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Epiphany at Beit Jala
It was two decades ago when I first arrived in Israel. Like many Westerners, and I suppose like most Americans at the time, I was something of an unwitting Zionist in my sympathies. If I did not embrace Israel's history of expansionism, I did not necessarily reject it either. I believed that the Jews deserved a secure state of their own, as the Nazi holocaust had proved, and it followed that Israelis had a right to look out for their own safety. This included Israel's continuing occupation of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in Jerusalem and the other territories captured by Israel in 1967. Even after eight years, the occupation was being described by Zionists as the "most benign in history" and the American media had little hesitancy in repeating that claim. As a strong believer in human rights, I wasn't comfortable with such a facile slogan. I didn't believe any occupation could be less than evil, a blasphemy against freedom and democracy and ultimately corrupting of the occupiers. But, if an exception existed, I assumed a case could be made for Israel's special needs. Palestinian rights had never been of high concern to the media or most Americans, especially in the Congress and the White House. Moreover, the Palestinians themselves had shown little talent for making their own case. Their prevailing image abroad was as hijackers of airliners and terrorists at Munich and elsewhere. I was unaware of any credible record of Israeli abuses and the Palestinians seemed incapable of producing one. In the circumstances, the occupation was troubling, but a distant subject for me. Of more immediate concern was the strategic contest with the Soviet Union. The Cold War and the Israeli-Arab wars—as opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—dominated the world's attention. The repercussions from the 1973 war were continuing to shake the region. The memory of the nuclear alert declared by Washington at the end of that war was still stark, causing more than theologians to talk seriously about Armageddon. Henry Kissinger was still shuttling through the region, the ballyhooed "Superman" who had already achieved disengagement agreements between Israel and its two most powerful neighbors, Egypt and Syria—the Soviets' friends. More than at any time before, the United States was being directly drawn into the Middle East. It was one of the top foreign stories of the year. It never occurred to me at the time how advantageous it was to Israel to portray its problems as arising from a fight against international communism rather than a local issue focused on the dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland. This was the rough outline of my mindset when Time magazine sent me to Israel in January 1975. Although I had been a reporter for more than twenty years and seen my share of the world, I had never worked in the Middle East. My attitude toward the region reflected pretty much the pro-Israel biases of the media and of Americans in general, unleavened by history or sophistication about Zionism. I was particularly admiring of Israel's army and its stunning six-day conquests of 1967 at a time when massive American forces were bogged down in Vietnam. With such sympathies, it did not sound strange or offensive to my ears when just before I flew off to Israel a colleague of mine at Time whom I knew as a decent man said: "Don't let the ragheads get you." He laughed and I laughed, neither of us feeling like a racist. It was clear who the good guys were. And in a way the warning was fitting. Most American correspondents, including Time's, in that period were isolated. Reporters assigned to Israel were confined to the Jewish state and reporters in Beirut or Cairo covering the Arab world could not travel to Israel without losing access to the Arab countries they covered. It was a practical necessity, but an unhealthy arrangement, limiting the reporters' exposure to only one side and by implication making them advocates to some unintended extent. It was only later that a discerning chief of correspondents, Murray Gart, finally decided that the two chiefs of bureau in the Middle East had to have a chance to exchange views. He provided a budget for me and Cairo correspondent Wilton Wynn, one of America's most insightful reporters on the Arab world, to meet every six weeks or so on neutral ground such as Nicosia or Athens. These meetings were invaluable. They allowed us to exchange ideas that greatly contributed to insights and understandings about this most complex confrontation. Under Wilton's tutoring I began to grasp some of the complexities of the conflict and, more important, the subtleties, too.
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