"Memory Hole" Shapes U.S. Policy To Pressure Group Requirements

By Andrew I. Killgore

In retrospect, perhaps it was a small conceit as a historian that helped blight my career as an Arabist. That, and my inability to grasp that bitterly satirical novelist/ social critic George Orwell's "memory hole" could ever be more than a literary device. It made the point that when dictators wanted some inconvenient fact "disappeared" they just pushed it down the "memory hole" and it vanished from public awareness.

So, as a newly arrived U.S. consul in Jerusalem in early 1957, when I asked how I could visit Deir Yassin, my question elicited only blank looks. Wasn't it just two miles down the hill from Jerusalem? Silence. Finally, from one Israeli official, "No, it no longer exists, physically."

I didn't worry at first. Surely, in my two-and-a-half-year tour of duty in Jerusalem, Israeli or U.S. newspapers, magazines, radio, television or speakers would have to mention the tragedy that had taken place in that Arab villageor former Arab village. But none ever did.

Was it only a dream that on April 9, 1948, 254 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered in Deir Yassin by Jewish terrorists, supported by the Haganah, which less than two months later became the Israeli army? Dazed and weeping survivors of the massacre had been paraded through Jerusalem in open trucks by Menachem Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi (Stern Gang) terrorists to garner maximum attention.

That exposure to the media of the house-byhouse slaughter of whole families in Deir Yassin had started the exodus of 750,000 terrified Palestinian refugees from their ancient homeland even before the birth of Israel on May 15, 1948. It was the single most successful act of terrorism in history.

Getting nowhere, I eased up in my quest to visit the site of Deir Yassin. I clearly remembered reading about it nine years before my assignment to Jerusalem, while I was in law school after returning from World War II service in the South Pacific. Now, however, with only negative consequences to be realized from further media exposure of the massacre, it had dropped out of the Israeli and U.S. press entirely.

I reflected that George Orwell, were he able to come back to life, would hardly believe that such a "memory hole" could actually exist in 1957, a full 27 years before the futuristic nightmare he had envisioned in his classic book 1984.

Throughout my tour as a junior Foreign service officer and self-appointed historian, there were many conversations with American journalists visiting Jerusalem. In seeking to convey what I had learned while living in Jerusalem to some of them, I noted that the Levant, presently consisting of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Jordan, has scanty resources and a population concentrated in a thin strip along the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Throughout history, therefore, it has never been able to maintain an independent existence for long.

Instead it fell alternately under the sway of Egypt's populous Nile Valley, or the other major regional concentrations of people in the Tigris/Euphrates plain and the Turkish plateau. This was a central lesson of 5,000 years of recorded Middle Eastern history, said the foreign service officer who didn't acknowledge that it is not always diplomatic to be too conversant with history.

After my transfer to Amman in August 1959, a letter arrived via the diplomatic pouch from a friend at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Sent at the request of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it asked me to explain my observations about the historic vicissitudes of the eastern Mediterranean littoral.

An Israeli official had been told by an American journalist that he "sensed" I had had Israel in mind when I spoke of the difficulties faced by any Levantine country trying to survive alone in the area, although the journalist conceded that I had spoken dispassionately.

Was this query the result of a betrayal by an American journalist of a confidential conversation? Something like that, I concluded, and also something that a naive young American foreign service officer hadn't believed could happen.

Obviously some American journalist's special interest in Israel had overridden his promise of confidentiality in exchange for an off-the-record briefing by an American Consulate political officer.

I shouldn't have been shocked, however. It wasn't the first time I had been criticized for a frank expression of my views. In Jerusalem, I had been outspoken in defending President Dwight D. Eisenhower's insistence that Israel evacuate the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, both of which it had seized in the 1956 Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt's Suez Canal.

In one such discussion, the visiting national president of Hadassah had challenged my defense of U.S. policy with daggers in her eyes. On a later visit to Jerusalem she told the consul general I was anti-Israel. Had I criticized the policy followed by the U.S. in 1956, rather than the policy followed by Israel, it would have gone unremarked by American officials of Zionist organizations. But I thought Eisenhower was right and Israel was wrong, and I had said so, politely but clearly.

Another betrayal of my confidence? Maybe. But in what other area of the world would it be a dangerous career move to defend U.S. foreign policy in a briefing for Americans who happened to agree with the host government and disagree with their own government's view?

So how to answer the letter that had reached me in Amman from Tel Aviv? In truth, I had been glad to get away from Jerusalem, as richly rewarding personally as my tour there had been. Israeli officials in Jerusalem hadn't liked either the U.S. consul general or me. They made this clear at dinners and diplomatic receptions, and in remarks to Americans stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.

The reason? Mainly that, reporting from our vantage point in a consulate with offices on both sides of the Mandelbaum Gate and accredited both to Jordanian authorities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and to Israeli authorities in West Jerusalem, we had reported that Israelis invariably provoked the recurring firefights that broke out on the Israeli-Syrian border.

The Israelis fabricated their versions of these outbreaks, saying they started with unprovoked shelling from the Golan Heights of Israeli kibbutzim in the Hula Valley below. The Israelis fed these fabrications to U.S. journalists, many of whom seemed remarkably gullible and compliant. In the Israeli versions, Syria was always at fault.

Our own reports were drawn from onsite investigations by U.N. military officers. They observed that year after year the outbreaks began with incursions by Israeli armored tractors plowing ever deeper into the demilitarized zone. This was an area between the lines from which Syrian forces had withdrawn after the 1948 ceasefire pending final resolution of its status in the peace negotiations which still had not taken place. Although our reports were classified to protect our U.N. sources, the contents obviously were being fed back to the Israelis by sympathizers in the State Department or elsewhere in the U.S. government.

Prickly Israeli reactions we interpreted as pressure and intimidation to soften our reports. We stuck to our guns, however, never really believing that reporting facts on the ground that were unflattering to Israel could have lasting adverse career consequences.

I suppose that in replying to the query from my friend in Tel Aviv I could have tried to mend career fences by declaring affection for Israel and pleading that I had been misunderstood. Frankly, however, the thought never crossed my mind.

Instead, I interpreted the Israeli Foreign Ministry's inquiry as a blatant effort, and certainly not the first one, to coopt or intimidate me. So, it was the outspoken historian, not the calculating diplomat, in me who dictated my response to my friend in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv: "Tell the Israeli Foreign Ministry that I said go to hell."

Back at the State Department

When I was back at the State Department in Washington from 1961 to 1965, first as number two on the Arabian peninsula desk and later as number one on Iraq-Jordan affairs, there were many fellow Arabists around. "Arabist" was the term to describe officers with the high language aptitude that had made them eligible to study a "hard language" like Arabic at the Department's Foreign Service Institute, the luck to be selected for the grueling 18-month course, and the drive to complete it.

There also were plenty of friends of Israel " FOIs." That was the politically correct term then used by State Department officers for Americans who put their sympathies for Israel or friendships with Israeli officials ahead of obligations to the United States or respect for confidences offered by its officials. FOIs resolved any conflict awakened by this reversal of customary loyalties by pretending to believe that Israel and the U.S. were allies with identical interests. This, in their minds, justified labeling any American who criticized Israeli actions as "anti-Israel" or, even more unconscionably, as "anti-Semitic. "

In the 19611965 period, Arabists still were treated as individuals. But it was getting harder to be one. FOIs in the Department and the media were turning us into two dimensional cardboard figures.

Arabists thus became "elitists" or, as portrayed in Robert Kaplan's recent book on the subject, "an elite within the elite." Kaplan depicted Arabists as eccentrics-romantics who glorified Arabs, particularly the "pure" Arabs of the desert, as Lawrence of Arabia and Richard Burton supposedly did.

Conversely, therefore, Americans who "idealized" Arabs supposedly couldn't really like Jews. They, after all, were Semites who had lost the "purity" of the desert Arab. Thus we Arabists became fair game dilettantes, not serious professionals, regardless of the fact that many of us had come into the foreign service after years abroad. Instead of being among the best and brightest of two generations seasoned by military service in World War 11, Korea or Vietnam or by hardship assignments in the Peace Corps, as virtually all of us had been, we became hateful caricatures.

The unremitting attacks, unfortunately, took their toll. Too many of the Arabists ran for cover! Especially the uncertain or overambitious officers. To avoid career penalties implicit in being stereotyped as narrow and predictable Arabists, some who had gone through the trial of learning, under severe time constraints, a very, very difficult language, simply melted away. One common technique was to drop snidely denigrating comments about Arabs into their reports. This signaled the FOIs: "Look, I don't have localitis, or clientitis. I'm okay. "

Ingeniously, one prominent Arabist of my era simply declined to speak Arabic throughout his career in the Arab world. No member of his staff apparently ever heard a word of Arabic pass his lips, even during his ambassadorships in two important Arab countries.

This non-Arabist Arabist was one of the few who thrived in a State Department increasingly dominated by both career and politically appointed "FOIs." At the time I became an "Arabist" it already had become politically prudent for the historians among us to push any special knowledge of the negative consequences of U.S. tilting toward Israel down the memory hole."

What a pity it will be if this trend continues, or accelerates. Will this finally culminate with the linguistically competent among foreign service officers also finding it necessary to push their knowledge of Arabic, gained at such cost to the government and sacrifice to themselves, down another "memory hole" imposed by a Middle East policymaking establishment dominated by FOIs?

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report, is an "Arabist " who was U.S. ambassador to Qatar when he retired from the foreign service in 1980. After World War II service in the U. S. Navy, he served as a career foreign service officer in Germany, the U.K., Lebanon, Jerusalem, Jordan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Iran, Bahrain and New Zealand.