A Lone Voice on a Foreign Beach Now Finds a Thousand American Echoes

By Lawrence S. Helm

If, in the course of an argument, you tell an intelligent person he is slow and ignorant, he will cock an eyebrow and carefully examine your premise. If he can, he will successfully rebut your evidence and finally indicate with a grin, "You see, I am neither slow nor ignorant."

If you make the same observation to someone who is indeed slow and ignorant, he will become frustrated and angry. Having neither the knowledge nor the verbal skills to disprove your statement, he will strike back with hard words or fists. I believe this is the drama that is beginning to be played out in the United States.

I faced this challenge on a beach in Crete in 1976. At 25 years of age, I was very well informed and politically aware. I read the newspapers every day, whether at work or on holiday. I had read many books concerning geopolitics and the projection of American power.

Then, while soaking up rays, I met a man my age who introduced himself as a Palestinian. I had always enjoyed political discussions because they provided me an opportunity to show people how smart I was.

So when he engaged me on the topic of Palestine I expressed my joy that the Jews finally had found a homeland, and how serendipitous it was that when they arrived the land was virtually uninhabited. He did not accept my judgment. Instead, slowly but relentlessly, he began to de-program me.

At first I was very offended. Here was an Arab presuming to instruct me about a subject upon which I considered myself especially well informed. After all, I'd read Exodus twice. However, perforce, since we both were there to enjoy the sea and sand, we met every day for about a week. He spoke to me firmly and patiently, as if he were housebreaking a puppy. At the end of the week I realized that I had been fooled—totally. My government was on the side of the bad guys.

The methods used by our own media to trick us are insidious. An Israeli is never killed. He is slaughtered or murdered. We learn his name and details about the family members he leaves behind. Palestinians, however, are shot while throwing stones at " settlers. " We see pictures of stones as big as pumpkins that can smash a car and cause its driver to lose control.

Our knowledge of the Holocaust in Europe is encyclopedic. Any American school child knows that six million Jews were killed in World War II. None knows how many American soldiers died in the same war.

We are orchestrated to identify with Zionism starting in Sunday School, and this continues throughout our school years. It is an effortless transition to reading newspapers or watching television as an adult and seeing images of poor put-upon Jews trying vainly to live in peace with malicious and violent Arabs. But now everything is changing for the American public, just as it did for me in 1976.

Once a person with any compassion at all understands the truth about the dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland, and the motivation behind the great lie invented to obscure this reality, he or she can't leave it alone. I've been in the trenches ever since I saw the light on that sun-drenched beach in Crete. Back then, no newspapers ever printed my letters, nor did I receive responses from my representatives in Congress. "Normal" people I met casually at parties undoubtedly considered me an obsessed fanatic or a vicious bigot.

Sometimes over the years I got tired of bumping up against the silent walls of indifference and considered giving up. "What's the use?" I would think. "You can't educate a sack of potatoes."

Then I would read or hear of the bulldozed homes, uprooted orchards and children living briefly and dying violently under occupation. I figured if they could go out for another day to face bullets with stones, I could sit down and write another batch of letters. So I did. But I operated in a vacuum, not knowing that there were other Americans who believed as I did.

It was not until the 1980s that I saw former Congressman Paul Findley on the "Today" show. They wouldn't put the American Educational Trust's number to call for his book on the screen, so he had to say it quickly before he was cut off. I sent for the book, which I'd never heard of and which wasn't available in any bookstore, and I wasn't alone anymore.

The Trickle Becomes a Flood

Now in the '90s, the trickle of information getting through or around the national media to the American public has become a flood. My letters are regularly printed in the local paper, though I doubt they would be in New York or Washington, DC. Congressmen reply now with halfhearted explanations of why they are spending my money to finance an occupation of which we both disapprove. When Israel or Palestine comes up in conversation, people stop and listen to what I have to say. I shake a copy of the Washington Report in the face of anyone who asks me questions.

We will win. But when the giant awakens and is told how long he has been slow and ignorant, will he cock an eyebrow to show he's alert and indicate with a wry grin that he's caught on? Or will he lash out in anger? Those who began this struggle, meaning the Washington Report, Paul Findley, and others, bear a special responsibility to prepare for V-Day, giving recognition to the brave Jews who, as individuals or as members of peace groups, sought to dissuade their American coreligionists from the folly of supporting ethnic and religious discrimination and bigotry in Israel. The last thing the rest of us grunts desire is to have to return to the trenches to help a new group of victims of ignorance and bigotry begin a new search for peace and justice in the world.