Eleven Months Chained to a Wall—Time to Reach Some Conclusions

By Jerry Levin

In December 1983, I went to Lebanon as Cable News Network's Lebanon bureau chief and correspondent determined to measure up as a reporter to one of my company's promotional slogans: "You have a right to know the score.” That, of course, meant looking at causes, as well as effects, objectively and evenhandedly, and telling the public, as far as humanly possible, the whole story—everyone's story.

My personal views regarding the general situation in the region did not change while I was there. They were only strengthened and enhanced by what I experienced as a willing practicing journalist and as an unwilling hostage. What I resent most about my captivity besides the fright it gave my loved ones—and me—is that it ended my assignment covering one of the toughest, and inherently most spectacular, but also one of the most often distorted stories of the decade. It was a plum, and I'm sorry to have lost the opportunity of doing my part to shed some light into the dark corners of that tragic event.

After my Syrian rescuers turned me over to my countrymen in Damascus on Feb. 15, 1985, one of the first questions I was asked by reporter colleagues was how did it feel to "be" the story, rather than to be reporting it. My answer was "very uncomfortable."

Even then I had a sinking feeling that my life was going to be complicated in a way that the lives of the Americans who had been held hostage in Iran years before had not been. When they came home, they left no fellow citizens behind still in captivity; so they could put their ordeal (at least in that respect) behind them. But as I fled down a mountain in the dark, early on the chilly morning of Feb. 14, 1985, I knew that I was leaving behind four or five other hostages in the house from which I had just escaped.

Despite the fact that I never knew them, talked with them, or even saw them during my captivity (because I was isolated in lonely solitary confinement), I was aware of their presence. I could hear the muffled sound of their footsteps as one by one they were led blindfolded to the bathroom each morning. A few moments later I could hear their knocks on the door to be led out. Then I could hear the door being opened and them being led back to their own lonely isolation and chains.

So, as I made my way in the dark to freedom, I felt an aching bond with those unfortunate men. I was certain that my getting away was going to make it more difficult if not impossible for them to escape too. And it has turned out that way.

Once I was free, that attachment, that concern for those hostage strangers, motivated both my wife and me to discuss publicly our perceptions of the meaning of my captivity and theirs—in particular its American foreign policy context. We probably would not have felt the need to do that so strongly if we had felt more secure about the national press's interest in those perceptions, or the administration's interest in having them heard. But we did not.

The barely comprehended context of our captivity has been this: our captors' made a specific demand (exchange for 17 Al Da4a commandos imprisoned in Kuwait, convicted of blowing up the American and French embassies there); the genesis of those violent acts was in part retaliation for America's deadly and provocative entry into the Lebanese civil war. Two of the 17 prisoners in Kuwait were Lebanese.

But the administration, spurred on too often by an obliging press, promoted the typically jingoistic idea that the captivity and the agony of the Americans taken hostage in Lebanon in 1984 and after had to do solely with callous, irrational acts by terrorists.

Once in captivity, as angry as I was about it, I had to admit to myself that there was a certain grim and plausible logic for my frightening restraint at the hands of terrorists, although obviously their actions against me and their other innocent victims could not and can never be condoned. A decades-long United States policy of diplomatic dialogue and negotiation in the Middle East had been abruptly abandoned in 1983 in favor of the use of military force as a coercive tool of foreign policy.

In Lebanon it took the form of violent military intervention which set the stage for the deaths of more Americans in that part of the world than at any time since our soldiers fought in the Middle East during World War II. Also, and just as important, the stage was set for more deaths inflicted by us on inhabitants of that part of the world than at any time since World War II.

But the administration, spurred on too often by an obliging press, promoted the typically jingoistic idea that the captivity and the agony of the Americans taken hostage in Lebanon in 1984 and after had to do solely with callous, irrational acts by terrorists. Although there has been a brutal side to their captivity for which there can be no rational, moral apologetic, examination reveals another critical component for which there also was and is no rational, moral apologetic: our nation's violently dehumanizing, one-sided interference and one-sided involvement in Lebanon's already pervasively cruel and brutalizing civil war.

The genesis of our confinement, the genesis of the deaths of the 241 Marines, the genesis of the deaths of scores of Americans in embassy bombings in Beirut and Kuwait, and equally important the genesis of the deaths of innocent non-combatant Lebanese and Palestinians was Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

Back then our leaders explained that we had entered the civil war on behalf of our Middle East military proxy, Israel, in our continuing effort to help it contain or roll back Soviet influence. In Lebanon, however, Soviet influence was neither ideologically, confessionally, socially, nor economically the critical issue. But when we began to use our military forces directly to oppose the straw man of Soviet penetration in Lebanon, and innocent Lebanese and Palestinian men, women, and children were killed and their property destroyed, retaliation was inevitable.

When I reached freedom, I learned to my amazement that those facts were hardly realized because they had hardly ever been a matter of public examination and discussion; and they still are not. The result was and continues to be the forestalling of debate where it needs to count most heavily—in the legislative and other domestic political arenas.

Counselors for candidates Reagan, Mondale, and Ferraro picked the brains of my wife and her key counselor, Landrum Bolling, at length before the 1984 election debate on foreign policy. But the Middle East—in particular Lebanon, the hostages, or the Israeli-Palestinian issue—was never mentioned. That was inexcusable in view of the record number of American lives lost and still in peril at the time, with nothing constructive to show for the losses in terms of shortening the distance to peace.

It is not difficult to conclude why both presidential candidates shied away. The genesis of our confinement, the genesis of the deaths of the 241 Marines, the genesis of the deaths of scores of Americans in embassy bombings in Beirut and Kuwait, and equally important the genesis of the deaths of innocent noncombatant Lebanese and Palestinians was Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

But the candidates had a technical excuse for not voluntarily addressing this issue. The format was controlled by the panel of reporters who never brought up the subject. For them not to question the candidates on the issue was journalistically scandalous.

And in 1988, despite the Palestinian uprising, despite the well-documented horrors of Israeli collective punishment and continued confiscatory aggression, and despite the shredding of our Constitution by the Iran-contra masterminds, the situation did not change. The only candidate to bring up those subjects regularly was Jesse Jackson.

During the presidential debates in the 1988 general election, the only way the Middle East was brought up by the panels of reporters was within the context of what the candidates would do about insurgent terrorism. The reporters made it easy for the candidates to come out foursquare against free-lance terrorism while ignoring the official Israeli reign of terror that has made a mockery of Palestinian human rights.

Nothing that the new administration has done so far indicates that the president intends to act more kindly or gently toward the Palestinians than his predecessor. This continued impersonal attitude was ominously demonstrated to my wife and me by a high State Department official who said to us, "You've got to understand, in the Middle East we still must be guided by practicality, not morality."

Sadly, in the one-sided battle between Rambo and reconciliation, Rambo still gets most of the attention. I was once uninvited from the "Today Show" after the producer who asked me to participate was overridden by her boss who, she said, told her, "We can't use him. He's been criticizing the president.”

Amazingly, while I was stiff in captivity; my wife's evenhanded, reconciliation oriented public statements at home and in Syria, where she lobbied tirelessly at the highest levels on my behalf, gained her an enmity in pro-Israeli quarters that actually erupted bitterly on the very day she learned I was free. While we were in separate airplanes winging our way toward a reunion on the airport tarmac at Frankfurt, West Germany, a spokesman for the Israeli cause in the United States was telling a producer for Cable News Network, my employer, that Sis Levin was a Syrian spy.

Since then we have been subject to other forms of character assassination. I have been accused of having the Stockholm syndrome, being un-American, unpatriotic, and—last and not least—a self-hating Jew. (I wonder: Since I have been critical of government actions, does that make me a self-hating American? Or does the little bit of tattling I've done here about the press make me a selfhating journalist?)

The sad fact is that while there has been some balance in the general American press (and it has grown during the uprising), the motivation has been, in my opinion, very often self-interested tokenism to protect circulation or viewership, and not necessarily something that can be counted on over the long haul.

Despite these problems my wife and I have learned since we began our do it-yourself enlightenment campaign four years ago that there are plenty of good-hearted people in our nation who can be motivated toward making their voices count. But we also have encountered tens of thousands of other decent people with decent convictions who are still by and large an untapped resource. In their isolation, when they do speak out or write they are often then intimidated to the point of silence by a form of neo-McCarthyism that equates sympathy for Palestinian suffering and support for Palestinian aspirations with anti-Semitism.

Finding a way to support these people of good heart and good will is essential. Because they have not been reached, they are a potential powerhouse that is still unorganized and uncoordinated.

In a democracy where persuasion is mandatory, quality of argument when the quantity of advocates is limited is not a guarantee of national acquiescence. In my opinion, it will take nothing less than massive education leading to massive political action at the grassroots level to make the critical and irrevocable dent in the issue of Palestinian rights that is needed.

It will also take nothing less than an energetic professional effort at the top working full time to inspire that kind of grassroots action and also to persuade the legislative and executive branches of government to be maximally responsive. What is needed is a kind of AIPAC but without intimidation, dirty tricks, or character assassination.

Only through such efforts will there ever be the quantity of voices needed to give weight to the cause a steadfast few have been trying to keep alive in the United States for so many years. There is no other way. And it is the quintessential American way.

Jerry Levin was the first of the so-called forgotten American hostages in Lebanon. Kidnapped on March 7, 1984, he spent 11-1/2 months chained to a wall in solitary confinement. Because of his wife's efforts, theirs is the only joint do-it-yourself husband-and-wife-rescue effort to have succeeded. The startling contrast between Sis Levin's successful non-violent reconciliation-oriented effort and the government's violence-perpetrating Iran-contra arms deal, which has left two of the original hostages still in captivity and led to the kidnapping of seven more Americans, is the theme of the Levins' presentations at churches, universities, social and business meetings, and conferences. They may be reached at 2928 33rd Place, NF, Washington, DC 20008; telephone (202) 333-5918.

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