We do indeed live in interesting times.
In 2011, an award for political journalism bearing the name of a Zionist, namely the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, went to anti-Zionist journalist Jonathan Cook. (You can see my series of posts on Gellhorn by clicking on the label below.)
Now, an award for political journalism bearing the name of an anti-Zionist, namely the Orwell Prize, has just gone to Zionist journalist Jonathan Freedland.
Stranger still, while Cook, one of the best journalists around on the subject of Palestine, was at least awarded his Gellhorn Prize for exposing "establishment propaganda" (in his case of the Zionist variety), Freedland's Orwell Prize was awarded, not for the content of his writing (which, as far as Palestine/Israel is concerned, invariably reduces to apologetics for the Zionist project) but for the "lucidity and elegance of his style." (Two Guardian journalists win Orwell prize for journalism, Martin Williams, theguardian.com, 22/5/14)
One can only imagine what Orwell himself would have thought about the awarding of an Orwell Prize for style alone. Still, it could have been worse. Imagine this Zionist apologist receiving an award for his content on the issue of Palestine/Israel.
To illustrate, take his July 18, 2012 article for the New Statesman, Yearning for the same land, essentially a defence of political Zionism:
Freedland here plays the game of Good Zionist vs Bad Zionist, contrasting what he calls "left-leaning Zionists who believe the original movement's goal was the liberation of people, not land," with "hawkish Zionists, heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who are territorial maximalists, eager to fly the Israeli flag over the West Bank."
It's the former, he maintains, who are "the true Zionists," those who are "eager to see territory now occupied by Israel ceded [?] to become sovereign Palestinian land." Freedland, of course, places himself in the camp of the Zionist angels, if I may be allowed an oxymoron.
To assert, as he does, that the goal of the Zionist angels (LOL) was never really the acquisition of Palestinian land, when they, in collaboration with the followers of Jabotinsky, ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, regardless of the borders proposed by the 1947 UN partition plan, and stole all the Palestinian land they could lay their blood-stained hands on, is simply risible.
He defends the Zionist bulldozing of the cosmopolitan, multi-sectarian Palestine of old by trotting out the boilerplate dogma of his "socialist-Zionist youth": the Jews are a "people," and as such "have a right to self-determination in the historic land of their birth."
Freedland's Zionist sleight of hand is transparent: Jews are not what they so indubitably are - a diverse (because of a past history of conversion) faith community originating in the Middle East - but are imagined as an homogenous ethnic grouping, who, following a collective heave-ho by the Romans, ended up as a scattered diaspora, somehow managing, against all the odds, to preserve their ethnic purity.
It's as if, whenever Freedland sees himself in a mirror, he sees Moses or Joshua looking back. Read Shlomo Sand? Forget it!
Our self-designated left Zionist today, however, is trendier than his forbears, who swore blind for decades (with that famous shrug) that the Palestinians inexplicably just went walkies in 1948. He now concedes that the Palestinian Nakba (which he still can't spell, rendering it as Naqba) actually happened and even thinks Israelis should be commemorating it. But more than that... nah.
To bolster his case that Zionism is still kosher, Freedland draws on "left-leaning Zionist" author Amos Oz.
First the hard sell:
"[Oz] argues that, besides the legal right bestowed by the UN's 1947 resolution to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, Israel has a moral right - the right of the drowning man... entitled to grab hold of a piece of driftwood even if another man is already holding it. The drowning man can even make the other man share it, by force, if necessary. His moral right ends, however, the moment he pushes the other man into the sea. The Jewish people, scythed by the Holocaust and after centuries of persecution, were gasping for breath in 1948; their need for a home was as great as that of any other people in history."
All pedestrian Zionist propaganda of course:
1) The partition was essentially an exercise in the White Man twisting the arms of just enough brown men to get the desired result at the UN, not to mention a violation of the latter's charter;
2) Jews in displaced persons camps after the war were not drowning, though they were harassed and bullied by Zionist enforcers; and
3) Zionism, the militant settler-colonial movement which created Israel, was forced on the Palestinians by British bayonets long before the Holocaust, and busied itself not with the rescue of European Jewry from the perils of Nazism, but solely with accumulating the cannon fodder and the arms necessary to roll Palestine's weaker indigenous population and seize as much of its Palestinian homeland as possible.
Having cleverly diverted the reader's attention with the (alleged) drowning man, gasping for breath, Freedland then slips in the following, hoping you won't notice:
"They had the right to act, even though the cost for another people, the Palestinians, was immense."
Sorry about that, Palestinians. Nothing personal mind you!
So who awarded the Orwell Prize to Freedland? There were 3 judges: Robin Lustig (BBC Radio), Paul Anderson (Tribune/New Statesman), and Michael Parks (Professor of Journalism at USC). On the first, you might like to read BBC buries the bitter at mondoweiss.net (7/7/10), and on the second, his rationale for opposing an academic boycott of Israel, No to the Academic Boycott, Tribune, 29/4/05).
Orwell famously wrote that Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed: everything else is public relations. Poor man, a prize bearing his name has just gone to a peddler of Zionist PR.
Showing posts with label Martha Gellhorn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martha Gellhorn. Show all posts
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 6
"I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator's code to tell me what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race."
Dorothy Thompson, 1937
"What then should we be? That each will answer for himself. But for myself I say: Though stripped of every armor, be a warrior - a warrior of the spirit, for what the spirit knows."
Dorothy Thompson, 1955
***
And so to my concluding post on this subject. I began with the question: Isn't it time to rename The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism? Needless to say, I believe it is.
Also needless to say, I base my case on the fact that Martha Gellhorn failed, and miserably so, the pre-eminent litmus test for journalistic integrity in our time, namely, Palestine or Israel - which side are you on?
So what to call it then? Keeping in mind that the prize is awarded to "journalists whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth," I'd be inclined to name it (if not after my all-time favourite choice, J.M.N. Jeffries) after the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961).
Dorothy who? I hear you all chorus. Unfortunately, for most of us today, Dorothy Thompson's is a long forgotten name. That wasn't the case, however, in her heyday. For a background sketch, try this from the dust jacket of Peter Kurth's invaluable 1990 biography, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson:
"For 3 decades, amid the sweeping events of the first half of the twentieth century, no journalist was more controversial, more opinionated, more irreverent, or more quoted than Dorothy Thompson. At the pinnacle of her career, Thompson's thrice-weekly news column, 'On the Record' - one of the longest running news columns ever - reached millions of people around the globe. She was heard by millions more in her regular radio broadcasts. She was satirized by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, and in 1939, in a Time magazine cover story, was called the most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt."
For most of her life, Dorothy Thompson was, in fact, an uncritical supporter of the Zionist movement, largely because, like so many other Western intellectuals of the time, she was focused more on the struggle against fascism in Europe, including the appalling resurgence of state-sponsored anti-Semitism under the Nazis in pre-war Germany, than on the crimes of British imperialism in faraway Palestine or elsewhere.
Writes Peter Kurth:
"[S]he had been, up through the end of World War II, one of Zionism's most profoundly moving spokesmen. In May of 1942 she had appeared as a keynote speaker at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where an international conference had been called to agitate for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. There is no question that Dorothy, up to that point, was wholeheartedly sympathetic to the Zionist movement and convinced (as later she was not) that the Jews were 'a separate people'... that needed to be dealt with as such after twenty centuries of persecution and oppression. 'The whole anti-Semitic movement is full of fetish and black magic,' Dorothy had written in 1943. 'It is a kind of modern witchcraft. Back of this black magic is the fact that the Jews do lead an abnormal life. They are a cohesive people without a place on earth of their own. That fact gives them, in the superstitious mind, an atmosphere of doom. An atmosphere of doom produces an atmosphere of fear.' And a state of their own, 'built by themselves and expressing their own peculiar culture and way of life,' might liberate the Jews from their status as outsiders. It would end the 'ghost story' of the Diaspora. It would allow any Jew, anywhere in the world, to make a choice: to become a member of the Jewish state, or to surrender his Jewishness (as distinct from his religious practice) once and for all to the country of his birth.
"Indeed, it was with an eye to the assimilation of the Jews that Dorothy had first thrown her support behind political Zionism. She had been assured 'time and again' (and for the first time in London, in 1920, during the Zionist conference that launched her career) that the Jewish state in Palestine would encompass 'in equal partnership' the indigenous population of the region, and that 'actively dissident Arabs,' if there were any, could be transferred 'to other parts of the vast Pan-Arab Empire, which covers a territory as large as large as the United States.' Ignorant of Arab culture, badly informed about the history of the Middle East, Dorothy had not then imagined that a Palestinian shepherd would care very much whether he drew water from a well in Bethlehem or in Fez. Later she would deeply regret the cultural and racial prejudice that had allowed her to regard 'the Arabs' as interchangeable bodies, indistinguishable one from another and superfluous in the face of Western plans, but even at the height of her devotion to Zionism she never suspected that whole populations (nearly a million people, by most estimates) would be uprooted from their homes in Palestine and driven into exile.
"'I should be opposed to it if I were a Jew,' Dorothy had warned, 'with the undimmed memory of the dispersion of my own people in mind. I should not want any Arab to sit beside the waters of Babylon and weep because he remembered Zion.' Her first trip to Palestine in 1945 had convinced her that Zionism was not the 'liberal crusade' she had thought it to be, 'that the Zionist leaders envisaged,' as she put it, 'not a small state of Jews who chose to live in Israel, but a Zionist state destined to become the leading power in the Middle East, as the ward of world Jewry whatever their citizenship in other countries [might be].' Dorothy was very much upset by Jewish terrorism in the quest for statehood. She was 'shocked beyond measure' when Menachem Begin, one of the leaders of the Irgun group that was responsible for the massacre of more than 250 Arabs at Deir Yassin, was accorded a hero's welcome by the Jews of New York, and when Ben Hecht, Peter Bergson, and other leading Zionists 'put on a show in Madison Square Garden' and 'slandered Great Britain' by displaying the Union Jack topped with the Nazi swastika. The failure of Israel, after 1948, to agree to the fixing of its borders, to heed the call for the internationalization of Jerusalem, or to provide any relief or compensation for the Palestinian refugees led Dorothy to conclude that Zionism was 'an aggressive, chauvinistic movement' and that the State of Israel was 'an expansionist power' - 'a creation of the United Nations decision made against the opposition of the whole Arab and Moslem world.'
"Ultimately Dorothy was more worried about the effect of Israeli propaganda on American foreign policy than she was about the righteousness or iniquity of Israel itself... She was ahead of most of her colleagues in journalism in considering the problem of Israel at all (beyond merely hailing its creation as a humanitarian enterprise or, like Walter Lippmann, arguing that the Western allies ought to 'impose peace' on the Middle East through the establishment of a joint Israeli-Palestinian confederation). But just as Dorothy was one of the first - and only - American journalists to speak out in defense of the Arab nations, so was she the first and most prominent American journalist to be smeared with the label of 'anti-semite'." (pp 423-425)
I'll finish specifically on the issue of the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948, the ones so venomously slandered by Gellhorn. As it happens, the first ever documentary film in English on the subject of those refugees, Sands of Sorrow (1950), produced by the Council for Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, was introduced and closed by Dorothy Thompson. Here is her moving introduction:
"I'm Dorothy Thompson and I have been asked to introduce Sands of Sorrow because I've recently returned from visiting the scenes of the picture you are about to see. Of course, the impression left on my mind by these wretched casualties of political change is much more distressing than the film. For no film can convey the icy winds from Mt Hermon as they blow upon flimsy, floorless tents in Syria or the rains that turn dwellings into mud holes in the rainy season in Lebanon. Nor the defeated feeling even of those who are trying to help, but this film tells part of the story that, until now, has hardly been told at all outside the Arab world."
This is light years away from the propagandist bile of Martha Gellhorn.
Re the name change, I rest my case.
Dorothy Thompson, 1937
"What then should we be? That each will answer for himself. But for myself I say: Though stripped of every armor, be a warrior - a warrior of the spirit, for what the spirit knows."
Dorothy Thompson, 1955
***
And so to my concluding post on this subject. I began with the question: Isn't it time to rename The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism? Needless to say, I believe it is.
Also needless to say, I base my case on the fact that Martha Gellhorn failed, and miserably so, the pre-eminent litmus test for journalistic integrity in our time, namely, Palestine or Israel - which side are you on?
So what to call it then? Keeping in mind that the prize is awarded to "journalists whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth," I'd be inclined to name it (if not after my all-time favourite choice, J.M.N. Jeffries) after the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961).
Dorothy who? I hear you all chorus. Unfortunately, for most of us today, Dorothy Thompson's is a long forgotten name. That wasn't the case, however, in her heyday. For a background sketch, try this from the dust jacket of Peter Kurth's invaluable 1990 biography, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson:
"For 3 decades, amid the sweeping events of the first half of the twentieth century, no journalist was more controversial, more opinionated, more irreverent, or more quoted than Dorothy Thompson. At the pinnacle of her career, Thompson's thrice-weekly news column, 'On the Record' - one of the longest running news columns ever - reached millions of people around the globe. She was heard by millions more in her regular radio broadcasts. She was satirized by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, and in 1939, in a Time magazine cover story, was called the most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt."
For most of her life, Dorothy Thompson was, in fact, an uncritical supporter of the Zionist movement, largely because, like so many other Western intellectuals of the time, she was focused more on the struggle against fascism in Europe, including the appalling resurgence of state-sponsored anti-Semitism under the Nazis in pre-war Germany, than on the crimes of British imperialism in faraway Palestine or elsewhere.
Writes Peter Kurth:
"[S]he had been, up through the end of World War II, one of Zionism's most profoundly moving spokesmen. In May of 1942 she had appeared as a keynote speaker at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where an international conference had been called to agitate for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. There is no question that Dorothy, up to that point, was wholeheartedly sympathetic to the Zionist movement and convinced (as later she was not) that the Jews were 'a separate people'... that needed to be dealt with as such after twenty centuries of persecution and oppression. 'The whole anti-Semitic movement is full of fetish and black magic,' Dorothy had written in 1943. 'It is a kind of modern witchcraft. Back of this black magic is the fact that the Jews do lead an abnormal life. They are a cohesive people without a place on earth of their own. That fact gives them, in the superstitious mind, an atmosphere of doom. An atmosphere of doom produces an atmosphere of fear.' And a state of their own, 'built by themselves and expressing their own peculiar culture and way of life,' might liberate the Jews from their status as outsiders. It would end the 'ghost story' of the Diaspora. It would allow any Jew, anywhere in the world, to make a choice: to become a member of the Jewish state, or to surrender his Jewishness (as distinct from his religious practice) once and for all to the country of his birth.
"Indeed, it was with an eye to the assimilation of the Jews that Dorothy had first thrown her support behind political Zionism. She had been assured 'time and again' (and for the first time in London, in 1920, during the Zionist conference that launched her career) that the Jewish state in Palestine would encompass 'in equal partnership' the indigenous population of the region, and that 'actively dissident Arabs,' if there were any, could be transferred 'to other parts of the vast Pan-Arab Empire, which covers a territory as large as large as the United States.' Ignorant of Arab culture, badly informed about the history of the Middle East, Dorothy had not then imagined that a Palestinian shepherd would care very much whether he drew water from a well in Bethlehem or in Fez. Later she would deeply regret the cultural and racial prejudice that had allowed her to regard 'the Arabs' as interchangeable bodies, indistinguishable one from another and superfluous in the face of Western plans, but even at the height of her devotion to Zionism she never suspected that whole populations (nearly a million people, by most estimates) would be uprooted from their homes in Palestine and driven into exile.
"'I should be opposed to it if I were a Jew,' Dorothy had warned, 'with the undimmed memory of the dispersion of my own people in mind. I should not want any Arab to sit beside the waters of Babylon and weep because he remembered Zion.' Her first trip to Palestine in 1945 had convinced her that Zionism was not the 'liberal crusade' she had thought it to be, 'that the Zionist leaders envisaged,' as she put it, 'not a small state of Jews who chose to live in Israel, but a Zionist state destined to become the leading power in the Middle East, as the ward of world Jewry whatever their citizenship in other countries [might be].' Dorothy was very much upset by Jewish terrorism in the quest for statehood. She was 'shocked beyond measure' when Menachem Begin, one of the leaders of the Irgun group that was responsible for the massacre of more than 250 Arabs at Deir Yassin, was accorded a hero's welcome by the Jews of New York, and when Ben Hecht, Peter Bergson, and other leading Zionists 'put on a show in Madison Square Garden' and 'slandered Great Britain' by displaying the Union Jack topped with the Nazi swastika. The failure of Israel, after 1948, to agree to the fixing of its borders, to heed the call for the internationalization of Jerusalem, or to provide any relief or compensation for the Palestinian refugees led Dorothy to conclude that Zionism was 'an aggressive, chauvinistic movement' and that the State of Israel was 'an expansionist power' - 'a creation of the United Nations decision made against the opposition of the whole Arab and Moslem world.'
"Ultimately Dorothy was more worried about the effect of Israeli propaganda on American foreign policy than she was about the righteousness or iniquity of Israel itself... She was ahead of most of her colleagues in journalism in considering the problem of Israel at all (beyond merely hailing its creation as a humanitarian enterprise or, like Walter Lippmann, arguing that the Western allies ought to 'impose peace' on the Middle East through the establishment of a joint Israeli-Palestinian confederation). But just as Dorothy was one of the first - and only - American journalists to speak out in defense of the Arab nations, so was she the first and most prominent American journalist to be smeared with the label of 'anti-semite'." (pp 423-425)
I'll finish specifically on the issue of the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948, the ones so venomously slandered by Gellhorn. As it happens, the first ever documentary film in English on the subject of those refugees, Sands of Sorrow (1950), produced by the Council for Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, was introduced and closed by Dorothy Thompson. Here is her moving introduction:
"I'm Dorothy Thompson and I have been asked to introduce Sands of Sorrow because I've recently returned from visiting the scenes of the picture you are about to see. Of course, the impression left on my mind by these wretched casualties of political change is much more distressing than the film. For no film can convey the icy winds from Mt Hermon as they blow upon flimsy, floorless tents in Syria or the rains that turn dwellings into mud holes in the rainy season in Lebanon. Nor the defeated feeling even of those who are trying to help, but this film tells part of the story that, until now, has hardly been told at all outside the Arab world."
This is light years away from the propagandist bile of Martha Gellhorn.
Re the name change, I rest my case.
Monday, October 28, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 5
Fast forward to July 1967, in the wake of Israel's conquest of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip), Syria's Golan Heights, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in the so-called Six Day War. True to form, Gellhorn was there, whitewashing the suffering of a new wave of Palestinian refugees, many of whom were also refugees from the 1948 era.
The following extract comes from her essay Why the Refugees Ran*, included in a 1988 collection of her essays called The Face of War. We see again the Palestinian straw man of her 1961 propaganda piece (joined on this occasion by a Palestinian straw woman); the hoary Zionist myth of Palestinians as witless pawns of Arab radio broadcasts; the always kind and thoroughly decent Israelis at a complete loss as to what has gotten into these people; and the usual apologetics for Israeli aggression:
"Aquabat [sic] Jaber and the neighboring Jericho camps are now ghost towns though probably most of the residents will filter back. No other mass exodus happened anywhere else in West Jordan and it is fishy. The lightning war was not heard even as a passing bang in this valley. The camp leader, himself a Palestinian refugee, is a choleric fat man, a powerful UNRWA administrator, feared and obeyed by his people... Why didn't he prevent this panic flight? We insisted that there must have been some sort of trouble to drive the people away.
"'No, no. The battle lasted an hour, far off,' the camp leader said. 'There was nothing here. No, no, the Israeli army did not come here at all; everything is all right; everything is correct. There are plenty of supplies. There is no trouble.'
"Since non-war had been followed by instant peace, why did the refugees run? 'People talk,' the camp leader said. 'There were a lot of stories. Political party people spread rumors. They said all the young men would be killed. People heard on the radio that this is not the end, only the beginning, so they think maybe it will be a long war and they want to be in Jordan.'
"A group of sullen young men were sitting in a cafe; they tuned in to Radio Cairo as we passed. Perhaps Radio Cairo and all it stands for, Arab politics and propaganda, are the true reason for the first frantic rush of of camp refugees into a second exile across the Jordan. They were not escaping the danger of war, nor fleeing their shattered homes. There are 20 UNRWA refugee camps in West Jordan, not one of them was touched by the war; not one resident was killed (Statement made by UNRWA's chief representative in West Jordan, during an interview on July 4 at Kalandia, which confirmed my own observations.)... I suggest that blind fear of the Israelis, not the dangers of war, was their driving emotion. Radio Cairo had promised destruction of the Jews. King Hussein's last broadcast before his ceasefire is memorable. 'Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your hands, with your nails and teeth.' Now the Jews had won, so the Jews would kill them instead.
"The majority of Palestinian refugees do not live in camps. Any of these, like any other Arabs who were exposed to actual war, may have decided to escape immediately lest the fighting go on or start again and trap them in danger. Perhaps some of the first wave of refugees had valid, political reasons for leaving, unlike the later waves of stoical departing Arabs.
"In the last few weeks, neither fear of war nor fear of reprisals nor family nor financial complications explain the smaller but steady flow of people plodding over the Allenby Bridge, no matter what the waiting hardships of exile. 'They don't feel secure,' said an intelligent Palestinian woman on UNRWA's staff in Hebron. 'They don't know what is going to happen next. They want to be among Arabs.' She surprised me by remarking that the local Israeli military commander had been 'very kind to UNRWA, very gentle and helpful,' amazing words for an Arab to use about a Jew. The commander had provided a car for their work, and truck transport for refugee women, children and old people to the Allenby Bridge. I surprised her by remarking that this truck transport, a gesture of decency in the white heat of summer, had been transmuted through propaganda into forced expulsion. If the Israeli army had tried at any moment to prevent the exodus, that would have been treated as forced detention." (pp 297-98)
And how's this for pious claptrap (Forty-six years on, note Gellhorn's advice not to "harass Israel for an overnight solution."):
"Hopefully, the Jordanian and Israeli governments will be able to co-operate... on the return of all those refugees who chose to come back to West Jordan. UNRWA's 'educated guess,' here, is that 100,000** of its West Jordan refugees are now on the east bank... It would be wise and restful not to harass Israel for an overnight solution of the 19-year-old Palestine refugee problem. With time, work, and money, the Israelis will manage simply by treating their acquired Palestine refugee population as people, not as political pawns." (p 298)
That Gellhorn is little more here than a peddler of Israeli propaganda becomes patently obvious when contrasted with the findings of research carried out by American University of Beirut sociologists Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat in September 1967, and set out in their report, River Without Bridges: A Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Palestinian Arab Refugees (The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969).
Here is the conclusion from Chapter 5, The Exodus: Its Direct & Indirect Causes:
"It is now time to attempt to answer our original question. Why did the exodus of 1967 take place? The answer is that the exodus was a response to the severe situational pressures existing at the time. The situational pressures were generated by the aerial attacks upon a defenseless country, including the extensive use of napalm, the occupation of the West Bank villages by the Israeli army, and the actions of the occupying forces. Certainly the most drastic of these actions was the eviction of civilians and the deliberate destruction of a number of villages. Other actions, such as threats and the mass detention of male civilians, also created situational pressures.
"For a number of reasons, which we have termed indirect causes, the Arab villages were not well equipped to resist these situational pressures. They were caught by surprise, ill-informed and unfamiliar with the terrifying nature of aerial bombardment. Their family-centred social structure decreased attachment to community and to nation. They fled to protect their families, including, and by no means least, the honor of their womenfolk.
"It is our opinion that the fears felt by the Arab villagers were not unreasonable. They are intelligible and explicable. One does not need to view the exodus of June 1967 as a mass panic of superstitious and ignorant people. It seems more reasonable to see the exodus as the response of the Palestinian Arab villagers to the conditions of enemy attack and occupation. In an earlier section of this report, we have presented our finding that the refugee families had strong ties with their home communities: ties of property, of affection, of kinship and of long residence. It is perhaps a measure of the strength of the 'situational pressures' that the families left their homes in spite of these ties. To explain it as a panic does not do justice to the strength of community ties, nor does it explain the cause of the exodus." (pp 54-55)
Israeli historian Tom Segev's book 1967: Israel, the War & the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007) presents Gellhorn's beautiful Israelis in a very different light, one more in keeping with the Israelis we have all come to - ahem - know and love today.
Segev reveals that a range of strategies, both passive and active, was used by the Israelis to stimulate flight and depopulate the West Bank: The roads leading to Jordan's Allenby Bridge were kept open. The bridge itself was not immediately destroyed. Buses and trucks were made available to speed up the exodus, not as a humanitarian gesture as Gellhorn has it. Again, despite her assertion to the contrary, refugee camps in the Jericho area were bombed, and columns of fleeing refugees were fired on. Vehicles equipped with loudspeakers disseminating disinformation designed to spook civilians into flight, made the rounds of West Bank towns and villages. Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the town of Kalkilya. The villages of Beit Awa and Beit Mirsim in the Hebron area were destroyed. The inhabitants of 3 villages in the Latrun salient, Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, were expelled and the villages razed. Large numbers of young men were rounded up in Tul Karem and detained. Harassing night searches of Palestinian homes by Israeli troops were instituted. The aim was simply to drive home the message: get out! (Segev, pp 403-407)
Gellhorn, apparently, heard nothing of this. And anyway, why spoil a beautiful friendship with Israel's hero du jour, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.***
Finally, on the subject of her fanciful speculation about refugees attempting to "filter back," those who tried were simply shot on sight. Only a limited number were later allowed to return as a PR exercise. (Segev, p 540-542)
To be concluded in my next post...
[*Written for the UK Guardian; *Dodd & Barakat estimate the number of 'old [1948] refugees' at 100,000 and the 'new refugees' at 100,000. Later estimates rise to well over 300,000; *** Moorehead, p 426]
The following extract comes from her essay Why the Refugees Ran*, included in a 1988 collection of her essays called The Face of War. We see again the Palestinian straw man of her 1961 propaganda piece (joined on this occasion by a Palestinian straw woman); the hoary Zionist myth of Palestinians as witless pawns of Arab radio broadcasts; the always kind and thoroughly decent Israelis at a complete loss as to what has gotten into these people; and the usual apologetics for Israeli aggression:
"Aquabat [sic] Jaber and the neighboring Jericho camps are now ghost towns though probably most of the residents will filter back. No other mass exodus happened anywhere else in West Jordan and it is fishy. The lightning war was not heard even as a passing bang in this valley. The camp leader, himself a Palestinian refugee, is a choleric fat man, a powerful UNRWA administrator, feared and obeyed by his people... Why didn't he prevent this panic flight? We insisted that there must have been some sort of trouble to drive the people away.
"'No, no. The battle lasted an hour, far off,' the camp leader said. 'There was nothing here. No, no, the Israeli army did not come here at all; everything is all right; everything is correct. There are plenty of supplies. There is no trouble.'
"Since non-war had been followed by instant peace, why did the refugees run? 'People talk,' the camp leader said. 'There were a lot of stories. Political party people spread rumors. They said all the young men would be killed. People heard on the radio that this is not the end, only the beginning, so they think maybe it will be a long war and they want to be in Jordan.'
"A group of sullen young men were sitting in a cafe; they tuned in to Radio Cairo as we passed. Perhaps Radio Cairo and all it stands for, Arab politics and propaganda, are the true reason for the first frantic rush of of camp refugees into a second exile across the Jordan. They were not escaping the danger of war, nor fleeing their shattered homes. There are 20 UNRWA refugee camps in West Jordan, not one of them was touched by the war; not one resident was killed (Statement made by UNRWA's chief representative in West Jordan, during an interview on July 4 at Kalandia, which confirmed my own observations.)... I suggest that blind fear of the Israelis, not the dangers of war, was their driving emotion. Radio Cairo had promised destruction of the Jews. King Hussein's last broadcast before his ceasefire is memorable. 'Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your hands, with your nails and teeth.' Now the Jews had won, so the Jews would kill them instead.
"The majority of Palestinian refugees do not live in camps. Any of these, like any other Arabs who were exposed to actual war, may have decided to escape immediately lest the fighting go on or start again and trap them in danger. Perhaps some of the first wave of refugees had valid, political reasons for leaving, unlike the later waves of stoical departing Arabs.
"In the last few weeks, neither fear of war nor fear of reprisals nor family nor financial complications explain the smaller but steady flow of people plodding over the Allenby Bridge, no matter what the waiting hardships of exile. 'They don't feel secure,' said an intelligent Palestinian woman on UNRWA's staff in Hebron. 'They don't know what is going to happen next. They want to be among Arabs.' She surprised me by remarking that the local Israeli military commander had been 'very kind to UNRWA, very gentle and helpful,' amazing words for an Arab to use about a Jew. The commander had provided a car for their work, and truck transport for refugee women, children and old people to the Allenby Bridge. I surprised her by remarking that this truck transport, a gesture of decency in the white heat of summer, had been transmuted through propaganda into forced expulsion. If the Israeli army had tried at any moment to prevent the exodus, that would have been treated as forced detention." (pp 297-98)
And how's this for pious claptrap (Forty-six years on, note Gellhorn's advice not to "harass Israel for an overnight solution."):
"Hopefully, the Jordanian and Israeli governments will be able to co-operate... on the return of all those refugees who chose to come back to West Jordan. UNRWA's 'educated guess,' here, is that 100,000** of its West Jordan refugees are now on the east bank... It would be wise and restful not to harass Israel for an overnight solution of the 19-year-old Palestine refugee problem. With time, work, and money, the Israelis will manage simply by treating their acquired Palestine refugee population as people, not as political pawns." (p 298)
That Gellhorn is little more here than a peddler of Israeli propaganda becomes patently obvious when contrasted with the findings of research carried out by American University of Beirut sociologists Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat in September 1967, and set out in their report, River Without Bridges: A Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Palestinian Arab Refugees (The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969).
Here is the conclusion from Chapter 5, The Exodus: Its Direct & Indirect Causes:
"It is now time to attempt to answer our original question. Why did the exodus of 1967 take place? The answer is that the exodus was a response to the severe situational pressures existing at the time. The situational pressures were generated by the aerial attacks upon a defenseless country, including the extensive use of napalm, the occupation of the West Bank villages by the Israeli army, and the actions of the occupying forces. Certainly the most drastic of these actions was the eviction of civilians and the deliberate destruction of a number of villages. Other actions, such as threats and the mass detention of male civilians, also created situational pressures.
"For a number of reasons, which we have termed indirect causes, the Arab villages were not well equipped to resist these situational pressures. They were caught by surprise, ill-informed and unfamiliar with the terrifying nature of aerial bombardment. Their family-centred social structure decreased attachment to community and to nation. They fled to protect their families, including, and by no means least, the honor of their womenfolk.
"It is our opinion that the fears felt by the Arab villagers were not unreasonable. They are intelligible and explicable. One does not need to view the exodus of June 1967 as a mass panic of superstitious and ignorant people. It seems more reasonable to see the exodus as the response of the Palestinian Arab villagers to the conditions of enemy attack and occupation. In an earlier section of this report, we have presented our finding that the refugee families had strong ties with their home communities: ties of property, of affection, of kinship and of long residence. It is perhaps a measure of the strength of the 'situational pressures' that the families left their homes in spite of these ties. To explain it as a panic does not do justice to the strength of community ties, nor does it explain the cause of the exodus." (pp 54-55)
Israeli historian Tom Segev's book 1967: Israel, the War & the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007) presents Gellhorn's beautiful Israelis in a very different light, one more in keeping with the Israelis we have all come to - ahem - know and love today.
Segev reveals that a range of strategies, both passive and active, was used by the Israelis to stimulate flight and depopulate the West Bank: The roads leading to Jordan's Allenby Bridge were kept open. The bridge itself was not immediately destroyed. Buses and trucks were made available to speed up the exodus, not as a humanitarian gesture as Gellhorn has it. Again, despite her assertion to the contrary, refugee camps in the Jericho area were bombed, and columns of fleeing refugees were fired on. Vehicles equipped with loudspeakers disseminating disinformation designed to spook civilians into flight, made the rounds of West Bank towns and villages. Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the town of Kalkilya. The villages of Beit Awa and Beit Mirsim in the Hebron area were destroyed. The inhabitants of 3 villages in the Latrun salient, Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, were expelled and the villages razed. Large numbers of young men were rounded up in Tul Karem and detained. Harassing night searches of Palestinian homes by Israeli troops were instituted. The aim was simply to drive home the message: get out! (Segev, pp 403-407)
Gellhorn, apparently, heard nothing of this. And anyway, why spoil a beautiful friendship with Israel's hero du jour, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.***
Finally, on the subject of her fanciful speculation about refugees attempting to "filter back," those who tried were simply shot on sight. Only a limited number were later allowed to return as a PR exercise. (Segev, p 540-542)
To be concluded in my next post...
[*Written for the UK Guardian; *Dodd & Barakat estimate the number of 'old [1948] refugees' at 100,000 and the 'new refugees' at 100,000. Later estimates rise to well over 300,000; *** Moorehead, p 426]
Sunday, October 27, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 4
In the West Bank (under Jordanian rule at the time), Gellhorn, who had hearted Republicans in 30s Spain, uncharacteristically finds herself warming to monarchists:
"In Jordan, a refugee's education and self-reliance showed at once in his politics. The better educated, the more able do not waste their time on thoughts of violent revenge, and give their loyalty to King Hussein. The more ignorant and less competent nourish themselves with a passion for Nasser, war, and Return."
In Israel itself, she seeks out "the [Palestinians] who stayed behind, the non-refugees," interviewing a Christian Arab schoolteacher in Galilee who informs her that "[i]n the 1948 war, the next village was bombed by the Jews; when we saw that, we knew we had no hope."
Gellhorn responds with the following parenthetical comment to the reader: "(Pause for breath: the Jewish Air Force at the time consisted of 19 Piper Cubs, a nice little plane, not a bomber...)"
In fact, the fledgling AIF had "25 Avia S-199s (purchased from Czechoslovakia, essentially Czechoslovak-built Messerschmitt Bf 109s) and 62 Supermarine Spitfire LF Mk IXEs (also purchased from Czechoslovakia)... Many of the first IAF's pilots in 1948 were foreign volunteers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) and World War II veterans... As the war progressed more and more aircraft were procured, including Boeing B-17s, Bristol Beaufighters, de Havilland Mosquitoes and P-51D Mustangs..." (Wikipedia)
The following conversation ensues, with Gellhorn displaying a mastery of Zionist talking points, an appalling condescension and racism, and a palpable impatience with an interlocutor who sounds suspiciously like the proverbial straw man:
"'The Arab Kings [says the teacher ] were not the true representatives of the Arab peoples when they made war against Israel. Now all the refugees should come back and we should have Palestine.'
"At this point, I decided to make one long, determined stand to see whether there was any meeting ground of minds on a basis of mutually accepted facts and reasoning.
"'Please bear with me and help me,' said I. 'I am a simple American, and I am trying to understand how the Arab mind works, and I am finding it very difficult. I want to put some things in order; if I have everything wrong, you will correct me. In 1947, the United Nations recommended the Partition of Palestine. I have seen the Partition map and studied it. I cannot tell, but it does not look to me as if the Arabs were being cheated of their share of good land. The idea was that this division would work, if both Jews and Arabs accepted it... The Jews accepted this Partition plan; I suppose because they felt they had to. They were outnumbered about two to one inside the country, and there were the neighboring Arab states with 5 regular armies and 40 million or more citizens, not feeling friendly. Are we agreed so far?'
"'It is right.'
"'The Arab governments and the Palestinian Arabs rejected Partition absolutely. You wanted the whole country. There is no secret about this... The Arab governments never hid the fact that they started the war against Israel. But you, the Palestinian Arabs, agreed to this... And you thought... that you would win and win quickly. It hardly seemed a gamble; it seemed a sure bet. You took the gamble and you lost. I can understand why you have all been searching for explanations of that defeat ever since, because it does seem incredible. I don't happen to accept your explanations, but that is beside the point. The point is that you lost.'
"'Yes.' It was too astonishing; at long last, East and West were in accord on the meaning of words.
"'Now you say that you want to return to the past; you want Partition. So, in fact you say, let us forget that war we started, and the defeat, and, after all, we think Partition is a good, sensible idea. Please answer me this... If the position were reversed, if the Jews had started the war and lost it, if you had won the war, would you now accept Partition? Would you give up part of the country and allow the 650,000 Jewish residents of Palestine - who had fled from the war - to come back?
"'Certainly not,' he said, without an instant's hesitation. 'But there would have been no Jewish refugees. They had no place to go. They would all be dead or in the sea.'
"He had given me the missing clue. The fancy word we use nowadays is 'empathy' - entering into the emotions of others. I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why... It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless. Some of them may be unfortunate human beings... But a profound difference exists between victims of misfortune... and victims of injustice. My empathy knew where it stood, thanks to the schoolteacher... He has never seen even a corner of a real big war; he cannot imagine it. He thinks war is something that lasts a few weeks... you run away for a bit and then come home to your undamaged houses and lead a good life, indeed a better material life than before. None of these Arabs has suffered anything comparable to what survivors of modern war know; none can imagine such catastrophe."
So the Palestinian nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 85% of the population of Palestine overrun by Zionist forces in 1948, the Israeli refusal to allow their return as demanded by international law and the United Nations, the theft of their homes, lands, businesses and bank accounts, and the consignment of around 750,000 people, all indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, to exile in perpetuity, is a mere "misfortune" which cannot even begin to compare with the "injustice" suffered by European Jewry.
But it gets worse. Gellhorn (whose knowledge of Arabic is zero) plumbs new depths of calumny and racist abuse with this outburst:
"Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?"
In fact, today's Islamophobic banshees, such as Oriana Fallaci, Pamela Geller, and Melanie Phillips have nothing on Gellhorn:
"Victory over a minor near enemy is planned as as the essential first step on a long triumphant road of conquest. A thousand-year Muslim Reich, the African continent ruled by Egypt, may be a mad dream, but we have experience of mad dreams. We cannot be too careful. The echo of Hitler's voice is heard again in the land, now speaking Arabic."
But, as the following data indicates, there's more, much more, to Gellhorn's Atlantic Monthly hatchet-job on the hapless victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing than meets the eye:
"In the early 1960s the American Zionist Council's (AZC) [AIPAC's parent organization] Magazine Committee met regularly with writers to prepare articles for top US magazines such as Reader's Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life. In its program for 'cultivation of editors' and 'stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines,' the committee pushed lighter subjects with prepared texts such as the 13th anniversary of Israel's founding while killing investigative pieces at such publications as the Christian Science Monitor. The committee confronted two major news items challenging Israel: fallout from the 'Lavon Affair' (a cover up of failed false-flag Israeli terrorist attacks on US government facilities in Egypt) and American peace proposals calling for the return of some expelled Palestinian refugees to their homes and property in Israel. The Israeli government and its US lobby invested heavily in arguing against the return of Palestinian refugees through The Atlantic, according to yet another secret AZC report: 'The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories. Acting on information that anti-Israel groups were bombarding the Atlantic with critical letters, we stimulated a letter campaign designed to counteract their impact... Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who's Who in America... The November issue of the Atlantic carried a special 64-page Supplement on Israel, with articles by some of Israel's top names... Our Committee is now planning articles for the women's magazines for the trade and business publications'." (The Israel lobby swims The Atlantic, Grant F. Smith, antiwar.com, 17/8/10)
To be continued...
"In Jordan, a refugee's education and self-reliance showed at once in his politics. The better educated, the more able do not waste their time on thoughts of violent revenge, and give their loyalty to King Hussein. The more ignorant and less competent nourish themselves with a passion for Nasser, war, and Return."
In Israel itself, she seeks out "the [Palestinians] who stayed behind, the non-refugees," interviewing a Christian Arab schoolteacher in Galilee who informs her that "[i]n the 1948 war, the next village was bombed by the Jews; when we saw that, we knew we had no hope."
Gellhorn responds with the following parenthetical comment to the reader: "(Pause for breath: the Jewish Air Force at the time consisted of 19 Piper Cubs, a nice little plane, not a bomber...)"
In fact, the fledgling AIF had "25 Avia S-199s (purchased from Czechoslovakia, essentially Czechoslovak-built Messerschmitt Bf 109s) and 62 Supermarine Spitfire LF Mk IXEs (also purchased from Czechoslovakia)... Many of the first IAF's pilots in 1948 were foreign volunteers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) and World War II veterans... As the war progressed more and more aircraft were procured, including Boeing B-17s, Bristol Beaufighters, de Havilland Mosquitoes and P-51D Mustangs..." (Wikipedia)
The following conversation ensues, with Gellhorn displaying a mastery of Zionist talking points, an appalling condescension and racism, and a palpable impatience with an interlocutor who sounds suspiciously like the proverbial straw man:
"'The Arab Kings [says the teacher ] were not the true representatives of the Arab peoples when they made war against Israel. Now all the refugees should come back and we should have Palestine.'
"At this point, I decided to make one long, determined stand to see whether there was any meeting ground of minds on a basis of mutually accepted facts and reasoning.
"'Please bear with me and help me,' said I. 'I am a simple American, and I am trying to understand how the Arab mind works, and I am finding it very difficult. I want to put some things in order; if I have everything wrong, you will correct me. In 1947, the United Nations recommended the Partition of Palestine. I have seen the Partition map and studied it. I cannot tell, but it does not look to me as if the Arabs were being cheated of their share of good land. The idea was that this division would work, if both Jews and Arabs accepted it... The Jews accepted this Partition plan; I suppose because they felt they had to. They were outnumbered about two to one inside the country, and there were the neighboring Arab states with 5 regular armies and 40 million or more citizens, not feeling friendly. Are we agreed so far?'
"'It is right.'
"'The Arab governments and the Palestinian Arabs rejected Partition absolutely. You wanted the whole country. There is no secret about this... The Arab governments never hid the fact that they started the war against Israel. But you, the Palestinian Arabs, agreed to this... And you thought... that you would win and win quickly. It hardly seemed a gamble; it seemed a sure bet. You took the gamble and you lost. I can understand why you have all been searching for explanations of that defeat ever since, because it does seem incredible. I don't happen to accept your explanations, but that is beside the point. The point is that you lost.'
"'Yes.' It was too astonishing; at long last, East and West were in accord on the meaning of words.
"'Now you say that you want to return to the past; you want Partition. So, in fact you say, let us forget that war we started, and the defeat, and, after all, we think Partition is a good, sensible idea. Please answer me this... If the position were reversed, if the Jews had started the war and lost it, if you had won the war, would you now accept Partition? Would you give up part of the country and allow the 650,000 Jewish residents of Palestine - who had fled from the war - to come back?
"'Certainly not,' he said, without an instant's hesitation. 'But there would have been no Jewish refugees. They had no place to go. They would all be dead or in the sea.'
"He had given me the missing clue. The fancy word we use nowadays is 'empathy' - entering into the emotions of others. I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why... It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless. Some of them may be unfortunate human beings... But a profound difference exists between victims of misfortune... and victims of injustice. My empathy knew where it stood, thanks to the schoolteacher... He has never seen even a corner of a real big war; he cannot imagine it. He thinks war is something that lasts a few weeks... you run away for a bit and then come home to your undamaged houses and lead a good life, indeed a better material life than before. None of these Arabs has suffered anything comparable to what survivors of modern war know; none can imagine such catastrophe."
So the Palestinian nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 85% of the population of Palestine overrun by Zionist forces in 1948, the Israeli refusal to allow their return as demanded by international law and the United Nations, the theft of their homes, lands, businesses and bank accounts, and the consignment of around 750,000 people, all indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, to exile in perpetuity, is a mere "misfortune" which cannot even begin to compare with the "injustice" suffered by European Jewry.
But it gets worse. Gellhorn (whose knowledge of Arabic is zero) plumbs new depths of calumny and racist abuse with this outburst:
"Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?"
In fact, today's Islamophobic banshees, such as Oriana Fallaci, Pamela Geller, and Melanie Phillips have nothing on Gellhorn:
"Victory over a minor near enemy is planned as as the essential first step on a long triumphant road of conquest. A thousand-year Muslim Reich, the African continent ruled by Egypt, may be a mad dream, but we have experience of mad dreams. We cannot be too careful. The echo of Hitler's voice is heard again in the land, now speaking Arabic."
But, as the following data indicates, there's more, much more, to Gellhorn's Atlantic Monthly hatchet-job on the hapless victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing than meets the eye:
"In the early 1960s the American Zionist Council's (AZC) [AIPAC's parent organization] Magazine Committee met regularly with writers to prepare articles for top US magazines such as Reader's Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life. In its program for 'cultivation of editors' and 'stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines,' the committee pushed lighter subjects with prepared texts such as the 13th anniversary of Israel's founding while killing investigative pieces at such publications as the Christian Science Monitor. The committee confronted two major news items challenging Israel: fallout from the 'Lavon Affair' (a cover up of failed false-flag Israeli terrorist attacks on US government facilities in Egypt) and American peace proposals calling for the return of some expelled Palestinian refugees to their homes and property in Israel. The Israeli government and its US lobby invested heavily in arguing against the return of Palestinian refugees through The Atlantic, according to yet another secret AZC report: 'The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories. Acting on information that anti-Israel groups were bombarding the Atlantic with critical letters, we stimulated a letter campaign designed to counteract their impact... Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who's Who in America... The November issue of the Atlantic carried a special 64-page Supplement on Israel, with articles by some of Israel's top names... Our Committee is now planning articles for the women's magazines for the trade and business publications'." (The Israel lobby swims The Atlantic, Grant F. Smith, antiwar.com, 17/8/10)
To be continued...
Saturday, October 26, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 3
The October 1961 issue of The Atlantic Monthly carried a lengthy report by Gellhorn called The Arabs of Palestine.
Here's the editor's preface:
"Martha Gellhorn, novelist, journalist, and former war correspondent, has recently returned from a journey to the Middle East, where she went to see the 'Palestinian Refugee Problem' in terms of real life, real people. Here she reports how the Arab refugees and Arab Israelis live, and what they say about themselves, their past and their future."
Gellhorn's introductory paragraphs set the tone for what is, in effect, a journalistic hatchet job. Were she speaking to us directly, it'd go something like this:
Listen, I know what refugees are. I saw them "in Germany at war's end... [T]he whole country seemed alive with the roaming mad - slave laborers, concentration camp survivors who spoke the many tongues of Babel, dressed in whatever scraps they had looted, and searched for food in stalled freight cars though the very rail-yards were being bombed." Now I knew that in the Middle East "there would be no high explosive, no concentration camps, but the imagined, expected scene was bad enough, lice and rickets and tuberculosis, bodies rotting in the heat, the apathy of despair [but] nothing I had read or heard prepared me for what I found." So what did I find? You're not going to believe this: A bunch of people as happy as pigs in clover, living off the fat of the land, and spoilt rotten, one and all, by Aunty UNRWA!
First a camp for Palestinian Christians in the hills near Beirut:
"The camp consisted of little cement or frame houses rambling over the hillside, a village of poor people, disorderly and beflowered and cheerful. School was letting out for lunch; troops of children... meandered home, shouting bye-bye at friendly, giggling length. They are Roman Catholics here, but the young teachers are refugees, not priests. They have to teach the children about Palestine, since most of them have never seen the country and even the oldest cannot remember it. The children are taught hate, the Garden of Eden stolen from them by murderers; their duty is to live for Return and Revenge.
"The miniature white clinic had only one customer, a nice-looking girl of 21 who had brought her fourth baby for a checkup. Her husband works in Libya... The resident nurse, a buxom elderly woman, said they had no real sickness... My [Palestinian UNRWA] guide announced that if any refugee needed an operation he was taken in an ambulance to a hospital in Beirut where UNRWA reserved beds and paid for everything; you would have to be a rich man in Lebanon to get such good and speedy treatment."
Luxury! What more could they want? Their country back? No, no, no. According to Gellhorn, her guide tells her:
"It can all be solved with money... if every man got a thousand dollars for each member of his family... he could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more. Then he could start a new life and be rich and happy... [T]hose who really do own something in Palestine must be paid for what they had there. But those are not many. Most had nothing, only work'."
Why, this guide could almost be a product of the good old Israeli propaganda mill:
"Out of the blue, my guide announced: 'There is no crime in the camps. No thefts, no fires, no blood feuds. It is much better than it was in Palestine..."
As could Gellhorn herself, chiming in with:
"And this is true. In all the camps. Exile has taught one valuable lesson: how to live lawfully and peacefully together."
Then it's off to Gaza:
"The refugee camps are much larger than those in Lebanon, small towns by Middle Eastern standards. They are by no means luxury establishments, but many people live in a nastier state in American and European slums. The poor villagers of Gaza are not as well housed or cared for as the refugees. The Gaza Strip is not a hell hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse; it is a jail - with a magical long white sand beach, and a breeze, and devoted welfare workers (UNRWA) to look after the prisoners. The Egyptian government is the jailer."
We should be so lucky!
Now check out these happy little vegemites:
"The Vocational Training School at Gaza is a freshly painted group of buildings, with well-kept lawns, flower borders, scrubbed Spartan self-respecting dormitories, and impressive workshops equipped with the complex machinery that modern life seems to depend on. The boys were on their playing field that afternoon, a holiday, marking white lines for various sporting events to come. A few of them drifted back and wanted to show off every inch of their school. Did they like it here, did they enjoy their work, were they happy? Needless to ask; the answer glowed and shone on them. The graduates of this school find good jobs for which they are trained; amongst its many other parental functions UNRWA operates a placement bureau throughout the Middle East. This is the new generation, the UNRWA graduates, and you find them everywhere in the Arab refugee world. They have not yet been crippled by exile, regret, or hate, and they may well be the brightest citizens of the Arab future."
So nice to see that, unlike the UNRWA school in Lebanon, hate is not on the curriculum.
Gellhorn bids adieu to Gaza's Club Med thus:
"I left Gaza, wishing that I could take all the young people with me, and not to Palestine, but out into the wider world. Their destiny should not be to go back, but to go forth. They need exactly the opposite of what the Jews need. There is plenty of room for both needs."
Now let me get that straight: Palestinian 'refugees' need to be dispersed throughout the Arab world. 'The Jews', on the other hand, need to be crammed into Palestine - sorry - Israel.
Talk about taking the words right out of Israel's mouth!
To be continued...
Here's the editor's preface:
"Martha Gellhorn, novelist, journalist, and former war correspondent, has recently returned from a journey to the Middle East, where she went to see the 'Palestinian Refugee Problem' in terms of real life, real people. Here she reports how the Arab refugees and Arab Israelis live, and what they say about themselves, their past and their future."
Gellhorn's introductory paragraphs set the tone for what is, in effect, a journalistic hatchet job. Were she speaking to us directly, it'd go something like this:
Listen, I know what refugees are. I saw them "in Germany at war's end... [T]he whole country seemed alive with the roaming mad - slave laborers, concentration camp survivors who spoke the many tongues of Babel, dressed in whatever scraps they had looted, and searched for food in stalled freight cars though the very rail-yards were being bombed." Now I knew that in the Middle East "there would be no high explosive, no concentration camps, but the imagined, expected scene was bad enough, lice and rickets and tuberculosis, bodies rotting in the heat, the apathy of despair [but] nothing I had read or heard prepared me for what I found." So what did I find? You're not going to believe this: A bunch of people as happy as pigs in clover, living off the fat of the land, and spoilt rotten, one and all, by Aunty UNRWA!
First a camp for Palestinian Christians in the hills near Beirut:
"The camp consisted of little cement or frame houses rambling over the hillside, a village of poor people, disorderly and beflowered and cheerful. School was letting out for lunch; troops of children... meandered home, shouting bye-bye at friendly, giggling length. They are Roman Catholics here, but the young teachers are refugees, not priests. They have to teach the children about Palestine, since most of them have never seen the country and even the oldest cannot remember it. The children are taught hate, the Garden of Eden stolen from them by murderers; their duty is to live for Return and Revenge.
"The miniature white clinic had only one customer, a nice-looking girl of 21 who had brought her fourth baby for a checkup. Her husband works in Libya... The resident nurse, a buxom elderly woman, said they had no real sickness... My [Palestinian UNRWA] guide announced that if any refugee needed an operation he was taken in an ambulance to a hospital in Beirut where UNRWA reserved beds and paid for everything; you would have to be a rich man in Lebanon to get such good and speedy treatment."
Luxury! What more could they want? Their country back? No, no, no. According to Gellhorn, her guide tells her:
"It can all be solved with money... if every man got a thousand dollars for each member of his family... he could be a citizen in any Arab country he likes, he would not think of Palestine any more. Then he could start a new life and be rich and happy... [T]hose who really do own something in Palestine must be paid for what they had there. But those are not many. Most had nothing, only work'."
Why, this guide could almost be a product of the good old Israeli propaganda mill:
"Out of the blue, my guide announced: 'There is no crime in the camps. No thefts, no fires, no blood feuds. It is much better than it was in Palestine..."
As could Gellhorn herself, chiming in with:
"And this is true. In all the camps. Exile has taught one valuable lesson: how to live lawfully and peacefully together."
Then it's off to Gaza:
"The refugee camps are much larger than those in Lebanon, small towns by Middle Eastern standards. They are by no means luxury establishments, but many people live in a nastier state in American and European slums. The poor villagers of Gaza are not as well housed or cared for as the refugees. The Gaza Strip is not a hell hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse; it is a jail - with a magical long white sand beach, and a breeze, and devoted welfare workers (UNRWA) to look after the prisoners. The Egyptian government is the jailer."
We should be so lucky!
Now check out these happy little vegemites:
"The Vocational Training School at Gaza is a freshly painted group of buildings, with well-kept lawns, flower borders, scrubbed Spartan self-respecting dormitories, and impressive workshops equipped with the complex machinery that modern life seems to depend on. The boys were on their playing field that afternoon, a holiday, marking white lines for various sporting events to come. A few of them drifted back and wanted to show off every inch of their school. Did they like it here, did they enjoy their work, were they happy? Needless to ask; the answer glowed and shone on them. The graduates of this school find good jobs for which they are trained; amongst its many other parental functions UNRWA operates a placement bureau throughout the Middle East. This is the new generation, the UNRWA graduates, and you find them everywhere in the Arab refugee world. They have not yet been crippled by exile, regret, or hate, and they may well be the brightest citizens of the Arab future."
So nice to see that, unlike the UNRWA school in Lebanon, hate is not on the curriculum.
Gellhorn bids adieu to Gaza's Club Med thus:
"I left Gaza, wishing that I could take all the young people with me, and not to Palestine, but out into the wider world. Their destiny should not be to go back, but to go forth. They need exactly the opposite of what the Jews need. There is plenty of room for both needs."
Now let me get that straight: Palestinian 'refugees' need to be dispersed throughout the Arab world. 'The Jews', on the other hand, need to be crammed into Palestine - sorry - Israel.
Talk about taking the words right out of Israel's mouth!
To be continued...
Friday, October 25, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 2
You can see why Pilger thought Gellhorn the journalistic real deal:
"It was in the textile mill towns of North Carolina that Martha finally found the writing voice that she had been looking for. It was clear and very simple, a careful selection of scenes and quotes, set down plainly and without hyperbole. Nothing particular; there were many other writers who did the same just as well. What made it her own was the tone, the barely contained fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed. Nothing so enraged her as bullying, superiority, the misuse of power; nothing touched her so sharply as people who had become victims, through the stupidity or casual brutality of others, or children who were frightened, in pain or did not have enough to eat." (Martha Gellhorn: A Life, Caroline Moorehead, 2003, p 91)
"She was often furious; furious with apocrophiars, a word she coined for those who rewrote history, particularly to their own advantage; furious with critics who read fact into her fiction; with trimmers and prevaricators; with those who had no guts for the fight and those who destroyed others, casually; and furious with the crassness and arrogance of governments. Like lying, sitting on the fence was contemptible. Martha's horizons were peopled by villains, politicians in particular, men and women such as Nixon and Kissinger and Mrs Thatcher, who led the innocent into chaos and the dark night, stupidity and arrogance." (ibid, pp 5-6)
Clearly, to her immense credit, she was no Greg Sheridan, Paul Sheehan or Peter Hartcher. And yet:
"Her blind spot was the Palestinian cause, in which she saw nothing honourable or good. A few chaps braved the fury and challenged the magisterial dismissal; most preferred to leave the subject to one side." (ibid p 6)
Why such sound and the fury at the mention of Palestine?
In a word, as my previous post indicated, 'Dachau'.
Gellhorn reached the SS-run concentration camp on the heels of the American army in May 1945, and took in its array of horrors: the walking skeletons, the evidence of medical experimentation on prisoners, the gas chamber and its crematorium, and the piles of bodies that the SS had not had time to dispose of before the camp was liberated. As her biographer noted:
"Something changed for Martha that day; something to do with what she felt about memory and the past, and her own sense of optimism, and perhaps even about being Jewish.* It was in Dachau, she said, that she really understood for the first time the true evil of man." (ibid p 284)
In her Eurocentric tendency to elevate the Nazi genocide as some kind of gold standard in man's inhumanity to man, Gellhorn calls to mind the insufferable Jewish Hungarian emigre intellectual and writer, Arthur Koestler. Here, for example, is Koestler playing the holocaust card at a social gathering in mandate Palestine in 1945:
"When he got into a heated argument with a British official named Ronnie Burroughs, who was making the case for evenhandedness between the Jews and the Arabs, Koestler burst into an impassioned denunciation of British indifference to the fact that the Jews of Europe were dying like flies for lack of a place to go. 'He thundered like an authentic Old Testament prophet, demolishing the other man's position,' according to the young American correspondent Saul David, who was present. 'Ronnie murmured something about the unfairness of Koestler's argument. Koestler apologized, but said it was impossible to be cool about such matters 'when your mother has been baked in an oven in Lublin'.' The shocked silence that followed this statement ended all argument then and there. Later a more knowledgeable bystander commented that 'Koestler was right, but his mother wasn't baked anywhere. She is alive and well'." (Koestler: The Literary & Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, Michael Scammell, 2009, p 257)
As it happened, Gellhorn and Koestler once met over dinner in wartime London, with the following, perhaps predictable, result:
"[H]e evidently thinks that he alone has a corner on the Light and the Way. I absolutely loathed him and made it clear, and it was mutual," she wrote to Ernest Hemingway. (Moorehead, p 246)
I venture to suggest that Gellhorn, post-Dachau, also considered that she had a corner on the Light and the Way, and that, as with Koestler in the aforementioned incident with Ronnie Burroughs, nothing brought this out quite like bringing up the case of the Palestinians.
The problem with Gellhorn though was that she took her blind spot one step further and went on to wage a vile Zionist propaganda war against Arabs in general and Palestinian refugees in particular.
[*Gellhorn's father was Jewish. Her mother, Christian.]
To be continued...
"It was in the textile mill towns of North Carolina that Martha finally found the writing voice that she had been looking for. It was clear and very simple, a careful selection of scenes and quotes, set down plainly and without hyperbole. Nothing particular; there were many other writers who did the same just as well. What made it her own was the tone, the barely contained fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed. Nothing so enraged her as bullying, superiority, the misuse of power; nothing touched her so sharply as people who had become victims, through the stupidity or casual brutality of others, or children who were frightened, in pain or did not have enough to eat." (Martha Gellhorn: A Life, Caroline Moorehead, 2003, p 91)
"She was often furious; furious with apocrophiars, a word she coined for those who rewrote history, particularly to their own advantage; furious with critics who read fact into her fiction; with trimmers and prevaricators; with those who had no guts for the fight and those who destroyed others, casually; and furious with the crassness and arrogance of governments. Like lying, sitting on the fence was contemptible. Martha's horizons were peopled by villains, politicians in particular, men and women such as Nixon and Kissinger and Mrs Thatcher, who led the innocent into chaos and the dark night, stupidity and arrogance." (ibid, pp 5-6)
Clearly, to her immense credit, she was no Greg Sheridan, Paul Sheehan or Peter Hartcher. And yet:
"Her blind spot was the Palestinian cause, in which she saw nothing honourable or good. A few chaps braved the fury and challenged the magisterial dismissal; most preferred to leave the subject to one side." (ibid p 6)
Why such sound and the fury at the mention of Palestine?
In a word, as my previous post indicated, 'Dachau'.
Gellhorn reached the SS-run concentration camp on the heels of the American army in May 1945, and took in its array of horrors: the walking skeletons, the evidence of medical experimentation on prisoners, the gas chamber and its crematorium, and the piles of bodies that the SS had not had time to dispose of before the camp was liberated. As her biographer noted:
"Something changed for Martha that day; something to do with what she felt about memory and the past, and her own sense of optimism, and perhaps even about being Jewish.* It was in Dachau, she said, that she really understood for the first time the true evil of man." (ibid p 284)
In her Eurocentric tendency to elevate the Nazi genocide as some kind of gold standard in man's inhumanity to man, Gellhorn calls to mind the insufferable Jewish Hungarian emigre intellectual and writer, Arthur Koestler. Here, for example, is Koestler playing the holocaust card at a social gathering in mandate Palestine in 1945:
"When he got into a heated argument with a British official named Ronnie Burroughs, who was making the case for evenhandedness between the Jews and the Arabs, Koestler burst into an impassioned denunciation of British indifference to the fact that the Jews of Europe were dying like flies for lack of a place to go. 'He thundered like an authentic Old Testament prophet, demolishing the other man's position,' according to the young American correspondent Saul David, who was present. 'Ronnie murmured something about the unfairness of Koestler's argument. Koestler apologized, but said it was impossible to be cool about such matters 'when your mother has been baked in an oven in Lublin'.' The shocked silence that followed this statement ended all argument then and there. Later a more knowledgeable bystander commented that 'Koestler was right, but his mother wasn't baked anywhere. She is alive and well'." (Koestler: The Literary & Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, Michael Scammell, 2009, p 257)
As it happened, Gellhorn and Koestler once met over dinner in wartime London, with the following, perhaps predictable, result:
"[H]e evidently thinks that he alone has a corner on the Light and the Way. I absolutely loathed him and made it clear, and it was mutual," she wrote to Ernest Hemingway. (Moorehead, p 246)
I venture to suggest that Gellhorn, post-Dachau, also considered that she had a corner on the Light and the Way, and that, as with Koestler in the aforementioned incident with Ronnie Burroughs, nothing brought this out quite like bringing up the case of the Palestinians.
The problem with Gellhorn though was that she took her blind spot one step further and went on to wage a vile Zionist propaganda war against Arabs in general and Palestinian refugees in particular.
[*Gellhorn's father was Jewish. Her mother, Christian.]
To be continued...
Thursday, October 24, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 1
I've been meaning for a while now to tackle the subject of The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an award which, in the words of its creator, the great Australian journalist John Pilger, "is in honour of one of the 20th century's greatest reporters. It's awarded to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth. It's validated by powerful facts that expose establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it." (An unpalatable truth: The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, John Pilger, Information Clearing House, 3/6/11)
So having just learned that the worthy Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook was awarded the Gellhorn Prize in 2011 is probably as good a prompt as any to raise what at first blush may appear to be a rather odd - even highly inappropriate - question: Isn't it perhaps time to rename this award?
Before returning to that question in my next post, a brief introduction to the career of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) and her connection with John Pilger is in order.
The following sketch, by Shane Maloney, John Pilger & Martha Gellhorn, comes from the Australian magazine The Monthly (5/3/08), and flags the concern I have about Gellhorn as a model of genuine, 'truth-to-power' journalism:
"Martha Gellhorn wrote many things during her remarkable 60-year career. Reports on living conditions in the mine and mill towns of Depression-era America. Newspaper despatches from battlefronts as far-flung as Spain, Finland, Java and El Salvador. Trenchant and prophetic observations on the rise of fascism. Eyewitness accounts of wars, insurrections, revolutions and invasions. Novels, collections of short stories, travelogues and autobiography.
"In 1975, she wrote a 'fan letter' to a stranger she saw on television. He was a 35-year-old Australian journalist named John Pilger. Gellhorn had chanced upon an interview in which Pilger was copping a mauling for his first book, The Last Day, an eyewitness account of the hasty American retreat from Saigon. Personally acquainted with the reception often given to the bearers of unpalatable news, she promptly went out and bought the book. Judging it fine, she wrote to Pilger to tell him so.
"Pilger, it transpired, owed his introduction to Indochina to Gellhorn. Eight years earlier, her articles on the horrors being unleashed on Vietnam's civilians had prompted Pilger's editor at the Daily Mirror to send him to cover the war. Pilger found Gellhorn's fan mail 'moving', but it was another 3 years before the two inveterate travellers were to meet. In 1978, following the screening of Pilger's documentary Do You Remember Vietnam?, they finally sat down together.
"Gellhorn kept a flat, a court of sorts, in London's Cadogan Square. As a young Midwesterner in Paris, she'd modelled for Chanel and Schiaparelli, and she retained a slim, striking elegance that must have contrasted to the lanky Aussie with fiercely independent hair. Over a bottle of Famous Grouse, they talked about 'the struggle of memory against forgetting', agreeing furiously on almost everything. The exception was Palestine. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists to enter Dachau and her adherence to Israel was unqualified. Pilger steered around the subject and the two became good friends.
"Strongly averse to 'the kitchen of life', the former Mrs Ernest Hemingway was a terrible cook. On subsequent visits, Pilger took food. Sometimes they would stroll in the park, talking surfing and snorkelling between denouncing the vileness of Kissinger. An incorrigible smoker, Gellhorn once got thrown out of Selfridges for lighting up.
"Martha Gellhorn was still reporting in her eighties, travelling to Panama in the wake of the American invasion and interviewing street kids in the favelas of Brazil. She died of cancer* in 1998. John Pilger continues to annoy the buggery out of his critics."
To be continued...
[*Although Gellhorn had cancer, it was a pre-emptive pill that actually did the trick.]
So having just learned that the worthy Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook was awarded the Gellhorn Prize in 2011 is probably as good a prompt as any to raise what at first blush may appear to be a rather odd - even highly inappropriate - question: Isn't it perhaps time to rename this award?
Before returning to that question in my next post, a brief introduction to the career of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) and her connection with John Pilger is in order.
The following sketch, by Shane Maloney, John Pilger & Martha Gellhorn, comes from the Australian magazine The Monthly (5/3/08), and flags the concern I have about Gellhorn as a model of genuine, 'truth-to-power' journalism:
"Martha Gellhorn wrote many things during her remarkable 60-year career. Reports on living conditions in the mine and mill towns of Depression-era America. Newspaper despatches from battlefronts as far-flung as Spain, Finland, Java and El Salvador. Trenchant and prophetic observations on the rise of fascism. Eyewitness accounts of wars, insurrections, revolutions and invasions. Novels, collections of short stories, travelogues and autobiography.
"In 1975, she wrote a 'fan letter' to a stranger she saw on television. He was a 35-year-old Australian journalist named John Pilger. Gellhorn had chanced upon an interview in which Pilger was copping a mauling for his first book, The Last Day, an eyewitness account of the hasty American retreat from Saigon. Personally acquainted with the reception often given to the bearers of unpalatable news, she promptly went out and bought the book. Judging it fine, she wrote to Pilger to tell him so.
"Pilger, it transpired, owed his introduction to Indochina to Gellhorn. Eight years earlier, her articles on the horrors being unleashed on Vietnam's civilians had prompted Pilger's editor at the Daily Mirror to send him to cover the war. Pilger found Gellhorn's fan mail 'moving', but it was another 3 years before the two inveterate travellers were to meet. In 1978, following the screening of Pilger's documentary Do You Remember Vietnam?, they finally sat down together.
"Gellhorn kept a flat, a court of sorts, in London's Cadogan Square. As a young Midwesterner in Paris, she'd modelled for Chanel and Schiaparelli, and she retained a slim, striking elegance that must have contrasted to the lanky Aussie with fiercely independent hair. Over a bottle of Famous Grouse, they talked about 'the struggle of memory against forgetting', agreeing furiously on almost everything. The exception was Palestine. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists to enter Dachau and her adherence to Israel was unqualified. Pilger steered around the subject and the two became good friends.
"Strongly averse to 'the kitchen of life', the former Mrs Ernest Hemingway was a terrible cook. On subsequent visits, Pilger took food. Sometimes they would stroll in the park, talking surfing and snorkelling between denouncing the vileness of Kissinger. An incorrigible smoker, Gellhorn once got thrown out of Selfridges for lighting up.
"Martha Gellhorn was still reporting in her eighties, travelling to Panama in the wake of the American invasion and interviewing street kids in the favelas of Brazil. She died of cancer* in 1998. John Pilger continues to annoy the buggery out of his critics."
To be continued...
[*Although Gellhorn had cancer, it was a pre-emptive pill that actually did the trick.]
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