Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1998, Pages 10, 100

Point of View

As Americans Learn the Facts They Are Turning Against Netanyahu’s Land-Grabbing Tactics

By Richard H. Curtiss

Older Americans still differ so strongly over the Vietnamese War that it’s a taboo subject in social conversation among casual acquaintances, like religion or like politics used to be. But a March 6 ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC was non-controversial. Two members of a three-man U.S. Army helicopter crew, pilot Hugh Thompson and his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, received the Soldier’s Medal for heroism at the scene of the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968.

Yes, it turns out, there were heroes at this most infamous incident in American military history—at least three of them. They were the crew of a helicopter that was flying in advance of ground patrols going into an area of “unfriendly” villages in Quang Ngai Province. The helicopter’s mission was to “draw enemy fire” and then report it to the troops on the ground. The troops, in turn, were to attack the places from which the firing came, thus clearing Viet Cong forces from the area.

As the helicopter flew back and forth between advancing U.S. forces on the ground and the heavily wooded potentially hostile areas ahead of them, a crew member had noticed some bodies in a ditch behind the advancing troops. Each time the helicopter returned there were more bodies in the same ditch, but the crew knew there were no more enemy forces in the area. Descending, the crew could see a group of women and children hiding in a bunker and U.S. troops heading directly toward them.

The crew landed their helicopter between the civilians and the troops and, pointing the helicopter’s 50-caliber machine gun at their fellow soldiers, demanded to know what was going on—though by this time they had a pretty good idea. With the advancing infantry platoon halted at gunpoint, the helicopter crew chief called in another helicopter which in two trips lifted the civilians out of harm’s way.

Thus ended, at gunpoint, the tragic events which resulted in Lt. William L. Calley Jr. being convicted of ordering the murder of several unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children. Probably many more civilians were murdered, but Calley was convicted only of documented killings carried out in response to his orders.

The third man in the helicopter, crew chief Glenn Andreotta, was killed a few days later in another combat operation. His medal was sent to his family. In fact, it took nearly a year before military witnesses to the My Lai massacre, including the two surviving helicopter crew members, the crew of the other helicopter that carried out the evacuation, ground troops who witnessed but didn’t participate in the killing of civilians, and journalists who heard their stories, were able to force a military investigation into the incident. Calley was the only officer convicted, but it ended the military careers of others higher in the line of command for passing down vague orders which Calley interpreted as a license to kill civilians, and for trying to cover it up.

The Israeli hold over U.S. public opinion has been loosened.

Atrocities undoubtedly have taken place in all wars. And, one can legitimately ask what is the difference between dropping bombs on great cities that killed hundreds of civilians, as took place day after day and night after night in World War II—the so-called “good war”—and what Lt. Calley’s troops did at the hostile village of My Lai.

In fact, my generation has debated for the past 53 years the morality of dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those two bombs abruptly ended World War II, only months before the planned U.S. landings on the Japanese homeland. But on the Sunday after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as a young infantryman I heard an Austin, Texas, minister emotionally denounce it. And, although it may well have saved my own life, I remain as troubled by it now as the minister was then.

During World War II I envied the moral absolutists. For eight months while I was studying Japanese to be a combat interpreter my company shared a mess hall with a group of conscientious objectors who, in lieu of combat service, had volunteered to be the subjects of nutritional experiments. I was baffled when, asked the inevitable question of whether they would pick up a weapon to defend their own mothers, wives or children against a personal attack by a German or Japanese soldier—or a burglar for that matter—some said no.

After the two bombs were dropped on Japan, I was equally astonished by some of my fellow infantry replacements. Some of us wrestled with the issue of whether the first of the two bombs could not have been dropped on an uninhabited island, or a Japanese military garrison, instead of an inhabited city to demonstrate the bomb’s power and perhaps end the war without further civilian deaths.

Others reduced the moral equation to simple mathematics. Sure, 200,000 Japanese civilians had died but as a result perhaps a million Japanese and American soldiers who would have been killed in the final battles had been spared. And besides, with only two bombs ready at that point, none could be spared for “demonstrations.”

While ethical ditherers like me seemed to be in the minority, I realized in the course of those barracks discussions that, regardless of religious or ethnic background, my American compatriots were, and I hope remain, deeply moral. But, then and now, they also are pragmatists. What’s done is done, they concluded. Now let’s move on and try to do better next time. Perhaps this pragmatism is best expressed in the popular prayer, “Give me the strength to change what I cannot accept and to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I believe that’s been the American pub lic’s attitude toward the Israel-Palestine prob lem, which has been around for as long as Americans under 60 can remember. Everyone knows that unacceptable things happen there, but until recently few Americans realized it was something they had the power to change.

There are good reasons for this general American ignorance, well known to readers of this magazine. They can be summarized in one sentence as a prejudiced media establishment which closed its eyes while what Fortune magazine recently called the second most powerful lobby in the United States bribed and browbeat the Congress, intimidated the president, and took over the American foreign policymaking establishment.

The astonishing results are illustrated by a question I once was asked in all sincerity by an American-born taxi driver when he noticed the Middle Eastern tags on my luggage: “Where did the Palestinians come from and why do they want to take over the Israelis’ land?”

In the 18 years since I retired after 31 years of U.S. military and diplomatic service, however, two things have changed—dramatically. The Israelist takeover of America’s Middle East policymaking establishment has been completed—lock, stock and barrel. But at the same time the total Israeli hold over U.S. public opinion has been loosened, perhaps even broken.

The myth or popular scenario of what happened in Palestine has changed. For Americans of my generation it was that the shattered survivors of the European Holocaust had returned to the ancient homeland of their ancestors, now a neglected desert, and had made it bloom with well-deserved American assistance. But now the nomads whose neglect had created the desert and who envied the Israelis for what they had created by the sweat of their brows were seeking to take it back again.

Over the years Americans who lived and worked in the Middle East returned with an entirely different, and far more historically accurate, picture. But they have faced an iron wall of media resistance. When they pointed out the similarity of the military occupation under which Palestinian Arabs—whose ancestors have lived for centuries in the Holy Land—have been living for dec ades to the Nazi military occupation of Europe during World War II, these “Arabists” were accused of “glorifying terrorists.” And when they pointed out that whatever those initial Jewish refugees had been when they arrived from Europe, they now have evolved to resemble their Nazi persecutors, these Americans were silenced as “anti-Semites.”

But, far too slowly, the situation has changed—if not by 180 degrees, then perhaps nearer to it than those of us closely involved realize. Now when I say on a radio talk show the same things I’ve been saying for the past 18 years, I’m no longer insulted. Instead, callers congratulate the host for “finally having someone on this show who knows something about the Middle East.”

At a Feb. 21 demonstration of 2,000 people in Washington, DC and an even larger Feb. 28 demonstration in New York against taking military action against Iraq, there were clerical collars and nuns’ habits in abundance. In Washington, there were organized groups of Methodists and Presbyterians, signs from two different local Unitarian congregations, Carmelite sisters and activist Catholics from Pax Cristi. Followers of mainstream African American Muslim leader Warith Deen Muhammad marched side by side with individuals carrying signs saying “I’m a Jew against bombing Arabs.”

Of course there were also the absolutists—anarchists who oppose anything any government might ever do, and people carrying signs saying “imperialist America must be destroyed.” And one group—non-Arab provocateurs or spoilers of the type who seem to turn up at most pro-Arab demonstrations—assembled the television cameras to watch them burn an American flag. That ensures that American audiences will be outraged and that the revealing anti-Zionist signs held by real Arab Americans won’t appear on the evening newscasts.

But those of us who were there saw signs reading “let’s look at Israel’s weapons of mass destruction” and “treat Iraq the way you treat Israel.” Interestingly, no more than a third of the crowds in either city seemed to be of Middle Eastern heritage, with the rest seemingly mainstream Americans, a discernible change from the much smaller crowds of a few years ago.

Recently, after a talk in Pennsylvania I told an intense but seemingly well-informed and well-intentioned questioner—whether Jew or Gentile I couldn’t tell—that he could do the most good not by joining marches in Washington but by talking to editors and his representatives in Congress at home. A few days ago he telephoned me excitedly. He had met, one-on-one, with his representative in the latter’s home office. The congressman had listened without interrupting his visitor and then had told him, “I believe that 85 percent of my constituents feel just as you do.”

“Did he say what he was going to do about it?” I asked.

“No,” confessed my caller, “I was so stunned at his response that I didn’t know what to ask him to do.”

So that comes next. Perhaps it’s because Israel’s American lobby has so dramatically overreached itself in demanding, and almost pulling off, a second, totally unnecessary U.S. war with Iraq. More likely it’s because Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is so arrogantly and openly trying to complete the final grab of Palestinian land that his predecessors dreamed of but didn’t quite dare to finish. In any case, U.S. public opinion has changed.

Now the question is what to do about it. After it dawned on those three Americans in a helicopter in 1968 that they were witnessing a massacre by the “good guys,” at great risk to their own lives they intervened personally to stop it—three men with one machine gun against a heavily armed and seemingly out-of-control infantry platoon. But it turned out that the infantrymen didn’t like what their lieutenant had told them to do, and most were more than ready to be stopped—even by three enlisted men like themselves.

Perhaps brave “ordinary” Americans, like the clerics and nuns marching in Washington and New York, will do it again—intervening personally with their representatives in Congress, who seem out-of-control but are openly unhappy about it. And perhaps it will happen even sooner than we dare to hope.