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Epiphany at Beit Jala
They denied confiscating Palestinian land, although new settlements were going up all the time in the occupied areas. They claimed the Palestinians were far better off economically than they would have been under Jordanian rule, although the sorry state of Palestinian villages displayed desperate poverty. They insisted the military government of the occupation respected Palestinians' rights, although increasing numbers of arrests in the middle of the night without charge or trial told a different story. So too did the blowing up of Palestinian houses and the forceful exiling of others who were deposited by their captors in the Jordanian desert or the mountains of Lebanon. They even insisted that security forces acted only to keep the peace, although it seemed to me the fatal incidents were increasing. Hardly a week seemed to go by without another killing, six in one memorable day that became known as Land Day. But nobody seemed to be counting or care. Such contradictions put a reporter in a particularly awkward situation. Lacking documentation or credible witnesses, a reporter is hard put to challenge the official word of a government. The difficulty was greatly compounded by the lack of documentation or reliable information about the occupation itself, which was still less than a decade old. In fact, looking back it is hard to believe how little had been published up to the mid-1970s on the Israeli-Palestinian aspect of the conflict going back to the turn of the century. As far as I knew, there was almost no objective research on the Palestinians available to the general public. The Journal of Palestine Studies had only begun publishing several years earlier and I was not yet aware of the level of its scholarship or the reliability of its research, nor was it popular reading in Israel. What was printed in English for the most part reflected the Zionist view. The prevailing picture in America of the Israelis was that of heroic pioneers right out of the Paul Newman movie “Exodus” depicting the struggle as against fanatical Arabs and an inhospitable desert, which through their hard labors they made bloom. Menachem Begin and his clique of terrorists were largely ignored or explained away as a lunatic fringe group. Israel was, the Zionists proclaimed, a "light unto the nations." The Palestinians were lumped with the general mass of Middle East Arabs and denied status as a separate people—in Golda Meir's memorable words, they "did not exist." Without hard documentation and credible witnesses, these stereotypes were almost impossible to shatter. This was so even though my eyes confirmed for me every day they were cartoons of reality. Yet I could not completely shed the stereotypes, not in my own thinking, much less in stories fit to print. Ultimately my breakthrough to reality was aided enormously by an unexpected source, the United Nations. Since the 1967 occupation, the General Assembly had become unusually active in challenging Israel's practices and affirming the rights of the Palestinians. Resolutions passed by the General Assembly over the years affirmed the Palestinians' status as a separate people with "inalienable rights," including the right of self-determination and the right to struggle for their freedom. I have to admit that these resolutions had mainly escaped my notice. In part this was because of my involvement in other assignments, but largely I believe because Israel had been so successful in its efforts to discredit the United Nations among Americans. Zionists hated the U.N., charging it was prejudiced. In fact, it was the only major institution that actually knew what was going on in the occupied territories and dared to speak out. Israel's reaction was not to change its occupation practices but instead to undermine the credibility of the United Nations itself. In this, of course, it was helped by the many other foes of the world body, but Israel's contribution should not be underestimated. By the mid-1970s, the United Nations had essentially ceased to be taken very seriously by the American media. Interestingly, although Israel lost no chance to denigrate the United Nations, Israel itself did take it seriously. As a result, whatever the United Nations did received prominent and critical attention in Israel. My exposure to what was going on in the United Nations opened up a documentary record on which I could rely. Israeli scorn of the U.N. turned into rage towards the end of 1975 when the General Assembly passed a resolution saying that Zionism was a "manifestation of racism and racial discrimination." The United States and Israel strongly condemned the single-line statement in the resolution and declared they would never acknowledge it. (In fact, the United States, prodded by Israel, managed to get it rescinded in 1991.) The resolution was no surprise to me since numerous Israelis had left no doubt to me that Christians, Muslims and other non-Jews were not welcome in the Jewish state. But passage of the resolution provoked me to ponder the broader implications of the exclusive nature of a Jewish state—as opposed to a democracy open to all. It had a powerful influence on my evolving attitude toward Israel. There were other events that aided my education. One was a rare divergence by the State Department from Israeli policy around the time of the U.N. racism resolution. The State Department publicly declared that the "heart of the conflict" in many ways was the Palestinian dimension, adding: "The legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiating of an Arab-Israeli peace."
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