To Palestine, Via Iran

By Andrea Wright

It's possible to spend the better part of a decade in the Middle East and still know nothing about the Palestinian issue. I arrived in Tehran in October, 1964. An early winter chill was sweeping down from the Elborz Mountains, and snow was expected within a few days.

Snow in the Middle East! I had traveled to Iran to join my fiance, and although I had spent some time in the US researching Iran, the information I brought with me was scanty and outdated. A letter written home that first year showed my culture shock: "No matter how much I might have read, I couldn't have been prepared. Mother was right: I'm in a different world."

Different indeed! At dawn I heard the muezzin call the faithful to prayer. Although I was studying Farsi, I could not converse with the Iranians I knew. I was stared at wherever I went, and there was always talk of "the foreigner." Nevertheless, I loved Iran, and winced at some of the queries from home: "Do you have any electricity? How do you get your bath water? Please send us a picture of your house, or whatever it is you live in."

While it took some time before I began to feel "at home" in the Middle East, it took even longer for some of the political realities of the region to sink in. Although I was a reporter for the Tehran Journal, my editor was only interested in local feature stories. I was still largely oblivious to the gathering tide which was someday to sweep Americans out of much of the Middle East when, two months after the 1967 Arab-Israel war, I had a brief layover in Tel Aviv. I remember that my friends from Iran and Texas had applauded the fury of little David meeting and beating the Arab Goliath—everyone I knew smugly cheered the perceived underdog. In retrospect, I see that I was only one of many Americans, including those then conducting the Johnson administration's foreign policy, who underestimated the momentous nature of the 1967 war.

Shuttling between the US and Iran for the next decade provided me with a chance to reflect more critically on America's policy towards the Shah's Iran. Like most Americans, I naively believed our leaders knew what they were doing in the Middle East, and that their Iran policies were designed as part of a larger regional strategy. By the mid-1970s, however, when those of us close to the heartbeat of the Iranian people felt with certainty the winds of chaos stirring, we watched with dismay as American leaders made one misstep after another. The way US leaders responded to Iran's revolution made me question their awareness and acumen. Gradually I came to realize that my native country was following a disastrous policy in Iran, or, even worse, no policy at all.

I was in Tehran when a truly revolutionary page in Iranian history was written: the Shah was overthrown, ending what he, at least, sought to depict as Iran's 2,500-year old monarchial tradition. There seemed to be almost as much chaos in Washington, however, as American officials sought to explain the revolution and to evade personal responsibility for pursuing American policies which had become out-dated years before.

Perhaps because Iranians and Arabs tend to distance themselves from one another—a monumental mistake in my opinion—it took Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the ensuing massacres at the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps to focus my attention on the festering wound that is the Palestine problem.

As pointed out in previous "Seeing the Light" columns, journalists like to consider themselves generally well-informed. Thus, as a journalist who had by 1982 spent over eight years in the Middle East, it was particularly embarrassing to admit I had a blind spot regarding the Palestinians. As a journalist I considered myself a merchant of information, but in reality I was a victim of disinformation.

As I gradually began to write on the Palestinian issue, and American policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I found that my pile of rejection slips began to grow. Like many other writers, having discovered the unpleasant truth about US policy toward the Palestinians, I wanted to share my insights with American readers. I gradually began to notice, however, that most of the US analysis and editorial commentary on the Middle East had a more or less explicitly pro-Israel viewpoint. For example, Israeli officials often published articles on US Middle East policy in America's "newspapers of record," but those newspapers rarely if ever gave the same space to Palestinian or Arab voices.

However, from the responses to my published articles, I am convinced of two things: the American people are hungry for more information on the Middle East, and that only through a spirit of unity among all peoples in the Middle East will the distorted views and stereotypes here in American be dispelled.

Andrea A. Wright is a staff writer at the Laredo Morning Times in Texas.