Let Us Now Bury the Truth (Again)
Headline in the Sunday editions of The New York Times: “A New Test for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?”
What a question. Let us set aside our indignation and think about this.
The piece below this head is by David Halbfinger, whose trade over the years has been to appear balanced when covering the Zionist state while glossing its past, which is wall-to-wall condemnable, and faithfully apologizing for its present, which — need this be said — is also wall-to-wall condemnable.
David Halbfinger, who has just begun his second tour as the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, in action:
“The war in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction. But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart ally, the United States.
Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses or among progressives….
The question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long- term — and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.”
Halbfinger proceeds to quote none of “those younger Americans,” or anyone else of any age who stands forthrightly against “the Jewish state” in response to the campaign of terror, murder and starvation it has conducted against the civilian population of Gaza these past two years.
No, his sources are professors, think-tank inhabitants and, of course, Israeli Zionists, American Zionists and in two cases Israeli–American Zionists — the good old divided-loyalties crowd.
Halbfinger quotes Shibley Telhami, an Arab–Israeli scholar with safe harbors at The Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland, to this effect:
“We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation. There’s this growing sense among people that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media, which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.”
This is an astute bit of historical context, I find — worthy of further exploration. And I am with Telhami: There is no persuading Americans — a majority, to go by recent polls — that the atrocities of the past two years are to be forgiven and forgotten. The thought is ridiculous.
But Halbfinger takes Telhami’s interesting observation no further. It stands only as what we can call “the problem.” He, Halbfinger, devotes the rest of his report to the thoughts of those trying to figure out how to make the Zionist regime look good again — or rid it of “a bad odor,” as one of these people puts it.
One of Halbfinger’s sources — Halie Soifer, chief exec at the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which supports Democratic political candidates “who share our core values” — is looking for “a bit of a reset in the way Israel is viewed.” Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli–American scholar, thinks “there is room for a bounce-back.”
Professor Scheindlin elaborates:
“People tend to overestimate how bad the damage has been. Just stopping the slaughter will allow some people to go back to their comfort zone of being supportive.”
Jeez, if I may invoke one of history’s most famous Jews. Bouncing back to the comfort zone, is it?
You see what is going on here, I trust.
I have anticipated for many months — no great insight in this — that when something like the end of Israel’s terror in Gaza comes there will be no thought among its allies in the West, and certainly none among its Zionist supporters, of any kind of reckoning in the name of justice.
No, a “war” will be over, not a racist campaign of annihilation, and certainly not a genocide. The highly honorable Cost of War Project at Brown University put out a paper on Oct. 7 reckoning total casualties in Gaza (killed and injured) at 236,505, “more than 10% of the pre-war population.” These are responsibly researched facts.
We know these facts. “It doesn’t take rocket science to grasp the picture,” Norman Finkelstein said in a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts five days before the Netanyahu–Trump “peace plan” was announced.
He said: “Everyone at this point knows the picture — unless you have a material stake in lying to yourself and lying to others.”
‘Everyone Knows the Picture’
Yes, we know the picture and the facts, and we are invited to live with these facts without any kind of investigation, truth and reconciliation project, such as post-apartheid South Africa conducted in the late 1990s, or any other effort in behalf of restorative justice.
No, the invitation is to go back to our comfort zones while a regime of racist murderers continues on its way.
The liars propose to prevail, to put this point another way.
Whatever other purpose this commentary may serve, I use it to raise my voice in protest against this… this desecration of the human cause.
When I consider the project of the liars now my mind goes back to al–Nakba — further, indeed. David Ben–Gurion and others of his time acknowledged the injustice and the violence on which the State of Israel was founded in July 1948. “We have come and we have stolen their country,” Ben–Gurion remarked.
[“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.]
There is no putting the point more truthfully. And all that has occurred since is the outcome of this, a covering up, a denial of the original sin.
And now again.
I do not mean to single out David Halbfinger — although by his record he arguably deserves it for all the blurring of the truth you find in his reporting on the Palestine question.
What he put in last Sunday’s Times is altogether what is going around now: another covering up, another denial of what a lot of people on both sides call “the second Nakba,” the sin atop the original sin. This is my point.
As if on auto-pilot, my mind goes to that famous remark Hegel made in the Introduction to his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
“But what experience and history teach is this,” the German giant wrote at some point shortly before he died in 1831, “that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
What we learn from history, in the common mis-translation, is that we do not learn from history. And now, as I say, once again.
Along with everyone else, I do not know at writing whether the Gaza Peace Plan, as it is billed, will hold or when — the better question at this point — it will fall apart like all those that have preceded it.
But — grim knowledge — I know this: It will not end well if the events of the past two years are buried as the events of the past seven and some decades have been buried. The human spirit simply does not work that way.
It will not, indeed, end at all.
https://www.unz.com/plawrence/let-us-now-bury-the-truth-again