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(The Latest Word provides Sandy's latest observations about folk music and other topics. The main Latest Word page contains a list of additional installments.) JOURNALISM IN THE MIDEAST: BLEEDING AND LEADING I had hoped not to have to write again so soon about the topic of the Intifadeh in the West Bank of the Israel-Palestine area. I needn't have worried, as the subject has changed as the stakes have risen. As I type this, a seemingly inexhaustible stream of "shahids" (modern nonuniformed kamikazes without planes) has been deliberately blowing Israeli public gathering places to bits—along with what little sense of security Israeli civilians had left. Concomitantly, whereas the last time I wrote about the situation the Israeli government was engaged in targeting terrorists (and inadvertently and unintentionally killing civilians in the process), today that same government has thrown all pretense of delicacy and diplomacy to the desert winds and begun having its troops and tanks bludgeon their way into every city in the West Bank and Gaza. The Shakespearean opprobrium, "a pox on both thy houses," comes to mind—except that one of those houses happens to be mine. Whereas months ago, I bridled at the propaganda terms "occupation" and "oppression" used to describe presence of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza, there is no dispute today that the people living in these areas are under siege and being subjected to extreme hardship regardless of their individual culpability in the terror visited upon civilians on the Israeli side of the (disputed and nebulous) border. To say that matters on both sides have gotten out of hand and spiraled out of control would be like describing the Grand Canyon as a big ditch. Okay—so today, nobody in this mess has clean hands. But nobody has gotten dirtier more quickly than the international press—especially the broadcast media. I won't name names, but certain cable TV correspondents have, to facilitate their safety and success in covering the Islamic world since we began fighting in Afghanistan, apparently fallen prey to a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome usually seen in hostages—ingratiating themselves (for their own survival) to their captors to such a degree that they begin to identify or at least sympathize with them. I can't help but notice that correspondents on long-term assignment in Israel (some since the Gulf War) have been reporting fairly and without bias, even in the suicide bombathons of the Passover season. Yet their counterparts who have served mostly in the Islamic nations (especially Pakistan and Afghanistan) have focused on the "suffering" of the Palestinian people engaged in their "noble struggle" nearly to the exclusion of the carnage and grief suffered by Israeli Jews. For every shot of a Jewish funeral after a suicide bombing, there are dozens of images and sound bites of Palestinians in mourning as tanks roll through their streets. For every quote from a Jewish civilian bereaved by the deliberate targeting of civilians by the shahids, there are dozens of Palestinians equating Israel's defense against the bombings with terrorism and saying things like, "It isn't right to be shot by tanks for throwing stones." I've said it before and I'll say it again: rocks kill. Big rocks. Little rocks. Ask Goliath's descendants. And if you think that Palestinians are using only rocks against Israeli soldiers, you must have been smoking Jaffa orange peels. Palestinians of all ages have been sniping from rooftops with high-powered rifles, lobbing Molotov cocktails, and shelling Israeli settlements and neighborhoods—all with decidedly lethal weapons. There is an old maxim, "Live by the sword, die by the sword." That was true back when all they had were swords—and you will notice that there is no corollary of "die by a sword of equal or lesser size." These days, if you live by the sword, you'd better be prepared to die by the Howitzer. As my grandmother liked to say, "Don't go tobogganing if you don't want to get your ass wet." (Gee, I miss you, Grandma.) But these days, there is an even more important maxim, which is the mantra of televised journalism: "If it bleeds, it leads." And, since the world loves an underdog, impoverished "nonpatriated" Palestinians bleed on camera a lot more picturesquely and sympathetically than do middle-class Jewish Israelis maimed or killed while shopping, partying, or knocking back frappuccinos. (I say "non-patriated" rather than "expatriated" Palestinians because there hasn't been a "Palestine" since the days after the Crusades.) And anyone with a conscience agrees that, regardless of what happened at the start of the Intifadeh, Palestinians are suffering enormously colossal economic, physical, and psychological losses as a result of Sharon's latest mega-escalation of his government's response. Perhaps this explains why just about every television journalist I've seen has been letting just about every Palestinian advocate and spokesman propagandize freely without challenging them to enumerate truthful reasons to justify their hatred of Israel and of Jews in general. To my horror, last week I watched several Arabian princes declare on world television that it is proper to hate and punish a race that has "killed Christ" and "many prophets." Now, I can understand hating a government that oppresses your people and whose immediate antecedents claimed and annexed the land on which your immediate antecedents were living. But why extend this hatred to an entire ethnic group and religion? Why? Perhaps because Palestinians specifically and Arabs in general actually believe all the slanderous accusations their educators, politicians, journalists, and clergy have been telling them about Jews and Israel. The Arab world actually believes such poisonous falsehoods as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ancient "blood libels" concerning how Jews make matzos and pastries, the "Christ-killer" myths (as well as even more outrageous myths about Jews having killed prophets), that Israel masterminded the destruction of the World Trade Center and attack on the Pentagon (and that Jews got advance warning and stayed home from work on September 11), and that the Holocaust never happened. Furthermore, how can one expect Palestinians to respect Israel's right to exist as a nation when the vast majority of the Palestinian populace (average age: 17) have been raised since birth to believe there is no such nation as Israel? The maps in schoolbooks throughout the Islamic world do not even mention Israel; the borders of the nonexistent nation "Palestine" are depicted as stretching from the Jordan River and Dead Sea west to the Mediterranean, and from Lebanon and Syria in the north to Egypt and the Red Sea in the south. A generation and a half of Palestinian people do not know that, up until the United Nations approved the creation of the State of Israel, that land in question was not a country called "Palestine" but lay entirely within Jordan and Egypt—and that the land of Jordan was in turn not stolen by Jews but ceded by the Muslims and Arabs of the Ottoman Empire. It has been posited by more than one pundit that neither side wants an agreement, settlement, or compromise, but the total capitulation of the other; and that both sides define "peace" as the calm that comes only after victory. The world can ill afford to indulge these anachronistic and impractical positions. Both sides must realize that they have to make meaningful concessions—and that true compromise is equally unpleasant for and ill-accepted by both sides. Israel wants the terrorism to end and for its citizens to be secure within recognized and respected borders. To get that it must compromise: It must grant useful and adequate land for a Palestinian state; it must relinquish sovereignty over the land it captured in the 1967 war (even though the Arab nations actively started the war and the lands were duly won when Israel successfully retaliated); and it must stop treating Palestinians as subjects to be vanquished and start treating them as full and equal citizens until such time as they receive their own state. Palestine wants what they originally mischaracterized as (but has since actually become) Israeli "occupation" and "oppression" of the West Bank and Gaza to stop, and to get their own homeland, including exclusive control of an undivided Old Jerusalem. To get that, it must compromise: It must allow all religions full, free, and safe use of all the holy sites of the Old City, even if that means neutral international administration of that neighborhood; it must recognize the existence and legitimacy of the State of Israel within at least the original pre-1967 borders; and it must immediately admit it has allowed major and egregious lies to prevail among its people, and immediately and conspicuously tell its citizens and all of the Islamic world the following truths (in Arabic and in indigenous languages, in print and over the airwaves, in the media and in its schools):
• The Jews
did not kill Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or any of the prophets. Dissemination and reaffirmation of these truths is utterly nonnegotiable. It's a sin to tell a lie, according to just about every world religion. No nation that professes to be governed by the tenets of any religion can be allowed to ignore this. Live by the sword, die by the sword, to be sure; but also live by the truth or die by the lie.
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