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July 15, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
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July
15, 2002
The History of Anti-Palestinian
Bias from Wilson to Bush
The Image Problem
by Kathleen Christison
A few years ago, I had the temerity to write to
David McCullough, the biographer of Harry Truman, to tell him
I thought he was wrong about an aspect of Truman's character.
I had seen McCullough on a C-SPAN rebroadcast of a talk on Truman.
Speaking about the recognition of Israel in 1948, McCullough
emphasized his belief that the reason Truman had persevered in
recognizing the new state of Israel despite the opposition of
many in his administration was that his high moral values would
not permit any other course. Truman, McCullough said, simply
had to "do the right thing" by rescuing the
Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and giving them a state
in Palestine, and his courage in standing up to the naysayers
clearly demonstrated his strength of character.
What I wrote to McCullough is that Truman's
stubbornness seemed to me to show the strength of his convictions
but not the strength of his character--that he did indeed
"do the right  thing" by helping Jews
after the Holocaust, but he did not "do it the right way."
The right way would not have involved displacing another entire
population--the Palestinians who lived on the land Truman helped
give away. Yet there is no evidence that Truman ever showed
concern for this part of his moral project on behalf of Israel.
McCullough was nice enough to write back.
He said he thought Truman had not been malicious but had simply
lacked understanding, and in a revealing remark, he acknowledged
that Truman "just didn't know enough about [the Palestinians]
and their situation"--which he said, quite accurately, is
still true of most Americans. "The great shame," he
wrote, "is that a reasonable discussion of the subject remains
so difficult to achieve in any public way."
Which brings me to my point: Reasonable
discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and particularly
of the Palestinian perspective, has always been "so difficult
to achieve in any public way," and since the days of Woodrow
Wilson immediately after World War I, this has been as true of
policymakers as it has of ordinary citizens and the media. There
has been much evolution in U.S. policy on the Palestinian issue
over the years, but one reality has held true consistently: every
president in the last 85 years, since World War I, has tried
to one degree or another to ignore the Palestinian issue in the
hope that it would somehow go away--that someone else would resolve
it, or that it could be swept under some rug, or that the Palestinians
would just not air their grievances.
But by ignoring the issue--by studiously
not knowing what the Palestinians' real grievances have been
all these years--the United States has kept the conflict going,
and escalating, for over half a century. By not understanding
and taking into account the Palestinian perspective equally with
the Israeli perspective and assuming that Palestinians are motivated
simply by hatred of Jews rather than by the fact of their expulsion
and flight from Palestine, the United States has actually created
the conditions that have led to most, or perhaps all, of the
region's wars.
Public thinking and public perceptions,
such as the one David McCullough propounded about the morality
of Israel's creation, have had a profound effect on the making
of U.S. policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since World
War I. Perceptions have a far greater impact, in fact, than
do actual realities on the ground. Malcolm Kerr, the late scholar
of the modern Arab world, wrote in 1980 that the conventional
wisdom on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was based on a fundamental
misperception that tended to skew all policymaking. The
perception was that Palestinian national claims were "artificially
and mischievously inspired" and thus could be ignored.
Everyone--ordinary citizens and policymakers alike--had come
to assume, Kerr said, that Arabs simply hated Jews and unreasonably
refused to accept Israel's existence, and that this was the ultimate
cause of the conflict. Virtually no one any longer remembered
that the Palestinians had been dispossessed in 1948 and that
this, not unreasoned hatred for Jews, lay at the heart of the
conflict. The Palestinians' dispersal had become what Kerr called
"an unrecognizable episode." Even policymakers had
forgotten it and forgotten that this was where the root of Palestinian
grievances lay.
Some things have changed by now, almost
two decades after Kerr wrote this. Palestinians were hardly
known among the general public in 1980, and almost nowhere were
they accepted as having any legitimate stake in the peace process
or any legitimate territorial claim. That has changed. But
the policymaking frame of reference that Kerr spoke of--which
attributed legitimacy to Israel but not to the Palestinians,
which approached peace negotiations and policymaking in general
from an Israeli perspective--this mindset is still very much
with us. Not only does the fact of Palestinian dispossession
in 1948 remain "an unrecognizable episode," but the
fact of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East
Jerusalem is now a new "unrecognizable" reality--mentioned
rarely by the media, even more rarely by policymakers. And Israel
still enjoys overwhelming predominance in U.S. policy considerations,
a reality magnified under the Bush administration.
The basic set of assumptions that has
governed policymaking on this issue is an enveloping blanket
of tightly knit impressions, perceptions, and fixed ideas that's
virtually impossible to unravel. It did not all just start in
1948; it is not a matter only of a very strong pro-Israel lobby;
it's not only the influence of a very manipulative media. These
are all part of it, but the frame of reference through which
policymakers have always shaped policy began to develop well
before 1948, and it's a much broader phenomenon than just skillful
lobbying or media misinformation. The entire process has been
cumulative. I want to emphasize that point: no one event, no
one trend in public thinking, no one policymaker brought this
frame of reference into existence.
So let me trace the cumulative nature
of this frame of reference or mindset. American impressions
and stereotypes of Arabs began to take shape in the 19th century.
This was a period in which travel to Palestine became immensely
popular, not only for scholars in many fields but for ordinary
citizens wanting to retrace Christ's footsteps in the Holy Land.
Travel writing flourished, adventurers toured the speaking circuit
to talk about their experiences, missionaries returned to preach
to their congregations. The word got around widely--and virtually
all of them conveyed extremely negative images of the Arabs they
encountered. Then, when Zionism emerged around the turn of the
century, it seemed wholly appropriate to an America steeped in
biblical teachings that Jews should return to the Holy Land.
This notion was given added impetus by the prevalent view that
Arabs and Muslims were somehow alien to that land and were inferior
human beings in any case--warlike and barbaric and not fit to
associate with civilized Westerners.
This kind of thinking had a inevitable
impact on policymakers of the early 20th century--including Woodrow
Wilson, the first president who made a policy decision on Palestine,
by endorsing the Balfour Declaration, and Franklin Roosevelt,
who followed along because supporting Zionism was already part
of the mindset. It's no accident that, after a century of denigration
of the Arabs, the only arguments about Palestine that these presidents
found convincing were those from the Zionist side.
By the time of Harry Truman, the mindset
had been cast in concrete. The immense sympathy throughout the
U.S. for the Jews after the Holocaust, on top of everything that
had gone before, made the establishment of Israel a virtual inevitability.
After this had been accomplished, literally everyone--including
the State Department people who had initially opposed Israel's
creation--fell into line, and the notion that Israel was a political
fact became part of the mindset.
Not surprisingly, the Palestinians disappeared
from the political radar screen in the United States altogether
after 1948 and remained off for two decades. This was a period
in which Israel's image was vastly enhanced, while the Palestinians,
not constituting a state and sunk in political oblivion, were
at a crippling disadvantage. When they were thought of at all
in Washington, it was only as refugees--an issue to which each
administration from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson paid less
and less attention.
Two trends in public thinking in the
1960s tipped the scales against the Palestinians even further.
One was the revival of interest in the Holocaust because of
the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. The trial brought
out the horrors of the Holocaust again and had a truly electrifying
effect on American public opinion. The Holocaust was written
about and discussed by intellectuals, including primarily Elie
Wiesel, and it was portrayed in popular books and movies, principally
Leon Uris's book and movie Exodus, which had an immense
influence on an entire generation of Americans. In all of this,
not only did Israel gain added sympathy and affection, but in
a kind of zero-sum effect, every notch up in the Israeli image
produced a notch down in the Arab image. Friends of Israel laid
out for the public a kind of continuum of Jewish suffering, and
Arabs were assigned the role of latter-day Hitlers, still trying
to exterminate Jews. When the 1967 war broke out--the second
of these major events of the '60s--many people saw it as a concerted
Arab attempt to continue Hitler's work and genuinely feared that
Israel was facing another Holocaust.
All of this had a profound effect on
policymakers. Lyndon Johnson already harbored all the stereotypical
notions of Arabs, and he felt a special affinity for Israel--to
such an extent that one adviser described him as having "Jewish
corpuscles in his blood." He had many friends, inside and
outside government, who were fervent supporters of Israel, who
vacationed with him at his Texas ranch and had constant access
to him to talk in an informal and emotional way about their concerns
for Israel. The Palestinians didn't have a chance. There was
no possible way to bring the Arab or Palestinian viewpoint to
the attention of policymakers in this environment. Then the
Palestinians compounded this in the late '60s and early '70s
by launching a campaign of international terrorism. This did
serve to bring them to public attention and out of oblivion,
but of course it also severely damaged their already abysmal
image.
1967 brought a profound change, not just
because it so vastly enhanced Israel's image in the U.S., but
chiefly because it fundamentally redefined the conflict by further
obscuring its real origins and the Palestinians' real grievances.
Policymakers who had long since forgotten anyway that the basis
of the entire Arab-Israel conflict lay in the Palestinians' displacement
in 1948, now focused on whether and how to resolve the territorial
issues created by the '67 war. Those who had never wanted to
acknowledge what was at the heart of the conflict could now divert
all attention to the issue of the occupied territories.
What this cumulative build-up of a frame
of reference totally focused on Israel meant is that the more
the Palestinians did to bring themselves to world attention,
the more strenuously the United States tried to ignore them.
In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger was so nonplussed at the notion
of having to legitimize the Palestinians by talking to them that
he ignored several overtures from Yasir Arafat that might have
been productive had they been explored. In the later '70s Jimmy
Carter was completely hamstrung--by political pressures and lobby
pressures and media criticism--in his attempts to pursue an opening
to the Palestinians and bring them into peace negotiations.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, who regarded the Palestinian problem
as just another of history's "running sores," as he
put it, that should be left to Israel to handle, created a policy
so unquestioningly pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian that he followed
Israel's lead virtually everywhere, underwriting a vast consolidation
of Israeli control over the West Bank and overseeing a campaign
by his political allies to deny Palestinian nationalism altogether.
Perceptions of the Palestinians and the
total Israeli focus of the general American mindset began to
change after Reagan. The first intifada gained the Palestinians
a great deal of sympathy in the United States and forced Israel
at least to start on the road to peace talks. These factors,
combined with the clear evidence the Palestinians gave, through
the PLO's acceptance of the two-state formula in 1988, that they
were ready to live in peace alongside Israel, forced U.S. policymakers
to begin thinking of the Palestinians for the first time as a
national entity with a stake in Palestine and in the peace process.
But it's now easy to see in retrospect that these changes wrought
a dozen years ago were not nearly enough to alter the basic mental
framework through which the Palestinian issue has always been
viewed.
As a result, even though the U.S. does
now recognize the Palestinians as legitimate participants in
the peace process, it is still second nature always to follow
Israel's lead, letting Israel set the starting point, the pace,
and the agenda of any move toward peace. This characterized
policymaking in the Clinton years and has intensified in the
current Bush administration. Clinton's failure, despite an intensive
effort, to bring the peace process to a successful conclusion
at Camp David in July 2000 and during the six months that followed
was directly attributable to this pursuit of Israel's agenda.
There's an irony here in the fact that Clinton had established
closer ties with Palestinians than any previous president. But,
at bottom, he had no deep understanding of what drove Palestinians,
of what their grievances were, of what the occupation meant to
their daily lives and to their national aspirations. His overriding
focus on Israel was part of his upbringing, part of his mindset.
The Clinton team purported to adopt a
position of strict neutrality, never taking a position on the
issues under negotiation in the belief that the parties should
be left to their own devices to work out a mutually acceptable
solution. But in a situation in which Israel was the vastly
stronger side, with physical control over all the territory under
negotiation, and the Palestinian side had no way other than verbal
argument to advance its position, a hands-off approach by the
United States as mediator obviously heavily favored Israel.
Clinton's false neutrality gave Israel a free hand to negotiate
or refuse to negotiate according to its own needs and to take
whatever steps it deemed necessary for its own security, no matter
how these impeded further negotiations.
Throughout eight years of peacemaking,
Clinton and his advisers removed the idea of "occupation"
altogether from the political vocabulary of the conflict. As
a result, they lost sight themselves, and most Americans lost
sight, of the most basic issue in the conflict today. The Bush
administration suffers from the same myopia. Although they do
occasionally refer to the "occupation," Bush policymakers
are no more aware of what the occupation involves for the Palestinians
than the Clinton team was.
Bush, it's clear, has set himself up
as distinctly different from Clinton--as sort of the "un-Clinton"--and
he is obviously very different in many ways. This is
particularly so in the influence the large group of neoconservatives
in his administration have on policymaking, particularly in the
Defense Department and on the various White House staffs, as
well as the influence Christian fundamentalists exert. But in
a very real sense, Bush has taken his cue from Clinton and pursues
a policy virtually identical to his predecessor's. Bush inherited
a mindset from Clinton that placed the entire burden of blame
on the Palestinians for the collapse of the peace process, and
as a result Bush policymakers fail to see any legitimacy in the
Palestinian position. They show no understanding of the grievances
that sparked the intifada, and no interest at all in the Palestinian
perspective on the conflict. Only by ignoring the Palestinians
in this way is it possible for Bush to hail Sharon as a "man
of peace" at the very moment that Sharon is destroying the
entire infrastructure of Palestinian society.
Today, perhaps more than at any time
in the past, the political culture in the United States makes
it almost impossible for policymakers to gain a balanced view
of the conflict. The events of September 11 and their aftermath
militate against any serious reassessment of where the Palestinian-Israeli
issue stands; the domestic political risks of confronting Israel
are almost overwhelming; sympathy for Israel is high; pressures
on policymakers from supporters of Israel inside and outside
government and in Congress are intense; and the media, which
ultimately create the atmosphere in which ordinary citizens and
policymakers alike form their most basic impressions, have shown
a higher degree of vicious anti-Palestinian bias than at any
time since the 1970s, and maybe ever.
There has never been much room in American
political discourse, at any level, for the Palestinian perspective.
But after years in which the Palestinians had begun to be accepted
by public opinion as legitimate participants in the peace process,
the extent and intensity of the poisonous atmosphere in the wake
of the intifada and of September 11 are startling. The United
States has always been blind, and is today even more blind, to
the Israeli occupation as the root of the present conflict and
therefore refuses to accept the Palestinian perspective on the
conflict as having any merit. As always from the beginning,
Palestinians and their concerns are essentially invisible to
U.S. policymakers.
In the end, what has this singular U.S.
focus on the Israeli perspective meant, for the Palestinians
and for the Middle East in general? The failure to take the
Palestinian perspective into account, I believe, has perpetuated
the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, at every step along the way.
In every war in the last half century, including the 1948 war,
you can point to a U.S. failure to anticipate, or to understand
the issues involved, or to probe openings that might have prevented
conflict. And this has generally always been because we looked
at the problem with one eye closed. If anything, this inclination
is intensifying under President Bush, and this does not bode
well for the future.
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political
analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with
the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before
resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance
writer, dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Her book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,"
was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband Bill,
also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the CounterPunch
website.
Other CounterPunch articles by Bill and
Kathleen Christison:
Bill Christison: Disastrous Foreign
Policies
of the US Part 3: What Can We Do About It?,
July 8, 2002
Kathleen Christison: The Story
of Resolution 242, How the US Sold Out the Palestinians,
June 28, 2002
Kathleen Christison:
Israel
and Ethics, May 11, 2002
Bill Christison: The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States,
May 10, 2002
Kathleen Christison: Before There
Was Terrorism, May 2, 2002
Bill
Christison: Oil and the Middle East, April
6, 2002
Bill
Christison:
Why
the War on Terror Won't Work,
March 5, 2002
Today's Features
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
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