The American people vs. the spinmeisters

Ahmed Bouzid

Polls conducted in July and December, 2000, by Zogby International, found the following: to the question, "Do you agree or disagree that Palestinians have this right to return?", a whopping 74% of participants answered with either strongly agree" (52.1%) or "somewhat agree" (21.9%). That is, 3 out of 4 Americans believe that the Palestinians do have a right to return to their land, and more than one out of two Americans strongly hold that belief.

Treading away from the real world and into the never-never land of the editorial and opinion pages of America's most prestigious newspapers, we discover an altogether different perspective on the Palestinians' right of return.

The New York Times, for example, in its December 27, 2000 editorial, called the idea of Palestinians returning to their home "unrealistic". "A better approach," the Times wrote, "would be to put together an international compensation and resettlement package for these refugees, housing as many of them as practical within the borders of the new Palestinian state." The Times moreover did not flinch from explaining to us why it felt that a Palestinian return was "unrealistic": it "would threaten Israel's character as a Jewish state", the editorial explained, as though there were nothing remarkable about a modern state, and a democracy at that, explicitly pursuing a policy of maintaining a religiously-based "national character"!

The Washington Post, on its part, as always eager to remain competitively on-par with the New York Times in the sport of pro-Israel pamphleteering, has hailed Barak's latest maneuvers as "a remarkable compromise" (Dec. 31, 2000). The Post does not bother to enlighten us on exactly what Barak has compromised on, given that the Prime Minister has not tired of repeating the refrain that he will never cede sovereignty of the Temple Mount, nor will he ever let Palestinian refugees return to their land. All the same, the Post pushes on. In a startling wholesale adoption of Israel's long standing policy of creating facts of the ground, the Post writes, and without a hint of embarrassment, that "the more Jewish settlements in the occupied territories grow, the less flexible Israel will be with land," as though settlements pop up and grow like mushrooms, just like that, all by themselves, rather than with the careful subsidy, supervision and encouragement of the Israeli government. Room for more Jewish settlments does exist, the Post believes, but "millions of Palestinian refugees cannot possibly be accommodated in Israel."

Amos Perlmutter, one of the most ardent mouthpieces of the Israeli Right in the United States, wrote in his December 27, 2000, column in the Washington Times that a Palestinian return to Israeli land "will change the demographic balance of power in Israel and will bring an end to Jewish statehood and to Zionism." Mincing his words not one bit, Mr. Perlmutter wrote: "Zionism was a philosophy of Jewish empowerment. The founding fathers of Israel and their successors up to Mr. Barak were dedicated to preserving the essence of a Jewish state, which means a Jewish majority in Israel." A true enough description of Zionism, but certainly no explanation why the whole world should subscribe to the Zionist ideal. Milosevic tried to argue once, along remarkably similar lines, for the need to maintain his nation's Serbian character, and we all know what that brought him: ridicule, a warrant for his arrest from the Hague, and the eventual collapse of his criminal regime.

Putting the matter in equally inflammatory terms, Yossi Klein Halevi of the New Republic wrote on The Los Angeles Times (Jan. 4th) that "the right of return is a euphemism for the destruction of Israel through demographic assault." George Will, another irredentist scribe well known for his unyielding pro-Israeli stands, managed to outdo even himself, when he wrote in the January 2 issue of Newsweek that "acknowledging a 'right of return' would be, for Israel, demographic suicide." In fact, damning the torpedoes, George Will went ahead and took out the precious (and yet often used) Holocaust card, by concluding his essay with: "Pessimists are realists who worry that, for the portion of world Jewry gathered in Israel, history may have saved its worst for last."

And even Richard Cohen, usually a vigorous voice against any form of racism or discrimination, simply threw up his hands -- and his principles -- in his column of January 4, where he wrote: "Israel cannot remain a Jewish state if about 4 million Palestinians are given the right to live there."

The American people have always stood in sympathy with Israel. In the Zogby poll mentioned above, those who identified themselves as sympathetic with the Israelis outnumbered those who said they were sympathetic with the Palestinians by a margin of 3 to 1. And yet, in spite of their bias in favor of Israel, average Americans have been consistently able to overcome that bias and have courageously stood on principle by agreeing that Palestinians indeed do have a right to return. If only America's opinion spinners could display such moral courage and such humane wisdom!

email: ahmed_bouzid@yahoo.com
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