by Noam Chomsky
The treatment of the editors of the Jerusalem journal Al Fajr illustrates what Arab intellectuals may expect if they “raise their heads,” in the terminology of the West Bank settlers—if they try to act with a measure of intellectual independence.* One was picked up by the police and kept in solitary confinement for 17 days. He was made to stand for 24 hours with a bag over his head and his arms bound, until he fainted. He was then charged with possessing two copies of a PLO journal. A second has been prevented for a year from visiting the occupied territories, where his family and friends live and where his professional responsibilities are focused. A third was kept in jail for a week for failure
* For an account of harassment and arbitrary arrest, detention and alleged beatings of journalists from Al Fajr, harassment of other Arab journals, and the forms taken by Israeli censorship, see Robert I. Friedman. “No Peace for West Bank Press.” CPJ Update, Committee to Protect Journalists, January 1983. Israeli officials defend the censorship on the grounds that “It’s no secret that Palestinians in general, and the Arab press, support the PLO” (it is kept a secret in some circles in the US., where the fact is consistently denied, e.g., in the New Republic; see p. 63), and Israel is “in a state of war with the PLO.” Israeli journalists who have investigated the censorship allege, however, that it is politically motivated, and often entirely arbitrary (e.g., love poems have been censored though they had no reference to the national question). Words are censored that Israeli officials find objectionable, e.g.. the word “sumud,” referring to the steadfastness of the samid who chooses the “third way,” neither resistance nor capitulation; see below, section 6.
to change the license on a new car. A fourth was confined for two and a half years in Ramallah. The journal is subjected to heavy censorship, often not permitted to republish material from the Hebrew or more conformist Arabic press. It is even prevented from publishing factual information about such matters as the opening of a school that had been closed, or events in the occupied territories. Journalists from Al Fajr are continually taken for interrogation, degraded, threatened, arrested. “If things like this happened to your journalists,” one editor said to an Israeli reporter, “all the world would respond with great anger. You shout about the suppression of intellectuals in the USSR, but you close your eyes to what is happening to the intellectuals in the West Bank, right under your noses.”134
Michal Meron, who reports these facts, writes that Al Fajr “is not an example of what it is possible to call free journalism.” The reason is that those who participate in the journal “see in their task a national mission, and their pen is ready to serve only the Palestinian interest.” The editors, in fact, are outspoken about their political commitments. One states to Meron that “we see in the PLO our sole representative, and therefore we support its point of view. We are in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside of the State of Israel.” Perhaps some might see in this a justification for the constant harassment of a journal that does not really merit the appellation “free press.” One might ask how such a stand differs in principle from that of Soviet authorities with regard to Zionist publications within the USSR. Or we might ask just what one should expect of honest journalists working under military occupation and living in what they—and virtually the entire world, including the U.S. government—regard as occupied East Jerusalem.
Other questions arise as well. While Meron was disparaging Al Fajr because of its commitment to “the Palestinian interest,” the Jerusalem Post, highly regarded within Israel and elsewhere, was celebrating its Jubilee. Editor Erwin Frenkel published an article in the Jubilee issuejust a week before Meron’s article on Al Fajr appeared, in which he explained that the goal of the paper today is “the same as it was from the start” 50 years ago: “the fulfilment of Zionism.” Its predecessor, the Palestine Post, was founded under the British Mandate “for a purpose that was political”; and under conditions far less onerous than those faced by the Arabs under Israeli occupation, it maintained this purpose, even after the state was founded. The journal also exercised selfcensorship. Readers of the Israeli press can hardly fail to notice that the English-language Post is more cautious in what it publishes than is the Hebrew press. The reasons are obvious, and editor Frenkel states them clearly: “Both within the newspaper and without, it was generally presumed that Hebrew was a private language of the Jews, in which they addressed only each other... English, on the other hand, was public. It enabled access from the outside, the Gentile world, the Arab foe. In short, what could be written in Hebrew could not necessarily be exposed in English.” Frenkel claims that this posture was modified in the 1960s, that “the old constraints of English” were abandoned and “English would no longer inhibit expression.”135 I do not believe that this is true, judging by my own limited exposure to the Hebrew and Englishlanguage press, and I would guess that a systematic investigation would support this conclusion. But even if the earlier constraints were dropped, the journal by its own admission remains subject to the critique that Meron applies to Al Fajr, and surely did even more so before the alleged abandonment of “the old constraints,” without the justification that it is attempting to survive with extremely limited resources under a harsh military regime where it attempts to express the aspirations of a conquered and oppressed people.
A few days earlier, the Congress of Jewish Journalists from the Diaspora opened, with 60 journalists from 14 countries. The deputy chairman of the Zionist Congress in Israel, Yitzhak Koren, informed the gathering “that anti-semites today blamed every Jew, wherever he might live, for Israel’s actions, and that it was therefore extremely important for the Jewish press to show Israeli policies in a positive light.”136
The constant and sometimes almost fanatic harassment of West Bank intellectuals and educational institutions, along with the general fear of permitting independent cultural expression, suggests that Israel’s leaders may be recalling some lessons from their own history, to which they frequently appeal. Every Israeli schoolchild knows the story of Rabbi Jochanan Ben Zakkai, who foresaw the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD when Jerusalem was under Roman siege. He opposed the final resistance and sought a way to save his people from destruction by an appeal to the Roman commander. Not being permitted to leave Jerusalem by its defenders, he had his disciples pretend that he was dead and carry him out in a coffin for burial. He reached the Roman camp and was granted his request to open a school in the small town of Yavneh. The famous Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz relates that the Roman commander “had nothing to urge against the harmless wish of Jochanan, for he could not foresee that by this unimportant concession he was enabling Judaism, feeble as it then appeared, to outlive Rome, which was in all its vigor, by thousands of years.”137 Most of the scholars of the next generation were his pupils. According to the tradition, he consoled them for the destruction of the Temple with a quote from the Prophet Hosea: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Both the appeal to the prophetic tradition and the significance of maintaining a school to keep the culture alive may well have a certain resonance today.
Israeli Arab citizens are, incidentally, also frequently denied the right of cultural expression. To cite one recent example, the High Court of Justice upheld the government’s refusal to permit Najwa Makhoul, a lecturer at the Hebrew University with a Phd degree from MIT, to publish an Arabic political-literary journal, citing undisclosed “security reasons.”
“The security of the state has silenced yet another Arab,” B. Michael observes, adding that Israeli intellectuals, professors, writers and poets have nothing to say. The journal was “envisioned as a forum for serious analyses of Palestinian-Israeli society, as well as more general articles written [in] a Third World context…[with] a scientific, Marxist and feminist perspective.” It would have been the only publication based in the Galilee, where most Israeli Arabs live, and not connected with a political party, and would have provided jobs for Arab university graduates, no small problem in Israe
l.138 This scandal was not reported in the U.S. to my knowledge, and at the time of writing has evoked no protest, though the facts have been known for many months to individuals and organizations devoted to intellectual freedom throughout the world. The “security reasons” are no doubt comparable to those used by other states to prevent groups that are “marginal to the nation” (in Michael Walzer’s phrase) from having an independent cultural and political life.
As for the lack of interest here, that should be no more surprising than the fact that there is no protest when the well-known Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, invited to take part in a UNICEF poetry reading, is denied a visa under a section of immigration law that allows the State Department to bar people for certain ideological reasons”—as the State Department confirmed. If an Israeli poet were denied entry to the United States for “ideological reasons”—assuming this to be possible—there would be no limits to the outrage and indignation, the charges of a return of Nazism, etc. In this case, there is no response at all. Similarly, when Israeli censors banned the play “The Patriot” by the Hebrew writer Hanoch Levin, there was considerable protest in Israel, widely reported here as further proof of the deep commitment to democratic principles in Israel. A few months before, the police banned a play by a Druze writer, Salman Natour, describing the life and opinions of a young Israeli Arab, and arrested the director. There was virtually no protest in Israel, and nothing was reported here. The same was true in early 1983 when an Arab from Nazareth was arrested “for publishing a newspaper without permission”—four information leaflets. He appealed to the responsible Israeli government authority in the Galilee, Israel Koenig, but his petition was rejected.139 Examples are numerous; the silence here is unbroken.
5.4 “The Opportunity to Work in Israel” As one might expect, the experiences of those who enjoy “the opportunity given to them to work in Israel” (Sasson Levi; see section 4.2.3) are also not entirely delightful. One problem that they face is that they are not permitted to spend the night within Israel. Since employers do not want to pay the costs of shipping workers back and forth, some have adopted the idea of locking them into factories at night, a practice that became public knowledge when several were found burned to death in a locked room after a fire in a small Tel Aviv factory. Others have been kept under armed guard behind barbed wire in factory detention camps, including one owned by Histadrut, the socialist trade union. These practices aroused some protest in Israel where, for example, Natan Dunvitz wrote in Ha’aretz that “it is unacceptable to treat Arab workers as Black slaves were treated in American cotton fields.” There was no mention here, to my knowledge, apart from a letter of mine,140 and the facts were not considered worthy of notice by those who were celebrating Israel’s advance towards democratic socialism. One might ask, incidentally, what the reaction would be if it were learned that Jewish workers were burned to death in a locked room in a Moscow factory or kept in factory detention camps because they are not permitted to spend the night in Russian areas. Praise for Russia’s march toward democratic socialism and its high moral purpose, perhaps?
The same regulation leads to other problems. Two moshavim (semicollective settlements) were recently condemned by the Moshav movement for arranging “decent housing” for seasonal agricultural workers, instead of bringing them from their homes in the Gaza Strip 200 km away every morning and returning them there in the evening, as required by law. Their work day thus ran from 3AM to 8PM, and they were found to be tired, strangely. The phrase “decent housing” appears in the English language press account. The Hebrew press tells a different story, with pictures to illustrate: the “decent housing” consisted of barns, storehouses, abandoned buildings where they are crammed into rooms, old buses; the headline in Haolam Haze reads: “Too far away for any eye to see, hidden in the orchards, there are the sheep pens for the servants, of a sort that even a state like South Africa would be ashamed of.” Amos Hadar, Secretary General of the Moshav movement, strongly opposes providing housing for the workers, which is in any event illegal. If they are given housing, he says, “after a short while the workers from the territories will bring their families and house them in camps. That would be Arab settlement on land of the Jewish National Fund. That cannot be.” Journalist Aryeh Rubinstein adds sarcastically: “his children will help with the picking and his wife will clean the ‘master’s’ house.” Hadar is asked whether he agrees to the use of Arab labor, “but only on condition that they will live in subhuman conditions, degraded, and not under human conditions, more or less.” “Correct,” he answers, conceding that “really, there is a difficult question here.” “There is no choice but to employ Arabs,” he says. They must be brought from Gaza in the morning and returned there in the evening. “It is hard, it is costly, it is problematic from an economic standpoint—but there is no other solution, if Jews in the State of Israel are unable to pick the oranges and grapes.”
Another officer of the Moshav movement concedes that hired labor troubles him: “But I am troubled far more by the fact that we, with our own hands, are establishing settlements for Arabs within the Green Line [the pre-June 1967 borders].” As for the problem of bringing in workers from such a distance, he asks: “What are 200 kilometers in comparison with the loss of the justice of our struggle for the land?”—especially when others are doing the travelling, with a work day from 3AM to 8PM. But the problem will apparently soon be resolved, since the Border Guards have been ordered to evacuate the Arab workers from the camps set up for them.141 Further steps towards “the democratic socialist hope.”
This only skims the surface. There is also, for example, the issue of child labor, of children aged six or seven trucked in by labor contractors at 4 AM to work on private or collective farms for “a meager subsistence wage,” though “often they are cheated on that.” Again, the matter has not been discussed in the United States, to my knowledge. And there is the matter of Arab trade unions, long a target of repression, again with little notice here from democratic socialist supporters of Israel, American union leaders who tell us how much they “love” Israel (see chapter 2, section 2.1*), or others. To cite only one recent case, the club of the Ramallah trade union was closed by orders of the military governer in December 1982, all written materials were seized, and its secretary, Bassem Barguti, was arrested, held for a month and then sentenced to two months in prison on charges of possessing forbidden material of political significance, including, according to the charges, some that was literally “obscene” (a publication that included the colors of the PLO flag) and some that was defamatory of the Israeli army (a calendar with a demand for release of prisoners in the Ansar concentration camp in Lebanon).142
5.5 Israeli Inquiries and American Suppression Coverage of events in the occupied territories is far more comprehensive in Israel than in the U.S., but it too is impeded, in part by censorship, in part by “internal censorship.” See chapter 2, section 1. TV journalists (including Rafik Halabi; see note 48) complain that they are kept away from 90% of the serious demonstrations in the territories and that they are not permitted to film much of what is happening, including soldiers firing at demonstrators, etc.143 “Only a small part of the actions of the settlers, in or out of uniform, reaches the Israeli press,” Amnon Kapeliouk reports: “facts about harassment and maltreatment of Palestinians are not published,” sometimes, because editors feel that they are “too hard to bear,” as one decided when “settlers caught an old man who had protested when his lands were taken and shaved off his beard—just what Polish anti-Semites did to Jews.”144
A great deal of information about human rights violations, particularly in the occupied territories, has been made available by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. Its Chairman from 1970, Dr. Israel Shahak, has compiled a personal record of courage and commitment to human rights that few people anywhere can equal, and has been untiring in exposing the facts about the occupation and circulating information, much of it from the Hebrew press, where seve
ral outstanding journalists (frequently cited above) have attempted to provide an honest record—sometimes, some say, using material provided by Arab journalists who hope to be able to reprint the stories from the Hebrew press. The work of the League is little known here, in part, because human rights organizations prefer not to know the facts. The League had been an affiliate of the New York-based International League for Human Rights, but was suspended in 1973 on the interesting grounds that the governing Labor Party had attempted to take over and destroy the League by methods so crude that they were quickly blocked by the Israeli Courts; on similar grounds, it would be proper for Amnesty International to suspend a Moscow chapter attacked by the government. One professed civil libertarian, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School (who had already distinguished himself by defending preventive detention in Israel and denouncing political prisoners in jail*—a particularly despicable practice, as would be at once recognized in any other context)—attempted to cover up the disgraceful Labor government takeover attempt with gross misrepresentation of the facts and slanderous accusations directed against Shahak, who has, in fact, been bitterly attacked by American Zionists who are horrified at his