I was looking for something else when I found an article about published in the June 9, 1967 issue of Time Magazine. (Despite the publication date, the article was clearly written beforeThe tone towards Israel was a lot more sympathetic than it is nowadays. And can you imagine any publication writing this nowadays?
In fact, one trouble is the profoundly emotional and irrational nature of many of the Arab demands and expectations—almost an inability to recognize the hard facts of life. The Arabs have seen Israel prosper on soil from which they barely scratched a living when they had it; Israel’s success is not only a blow to their pride but a constant rebuke to the dismal poverty in which most of the Arab world lives.
Then I started searching through Time’s archives to get a sense of how Time’s attitude towards Israel changed over the years. I’m just going to take arbitrary paragraphs. Some are from news stories; others from opinion pieces. And, of course, you can follow the links to see the whole context.
Israel and its enemies (June 22, 1970) focused on the threat presented by the Arab world armed by Russia.
It is on the ground that the odds are longest against the Israelis—at least in terms of numbers. With a population of 2,800.000 v. 51 million Arabs, Israel can mobilize an army of 275,000 against Arab armies of 398,000 men. The Israelis depend on air superiority and wits to protect themselves. One reason that Israeli soldiers have hunkered down for so long on the Bar-Lev Line under barely tolerable siege conditions is that their string of hedgehog forts and minefields serve as a kind of trip wire. The line, using relatively few men, is designed to delay any kind of major Egyptian cross-canal attack until troops stationed in the desert behind them can come up to help.
For a mobile army whose motto has always been “Attack,” the static warfare of the Bar-Lev Line is an often demoralizing experience. So is the war of attrition that Israel is being forced to fight on all its borders. Casualties have been heavy. In May, 61 soldiers and civilians were killed, the heaviest one-month toll since the 1967 war; on the basis of population, this is the equivalent of losing 4,300 U.S. troops in one month in Viet Nam. During the six days of the ’67 war, 777 soldiers and 26 Israeli civilians were killed. Since the war, 558 soldiers and 112 civilians have died, and the nation is feeling uneasy. “Before the Six-Day War,” says Bar-Lev, “there was general danger but day-to-day security. Today we have general security but day-to-day danger.”
A Nation sorely Beseiged ( 1974) also seems rather sympathetic, but has a mention of the “occupied West Bank.”.
The weekend alert could prove to be merely the opening drum roll of yet another crisis. Nov. 30 is the expiration date of the mandate for the presence of some 1,250 United Nations troops stationed along the Golan Heights cease-fire line, placed there last June under the cease-fire agreement worked out by Kissinger. Israel emphatically favors renewal of the mandate by the Security Council and might in fact regard nonrenewal as a casus belli.
To the ultrasensitive Israelis, the present period is all too reminiscent of the situation that existed in May 1967. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser loudly proclaimed his revocation of the U.N. mandate in the Sinai, the Israelis mobilized, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant precipitately withdrew U.N. forces, thereby setting the stage for the Six-Day War.
American Jews and Israel, ( March 10, 1975) I think, serves as a marker for when attitudes started to change.
Belatedly, the Arabs discovered public relations and began to cultivate U.S. opinion. For all of these reasons, Americans paid more attention to the area’s problems than ever before and began to examine the Arab cause more sympathetically.
Partly because of their continued insistence on security through territory, the Israelis suddenly seem intransigent to many people. The perception comes at a time when, globally, Israel is increasingly isolated. The nations of Western Europe appear willing to bargain away Israel’s security in return for access to Arabian oil. Arab petropower seems aimed at blacklisting Jews from many transactions in international finance, causing President Gerald Ford last week sharply to condemn such practices (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Last fall UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from some of its activities, and the United Nations General Assembly applauded the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, who frankly spoke at the U.N. of generations of war against Israel, as a legitimate spokesman for Palestinians.
In this atmosphere, minor and major events are seen as portents. Kissinger jokingly tries on an Arab headdress in Jordan; to some Jews this symbolizes his wooing of the Arabs (and because he himself is Jewish, he is believed by some other Jews to be bending over backward to demonstrate his impartiality). General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declares that there is strong Jewish-Israeli influence on Congress (true) and that Jews dominate most U.S. banks and newspapers (false). The simplistic statement is seen as a harbinger of antiSemitism. There is also alarm when such longtime friends of Israel as Senators Charles Percy and Henry Jackson dare to urge Israel to be flexible.
(Charles Percy was once considered friendly to Israel! I didn’t know that.)
Stroke Talbott took a sharply anti-Israel stand in What to do about Israel ( September 7, 1981):
Israel argues that it is strong, stable and pro-Western, while most of the Arab states are weak, fractious and radical. But one reason the Arabs are that way, and becoming more so, is precisely because of their impasse with Israel. The tragedy and chaos that have engulfed the once peaceful, prosperous nation of Lebanon are a direct spillover of the Palestinian problem. Anwar Sadat’s position both within Egypt and among his Arab brethren elsewhere will remain precarious unless he can point to some success in the Palestinian autonomy talks initiated by the Camp David agreements and due to resume in three weeks. By and large Sadat has shown forbearance over Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and flexibility over the delicate issue of West Bank water rights. Israel, for its part, has done everything it could to prevent the West Bank Arabs from genuinely governing themselves—a goal set by the Camp David accords.
That’s a much different attitude from what was reported in 1967! In 1967 it was the lack of Arabi realism that was the main problem in the MIddle East, but fourteen years later it was Israel’s failings that were responsible for Arab radicalism.
And in an essay title Israel at 40: The dream confronts Palestinian fury (despite the date, it must be from 1988) we have this:
Herein lies Israel’s biggest dilemma. When the virtues of Israel are enumerated, almost the first to be mentioned by Israelis and their supporters is the fact that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. But when it comes to the Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, the Israelis are anything but democratic; Arabs have been denied fundamental civil and political rights. If present trends continue, Israel will have to choose between its democratic principles — which would eventually require sharing political power with Arabs — and its other profound ambition, to offer to Jews around the world a land they can always call their own. The Palestinian problem cannot be brushed aside by rhetoric or obliterated by military force.
Finally, in the February 26, 1990, Charles Krauthammer took aim at the prevailing media biases regarding Israel, in Judging Israel:
Last fall Anthony Lewis excoriated Israel for putting down a tax revolt in the town of Beit Sahour. He wrote: “Suppose the people of some small American town decided to protest Federal Government policy by withholding their taxes. The Government responded by sending in the Army . . . Unthinkable? Of course it is in this country. But it is happening in another . . . Israel.”
Middle East scholar Clinton Bailey tried to point out just how false this analogy is. Protesting Federal Government policy? The West Bank is not Selma. Palestinians are not demanding service at the lunch counter. They demand a flag and an army. This is insurrection for independence. They are part of a movement whose covenant explicitly declares its mission to be the abolition of the state of Israel.
Bailey tried manfully for the better analogy. It required him to posit 1) a pre-glasnost Soviet Union, 2) a communist Mexico demanding the return of “occupied Mexican” territory lost in the Mexican War (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California) and 3) insurrection by former Mexicans living in these territories demanding secession from the Union. Then imagine, Bailey continued, that the insurrectionists, supported and financed by Mexico and other communist states in Latin America, obstruct communications; attack civilians and police with stones and fire bombs; kill former Mexicans holding U.S. Government jobs (“collaborators”); and then begin a tax revolt. Now you have the correct analogy. Would the U.S., like Israel, then send in the Army? Of course.
But even this analogy falls flat because it is simply impossible to imagine an America in a position of conflict and vulnerability analogous to Israel’s. Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and knows it.” Czechoslovakia is a small nation. Judea was. Israel is. The U.S. is not.
A recent ADL poll shows that Americans support Israel roughly at three times the rate they support the Palestinians. It’s quite remarkable that the ratio is that good given the propaganda that is so often passed off as news. It makes me wonder what support for Israel would be if the media made any effort to be evenhanded.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad
Addendum from Meryl: Then there’s this little gem from 1977 that made me cancel my subscription then and forever.
His first name means “comforter.”
Menachem Begin (rhymes with Fagin) has been anything but that to his numerous antagonists.
My grandfather had been telling me for years that Time was anti-Semitic. This was the item that proved it to me.
It makes me wonder what support for Israel would be if the media made any effort to be
evenhandedhonest.I modified your statement to be more accurate. It is not a matter of being enen handed as that implies deliberately presenting both sides favorably or sympathetically. The actual necessity is to present the facts and to present them honestly. I think that we can all think about analogies that will apply to the situation.
Meryl,
I had forgotten that one. But then I wasn’t pretending to be complete either.
Wasn’t that the one with the cover that showed Begin framed by a Jewish star made up of machine guns? Or was that Newsweek?
About that time some clever dude wrote a letter to one of the newsweeklies saying that he thought that the Israeli prime minister’s first name was “Intransigent.”
David
“It makes me wonder what support for Israel would be if the media made any effort to be honest.”
The problem isn’t just dishonest reporting. It’s a dishonest, distorted, and unjust utopian worldview that originated in Nazi Germany, and has been spread thoughout the US for decades, ever since the Carter administration. This worldview, and the entitlement mentality it induces, are what is causing the wave of antisemitism that is rapidly poisoning the world today. “The world would be peaceful, if not for Israel” is just the modern version of “The world would be perfect, if not for the Jews.”
Honest reporting on Israel would only serve to drive more people to condemn them, for making the hard choices that protect themselves at the expense of their enemies’ lives, whereas entitled left-wingers believe they should let themselves be killed, as Ghandi suggested, so they could claim the “moral high ground.” Better a dead saint than a living sinner, at least as long as it’s the Jews that are dying for the sake of the Gentiles’ sins.
Yes, well, whether or not they let themselves be killed, the Jews of Europe were killed en masse and that hasn’t seem to had much of an effect on Jews’ standing on moral high ground.
Golda Meir once said something that at the time I thought was hyperbole, and I’m paraphrasing: What the world wants is a liberal, progressive, humane, dead Jewish people.
While Americans tend to remain pro-Israel Europeans aren’t. It reminds me of Tom Wolf’es quip that the dark night of fascism always seems about to fall on America but somehow it lands on Europe. But let’s concede that part, if not the most part, of the problem is Israel’s deplorable and often almost non-existent hasbara (information) efforts.
Europe is pretty much gone, although such efforts are still worth it there, but between the growing Muslim population and what turned out to be Europe’s endemic and iradicable anti-Semitism, we can hardly expect European governments, except possibly for former Soviet-ruled countries, to be pro-Israel. But the American people’s support for Israel is not etched in stone and especially under the current administration among certain demographic groups support is going to go down.
Alas, back in the early seventies Bayard Rustin organized BASIC, the Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee, with many black establishment figures signing on. Today I wonder how many you’d get.
Magazines are dying left and right. I wonder when it might happen to Time and Newsweek. Are they even profitable anymore? They’re becoming almost totally irrelevant. It seems their primary role these days is to occupy your attention while sitting in a waiting room. I don’t know if they have any significant impact on public opinion.