- "It seems to me clear that a great many Israelis,
ideally, would like to see an Arab-free West Bank and Gaza. The statistics
seem to show that. But of course, the question is how to implement this,"
David Hirst explains in this interview with EI. David Hirst worked as The
Guardian's Middle East correspondent from 1967 to 2001, and authored the
classic book The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the
Middle East, which was published in its third edition in 2003 with a new
120 page foreword. From Beirut, Hirst spoke with EI on the bias of the
American media towards Israel in its coverage of the conflict, the implications
of Israel's nuclear aresenal, and how Israel is more of a strategic liability
than asset for the U.S.
-
- Maureen Clare Murphy: In the book's new foreword, Mr.
Hirst, you comment on the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000,
which found the U.S. media parroting the Barak story that Arafat rejected
Israel's unprecedented generous offer. You write: "the fact that it
took so long [to debunk the generous offer myth] exposed the incompetence
of a Palestinian leadership which miserably neglected to tell its side
of the story, but it was also an indictment of such weighty organs of news
and opinion as the New York Times, which had failed to investigate the
claim, or even wonder whether there might possibly be something blatantly
self-serving about it."
-
- What impact do you think the U.S. media has on efforts
towards negotiations and peace when CNN and the like declare any time there
is Palestinian-perpetrated violence that the peace process is on the brink
of failure?
-
- David Hirst: That's a reflection of the one-sided ness
of the American media, which is endemic and has been for a long time. Since
is the beginning, vis-a-vis the whole Israeli Palestinian conflict and
the reactions of the media to violence from one side or the other, has
perhaps typicalized that more than anything else. I also mentioned in my
book in this respect, but according to scientific calculations of some
American organizations that devote themselves to this, one should mention
that, for example, since the beginning of the intifida, it was always the
Palestinians who were portrayed as initiating violence and that the Israelis
were retaliating for it.
-
- It became so grotesque, especially in the television
coverage, that the figures were something like 100 to 8 times that the
word retaliation referred to Israelis, 100 times to Israelis 8 times to
Palestinians, while in it became clearer and clearer as the intifada went
on, it was more the other way around. The Israelis were intiating violence
and the Palestinians were retaliating. And yet it persisted like this,
so that is a very typical reflection on the way which the American media
has covered the intifada.
-
-
- MCM: How problematic do you find the lack of historical
context in news reports on the conflict?
-
- DH: Of course as a journalist myself, I know how difficult
it is to inject history into the situation of a given moment - obviously,
no article can be a history. But again one finds this problem in the American
media more than other Western media, in the sense that, for example, during
the intifada, there was a lack of reference to something called the Occupied
Territories, especially in much of the television coverage.
-
- This of course might not matter for those of us who are
very familiar with the problem, but generally speaking, the television
is informing the mass of the public. So when there is an attack by Palestinians
on an Israeli position, and there was no description of where that Israeli
position was, i.e. in the occupied territories, it sounded as if it was
in Israel proper, so again that illustrates a serious shortcoming indeed
by, essentially, the American media.
-
-
- MCM: What kind of editorial pressure do you think journalists
from the U.S. who correspond from the Middle East, particularly Israel-Palestine,
face that are different from your experience as Middle East correspondent
for The Guardian?
-
- DH: I said in my book that I think it's difficult for
me to say I know precisely what kind of pressures are exerted, because
by definition pressures are something exerted surreptitiously in certain
organizations. But I also said that I think this bias ... is less apparent
in the day to day coverage by individual correspondents on the spot than
it is in the strictly editorial side of newspapers. The commentators, the
editorials as such, the official opinions of the newspapers, seems to me
that is where the bias primarily lies.
-
- It is fairly notorious, I gather, from one or two colleagues
who write for such newspapers as the Wall Street Journal, which is one
of the more right-wing and pro-Israeli newspapers in the United States,
there is a clear cleavage of what the correspondents write and what the
editorial writers say. In other words, if the editorial writers were to
derive their point of view from what their correspondents were saying,
they would take a different line because what the correspondents say is
really very often at odds with what the opinion columns say.
-
-
- MCM: In the opening pages of the new edition of The Gun
and the Olive Branch, you contrast how your book, first published in the
U.S. in 1977, was met in the country with what the publisher described
as a "resounding and puzzling silence" while a few years later
Joan Peters' academic fraud From Time Immemorial was heralded by the press.
Peters' book, which was republished in 2001, and Alan Dershowitz's book
The Case for Israel, which plagiarizes Peters, enjoy high sales and are
not exposed as frauds in the U.S.' mainstream press. What do you think
these books' popularity point to?
-
- DH: I must say that although being a long time follower
of the conflict, I was aware of a general bias in favor of the Israelis
on the part of the American media, nonetheless in researching this book
it really came as something as a surprise to me just how systematic this
bias could be. I found this Joan Peters case perhaps the most startling
illustration of this. It's not my research, of course; I take my information
from people who have written about this in the United States itself, but
I found this particularly dramatic.
-
- In Britain for example, this book was laughed out of
court, it was derided from the very outset, whereas in the United States
the whole kind of cultural, political establishment seemed to rally behind
it in the most extraordinary, uniform manner. I can only assume that this
stems from the extraordinary strength of what I call the dominant orthodoxy
the Zionists inspired, that most of the mainstream establishment organs
of opinion adhere to or are afraid to contradict. I think the proof seems
to be in the pudding; how is it possible, as Edward Said asked, that otherwise
intelligent, thoughtful editors could idolize this book the way that they
did? That's the impression one gets.
-
-
- MCM: Also in the book's foreward, you discuss Israel's
friends in America, identifying the somewhat paradoxical relationship between
Christian fundamentalists and the pro-Israeli lobby, along with the neoconservatives
currently serving in the Bush administration. What do you think might disrupt
this triple alliance, or do you see it continue to have a stronghold on
U.S. policy and media?
-
- DH: I believe at the end of the day there will be a huge
bust-up between the United States and its Israeli protege because I do
believe that Israel is not an American strategic asset. I think it's the
very reverse. This, sooner or later, will become apparent in a dramatic
fashion. But the problem lies in the domestic arena in the United States.
Israel is essentially a critical aspect of domestic politics. It's rooted
originally, I would say, in the strength of the Zionist lobby. But that
has grown out, fortuitously perhaps, a new and larger force in the shape
of the right wing Christian fundamentalists who now, some people would
say, are more important than the Israeli Jewish Zionist lobby itself.
-
- It's very bizarre, because we also know, theologically
speaking, these two groups - the Christian right and the Jews - should
be, and were in fact, at odds with each other. We know the right wing Christians
don't hold out a very nice fate for the Jews with the coming of the millennium.
But all this seems to be swept under the carpet now for pragmatic reasons.
In fact ... eight years ago the Anti Defamation League produced a denunciation,
a formal booklet or pamphlet, of the right wing Christians. But a few years
later, it came out with a statement to the effect that, well they are now
our friends, even if our motives are different than ours, we'll forget
about the motives, we'll ignore them for the time being. It's a very bizarre
alliance, but evidently a very powerful one, especially with the President
of United States, a man who says he is sympathetic to the evangelicals.
I don't think we will see any break down of this alliance while Bush is
in power.
-
-
- MCM: In an article that was published in The Japan Times
in 2002, you argue that Israel has become the U.S.' own rogue state, and
that the game is up regarding the U.S.' ability to rein in Sharon and prevent
him from disrupting the regional order. Do you see any other entities,
such as the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, even
coming close to disciplining Israel in an effective manner?
-
- DH: It's clear that one of the issues that divides Israeli
and European opinion, and to some extent, European government policy, in
these times and since the Bush administration came to power ... is America's
treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, vis-a-vis Europe's. I think that
the Europeans are likely to grow more hostile to America's promises on
this question the more the Americans align themselves behind Sharon and
his policies.
-
- But as we also know, America has always dominated the
peacemaking in the Middle East, and continues to do so despite efforts
by the Europeans to inject some degree of fairness into it. Even Tony Blair
is playing a role in this despite his alliance with the United States in
the invasion of Iraq. It is said that the road map to peace was inaugurated
in July by President Bush, to some extent in deference to Tony Blair's
concern about the negative impact of the invasion of Iraq on the other
great Middle Eastern problem, namely the Arab-Israeli one. It is clear
that this European input is not really very effective because, essentially,
Bush, though he may be embarrassed by Sharon's behavior, is not willing
to give any great effect to his embarrassment by reining him in, especially
of course in an election year.
-
-
- MCM: If there were trade restrictions implemented by
various European states and the countries in the Arab League, do you think
that would have any kind of influence on Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians?
-
- DH: I suppose it would. I think there was a [controversy]
recently concerning the export of goods from the Occupied Territories,
products emanating from Israeli settlements, which were labeled as if they
were coming from Israel proper, and this caused considerable alarm in the
government quarters in Israel. I'm not sure what the upshot was, but it
certainly did worry them. I'm sure that if sanctions of that kind, if they
were stepped up incrementally, really would have a great impact on Israeli
thinking.
-
- I don't know how the Israelis would react, but it would
certainly be very damaging. Today the Israeli minister of Justice has publicly
stated that he thinks that the construction of the so-called apartheid
wall risks turning Israel into a pariah state, obviously a sign of greater
alarm. So yes, what did eventually happen to South Africa? That's the parallel
that he drew, and economic sanctions would of course stem from the European
view that there is a parallel between Israel and South Africa in their
treatments of the Arabs.
-
-
- MCM: In the section of the foreword aptly titled "No
End of American Partisanship," you identify that Israel has used its
nuclear arsenal not necessarily to threaten its Arab neighbors but rather
as a means to blackmail the U.S., lest Israel use its weapons to completely
disrupt the balance, albeit a precarious one, of the region. Do you think
Israel's air strike on Syria this past autumn was a not so subtle reminder
by Israel to the U.S. of its capacity to destabilize U.S. interests in
the Middle East?
-
- DH: I'm not sure if that was the intention, but that
certainly is an impression that it deliberately or inadvertently creates.
The basic argument which I make in the last part of the book, when I deal
with this question of nuclear weapons, is to say that this Israel which
America has, formally speaking, anointed as a strategic asset, and which
American politicians sincerely or otherwise regard as such an asset, can
easily become a liability. In fact, it can be easily be seen that the Israelis
sometimes surreptitiously, or not surreptitiously actually, intimate that
they have the ability to be a strategic liability. That is to frighten
the Americans with its capacity to disrupt their policies in the region;
the capacity, in the final analysis, to destroy American interests in the
region.
-
- The most dramatic example of this, of course, is to be
found in the nuclear context. I quote a well known Israeli military strategist
who himself is quoting the former Israeli Minister of Defense, the late
Moshe Dayan, saying that Israel should behave like a mad dog, so that nobody
touches it. That kind of mentality has been latent in Israeli strategic
thinking from the very outset, from the very beginning of the state. So
yes, obviously Israelis don't want to use their nuclear weapons, nobody
wants to use their nuclear weapons, but to have them as a deterrent against
those who they may feel threaten them, or against those like the Americans
[they fear] might abandon them, precisely because, at some point, Israel
is going to be a terrible source of diplomatic and strategic setbacks for
the United States.
-
-
- MCM: You write in The Gun and the Olive Branch that during
Begin's administration of Israel, "The more moderate, the more 'civilized'
the PLO became, the more this alarmed Begin and his superhawks" because
it meant that there could be a long-term solution, something that Likud
didn't want. Do you think that the so-called "targeted killings,"
or assassinations, of Palestinians by Israel during lulls of Palestinian
violence, which inevitably lead to more suicide bombings, are conscious
efforts by the Sharon administration to prevent a long-term solution from
occurring?
-
- DH: I certainly think that these targeted assassinations
and other things like that were designed to prevent the introduction of
a stable cease-fire because a cease-fire would mean that diplomacy would
have to start again, and Sharon does not want diplomacy to start again.
He's more comfortable with a situation in which there is no diplomacy because
diplomacy means, at the end of the game, declaring your hand, what have
you got to offer, what kind of peace do you want or are you prepared to
accept. Sharon's peace is the very antithesis of peace as it is generally
understood by almost everybody.
-
- Officially speaking, I'm not now talking about the current
administration and the neoconservatives, the Europeans and the Americans
share a basic, general orthodox view of what the basis of peace would be
- a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But his formula, insofar
as we know it, became clearer in the last week with the speech that he
made to an institution in Tel Aviv concerning the necessity of the Palestinians
to come forward after eliminating the infrastructure of terror, to come
to the peace process in a serious way. If that didn't happen, there would
be unilateral steps on the Israeli side, and he made it clear that these
unilateral steps would involve a disengagement of the Israelis from really
a rather small area of Palestine, of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the
Palestinians in charge of something like 42 percent.
-
- So that's what he means, territorially speaking, by peace,
and it's not even peace - it's going to be another interim agreement so
that he is free to continue with the up-building of greater Israel. So
yes, these targeted assassinations are designed to essentially prevent
a peace, as the world understands it, from coming to pass, by a dynamic
which he sets in motion, a cycle of violence.
-
-
- MCM: In your book you refer to a 2002 poll that "showed
that 46 percent of the population [of Israel] would like to see the 'transfer'
of the inhabitants of the occupied territories, and 31 percent ... [would
like to see] that of the Palestinians of Israel proper." Already Israel
has been implementing population transfer since Oslo, but in an incremental
fashion so as to keep it off of the international radar. Do you think that
population transfer will continue in this incremental way without disruption,
or do you think that Sharon will implement a mass transfer of Palestinians,
under the guise of fighting terror, after, say, a particularly devastating
suicide bombing?
-
- DH: It's an interesting question. It seems to me clear
that a great many Israelis, ideally, would like to see an Arab-free West
Bank and Gaza. The statistics seem to show that. But of course, the question
is how to implement this, and there was some expectation that Sharon might
have engineered a mass expulsion under cover of dramatic events elsewhere,
events which might have been generated by the invasion of Iraq, but that
didn't come to pass.
-
- I think it's difficult to foresee any circumstances that
might give him the opportunity to do this. I can't visualize any circumstances
in the foreseeable future. But I'm sure that if they did arise, the temptation
to use this as a pretext to engineer mass expulsion will grow greater and
greater, so long as there is no settlement before such circumstances arise.
Because the problem facing the Israelis, the demographic problem, is really
getting worse and worse all the time because of the disparity in birth
rates.
-
- But I see the [West Bank] wall as a part of a process
of what you call incremental transfer or pressures designed to bring about
transfer, because life become so impossible for yet another large group
of Palestinians that it will push them into despair to leave. A different
kind of incremental pressure has been present ever since 1967. The Israeli
ministers have not so surreptitiously advocated it; Moshe Dayan was one
of them. But I think that will continue indefinitely. There is always the
possibility in some traumatic regional compulsion that the Israelis will
do again what they did in 1948 or 1967.
-
-
- MCM: What changes have you noticed in Palestinian, Arab,
and Israeli psychology since you began reporting for The Guardian in 1967?
Are there differences in attitudes and identity regarding the conflict
from one generation to the next?
-
- DH: The greatest change has probably taken part is to
be found among the Palestinians who are essentially the losers of this
conflict. When I first started reporting, the Palestinians were all of
the opinion that the Israeli state has to be dismantled, and the territory
completely liberated. This was formally expressed in the official aims
and ambitions of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and remained
the official position until the late '70s when a change began to take place.
-
- It was finally crystallized in the 1988 meeting of the
Palestine National council, which formally for the first time declared
that the Palestinians were ready to accept the two-state solution, and
it was further consecrated in the Oslo accords. I think that was the official
PLO position, but it's fair to say that most Palestinians were ready to
go along with it. So there's a fundamental change in the thinking and the
attitudes of the Palestinians. And I do believe that if the Israelis had
been reasonable, and saw the generous offer that the Palestinians were
collectively making, we would have a peace now.
-
- But they were not reasonable, and so I fear there may
be a shirt back to the original thinking, the original standpoint among
the Palestinians because they were drawing the collective conclusion that
peace with this intruder is something impossible to achieve, and there
will be [a similar conclusion] in the wider Arab world. So that's where
I see the largest, most general change, in the standpoint of one side of
the conflict. It seems to me, as I said in the book, that the Israelis
have simply just grown more and more extreme, and that is manifest in the
people who run and have run the country since the emergence of the Likud
in power in 1977.
-
-
- MCM: You write in The Gun and the Olive Branch, "Under
the guise of forcibly divesting Iraq from its weapons of mass destruction,
the United States is seeking to 'reshape' the entire Middle East, with
this most richly endowed and pivotal of countries as the lynchpin of a
whole new, pro-American geopoligical order." In addition to Iraq,
which countries in the region are most vulnerable to U.S. ambitions? Do
you see any countries that are allied with the U.S, facing uprisings from
within their own borders as a result?
-
- DH: The countries most vulnerable to the Saddam treatment,
so to speak, are pretty well known - not much is hidden by the neoconservatives
who are the architects of this policy. Syria and Iran are the two most
obvious candidates, but the more pro-Israeli of [the neoconservatives]
also have their sights on Saudi Arabia, a long standing American ally.
Some of them write about six or seven Arab regimes that should go, from
Libya, via Egypt, to Syria, Saudi Arabia, and non-Arab Iran. And let's
not forget Yasser Arafat.
-
-
- MCM: It seems that if such a dramatic shift in power
balance occurs, then perhaps some countries that have enjoyed relative
stability, i.e. Jordan, would be threatened by unhappiness within their
own population.
-
- DH: Well, yes. We're always asking, we journalists, about
the famous "Arab street" which is permanently at odds with their
own governments. The level of disillusionment of the Arab people vis-a-vis
their own governments, partly because of their own governments' incompetence
in dealing with the Israelis, and their subservience to the Americans,
but also for well known domestic reasons. It's legendary. But this famous
Arab street never does seem to rise.
-
- I would hesitate to say that a country like Jordan is
more seriously at risk to such an internal explosion than so-called radical
regimes like Syria, which is not seen as being very friendly to the United
States, or Saudi Arabia. I think at the moment a country like Syria does
enjoy a greater standing in the greater Arab public opinion than does a
regime like Egypt or the Hashemites in Jordan. But the level of discontent
inside Syria, for strictly domestic reasons, is just as great vis-a-vis
that regime, as the level of discontent vis-a-vis the Jordanian regime.
-
- They're all in a sense the same boat, these same regimes,
in that they're all as discredited as each other. I think what's happened
in Iraq has certainly pushed the region towards upheaval, upheaval which
would probably becoming anyway because of this deplorable relationship
between governments and people in the region, between rulers and ruled,
because they're all sick regimes, and it's going to happen. But the destabilization
process has been expedited, given a huge push, by Iraq.
-
-
- MCM: What do you think it's going to take to change for
the better the status quo of curfews, checkpoints, and lost lives of Palestinians
living under Israeli military occupation the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
-
- DH: I find it difficult to imagine that until there is
a final settlement, the Palestinian situation is going to change for the
better in a serious way. I don't think that the intifada is really going
to disappear. It may have lulls, but it's not going to disappear.
-
- I don't think the Israelis are going to enjoy any significant
sense of security until this intifada is over. I really don't think it's
going to be over until there is a final settlement. I don't even believe
there's going to be a final settlement unless there is an imposed one from
the outside. I just can't see these two parties agreeing to anything without
huge external pressure or intervention because they've tried everything.
They're simply not able to accommodate each other. One peace plan after
another goes down the drain and there is no real progress.
-
- Maybe the maximum was reached not at Camp David, but
at President Clinton's last desperate effort to achieve an accord just
before he gave up his presidency. But that was the maximum and it failed,
and under a regime like Sharon's it's not possible to imagine any serious
peacemaking. So the situation will continue as it is, and I think that
there were be more dramatic terrorism than there has been so far. But the
situation could go on for a long time like this before some kind of resolution,
before some kind of intervention from the outside world.
-
- - Maureen Clare Murphy is an Arts, Music, and Culture
correspondent for EI and its sister site eIraq
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