Talking Across Invisible Barriers

Lebanon was once the paradise of the Middle East, but beneath its glitter there lurked a social cancer called the mosaic system. In Beirut, neighborhoods were built around particular sectarian or ethnic communities. The picturesque villages nestled in valleys or on mountain ridges were similarly segregated. They were Druze, Maronite, or Shiite villages, but almost never mixed. A Lebanese might spend a lifetime never encountering opinions different from those prevailing in his own family. He therefore was capable of believing almost anything about members of other groups and was fair game for incitement by foreigners against his own countrymen of different sects.

The results are there for all to see: A swath of shattered buildings bisects Beirut, marking the "green line" between Maronite Christian neighborhoods on one side and Sunni and Shiite Muslim neighborhoods on the other. Some 100,000 of Lebanon's people are dead, comparable on a percentage basis to eight and a half million dead Americans, or perhaps 10 times as many deaths as we have suffered in all the wars in our history.

Pathetically, the last neighborhood in Beirut to disintegrate into anarchy was the one area where Muslims and Christians did live together in harmony—the Ras Beirut area that had grown up around the American University. But the cancer that overwhelmed the entire country finally reached it as well, and Druze, Sunni and Shiite gunmen now skirmish through streets that were once as gracious and cosmopolitan as any in the world.

In the United States, by contrast, we devised the "melting pot" system to absorb the waves of immigrants that began arriving in the mid-19th century. Its action arm was our almost uniquely successful system of public schools, in which most Americans became comfortable from an early age with people with different names, backgrounds and ideas. Reinforced by the military draft, our state universities, and the recent emphasis on affirmative action in even the most elite institutions, the result is our miles of homogenized suburbs, where Americans are sorted out by income rather than by race or religion. If the inner cities have not yet fully measured up to this ideal, at least one can safely say that the centripetal pulls in American life counterbalance the centrifugal forces that have caused nations like Lebanon to fly apart.

On one subject, however—the Middle East—Americans are demonstrably not communicating across those religious or ethnic green lines, and the results can later bring sorrow to us all.

Anyone who followed letters to the editors during the TWA hostage crisis was quickly aware that they fell into three distinct categories. There were calls for the President to put aside politics and get our people back alive, and most of the people who wrote them had names that ring no special bells, like Smith. There were pleas for understanding the concerns of the Shiite hijackers. Some who wrote them had Islamic names, and others also had names like Smith. Then there were the demands for retribution or revenge on "terrorists" in general or Shiites in particular, and a much larger percentage of those seemed to be written by people whose names we privately—but never out loud—classify as "Jewish sounding."

Media commentators divided even more clearly—not by religion but by previously-demonstrated attitudes on the Middle East. Persistent apologists of the "Israel right or wrong school" like George Will or Joseph Kraft dwelt on the need for immediate retaliation, even at the cost of the lives of the hostages. Persistent critics of Israeli extremism like Richard Cohen or Carl Rowan, wrote of the need for knowledge, understanding, and restraint.

In the political world the gulf was even wider. Jeane Kirkpatrick and Henry Kissinger, both of whom have placed their comeback bets on the Israel lobby, spoke forcefully of retaliation. Leaders not particularly identified with Israel, foremost of whom was President Reagan, pointed out that the specific situation was delicate and American lives were at stake.

In short, whatever the arguments used, the dialogue was not really about terrorism, hostages or retaliation in the abstract. It was about Israel. Those with only U.S. interests on their agendas—who were by no means all non-Jewish—saw clearly that Israel's lawless action had gotten the U.S. into a fix, and that it was Israel's duty to get us out of it. Those who generally put Israel's interests first—and they are by no means all Jewish—sought to shift the dialogue from the specific cases of the TWA hostages to sweeping generalities about "international terrorism" and American "credibility" in the world.

Let's assume, as Israel's supporters seem to, that 50 per cent of Americans don't have a clue about what the code words really mean. They don't know that Jeane Kirkpatrick's crusade against third world critics at the UN had virtually nothing to do with U.S. interests per se, and a great deal to do with world criticism of Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians. Or that the American delegates to the just concluded meeting in Nairobi of international women's groups were not really engaged in defending the U.S. from criticism, but in fact were staving off resolutions expressing the sentiment that Zionism, like Apartheid, is in fact racism.

Even if 50 percent of Americans understand none of this, Israel's supporters must face the fact that these are the same 50 percent who can't name the two foreign countries that border on the continental United States, or President Carter's predecessor in the White House. They are the part of the electorate that doesn't read, doesn't vote, and probably doesn't even turn out for the local football team, much less the neighborhood watch or a political candidate.

The days when a Pat Moynihan could get elected to the Senate from New York by running against the Arabs at the U.N. may be past, although Ms. Kirkpatrick, eyes fixed on a Maryland Senate seat in 1986, apparently doesn't think so. Her successor as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the veteran General Vernon Walters, bluntly told interviewers that his biggest problem there would be the international opposition engendered by America's persistent defense of Israeli actions. As a man of proven international experience and patriotism, he felt able to drop the code words and speak the truth.

Others are starting to speak equally frankly, giving up the pretense that recurring deaths of Americans overseas are due to some random series of unconnected terrorist incidents rather than a direct result of our subsidization of Israeli terrorism against Palestinians. Or that "international terrorism" directed against the U.S. is some malign cosmic force rather than a direct consequence of our refusal to apply to Israel the civilized norms we uphold elsewhere.

Israel's American supporters seem incapable of absorbing the lesson of an ABC/Washington Post survey taken at the height of the hostage crisis that showed 43 per cent of respondents (against 42 per cent who disagreed) agreeing with the statement that we should put some space between ourselves and Israel to avoid similar incidents in the future. Or the lesson that a very clear majority of Americans polled thinks President Reagan handled the IVA matter very well, and disagree with those who taunted him for not "standing tall." Most Americans, in fact, will always agree that reconciliation, not revenge, is both a Christian obligation and an American tradition.

U.S. Jews should be the first to recognize that the tide of American sympathy for the underdog that underlay the U.S. support for Israel did not stop flowing with the establishment and consolidation of a Jewish state. Dispossessed Palestinians are now seen with increasing clarity as deserving of American help and compassion in their quest for human rights and a state of their own. If Israel's friends are perceived as seeking to thwart the instinctive American, and Christian, desire to help the underdog Palestinians, both Israel and American Jews will be the losers.

Probably every American who reads this editorial discussed the hostage crisis, while it continued, with friends. Give yourself a test. Did you speak more frankly with members of your own group—those most likely to share your own views on the Middle East—than you did with others? Whether you are Christian or Jewish you almost certainly did, simply because you grew up in the melting pot and learned from childhood to avoid confrontation on ethnic, religious and sensitive political issues. Perhaps, however, it's time for both sides to speak a little more frankly across those invisible lines.

Americans who can read, think and feel have changed their image of Israel. Here again it has nothing to do with being Christian or Jewish. We all once pictured Israel as an embattled nation of refugees determined to preserve democratic freedoms even while fighting a desperate battle for national existence. Now the nearly universal stereotype is that of an aggressive little state composed of people who range from cantankerous to dangerously fanatic, unwilling to define their own borders and with a history of ruthless military action.

So if you are Jewish, ask yourself what your Christian neighbor may really think of a stubborn "Israel right or wrong" attitude. It's a problem many other hyphenated Americans, starting with the English-American colonists and continuing with Spaniards, Germans, Japanese, Italians and, yes, Arabs, have faced when the responsibilities of American citizenship suddenly, and sometimes violently, conflicted with old world tribal loyalties. All have handled this heart-wrenching plight with dignity and retained the respect of all the other flavors in the melting pot.

If you are Christian, ask yourself whether you are really being fair to your Jewish neighbor if you don't tell him honestly what you think about our "tilt" in the Middle East, the pressures placed by the "Jewish lobby" on Congress and the media, and the ultimate cost it exacts from our soldiers, diplomats, businessmen and tourists.

Thoughtful Americans now do understand that U.S. policy is going to have to change in the Middle East, because the world, morality, and our traditions demand it. Perhaps if we discuss it openly with each other now, we can save ourselves future grief.

—Richard Curtiss

Richard Curtiss was Chief Inspector of the U.S. Information Agency when he retired in 1980 after 31 years of service with the U.S. Army, Department of State, and USIA.