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May 11, 1998[Image]by Andrea Levin
Israel's 50th, the New Historians and NPR
Israel's 50th anniversary with its outpouring of media coverage has
been a numbing reminder of journalism's herd instinct, the tendency
of reporters to imitate one another, repeating the same themes and
citing the same experts. The line on Israel's birthday has been that
this is a time for some limited upbeat appraisal — the Israeli
high-tech sector is extraordinary — but much dour reassessment of
Israel's past.
In this vein many reporters have quoted the "new historians," a
self-styled group of Israeli writers who claim to have exposed the
falsity of Zionist "myths" about the founding of the nation. Israel,
according to writers such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim
and Tom Segev, bears little resemblance to the heroic image purveyed
in history books. For these authors the Zionist enterprise is deeply
flawed, if not rotten at its heart.
They claim, for example: the Jews were not a vulnerable, outnumbered
force in 1948 but a cleverly organized, well-armed military that
overwhelmed weaker opponents; the Jews expelled Palestinian Arabs
from Mandate Palestine in a violent and calculated plan; the Jews
did not face implacable Arab enmity, but passed up promising
opportunities for compromise; Palestinian Jews deliberately turned
their backs on European Jews in the Holocaust. And more.
All these assertions have been systematically examined and refuted
in articles and books by Israeli scholars, including Shabtai Teveth,
Itamar Rabinovich, Efraim Karsh and others, but the media have
lionized the revisionists and their themes and virtually ignored the
refutations and the authorities making them.
In the first weeks of April alone leading up to Israel's birthday,
dozens of articles cited the views of revisionists without any
indication their claims have been discredited. Only one reporter,
Nicholas Goldberg in Newsday, included the rebuttals.
He quoted Efraim Karsh, Chairman of the Mediterranean Studies
Department at Kings College London and author of Fabricating Israeli
History. Karsh's research finds the so-called "new historians" have
manipulated and misrepresented original sources, and in effect
invented a history to suit their current political agenda.
Nowhere were these revisionist writers cited more deceptively than
in an April 9 broadcast on National Public Radio. Correspondent Eric
Weiner devoted a long segment to Deir Yassin, an Arab town overrun
by Jewish forces fifty years ago to the day. Controversy has raged
over whether Arab casualties occurred in the course of a military
operation or as a deliberate massacre.
Although it is clear that Arab forces in Deir Yassin were attacking
Jewish convoys trying to break the siege of Jerusalem, that the Jews
counterattacked trying to dislodge those forces, and that Arab
civilians were killed in the course of the conflict, Weiner offers
not a word about these issues. Instead, in an unabashedly one-sided
presentation he promotes Ilan Pappe's version, that Jews massacred
Arabs there. And he repeats Pappe's outrageous claim that "massacres
were part of a Zionist plan to forcibly expel or kill as many Arabs
as possible."
In a particularly scurrilous segment Weiner interviews an Arab
eyewitness at Deir Yassin who claims the Jews prevented the Red
Cross from treating a badly injured Arab infant whose mother was
dead. The NPR reporter offers no corroboration for the claim, nor
does he challenge the speaker. Though there are Jewish eyewitnesses
who would present the other side, Weiner fails to interview them.
In fact, counter-evidence in the Deir Yassin story has been offered
repeatedly not only by Jewish but by Arab sources. For example, as
the Jerusalem Report noted in an April 2, 1998 article:
In a BBC television series, "Israel and the Arabs: the 50
Year Conflict," Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the
Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948,
describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's
Old City with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian
leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the
Arab Higher Committee (the representative body of the
Arabs of British Palestine).
"I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story,"
recalled Nusseibeh, now living in Amman. "He said, 'We
must make the most of this.' So we wrote a press release
stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered,
pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities."
A Deir Yassin survivor identified as Abu Mahmud, said the
villagers protested at the time. "We said, 'There was no
rape.' [Khalidi] said, 'We have to say this, so the Arab
armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.'"
Weiner, in citing Pappe's crude revisionist history, casts Pappe as
a beleaguered reformer trying — thus far unsuccessfully — to
introduce his enlightened version of history in the Israeli school
system. Unmentioned are Pappe's extremist political agenda as an
activist in the Israeli Communist party and former candidate in the
1996 Knesset elections on the Communist party ticket. The party
platform opposes the Zionist character of Israel and calls for
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of formulas
that would entail the dissolution of Israel.
It is unfortunate that a reporter for National Public Radio should
offer his audience "news" more reminiscent of Hazem Nusseibeh's
self-confessed 1948 propaganda than of responsible journalism.
Speaking at a conference of Arab-Americans a year ago, NPR Foreign
Editor Loren Jenkins assured the audience that 90% of the criticism
received at the network faults the coverage for being "pro-Arab." He
said the complaints are "overwhelming on one side." Needless to say,
Jenkins did not address the bias and distortion in NPR coverage that
are the basis of those complaints.
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Andrea Levin is National President of CAMERA - PO Box 428, Boston,
MA, 02456-0428.
Copyright © 1998 by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America. All rights reserved. This column may be
reprinted without prior permission.
The rest of the world don't have to listen to your side only, and indeed we don't even have to listen to it. As time goes on, more and more people everywhere will be taking this position.
The refugees exist, their existence is continually being made worse, and the day-to-day mistreatment of them is what's feeding the current Intifada, all your pseudo-history aside.