Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Page 154

Editor's Essays, Explications, Explanations and Expletives

Dr. Israel Shahak's Translations

They say that if everything's coming your way, it means you're driving in the wrong lane! We'd been opening all those donation envelopes that assure us a good start for 1998. And we figured we'd solved the problem of providing a good swath of "Other Voices" opinion and fact articles by letting Washington Report readers who had the time and interest subscribe to them separately for $15 (see preceding page and explanatory box on "Other Voices," p. 87). But then we opened our mail at home and found a little notice saying that Translations From the Hebrew Press by Israel Shahak was being discontinued.

It seemed that Dr. Shahak, who lives in Jerusalem and suffers from diabetes, had had a frightening downturn. And Frank and Toni Collins, he a retired chemistry professor and she a writer, had pretty well put their lives on hold for the past couple of years to issue their 24-page compilation of his translations monthly, and in recent months a supplement of almost equal size to those who paid an additional fee.

Well, we've been there before. When we first set out to get Dr. Shahak's translations to a wider U.S. audience, longtime volunteer Donna Bourne and another volunteer, Foreign Broadcast Information Service retiree George Paduda, teamed up to prepare it for publication. He had painful arthritis and finally had to leave the project shortly before his death.

After that Donna did it alone for some years and sometimes with aid from others like French-born Genevieve Mason, a foreign service wife. Donna used to get so upset and angry at what she was inputting that she had to walk around the block on downtown Washington's mean streets to cool down. (Bleeding hearts like Donna are cautioned to take Dr. Shahak's selections in carefully regulated doses under a physician's care.)

Anyway, she had to give up preparing Translations From the Hebrew Press for a while when her late mother needed more care and it was picked up by a succession of student interns. The most recent was Monica Ringer, a young woman of blinding speed at the keyboard who did similar chores for the Washington Report as well.

The Collinses came along at about the same time work on her Ph.D. dissertation began to consume all of Monica's time, so the torch was passed to them. Now it's baaaack. But we'll work out something for their subscribers. Meanwhile, as we go to press, Israel Shahak, who no longer has the strength to do the translations, has agreed to go right on selecting and sending to us, gratis, articles to be translated from the Hebrew press. And he'll go on writing at least one feature article per issue for the Washington Report. The problem for us now is to find volunteers or paid interns to do the actual translating. So IF YOU HAVE HEBREW-TO-ENGLISH SKILLS, we'd appreciate hearing from you. And for readers without those skills but who are hooked on a Shahak fix every month (it's more of a jolt than coffee for the brain and red wine or red grapes for the heart), hang in there. We'll have something ready next month, and we'll let you subscribe without a doctor's prescription so long as you're over 21 and fully insured.

Goodbye to Carol Farmer

"Remember, if you drive fast enough you don't have to worry about chloresterol!" What does that have to do with hard-working Carol Morelli- Farmer, our full-time intern from the University of Utah? We'll explain. In her Washington semester, now coming to an end, she mostly got to work by metro and on foot. And life in a group house with other student interns, some of them half her age, probably didn't seem totally jet set. But it was a necessary part of getting her B.A. this year. On the day she started with us she moved into our Book Club position, providing a nice bridge between hard-working outgoing manager Geoff Lumetta and hard-working incoming manager Michael Lee. Then, in her third week, she slipped into the office manager position, providing a bridge between outgoing manager John Vandenberg and, well, by then we hoped it might be Carol, who's been to many Middle Eastern countries on her own and who was Utah state chairman for the Arab-American Affairs Council before she went back to school. But her husband, Morris, who does daring things with flight simulators in Salt Lake City, didn't think that was such a great idea. To keep her from getting hooked on the national capital he's been sending her jokes via the Internet all the time she's been with us. That explains the discernable improvement in the humor content on this page, the preceding one, and in speeches given by AET officers throughout this fall and winter.

Carol's work ethic also explains why we've let our full-time paid staff dwindle to four employees and why libraries that subscribe to the Washington Report are getting their annual $150 library book donation packages on time (see photo). And, finally, it explains why we telephoned the University of Utah begging for Carol clones for the spring semester. Anyway, we're bidding a reluctant goodbye to Carol and we're still negotiating with Morris about staying on his joke net.

Looking Good for Spring

Happily, two more Utes will be starting with us in January, and our third full-time intern will be a young woman from Gaza. If she's as persistent in getting us stories and subscribers as she was in getting the job, we'll be looking good! The truth is, Palestinian interns are hard to find. People can differ on race-based affirmative action programs, but no one can contradict the statement that a program of jobs for Palestinians is 100 percent justice-based.

Recently when, while reading an article in The Washington Post about the European Union's problems, we saw a frustrated diplomat quoted as saying, "The only thing that unites Europeans so far is opposition to Israel."

Well, as readers know, we've always been a bit cynical about the ability of Europeans to do anything together except make war. (Remember Bosnia?) But after reading that, we're rethinking.

For one thing, while really cruel bigots like Republican Rep. Benjamin Gilman of New York are working night and day to keep the Palestinians from getting even the pittance Congress appropriates for them, it's the European nations, NGOs and individuals who are making sure that Israeli attempts to literally starve the Palestinians out of their country are frustrated.

We also have to take off our fuzzy winter cap to Washington Post staff writer Barton Gelman, who started his tour in Jerusalem starry-eyed about Israel but in no time was providing reportage just as penetrating as anything in the Christian Science Monitor or the Los Angeles Times, and perhaps even more revealing because the Post gives its foreign correspondents more space.

So the times they are a changing! Meanwhile, don't let your Washington Report subscription lapse or you'll miss in the next issue Victor Ostrovsky's almost comical compilation of Mossad blunders over the years, Rachelle Marshall's overview of Netanyahu's methodical destruction of the peace process, and Morris Farmer's joke about the engineer in hell. So, that's all for now from the Washington Report, where all the editors are good, all the writers are great, and all the subscribers are way above average.