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Talking to a Wall
Palestine in the Mind of America
By Kathleen and Bill Christison
15/02/08 "Counterpunch" --- - You would think that showing maps
clearly delineating the truncated, obviously non-viable area
available for a possible Palestinian state and showing pictures
that define Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories would
have some kind of impact on an audience of astute but, on this
issue, generally uninformed Americans. We recently spoke to a
small foreign affairs discussion group and devoted much of our
presentation to these images of oppression -- images that never
appear in the U.S. media -- in the probably naïve hope of making
some kind of dent in the impassive American attitude toward
Israel's 40-year occupation of Palestinian territory.
But our expectations that these people would listen and perhaps
learn something were sadly misplaced. Few among the elite
seminar-style discussion group seemed concerned about, or even
particularly interested in, what is happening on the ground in
Palestine-Israel, and the event stands as starkly emblematic of
American apathy about the oppressive Israeli regime in the
occupied territories that the United States is enabling and in
many instances actively encouraging.
The maps that we displayed of the West Bank, prepared by the UN
and by Israeli human rights groups, clearly depicted the
segmented, disconnected scatter of territorial pieces that would
make up the Palestinian state even in the most optimistic of
scenarios -- Palestinian areas broken up by the separation wall
cutting deep into the West Bank; by large Israeli settlements
scattered throughout and taking up something like 10 percent of
the territory; by the network of roads connecting the
settlements, all accessible only to Israeli drivers; and by the
Jordan Valley, currently barred to any Palestinian not already
living there, making up fully one-quarter of the West Bank, and
ultimately destined for annexation by Israel.
The maps make it clear that even the most generous Israeli plan
would leave a Palestinian state with only 50-60 percent of the
West Bank (constituting 11-12 percent of original Palestine),
broken into multiple separated segments and including no part of
Jerusalem. The photographs, taken during our several trips to
Palestine in recent years, depicted the separation wall,
checkpoints and terminals in the wall resembling cages,
Palestinian homes demolished and official buildings destroyed,
vast Israeli settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land,
destroyed Palestinian olive groves, commerce in Palestinian
cities shut down because of marauding Israeli settlers or
soldiers.
We have shown maps and pictures like these myriad times before,
but have never been received with quite such disinterest. Here
was a group of mostly retired U.S. government officials,
academics, journalists, and business executives, as well as a
few still-working professionals -- all ranging in political
orientation from center right to center left, the cream of
informed, educated America, the exemplar of elite mainstream
opinion in the United States. Their lack of concern about what
Israel and, because of its enabling role, the U.S. are doing to
destroy an entire people and their national aspirations could
not have been more evident.
The first person to comment when our presentation concluded,
identifying herself as Jewish, said she had "never heard a more
one-sided presentation" and labeled us "beyond anti-Semitic" --
which presumably is somewhat worse than plain-and-simple
anti-Semitic. This is always a somewhat upsetting charge,
although it is so common and so expected as to be of little note
anymore. What was more noteworthy was the reaction, or lack of
it, among the rest of the assembled, who never disputed her
charge but spent most of the discussion period either disputing
our presentation or trying to find ways to accommodate "Jewish
pain."
Our brief conversation with this woman progressed in an
interesting fashion. We tried to engage her in a discussion
about what exactly was one-sided in our depiction of the
situation on the ground and what she would have liked to see to
make it "two-sided." She did not answer but indicated that she
thought whatever Israel did must be justified by Palestinian
actions. "Someone had to have started it," she said. We laid out
a little history for her, noting that the first action, the
"who-started-it" part, could be traced back to Britain's Balfour
Declaration pledge in 1917 to promote the establishment of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine, at a time when Jews made up no
more than 10 percent of the population of Palestine. Then we
came up to the 1947 UN partition resolution, which allotted 55
percent of Palestine for a Jewish state at a time when Jews
owned only seven percent of the land and made up slightly less
than one-third of the population.
Her answer was, "Well, but it wasn't Jews who did this." We
disabused her of this and briefly detailed the deliberate
Zionist program of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian
population conducted during 1947-48 war, as described by several
Israeli historians, including particularly Ilan Pappe, whose The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is based on Israeli military
archives. Her eyes actually began to bulge, but she held her
tongue. Apparently deciding that she had no way of refuting
these facts, she finally decided that going back in history was
of no utility -- a common Zionist dodge -- and that Israel had
not been established in any case to be a democracy but was a
haven for persecuted Jews and as such has every right to
organize itself in any way it sees fit. The moderator finally
called on others who wanted to speak, and the discussion moved
on.
But not very far. The talk now circled, for over an hour, around
what passed for profound discussion: around someone's curious
remarks about Zeitgeist, someone else's equally curious
insistence that there was "something out there that no one would
talk about" that was influencing the situation, a few remarks
about Palestinians as terrorists and how even if Israel made
peace with the Palestinians Hamas would still try to destroy it,
a lot of talk about how to accommodate Jewish pain and, taking
off from this, a psychologist's attempt to draw an analogy
between Jews who live in fear of persecution and the rape
victims she counsels who live in constant fear that they will be
raped again or worse.
A few people did ask interested questions about the situation on
the ground and about various aspects of Israeli policy. After
the discussion had centered for quite a while on Jewish pain,
one person pointed out that Palestinians too feel pain and live
in fear, but no one else picked up on this. No one challenged
the first speaker's personal charge of anti-Semitism against us,
and in the end there was almost no mention of the destructive
Israeli practices that had been the subject of our presentation.
We had occasion to email several of the participants the next
day. In one message, we lodged a mild complaint with the three
group organizers about the fact that the charge of anti-Semitism
was allowed not only to stand but to set the tone for much of
the discussion, with no refutation of the substance of the
charge by anyone except us. In another message, sent to a man
who had expressed puzzlement over why the Jewish vote was
thought to be important in U.S. elections, we forwarded without
comment an article from Mother Jones about Barack Obama's
difficulties with the Jewish community and his concerted effort
to demonstrate his bona fides by pledging fealty to Israel and
justifying Israel's siege of Gaza.
Finally, to the psychologist, we wrote a comment on her analogy
between Jews and rape victims, observing that as a psychologist
she undoubtedly did not encourage her rape victim clients to
perpetuate their fear or adopt an aggressive attitude toward
other people, but most likely gave them tools to help them
regain trust and move beyond fears for their personal safety.
This kind of restorative therapy for Jews has never been
employed, we noted, but on the contrary Israeli leaders and
American Jewish leaders have encouraged Jewish fears, along with
an aggressive, militaristic Israeli policy toward its neighbors.
These were all gratuitous overtures by us, but they were not
inappropriate or uncivil. Yet not one of these people saw fit to
answer our missives or even acknowledge their receipt --
indicating, we can only assume, the general level of unconcern
among Americans about the atrocities being committed against
Palestinians, including the siege and starvation imposed on
Gazans. Then, too, the lack of response probably reflects
feelings on the part of most attendees that we are somehow
responsible for having involved them in a discussion that turned
out to be fairly unpleasant for them.
Why is this interesting to anyone but us? Because this in-depth
discussion with a small but representative group of intelligent,
thinking Americans is indicative of a broad range of U.S. public
opinion on foreign policy issues, and their level of disinterest
in the consequences of U.S. policies is quite disturbing. The
self-absorption evident during this meeting, the general
"don't-rock-the-boat" posture, the overwhelming lack of concern
for the victims of Israeli and U.S. power amount to a license to
kill for the U.S. and its allies. The same unconcern allowed the
United States to get away with killing millions of Vietnamese
decades ago; it gives license to mass U.S. killing in Iraq and
Afghanistan; it is the reason Democrats still, after seven years
of Bush administration torture and killing around the world,
cannot fully separate themselves from Republican militarism. It
gives Israel license to kill and ethnically cleanse the entire
nation of Palestine.
Kathleen Christison is a
former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East
issues for 30 years. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine and
The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at
kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
Bill Christison was a senior
official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence
officer and as director of the CIA's Office of Regional and
Political Analysis.
They can be reached at
kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
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