ten days after the
Israeli athletes had been killed-the endless, overwhelming,
nationwide media reportage detailing the mourning, tributes
to the dead, and vituperative censure of the
Arabs.39
The media's gross romanticization of
the Munich tragedy was exposed in a column by Shirley Povich
in the Washington Post "It is time to deflate that guff
about the great brotherhood the Olympics promote. They are
torn by constant bickering among team officials of all the
nations, and political alignments influence the judging in
events like boxing, diving and gymnastics." In contrast to
the sensationalism in U.S. newspapers that ran photos
showing mourning athlete Jesse Owens, handkerchief in hand,
and grieving Israeli teammates of the deceased,40 the Washington writer
noted:
Olympic Village was a shame to behold on
Tuesday afternoon, after the first shock at the news that
two Israelis were dead and nine held hostage by Arab
raiders. A few hours after the initial excitement subsided,
you couldn't find an empty ping pong table in the village,
rock music was blaring as usual, and it was just another day
in Olympic Village. There was other evidence of boredom all
around, even with their Israeli comrades having all that
trouble in Building 33. 41
The funeral services both in Israel and in the U.S. for
the one athlete who had been born American, but at the time
of his death held Israeli citizenship, received the widest
coverage. An Associated Press story out of Cleveland, Ohio,
indicated that Governor John J. Gilligan, at that time a
presidential hopeful, had ordered state flags to be lowered
to half-mast in memory of this weight lifter who was one of
the nine Israeli hostages "killed by Arab commandos" (two
athletes died in the original attack at Olympic Village).
The bereavement of the parents of David Berger overflowed
onto every television set in the U.S. 42
The Times' recital of the return of the
bodies of the Arab victims of the Libyan plane incident to
Cairo noted that six bodies, which were neither Egyptian nor
Libyan, had been sent to the governments concerned: five to
France and one to the U.S. This, three days after the
incident, was the first reference whatsoever to the fact
that an American had been among the victims. Only on the
last six lines on page 8 of the New York Times 43 did the name of the
American appear - Wladyslaw Boysoglebski, sixty-two years
old, of Chicago, an American who had taken out citizenship
after immigrating from Poland. No flags were ordered to be
set at half-mast by Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie
when the body of this American was returned, in contrast to
the honor accorded in Ohio to a half-American, half-Israeli
serving on the Olympic team of a foreign country. A call to
the cable desk of UPI to find out whether they knew anything
about the disposition of the body that was being shipped via
Tel Aviv embassy to the States yielded a total blank.
While the responsibility or necessity
for the German attack killing the Munich hostages was never
established, at no point did the media ever call attention
to this doubt. However, in the reportage of the Libyan plane
incident, every sort of innuendo, excuse, or explanation was
indulged in, either by the media on its own or by
publicizing the views of the Israeli pilots, the Israeli
army, and the Israeli government. Where the Munich story had
received banner headlines right across the front page and
was continued with large five-column Times [380] [381]
headlines on the second day, the 110 innocent victims of
trigger~happy Israeli pilots received, on the first day,
three columns, and the third line of the heading gave the
Israeli point of view, and that was that.
More than four years later, the
Zionists were continuing to exploit the 1972 Olympics
affair. ABC national television provided unpaid prime time
(December 1976) at a cost of close to $2 million for a
specially produced Sunday evening television film,
Twenty-One Hours at Munich, under the meticulous direction
of coproducers Edward Feldman and Robert Greenwald
(illustrating once more the Zionist connection). The
greatest liberties were taken with the facts to portray the
Palestinians as the blackest villains, even attributing
sorrowful last words to one Israeli athlete, who had died
all alone. The ABC press releases, replete with pejorative
adjectives, further spawned anti-Arab hatred.
Everywhere this double standard
prevailed 44 with but
a few dissenting voices. Robert Pierpoint, CBS White House
correspondent, was one of a handful to point out that the
U.S. had lost its sense of fair play. He noted that in
February 1973, when the Israelis carried out a commando raid
deep in the heart of Lebanon, striking at Palestinian
refugee camps 130 miles from their own territory with planes
and tanks and wiping out thirty-seven lives in the process,
"there was next to no outcry in this country." It was on
this occasion that an entire Lebanese family of six was
crushed to death as they sat in their car, by an Israeli
tank. Many other innocents were killed in this same raid,
along with a few Palestinian guerrillas, allegedly part of
the Black September movement.
Pierpoint on this CBS telecast declared
that the shooting down of the Libyan airliner had drawn some
official regrets, but not expressed publicly nor at the
level of the White House. He continued:
Nor did any U.S. official ever indicate that
the U.S might think twice before It dispatched more
American-built Phantom jets to Israel of the type that had
shot down the Libyan airliner. Indeed, the very next week,
President Nixon let it be known after his talk in the Oval
Office with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that more such
Phantoms would soon be on their way. Contrast these events
with what happened after the Arab Black September's massacre
of Israeli athletes at Munich. The U.S., from President
Nixon on down, expressed outrage, and the President ordered
steps taken to see that no such terrorism could strike at
Israelis in this country.
Senator Hugh Scott, after meeting with President
Nixon to discuss domestic problems, standing at a White
House podium, in response to a question on what should be
done to the Arabs who had participated in the murders in
Khartoum, responded, "I hope they shoot them all, and the
sooner the better." No mention was made of a trial, or the
possibility that if a fair trial were held, it might turn
out that not all the terrorists were guilty of the
murders.
For so long Americans have become used to
thinking of the Israelis as the good guys and the Arabs as
the bad guys that many react emotionally along the lines of
previous prejudices. The fact is that both sides have
committed unforgivable acts of terror, both sides have
killed innocents, both sides have legitimate grievances and
illegitimate methods of expressing them. Perhaps the Arabs'
action was more irrational-sheer terror. At least it was not
backed by a relatively rational government which justifies
its actions as necessary. The Israelis have and utilize a
formidable political propaganda force in this country in the
form of six million Jews. The Arabs have only slightly less
than a million descendants in America just beginning to
organize a nationwide counterforce. Perhaps this will help
bring balance. In the meantime, the rest of us might apply
more steady balance and fair play to the difficult problems
of the Middle East " [Italics added.)
The broadcast was no sooner on the airwaves and reprinted
in the Christian Science Monitor 45 than the usual hue and cry was
raised. Pierpoint was, of course, charged with
anti-Semitism, and his head was demanded. Telegrams and
letters poured into the network. The CBS President and Vice
President in charge of news were importuned to exercise some
control over Pierpoint's judgment. The CBS correspondent had
this to say about the smears and fears that were raised: "As
you can imagine, some of the criticism was highly emotional
if not downright hysterical. I was not surprised at this
since the subject is a highly emotional one. I was mildly
surprised at the manner in which the critics are so well
organized that within hours people who had not heard the
broadcast were protesting by phone or writing letters. In
any case, the opposition to this kind of broadcast was and
is formidable."46
The treatment of the Ma'alot affair
soon thereafter clearly indicated that the Pierpoint call
for press fair play had fallen on deaf ears. On May 15,
1974, three fedayeen from the Popular Democratic Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) stole across the
Lebanese-Israel border (an Israeli nurse testified that one
had been living nearby in Safad for a long time) and at six
in the morning seized a Ma'alot school in which ninety
teenage members of the semimilitary Nahal 47 had been
spending the night after some training.
Fifteen youngsters escaped through an
open door at the time of the takeover, and two were allowed
to leave because they were ill. The guerrillas sent two more
youths out with a list of twenty-six prisoners held in
Israeli jails whose release they demanded in exchange for
the [382] [383] hostages. They asked that the French and
Rumanian Ambassadors serve as mediators.
The prisoners-twenty-three
Palestinians, two Israelis, and one Japanese-were to be
flown to Damascus, according to the guerrilla demand. As
soon as the arrival of the released prisoners had been
confirmed in the Syrian capital, the mediating Ambassadors
would receive through Paris and Bucharest a code word with
which to identify themselves before starting negotiations
for the release of the hostages. But if no code word was
received by 6:00 F.M., the guerrillas "would not be
responsible for the consequences,' they warned.
While negotiations were being carried
on between the Palestinians, Israelis, Cairo (from where the
plane to carry out the Palestinian prisoners was to come),
and the Ambassadors, Israeli military forces attacked the
school half an hour before the guerrilla deadline. In the
ensuing battle the fedayeen were wiped out, but sixteen
children were killed, victims of either exploding
Palestinian grenades or Israeli bullets. And the
Zionist-media alliance both in the U.S. and Britain (where I
happened to be at the moment) went absolutely wild, even as
the facts surrounding the tragedy's final moments became
increasingly beclouded. While nothing could ever condone the
brutal killing of innocent children, much evidence was
adduced that the Israeli government had far from done
everything in its power to avoid the tragic loss of life and
that the military had overreacted. And it was the French
Ambassador to Israel who cast the principal doubts on the
oversimplified story disseminated by the Western press.
Ambassador Jean Herly was waiting at
the French Consulate in Haifa throughout the afternoon for
the Israeli authorities to call him to Ma'alot. At 2:00 he
had been informed by the Israelis that he was not to receive
the code word permitting him to negotiate with the fedayeen
until the prisoners held by Israel had been freed and had
reached Damascus. At 3:22, according to Israeli Foreign
Ministry documents, the Ambassador had requested permission
to proceed to Ma'alot. The answer was delayed. Realizing at
4:45 that it was now impossible to organize the release of
the Palestinian prisoners and get them to Damascus in time
for the 6:00 deadline, the Ambassador had himself flown by
helicopter to Ma'alot to plead with the Palestinians to
extend their ultimatum.
Upon his arrival, a high-ranking
Israeli officer asked the French Ambassador if he had the
code word. He replied in the negative, and then, as he told
Agence France Presse, asked to meet the Minister of Defense
or the Chief of Staff, "thinking that I could perhaps, even
without the code word and through my diplomatic pass, get
into contact with the fedayeen and try at least to postpone
the expiration of the ultimatum." But he was informed it was
"too dangerous." A few minutes later, at 5:30, in the words
of the Ambassador to the press, he heard shots and
explosions. "I was told that it was all over and asked to
return to Tel Aviv." Acting on the direct orders of the
Chief of Staff, forty minutes before the ultimatum's
expiration at 5:20 P.M., the Israeli military forces stormed
the building.
Herly, a diplomat to the end, stated
that he was certain that the authorities "had not willfully
sought to prevent him from speaking to the terrorists, but I
still ask myself and wonder: What could have been done that
wasn't done between five o'clock and six o'clock?" He had
been denied permission to talk to the Palestinians on the
grounds that he had not received the code word from
Palestinian headquarters in Damascus. But as the Ambassador
later told the Jerusalem Post, there must have been a "grave
misunderstanding" because he was, in fact, not supposed to
receive the code word until the released prisoners had
arrived safely in Damascus. Israeli Information Minister
Shimon Peres insisted that Herly never could have talked to
the Palestinians without having the code word in his
possession.
According to Ha'aretz of May 17, the
government had decided early in the morning to reject the
clearly understood Palestinian conditions. But to buy time,
Moshe Dayan and General Mordechai Gur informed the fedayeen
that they agreed to their terms, meanwhile formulating plans
for the military rescue of the hostages. Fully aware of the
overwhelming sympathy of the Western press, both the Prime
Minister and the Minister of Defense saw an opportunity to
take a chance, even at the expense of children's lives, of
making important favorable international propaganda at a
time when Israel's public relations standing in the world
had gravely plummeted. The die was cast, and French
mediation efforts were not permitted to upset the carefully
calculated Israeli planning.
As at Munich, the Israelis justified
the decision to storm the school on the conviction that the
Palestinians intended, in any event, to kill their young
hostages when their demands were rejected and the ultimatum
ran out. Again, guerrilla action did not sustain this
thesis. As PDFLP spokesman Yasser Abed Rubbuh later
declared, the three terrorists had orders to prolong the
original deadline by two hours in the event no agreement was
reached. The Palestinians maintained that at no time did
they plan to harm the hostages if their demands were met.
Their plan had been to bargain the first half of the
hostages for the [384] release of the prisoners on their
list, and then the second half for the safe passage of the
three Palestinians out of Israel.
It was the Palestinian contention that
the political decision to storm the school "whatever the
consequences" had been made long before the 1600 GMT
deadline was reached. According to the PDFLP version, "the
Rumanian and French Ambassadors were (old by the Israelis
they do not have any aircraft available to take the
prisoners to Damascus." But the Rumanian government had been
notified at 1530 GMT, half an hour before the deadline and
the exact time the Israelis stormed the school, that the
prisoners had actually taken off for Cyprus.
The Popular Front openly admitted
responsibility for Ma'alot, but at the same time, in a
statement appearing in the London Times,48 PDFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh
challenged Israel to submit to a public postmortem to
determine who, in fact, had been responsible for the
bloodshed. This the Israeli government ignored, and the
media declined to follow up the matter.
Had there been a careful investigation,
it would have been revealed that the border settlement of
Ma'alot had been carefully chosen by Hawatmeh for this raid
on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the
Israeli state. This village, once the Arab village of
Tarchiha, as part of western Galilee, was to have been
included under the 1948 U.N. partition plan in the Arab
state, but was attacked and occupied before May 15, then
annexed by the Israeli state. The Arab villagers fled during
the fighting, and after the 1949 armistice their return was
barred. The village was razed to the ground, and on its
ruins the Israeli village of Ma'alot had been built.
The U.S. media was totally uninterested
in any exposition of Palestinian thinking. By the sheerest
of coincidences, in the late evening of May 14 as the attack
on Ma'alot was taking place, I was in Beirut taping a
conversation with Palestinian Abu Nidal (a pseudonym),
leader of a group that had split off from the PDFLP and is
Iraq oriented. This twenty-five-year-old Palestinian
expressed himself frankly and violently:
We believe that Palestine is ours, and the
only way to get back what is ours is to fight.... I am not
Mr. Sadat. I am a Palestinian, and I am not concerned with
world opinion, including American, which has done nothing
for our very fair cause through more than twenty-six years.
The world can respect you only when you are strong enough to
stand in the face of the world and fight for your cause.. ..
We showed we were serious in our attack on Qiryat Shemona,
and we will strike again. [385]
His reference was to the Palestinian attack six weeks
earlier on an Israeli border village in which eighteen
Israelis had been killed and sixteen injured, but three of
his companions had lost their lives, the oldest of whom was
just twenty years old.
The following day when I reached
London, this pertinent tape was used on BBC television and
radio. But on arrival in New York, forty eight hours after
Ma'alot, there was the accustomed total blackout from
television-radio news and talk shows. No one dared put into
question the Israeli-Zionist propaganda that the sole
Palestinian aim was to murder the innocent and spread terror
without cause.
At Ma'alot little children had been
involved, and hysteria ruled the American Jewish community.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold and companions
chained themselves to a fence in front of the U.N. in
protest. New York's Mayor Beame addressed a large emotional
rally, urging the U.N. to adopt immediate sanctions against
Arab countries to avert further acts of terrorism. New York
Post columnists Max Lerner and Peter Hamill far outstripped
in narrow, vindictive one-sidedness the efforts of other
media pundits. Hamill screamed:
And now they were killing children, Israeli
children.... People were dying in the deserts of the Middle
East. Israel, which initially had allied itself with the
U.S. on a moral basis, had discovered that it was just
another colony, its fate in the hands of Henry Kissinger
whose wife kept Arab swag in a wall safe in her
bedroom.49
In Jerusalem Premier Golda Meir claimed her government
had been prepared to submit to the commandos' demands to
free the prisoners, but that they had not had enough time to
act. In an angry television address she vowed that Israel
"will do everything in its power to chop off the hands that
intend to harm a child or an adult in any city or village."
The Meir caretaker government, which was soon replaced by
the Yitzhak Rabin Cabinet, came under increasingly angry
attack from many quarters for its handling of the affair, as
more and more of the facts began to leak out.
One of the freed Ma'alot students,
sixteen-year-old Rachel Lagziel, told reporters that the
captives were allowed to listen to their transistors and to
hear all the news broadcast in Hebrew. "We were allowed to
drink our water and eat our provisions," eighteen-year-old
Tamara Ben-Hamu later said. "Don't be afraid" one commando
said. "If Israel gives us the prisoners, you will not be
harmed." (This, of course, never appeared in the U.S.
press~only in Israel.)
Angry Israelis assailed Dayan. "You
have made us the [386] [387] stepchildren of Israel,"
Ma'alot Council Chairman Eli Ben Yaacov screamed at him.
"It's because most of us are from Morocco," he added.
Before a day after the incident had
passed, the Israelis had struck back against South Lebanon
in a retaliatory raid. Air attacks against civilian targets
brought death to fifty~two in an. impoverished refugee camp
and in Lebanese villages. Am El Helweh and Bowry El
Barajneh, refugee camps north and south of Beirut, were the
targets of the Israeli air attacks carried out by thirty-six
U.S.-supplied Phantoms. On the second successive day the
"reprisal" for Ma'alot found the Nabitieh refugee camp in
South Lebanon literally razed to the ground.
The following is from a dispatch filed
by Paul Martin, which appeared in the London Times on May
18:
Rescue workers had just dug up
the bodies of the young woman and her four small children
from the rooms of their tiny house when I arrived in this
Palestinian refugee camp today. The bodies were mutilated
almost beyond recognition. Nobody knew the woman's name, but
one refugee said he thought her husband had been killed
during last night's Israeli bombing raids as well.
The house was one of about 60, lining the camp's
main street, which were flattened by three separate air
strikes in two and a half hours. Half the camp, which holds
5,000 people, had been completely destroyed by direct hits
on houses in no way connected with the Palestinian
guerrillas. I counted more than 40 craters from 1,000-lb.
bombs peppering an area of less than 400 square yards.
Eight children, between the ages of 8 and 12
were killed when bombs showered down on the camp's school.
Their bodies were taken to Sidon Hospital because their
parents could not be found in the confusion. More bodies are
expected to be recovered from the debris of twisted and
crumbled buildings. The death toll so far in Nabatieh alone
is 25 civilians killed and nearly 60 wounded.
On the outskirts of the camp there was an
endless string of pathetic processions to the sedate little
cemetery. There were no demonstrations of overt grief or
anger~just looks of shock and fear. Men, women and children,
who died in Israel's reprisal, were taken at short intervals
to hastily prepared graves. Their bodies were borne on open
stretcher-like coffins, draped with a flower arrangement
resembling the Palestinian flag.
Nabatieh was the worst hit in Israel's wave of
air strikes launched yesterday afternoon on Palestinian
refugee camps and villages at 4 P.M. as the streets were
filled with people. The bombing and strafing lasted 10
minutes. Then, as rescue workers began to drag the dead and
wounded from the debris, they struck again at 5 P.M.; the
final and most devastating strike came at 6:45 P.M.
As I arrived in Nabatieh today, the last
refugees were fleeing with mattresses and the bare
essentials of survival: "This is the third time in the past
three years that we have been driven out of here by Israeli
air raids," an old villager said, "Each time we have had to
build up all over again, but we will be back, perhaps in a
week, perhaps in a month; but, God willing, we will be
back."
The presence of armed guerrillas in Palestinian
refugee camps is no new phenomenon. However, at Nabatieh
there clearly was no evidence in the camp itself of any
guerrilla military bases. What is obvious from this latest
Israeli blow against Lebanon is that civilians suffered the
most. Little or no damage was done to the guerrillas and, if
anything, they stand to gain much politically from what has
happened.
Such events tend to create militants. At one
point a group of refugees who had lost a relative gathered
around me when I was introduced as a British correspondent,
a man of about 40 snapped angrily: "Curse you and your
Balfour. Curse America. Curse you all."
A U.N. report on Nabatieh listed "60 percent destroyed,
20 percent badly damaged, 20 percent partly destroyed. Not
one house had a roof left," the international organization
noted. Yet such acts of terror against civilian populations
were relegated to inconspicuous coverage, and the pretext
for the merciless retaliation, that fedayeen were based in
this area, was accepted as an extenuating circumstance for
the killings in the retaliatory onslaughts on refugee camps.
As planes brought death to 200
innocents in these latest May raids in South Lebanon, which
had begun in 1968 and accelerated to almost daily attacks,
the same politicians, ministers, rabbis, priests, and
writers who had condemned the "cowardly methods" employed in
the killings at Munich and Ma'alot found themselves
acquiescing in the more sophisticated Israeli means of
terror used in Lebanon. Exploding dolls dropped from planes
"to entice" children to their deaths brought no outraged
outcries. Lebanese villages such as Rashaya Fuqhar, once a
prosperous town of 2,000 Christian Arabs and a handful of
Palestinian refugee camps in the Arkoub region of Lebanon,
were subjected to attacks by airplane, artillery, tanks, and
gunboats. Israeli commandos invaded villages and camps
alike, "forcibly checking identifications, blowing up
houses, killing villagers, and taking prisoners."50 Still, certain American
newspapers called this tragedy-the forerunner to the
Lebanese civil war-a lesson that should serve as "an
ultimatum to the Lebanese government to rid themselves of
the Palestinians within their midst."
It was very obvious that the "lords of
the press" were not interested in striking an equal balance
by reporting these as "atrocities" as they had so labeled
Ma'alot. In the face of the Israeli aerial onslaught on
innocent Lebanese and Palestinian refugees, all that the New
York [388] [389] Times would do was to administer another
mild slap to the Israel wrist and ask for "a determined show
of restraint on both sides":
The fully justified anger and determination
of Israel to resist terrorist assaults that have caused 49
deaths, mostly among children in ten weeks, nevertheless
affords no sound basis for resort to counterterror from the
air, especially when such indiscriminate tactics, also
involving the death of many innocents, have repeatedly
proved ineffective. In the present context, the Israeli
response is especially unfortunate since it directly
serves the Palestinian extremists' objectives.51 [Italics added.J
The principal concern of the Times was that the Israeli
savagery was counterproductive.
Unmatched continued Israeli and U.S.
Zionist-induced media hysteria over the thirty-eight victims
of the March 11, 1978, Palestinian raid served as a cover
for Begin's retaliatory blitzkrieg into southern Lebanon.
First reports two days later in the New York Post mentioned
250 deaths and 100,000 refugees.52 In Saturday's New York Times,
Marvine Howe quoted "reports" of 100,000 refugees. In fact,
there were some 260,000 refugees and approximately 2000
deaths. For noting that "apparently a dead woman in Lebanon
is not worth as much as a dead woman in Israel, "Jimmy
Breslin of the New York Daily News was bitterly assailed,
and the next week an entire Sunday letters column was
devoted to ten angry writers tearing him to pieces.
Two Times editorials flayed "the
senseless terror against Israel" and averred that, "beyond
messages of condolence," the world "owes Israelis sympathy
and partnership in measures to punish terrorism on every
front,"53 and as late
as May 7 correspondent William Farrell was writing about the
"terrorist rampage in the March carnage. James Wechsler's
front and editorial pages in the Post alternately spared no
language in attacking the Palestinian raiders, bemoaned the
"lost peace," and then gloried with across-the-page
headlines: "Guerrillas Routed In All-Out Retaliation."54 As the air bombardment
of fleeing innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians
continued, the Times referred to the "justified Lebanese
retaliation."55
The Washington Post carried an AP
picture of a machine-gunned car and reported the ambushing
at Aadloun by Israeli commandos of two taxi-loads of Tibnine
villagers. According to reporter Jonathan Randal, "one taxi
was riddled with machine-gun bullets, the other hit by the
fin of a rocket with Hebrew lettering on it. As many as 20
villagers-most of them women and children-were killed.
"56 Marvine Howe of
the Times simply reported that fifteen civilians had been
killed and two wounded in circumstances that were
"unclear,"57 while
the Daily News briefly referred to an AP report of civilian
deaths. The Time correspondent described the "ghastly" sight
of the taxis, noting that fourteen in all had been
slaughtered. Correspondent Dean Brelis referred to the
"indiscriminate" bombing of the port city of Tyre, where,
with the exception of one Palestinian anti-aircraft gun, "no
military target had been hit. . . What had been hit, and
hard, was the civilian dwellings. Was this deliberate
counter-terrorism on the part of the Israelis? It certainly
looked that way."58
Nothing of this was even hinted at in the Times or other
U.S. dailies. And the State Department, which had quickly
condemned what it called "a brutal act of terrorism against
Israeli civilians," refused to issue any censure of Israel
for its invasion of Lebanon.
During an Israeli air bombardment of
Lebanon the previous November in which more than 100
civilians were killed, a man in his sixties, as told by an
American newsman, "lost everyone he had in the world at
Hazziyeh - his wife, six children, his brother, his
brother's wife, his brother's four children. Numbed by
grief, he walked like a robot around a Palestinian Red
Crescent hospital near Tyre. He knelt among the bodies of
his family, crouched over the dirty mutilated face of his
smallest son, kissed him and said, 'Darling, go. It doesn't
matter, God is great.' "59
This man, if possible, was perhaps more
fortunate than other defenseless parents in unarmed Lebanese
villages and Palestinian refugee camps upon whom, as Thomas
Kiernan describes in the prologue of The Arabs,
American-made Phantoms showered phosphorous bombs made of
wax and acid-wax which stuck to the skin while the acid ate
it away:
A human figure materialized out of the gloom,
an eerie, unintelligible chant issuing from what was once
its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its knees and
crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child-boy or girl I
couldn't tell-and its charred skin was literally melting,
leaving a trail of viscous fluid in its wake. Its face had
no recognizable features. The top of its skull shone through
the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not more
than ten yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps
exposing like the yolks of poached eggs. It twitched once or
twice in the dust, gave a final wheeze, then went still in
the puddle of molten flesh that formed around it in the
dust. . . . Later it was run over by a car. No one would
ever know what had happened to that child.60
While the unparalleled destruction in Lebanon has since
become a recognized fact, only the primary cause remaining
in contention, the total devastation of Quneitra, the
one-time capital of Syria's Golan [390] [391] Heights,
remains one of the world's best-kept secrets.
Under the terms of the Syrian-Israeli
disengagement accord, the return of Quneitra to the Syrians
was the principal quid pro quo for President Hafez
al-Assad's reluctant acceptance of the fruits of Henry
Kissinger's thirty~day shuttling. The southern quarter of
the town, the hills surrounding it on three sides, and the
rich cultivated land east, west, and south-still remained in
Israeli hands, allegedly to protect Israeli settlements in
the Hulah valley. Three Israeli settlements built since
1967, in defiance of U.N. resolutions, lay within four miles
of the town. Without these Israeli settlers in the Golan,
Kissinger might have been able to make a more satisfactory
arrangement. But as one settler in Merom Golan boasted, "By
our very presence we are proving once again the importance
of settlement to Israel. Where we settle, there we shall
remain."61
The Syrian returnees in June 1967 were
greeted by a Hebrew inscription on a demolished wall: "You
wanted Quneitra. You will have it in ruins." This threat was
carried out.
Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the
U.N., after visiting the former capital of the Golan
Heights, remarked: "I was very shocked by what I saw at
Quneitra." For the Soviet Ambassador to Syria, Quneitra
revived memories of Stalingrad at the end of the last war.
And to Father George Muhassal, when he and his flock were
finally permitted to reenter the city, it was Hiroshima all
over again.
In a statement released through the
Near East Ecumenical Bureau in Beirut, this pastor of the
Greek Orthodox Church in Quneitra charged the Israelis with
bulldozing 80 percent of the city and with
desecrating-looting Christian churches and the cemetery just
prior to their withdrawal on June 26: "The concrete tombs
were opened by machine~gun fire and, in some cases, hand
grenades. The bodies were brought outside and systematically
looted. Hands were broken off to get bracelets, teeth with
gold were taken, and parts of the bodies were not put back
in the proper coffins."
Such accusations coming from a priest
of a church in the city might be dismissed as exaggerations.
But Irene Beeson, writing in the Guardian was most explicit
in her description of the systematic Israeli destruction
before leaving. These are the words, as recounted by Beeson,
of one of the ten inhabitants who alone had remained under
the Israeli occupation in 1967:
They had about eleven bulldozers stationed in
the town, but they had to bring in reinforcements to cope
with the huge task. The smaller houses collapsedunder a
single thrust. For the larger two, three and four-story
villas and buildings, they had to build earth ramps so that
the bulldozers could reach the upper floors.
They worked from dawn to dusk for several days
with grim determination and great expertise. It took them
practically a whole day to finish off the three-story house
down the street. Only the houses of the ten Arab inhabitants
who had not fled were intact. Left standing, also, was the
gutted, bullet-ridden 300-bed hospital which the Israelis
used for target practice. One of the town's churches was
destroyed. Others left standing and only slightly damaged
structurally, but had been stripped of everything-marble
facings on the walls, furnishings, precious 4th-century
icons, statues, lamps.
The shell of the Officers' Club is another
landmark. What remains of this wall is riddled with bullet
holes, decorated with sexy murals, insulting and
pornographic graffiti. . . . Generators were removed and
carted away by the Israelis, who made off with all the
town's pumps for drinking and irrigation water. Into the
water reserves and wells the Israelis had poured diesel oil,
petrol and garbage, making good the inscription they had
left behind.62
You can always read what others have to say, but that is
not the same as viewing for yourself, as I did a year later,
the utter emptiness and desolation of Quneitra, a city that
had been bulldozed in its entirety. The tracks of the
machines were still evident everywhere. Smaller houses had
collapsed under a single thrust, while the larger villas and
buildings had obviously been bulldozed in the manner
described by Irene Beeson.
Such dark devastation visited by man
upon man has had few equals. The only signs of life were the
stray, hungry-looking cat streaking across the road and a
few wild red poppies that had sprung up beside the burnt-out
framework of what once had been Quneitra's proud hospital.
To me came a flashback to childhood:
In Flanders Field the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark their place.
My visit to Quneitra was on a cold May afternoon, but the
temperature in no way could match the frigidity of the scene
- dramatized by nearby snow-capped Mount Herman, where so
many fierce aerial battles between the Syrians and the
Israelis had occurred. The approaches to Quneitra were
guarded by the Austrian U.N. peacekeeping force.
This tragedy can best be seen through
neutral eyes. However, despite continued widespread coverage
of violence and terrorism in the U.S. media, there were no
reports on Quneitra. In July 1974 an Australian delegation
comprised of two members of Parliament, two [392] Labor
leaders, two journalists, and the Federal Secretary of the
Young Labor Association visited the Golan Heights. Leader of
the delegation George Petersen wrote an article, "The Town
That Used To Be," for the Australian publication, Nation
Review:
The most striking feature of the Quneitra
buildings is that, in most cases, there are no walls and the
roofs are resting on the ground. How this was done is only
too apparent by the caterpillar tracks on the ground near
the destroyed buildings.63
After describing the conditions he found in the city,
Petersen concluded:
Quneitra was destroyed for the same reasons
that most of the original inhabitants were expelled from
Palestine-because the Zionists intend to take over the land,
expel the original inhabitants and use it for their own
purposes. . . Looking across the cease-fire lines to Ain
Zivan kibbutz in Israel, I know whom I would hate the most
if I were a native of Quneitra. Not the soldiers, not even
the bulldozer operators, but the men, women and children
living on that kibbutz for the benefit of whom and of others
like them the destruction of Quneitra was instituted at an
enormous cost to the native inhabitants. And I know that I
would want to cross the cease-fire line and kill those
usurpers.
In the same publication, many letters from Zionists who
knew nothing whatsoever about Quneitra emotionally reacted
to the Petersen article. In a reply to one of the letters
signed by five persons, Petersen struck back:
When I was at Quneitra on July 5, the
bulldozer tracks were clearly visible. I am puzzled why the
apologists for the Israeli government deny that Quneitra was
destroyed by bulldozers and explosives! The Israeli practice
of bulldozing Arab villages to the ground is well
substantiated in past reports by such impartial parties as
the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Israeli
League for Human and Civil Rights. . . . Why should the
Zionists have made an exception of Quneitra? I would
particularly like your five correspondents to explain how
they justify the forcible eviction to Syria of over 100,000
native inhabitants of the Golan Heights area. Does Israel's
right to exist justify turning the civilian residents into
homeless refugees? Or are your correspondents' concepts of
humanity confined only to people who describe themselves as
"Jews"?
Zionists contend that Quneitra had been destroyed during
the 1967 and 1973 wars rather than methodically bulldozed at
the time of the Israeli withdrawal. But a BBC documentary
film showed Commentator Peter Snow some three or four days
before the Israeli evacuation in a very alive city with many
houses all intact-further proof that the [393] city had been
calculatingly destroyed, house by house, church by church.
Another eyewitness from the Australian
delegation was Stewart West, President of the South Post
Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia.
Under the title "The Destruction of Quneitra," he wrote as
follows:
In most war-damaged cities, you see heaps of
rubble, bomb and shell craters, burned-out buildings, with
walls still standing and sometimes whole streets left
undamaged. But not in Quneitra. The city was completely
destroyed in a couple of days immediately prior to the
Israeli withdrawal on June 25, 1974. Most of the houses were
demolished with explosives or pushed down with bulldozers. .
. . The destruction of Quneitra must be in the same
category as the destruction of ancient Carthage, as the
destruction of European cities by the Huns, and the Mongols,
and with Hiroshima and the Nazi destructions during World
War II. 64
[Italics added.]
Australian trade union newspaper Scope in a
special twenty-eight page supplement of August 1, 1974,
devoted two of its pages to the Quneitra atrocities with a
lead that read: "Syrian city of Quneitra used to be half-way
between the Israeli border and Damascus. In June of this
year, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the last of its houses,
ripped down the last of its trees and orchards and pulled
back up the hills of the Golan Heights." The main piece,
presumably written by Scope's Editor, George Coote,
added in part:
June 26 was days after the disengagement
between Israeli and Syrian troops, and the last Arab house
in Quneitra was destroyed minutes before UN peacekeeping
forces moved in. . . . Quneitra was smashed with dynamite
and bulldozers which made sure nobody would live there
again.... This was a puzzle for the Australian delegation
visiting the city. Did the Quneitra story hit the Australian
media?
The answer to this question and to the query posed by
British journalist Kathleen Evan's contribution to the same
special issue, "Had You Really Heard About Israel's
Genocide?" was identical. Next to nothing had appeared in
Australia and Britain-and nothing in the U.S.-on the story
of a gutted city where nearly 45,000 people once had happily
lived.
Zionist terror also
reached the sidewalks of New York. One Sunday afternoon in
January 1972, the relative stillness of Seventh Avenue was
broken by the angry bellow of voices crying out in unison
"Free Soviet Jews," alternating with "Six Million-Not One
More." Carnegie Hall, where the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra
was performing with stars [394] [395] of the Bolshoi Ballet
and the Bolshoi Opera Company, was under siege. Two busloads
of Mayor John Lindsay's police were keeping an angry
threatening mob from ticket holders who had to pass the
picket lines to enter the famed music hall.
The ugly, tastelessly clad pickets who
were alternately cursing, hissing, and spitting at other
Americans, many of whom were themselves Jews, were members
of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Most of them
were wearing buttons bearing their organizational emblem,
"Never Again," while some had buttons reading "Free Syrian
Jews." One woman in a fur coat had a cloth emblem with the
flags of Israel and the U.S. joined together - symbolizing
the duality of these rabid ultramilitants. And on that
Sunday miscreants of the same ilk were picketing the Syrian
Mission in another section of Manhattan. That evening the
Egyptian Tourist Office at Rockefeller Center was bombed.
And two days later a fire bombing of "unknown origin"
erupted in the offices of impresario Sol Hurok and Columbia
Artists, killing his secretary and injuring many. An
anonymous caller to the Associated Press said: "Cultural
bridges of friendship will not be built over the bodies of
Soviet Jews. Never again." On this occasion the leaders of a
few rival Israelist organizations in muffled voices related
their disapproval to the press. But no action was taken, and
history was being allowed to repeat itself.
The case of Meir Kahane would require a
long examination. All that may be noted here is the way he
has benefited from the imposition of the double standard.
The five-year suspended sentence given him in 1971 after his
admitted manufacture of bombs, harassment of Soviet
diplomats, and acts of violence against American and Arab
citizens was scarcely believable. Only in a Brooklyn
District Court presided over by Judge Jack Weinstein and in
an America under Zionist domination could this have
happened.
In a news conference following the
sentencing, the brazen Rabbi forthrightly disavowed the
court's injunction against further breaches of the peace by
stating that he would use violence if he determined it to be
"necessary." He announced that he would divide his time
between New York and Jerusalem, where he was opening an
international center, and would "maintain dual citizenship
as permitted under Israeli law."
The militant Rabbi vacated the
leadership of the group he founded after his defeat in the
December 1973 Israeli parliamentary elections. The Israeli
government deported him after he and other Israeli militants
were arrested following a Gush Emunim demonstration during
the summer of 1976 in an off-limits Hebron hospital on the
West Bank. Kahane cried out to his followers living in the
nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, which looks down on
the Arab city from a promontory: "This is a Jewish city.
Abraham lived here, and so will we. This is the building
where Jews were murdered by Arabs." The six-columned New
York Times report on page 2 showed a smiling, charismatic
Kahane sitting in an Israeli army truck after his
arrest.65
Upon release from prison in his country
of adoption, Kahane returned to the U.S. to face criminal
charges. Convicted, he kept newly enthralled followers in
line through his arrogant behavior from his "country club
prison," as he used his demand for kosher food and religious
observance to move freely in and out of confinement.
His 1975 book, The Story of the Jewish
Defense League,66 was
reviewed in the Sunday Times book section by Herbert Gold 67
(on the same page as Elie Wiesel was reviewing The Blood of
Israel. The Massacre of the Israeli Athletes), and the
reputedly sensitive novelist referred to Kahane as a "lively
rabbi with a baroque mind" whose "new book, ill-written,
shrill and without nuance, nevertheless gets at a truth
about contemporary Jewish experience which is generally
missed by both the un-Jewish popular mind and the
established Jewish organizations." The reviewer found Kahane
at times "almost lovable," supporting the publisher's jacket
blurb "that militance is and will be necessary to assure the
future physical and spiritual existence of the Jewish
people."
Little wonder that Kahane and his breed
in the JDL, despite an occasional rap on the knuckles, have
been permitted to break the laws, shoot at the innocent,
deface property, and attack with impunity. When Dr. Mohamed
Mehdi of the Action Committee was attacked by JDL members
with a lead pipe in May 1974 and sent to the hospital with a
broken back,68 it
took nearly a year for the police to make an arrest although
a perpetrator appeared on television to boast of the deed.
This same arrogant defiance of the law was manifested in an
ugly attack on me when I lectured February 5, 1975 at
William Patterson College at Wayne, New Jersey, in a
rebuttal to an address made there by former Israeli Foreign
Minister Abba Eban.69
Neither of these incidents received any media attention.
Shortly thereafter, Mehdi's offices on East 44th Street. in
Manhattan were set afire and almost totally gutted. The New
York Times relegated this obviously vicious arson to five
short paragraphs on page 40, referring only to a "suspicious
fire" resulting in "medium damage to office equipment."70 Yet this same newspaper
had often given prominent coverage to the many Mehdi
demonstrations and his often zany statements which did not
put the [396] [397] Palestinian position in the best light.
Frustration and desperation breed
desperation and frustration. The grim reaction to the
devastation suffered by the Palestinians in Jordan in 1970
led to an increase in violence and in the arenas in which
force was applied. There emerged more desperate and
intransigent guerrillas, groups such as the Black September
tied to the internationalist terrorist-revolutionary
movement. The Japanese Red Army, the Bader-Meinhof and other
groups cooperated with Palestinians on whose strong moral
position they drew to achieve their own ends in Europe.
terrorist acts served as a sad reminder that these
Palestinians just would not disappear. As Dr. Elmer Berger,
expressed it:
Right or wrong, the exploits of the
Palestinians stir an Arab world which knows that if the
president of the United States calls them "outlaws," no
power has done more to put these people outside the "law"
than the United States. For no power is as responsible as
the United States for Israel's persistent defiance of the
"law" as it has been inscribed in every international
agreement ever written on the Palestine problem."71
The vilification of Palestinians goes forward without
placing their terrorism in the tragic context of the
struggle for their right of self determination. This refusal
of Western communications media to relate cause to effect
has made the growth of violence inevitable and the ensuing
harrowing conflict in Lebanon unavoidable. The die was first
cast for that lovely country with Israel's December 1968
reprisal attack on the Beirut Airport.
For this double standard the New York
Times must bear a heavy responsibility, riveting so much
attention, as it has, on the subject of terrorism and
refusing (even in a piece "Terrorism or Liberation Struggle?
Violence Begets Many New Nations"72 in which the PLO was discussed but
not a word said about Begin's Irgun) to place any blame on
Israel for the use of violence from the onset of her
successful struggle for "legitimacy," but on every occasion
detailing the rise of the PLO through alleged stages of
terrorism.73
In a June 22, 1974, editorial following
the Palestinian attack on the Israeli border villages of
Kiryat Shemona, Ma'alot, and Shamir 74 in which fifty-one in all had been
killed, the Times placed the responsibility for the
"stepped-up Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli
counterattacks" at the door of "die-hard Palestinian
extremists, infuriated by the rapid erosion of the support
for their intransigent stand among their own people as well
as in Arab capitals... these frustrated fanatics have
resorted to repeated acts of barbarism in a desperate effort
to reverse the accelerating momentum toward accommodation."
(Warned indeed they were, as were all Palestinians, that
there might be a Middle East accommodation that did not take
into consideration their 'inalienable rights.'')
It is the saddest commentary on the
decadence of the world in which we live, that the only way
these people could be heard was to launch repeated terrorist
attacks. Who knew about the Palestinians before Munich? Who
cared one whit about the rights of Palestinians before
Ma'alot? The answer is obvious-no one! There have been
myriad stories about the poor Jewish refugees from
everywhere coming into Israel and building up "the desert,"
but what humanitarian pieces broke into print about the
Palestinians who had been thrown out from their ancient
homes, until they struck and struck hard? And did not
Winston Churchill in his History of the English Speaking
Peoples once write, "It is in the primary right of man to
fight and to kill for the land they live in."75
Parade compounded the Times' felonies
with its own piece: "Terrorists: How They Operate a
World-wide Network" in which it was made to appear that most
terrorism stems solely from the Arab Middle East where "a
gusher of Arab oil money is available" and "President
Qaddafi, an unpredictable Big Daddy, subsidizes terrorism to
the tune of $90 million a year. 76 In an October 1976 interview, "Our
Very Existence Depends on the U.S.," with Parade writer
George Michaelson, Prime Minister Rabin complained that the
media had blown up the West Bank demonstrations. The article
contained the subhead, "An Exaggerated Picture," above
reports of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, together
with a photograph captioned: "Israeli Soldiers Grab West
Bank Rioter."77 But
four months later, an expansive, flattering Michaelson
outpouring on President Sadat (the cover showed the Egyptian
holding a rose) discussed every aspect of war and peace in
the Middle East without the word "Palestine" appearing
once.78 And in two
other articles dealing with the West Bank problem, this
writer further attached the terrorist label to the
Palestinians and dismissed the PLO with an unsubstantiated
blanket statement that "among older, wealthier and more
traditional West Bankers, the PLO's militancy is
suspect."79
Few in the media cared to distinguish
between terror as carried out by private groups or
individuals and terror as executed as part of governmental
policy. Neither the leaders of the Irgun nor of the Stern
Gang had ever been prosecuted by the Israeli government
after the establishment of the state. These terrorist groups
were absorbed into [398] [399] the Israeli army intact as
special units and their leaders elected to the Knesset. And
shortly after he took over as chief of state, Begin issued a
postage stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group had helped
him in the assault on Deir Yassin and had masterminded the
assassination of U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte.
As South Dakota Senator James Abourezk
noted in a speech on the Senate floor prior to the Ma'alot
incident, the village of Kfeir in South Lebanon where his
parents had been born "was bombed by Israeli Phantoms,
fueled by American bombs and American money." In that attack
four civilians had been killed: a six-month-old baby, a
five-year-old and an eight-year~old child, and the mother of
one of the children. Coming two days prior to Ma'alot, the
Israelis could not claim "retaliation." And if ever there
were heartrending de~ails that lent themselves to dramatic
rendition, here they were. But no NBC spectaculars, no New
York Times Sunday magazine or Parade renditions ever sobbed
out this tale.
Senator Fulbright added his comments to
those of his South Dakota colleague, noting that these
persistent attacks cast doubt on Israeli's sincerity for
peace, a capital reason for the U.S. media reticence to
publicize Israeli raids on civilian sites in South Lebanon
and on defenseless refugee camps. The standard Israeli
justification for these raids had invariably been to bomb
"terrorists" who had committed previous acts of violence
against them. Yet the "terrorists" who committed the Ma'alot
atrocity had died at Ma'alot.
Nor had other Israeli "retaliations"
scarcely ever been visited upon those Palestinians who had
perpetrated the provocative raids. Rather, the Israeli
alleged responses" were aimed at eradicating any chance of a
peace settlement according recognition to the Palestinians.
A spiraling sequence of violence and terrorism was hardly
likely to muster the respect from the world the displaced
Palestinians so desperately needed in order to win
acceptance of their rights~rights which, if granted, might
jeopardize the existing character of the Israeli state.
What added insult to injury for the
handful of protesting Senators was that these Israeli raids
had been all carried out with armaments supplied by the U.S.
through a vote of the very legislative body in which they
served. As Senator Abourezk pointedly reminded his
colleagues in the Senate (scarcely reported outside of the
Congressional Record):
If we in the United States are to furnish
Phantom jets, bombs, napalm, fire bombs and money to fuel
the planes when they do the bombing and the killing in
southern Lebanon, then we must be held accountable for the
deaths that will result from what I consider to be official
Israeli Government terrorist activities - no less terrorist
in nature than an act of three of four individual Arabs who
kill civilians in Israel.
Mr. President, this raises one important
question: "Where are the doves in the United States today
who cried and who agonized over the killing in Vietnam - the
killing that was carried out in the very same manner as it
is being done now in souther Lebanon? Where are these people
today who protested that same kind of killing in
Indo-China?"
The answer is obvious, Mr. President: They are
deathly silent and in some cases, those very same doves are
cheering on the Israelis in their bombing raids that result
in the slaughter of so many innocent people. 80
The significance of the role played by the issue of
terror in achieving the Middle East "cover-up" has been
surpassed only by the contribution of the syndrome of
anti-anti-Semitism to the "cover-over," which shall now be
examined.
[End of Chapter]
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