Americans Still Blind to Israel's Domination of Palestinians
When Stephen
Colbert looks at people he doesn't see skin color. He treats everyone equally
because everyone is equally white to him. In the same way, Joseph Kahn, foreign
editor of the New York Times, sees no
difference between Israelis and Palestinians. When it comes to covering the
U.S. - supervised talks between the two neighbors, the Times treats both sides with scrupulously fair equality, Kahn
insists.
Of course
Colbert's "color blindness" is a joke, meant to remind us that it's
absurd to treat the historically powerful and powerless as if they were equal.
But when the Times' editor insists on his even-handedness he is apparently dead
serious.
When it comes to
the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, at least, the Times is still the flagship of the U.S. mass media, charting the
course that most others follow. Even if the Israelis were all white and the
Palestinians all black, our mass media would remain strictly color blind. How
else could they achieve their constant goal of neutrality, the key to objective
reporting?
I trust you get
the Colbertian joke. Israel has been dominating the Palestinians ever since it
conquered their territories in 1967. It would be crude to say that it's just
like the way white Americans have dominated black Americans over the centuries.
There are vast differences. But there is also a very rough analogy here.
At least it's an
exaggeration that points to a crucial truth: In this case, as in so many
others, neutrality cannot be the key to objectivity because it ignores an
immense inequity of power. When the powerful meet the powerless, journalists
must always keep that inequity front and center if they want their reporting to
be anything close to objective.
Yet the U.S.
mass media do just the opposite. Their reporting on the Israel-Palestine
interaction is an endless litany of "he said, she said; he said, she
said," constantly reinforcing the mistaken impression that the two sides
are equals in something like a fair fight.
Consider the
latest impasse in the talks. The Israelis had promised to release a number of
Palestinians they had imprisoned for the "crime" of fighting for
their own nation's independence. No doubt some had used, or planned to use,
violent means -- imitating the American revolutionaries of 1776 whom our
national mythology holds up as heroes. Others, like many Americans during the
Revolutionary War, had done no violence but were imprisoned in arbitrary
roundups.
In return, the
Palestinians had promised not to join any international organizations or sign
on to international treaties.
Israel reneged
on its promise to release the prisoners and rubbed salt in the wound by announcing
700 new apartments for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian
Authority responded by signing 15 international conventions and treaties,
including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Hague Convention respecting the
Laws and Customs of War, and treaties dealing with women's and children's
rights.
Yet the official
U.S. government response treated both the Israeli and Palestinian actions as
equally "unhelpful" acts. The U.S. media was similarly even-handed at
best -- depicting both steps as equally damaging to the peace process -- or,
like the Times, put more blame on the
Palestinian move.
So Palestinian
commitment to international laws of peace and justice was framed as something
evil, just as bad as or worse than Israel expanding its illegal housing and imprisoning
rebels who were fighting (or wrongly accused of fighting) for their nation's
right to be free.
That's what
happens when you are politically color-blind.
In a sense, American
political leaders, media, and most of the public really are blind to the difference
between Israeli and Palestinian actions. They are so sympathetic to Israel, and
so antipathetic to Palestine, that they don't see Israel's dominance over
Palestinian life as a form of brute oppression. So they don't see Palestinian
reactions as an understandable -- and, in recent years, quite restrained and
nonviolent -- response to oppression. Treating the two sides as if they were
equal combatants in an endless fight reinforces this blindness.
Now the U.S.
government is trying, with greater persistence than ever, to resolve the
quarrel. So the appearance of neutrality is more important than ever.
If the media
constantly reminded us of the immense power inequity between the two sides, the
practical implication of U.S. policy would be clear: By constantly demanding
Palestinian concessions in roughly equal measure to Israeli concessions, the U.S.
government is continuing its historical pro-Israel bias, a bias going back to
the very inception of the nation of Israel.
When Harry
Truman extended de
facto recognition to Israel on the very day it declared its independence
(though he waited several months for de jure recognition), he overrode the
objection of his own State Department that he would alienate Arab states.
The anti-Arab
bias grew stronger in the Eisenhower White House, where it was an article of
faith that most Arab governments were tilting toward the communists. When
Eisenhower demanded that the Israelis pull back from the Suez Canal in 1956, he
wasn't moved by any concern about justice for the Arabs; he was incensed that
Israel -- and its allies in the conquest of Suez, Britain and France -- would
act without his approval and risk pushing the Arabs further into the
communists' arms.
America's
pro-Israel tilt became more blatant during the 1967 and 1973 wars and has
remained a hallmark of U.S. policy and politics ever since. The only change is
that Republicans are now
more likely than Democrats to support the Israeli government, no matter how
hawkish it may be.
Barack Obama is
following the tradition of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, all Democratic
presidents who have posed as neutral mediators between Israel and its Arab
rivals (though George W. Bush tried to make that a bipartisan tradition). The
key to this pose is a Colbertian pretense of blindness to difference.
By demanding
roughly equal concessions from both sides, the U.S. is insisting on an outcome
that will maintain the imbalance in power, even if it becomes an imbalance
between two independent states.
Yet there's more
than just a pro-Israel bias driving America's image of equality between the
negotiating rivals. It's also a matter of America's self-image about its role
in the world.
It has always
been an article of faith in American public mythology that our foreign policy
aims at justice and peace, while other nations are moved by lust for wealth and
power. That's just one of the many ways America is exceptional, the mythology says.
The idea goes
back at least as far as Thomas Paine, who wrote in Common Sense that "in England a King hath little more to do
than to make war" which "is to empoverish the nation." So
colonial subjects of the British king would always be embroiled in and
impoverished by war. But if they became an independent republic, ruled by the
will of the people, they could shape an independent foreign policy that would
keep them in peace and prosperity. They would remain above every foreign fray,
keeping their hands free of bloodshed and thus pure.
In the early years of the 20th
century the myth was extended to cast America as the prime force for world
peace and moral purity. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace prize in 1906
for his "happy role in bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged
between two of the world's great powers, Japan and Russia," the Nobel
Committee declared, adding that "the United States of America was
among the first to infuse the ideal of peace into practical politics."
But there was
plenty of self-interest involved. "We have become a great nation ... and
we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities," TR
boasted. Mediating the Russo-Japanese war was a way to act out American greatness
and muscle on the world stage, well-dressed as moral virtue.
It was also a
way to stop the expansion of the obviously stronger Japanese military. Roosevelt
"decided that [the war] must be stopped before Japan could gain too great an
edge and he offered his good offices" as a mediator, George Herring wrote
in his authoritative history of U.S. foreign policy, From Colony to Superpower.
Woodrow Wilson
made this image of American neutrality and superiority a bipartisan affair in
his response to World War I. By guiding the warring Europeans toward a just and
lasting peace, he proclaimed before the U.S. entered the war, he would make
sure America played "the great part in the world which was providentially
cut out for her. ... We have got to serve the world."
But he also
intended to lead and shape the world. Though he posed at the Versailles peace
conference as a morally superior neutral, he insisted that a just peace "must
be constructed along American lines," especially to ward off the threat of
Soviet Bolshevism, which he "abhorred," to use Herring's words.
So the Obama administration,
with immense help from the U.S. mass media, is continuing a distinguished
bipartisan tradition. By treating Israel and the Palestinians as equals, it can
portray America standing virtuously above the bloody Old World fray, while at the
same time insuring that the outcome suits U.S. interests and the political
interests of the administration.
So far that
approach doesn't seem to be moving the Middle East closer to peace.
The only
realistic path to peace is to speak honestly -- to name Israel as the stronger
party, the occupier, and thus the side obliged (legally, morally, and
practically) to make more concessions.
There is now
a hint that the administration may yet surprise us and move in that direction. But
all depends on how the White House reads the domestic public winds. All depends
on the opinions expressed by the American people.