The "Israel Can Do No Wrong" Attitude

By John P. Egan

I first became aware of the "Israel can do no wrong" attitude when I attended hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the summer of 1981. I was an intern for the State Department at the time, and although I had no specialized knowledge of the Middle East, I noticed that developments in the region were featured more or less consistently on the front page of the Washington Post.

Throughout that spring, Syrian-Israeli tensions mounted, culminating in a series of Israeli attacks against Syrian missile batteries in Lebanon. In early June the Israeli air force destroyed a nuclear reactor in Iraq, claiming that it was nearly ready to produce nuclear weapons for use against the Jewish state. Shortly thereafter, Menachem Begin's Herut Party won re-election in Israel. And in July the Israeli air force bombed some residential areas of Beirut, killing scores of civilians. When the PLO responded by shelling northern Israel, the Israeli air force increased its bombing raids in Lebanon. The carnage and death were only stopped when President Reagan dispatched Philip Habib, his special envoy, to the Middle East to broker the cease-fire between Israel and the PLO that lasted until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon one year later.

During that fateful summer of 1981 I occasionally went to Capitol Hill, eager to walk in the famed "corridors of power." On this particular day, I found the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room and settled in for what I hoped would be an interesting afternoon: testimony was to be given on Israel's bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor.

I don't remember much that was said that afternoon—many of those testifying were scientists, and they disagreed over whether the Iraqi reactor was designed primarily for peaceful uses, or as a factory for nuclear weapons. However, I do remember that one Senator—later I would learn that it was Alan Cranston of California—seemed particularly prominent that afternoon. He had brought several witnesses to testify, and he asked each to discuss, often at great length, the potential military uses of the Iraqi nuclear reactor. Eventually, contending that Iraq had spent billions of dollars building the reactor to manufacture nuclear weapons for use against Israel, Cranston announced that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was to blame for Israel's casus belli: after all, if Iraq hadn't built the reactor, Israel wouldn't have had to destroy it.

When I returned to college, I took courses on Middle East history and politics. I was particularly intrigued by the PLO and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Very early in my research I found that a wide-ranging consensus existed in the US print media, stretching from ostensibly "liberal" publications like the New Republic to the conservative Wall Street Journal, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: both publications, and more or less everything in between, were deeply hostile to the PLO and strongly supported Israel and the Zionist movement.

Israel's Partisans Always Active

This tendency revealed itself more clearly the following year, when Israel invaded Lebanon. With only a handful of exceptions—including an important op-ed article in the New York Times by Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein—the mainstream press didn't ask why Israel invaded Lebanon. Instead, there was much talk of "hot pursuit" and the need to "cleanse terrorist nests." Those who pointed out that Israel was killing civilians with US-supplied arms were vilified by Israel's supporters in America. Norman Podhoretz, editor of the American Jewish Committee's magazine Commentary, and Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic, turned reality on its head by charging that the Palestinians were to blame for their fate: if they weren't in Beirut, then they wouldn't have been killed by Israeli soldiers. Although the US government said it "deplored the continuing cycle of violence in Lebanon," it vetoed UN Security Council resolutions designed to halt the Israeli invasion. Night after night that bloody summer, the television news shows presented horrifying film footage of Israel's siege of West Beirut. As one who had waited for such coverage of what was really happening in the Middle East, I was astonished to hear, from Israel's partisans in America, that such network news presentations were part of the "new anti-Semitism."

Finally there was the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Some people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when President John F. Kennedy was killed; I will always remember the fund-raising event I attended when those terrible massacres were first reported. The photos from Sabra and Shatila made me physically sick: how could human beings carry out such atrocities, I asked somewhat naively. And, how many more times must Palestinians be massacred before the US acknowledges their right to a homeland of their own?