For 53 years, Israel’s enemies in the Arab world and elsewhere have used any excuse they could find, real or imaginary, to defame the Jewish state. Some of these have been obvious anti-Semitic fabrications, like claims that Israeli aircraft were dropping poisoned candy on Palestinian children (reported in the Jerusalem Post, May 23, 2001).
But other lies along this line seem to be worming their way into reputable journalistic commentary. Some Milwaukee news media have recently presented subtle yet harmful insinuations that U.S. support for Israel — particularly providing Israel with weapons — and the Arab/Muslim world’s “deep feelings for the plight of the Palestinians” are behind the pervasive dislike and even hatred of this country that was made manifest in the Sept. 11 terror attacks against it.
In this context, it is hard to say whether these insinuations arise from ignorance or ill-will. If the problem is ignorance, then the cure is accurate information, such as the following:
• The U.S. government, including the present Bush administration, has never been an uncritical or blind supporter of Israel. The entire history is beyond retelling here; suffice it to say for now that after Sept. 11 Israel initially worried whether the Bush administration would push Israel and its concerns aside in its effort to build a Muslim coalition against Al-Qaida. Not until the recent wave of Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel began did the Bush administration really begin to understand Israel’s plight.
Criticizing the U.S. for providing Israel with weapons is, at generous best, disingenuous. Israel’s five million Jews live in a region of hundreds of millions of Arabs most of whom want Israel destroyed. That millions of Arabs and Muslims don’t like to see Israel armed only indicates that they would prefer to see Israel defenseless and easier to destroy. The use of these weapons to defend against suicide bombers and other terrorists is morally no different from using those weapons against the threat of invading armies, especially when the terrorists and armies have the same goals in mind.
• Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida organization are latecomers to the Palestinian cause. Bin Laden began issuing pro-Palestinian statements after Sept. 11 to try to attract Arab and Muslim support. In his weekly “Myths & Facts Online — A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Mitchell G. Bard cites an Arab authority as saying “Al-Qaida never linked anything to Palestine” in the literature it has produced for some seven years before Sept. 11.
Moreover, a recent New York Times article pointed out that most of the known operatives who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks had lived in Europe and turned to Islamic extremism because they were ill-equipped to deal with their experiences there. Israel and the Palestinians, much less the U.S., had nothing to do with that.
• The Arab/Muslim world’s “deep feelings for the plight of the Palestinians” are at worst bogus and at best selective. It has long been known that most of the Arab and Muslim countries surrounding Israel (Jordan is the big exception) have refused to resettle Palestinians or allow improvements to be made in the refugee camps in their borders.
Egypt and Jordan when they controlled the Gaza Strip and West Bank, respectively (1948-1967), made no effort to create a state for the Palestinians there. Even critics of Israel have acknowledged that the monarchs and dictators who rule nearly every Muslim country have used the Palestinian cause to distract their own populations from domestic problems while seldom doing anything substantive to ameliorate the “plight of the Palestinians.”
None of this information is secret, however. We can’t answer the question of why it keeps being omitted or downplayed in so many reports and commentaries in U.S. news media. All we can do is keep ourselves informed about the realities and never allow such distortions to go unchallenged.
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