In 1992, I sent a letter to the magazine “The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), to which both the editors of WRMEA and its “reporters” replied. Here is a reproduction of my letter, the editors’ response and Ms. Rachelle Marshall’s reply to my letter.
From: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 1992
Letter to the Editor:
The Wrong Message
When I first subscribed to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), I was seduced by its courage to tell the untold version of the Israeli-Arab conflict. While your coverage does indeed balance out the heavily pro-Israeli U.S. media, it fails in its silence over the role played by most Arab regimes in mistreating their own constituent societies.
It would be exceedingly provincial on your part to argue that, by raising those issues at a time when the Palestinian struggle is finally bearing fruit, you would only be doing a service to the pro-Israeli propaganda. I believe that justice in the Middle East should go beyond the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and that the definition of freedom should be broadened to include the emancipation of the Arab individual from the shackles of tyranny and archaic governments. Those Arab regimes have exploited the Israeli threat to maintain their grip on power, and have succeeded only in preventing their societies from outgrowing their feudal and tribal mindsets. [A harbinger of the Arab Spring revolutions that were come 20 years later]
Your coverage of Lebanon is a case in point. Whether it is Marilyn Raschka, Susan Smith, or Rachelle Marshall, you consistently project a rosy image of the intra-Lebanese political situation, while finding blame uniquely in the Israeli occupation in the south. In “Israel in Lebanon: Turning Neighbors into Enemies” (Aug./Sept. ’92), Ms. Marshall’s point that the Islamic fundamentalist threat is exaggerated by the pro-Israel lobby is well taken. But her argument that Israel is the only source of terror and instability in south Lebanon is equally exaggerated.
The history and the realities of the tragedy in southern Lebanon are multi-faceted and cannot be treated in fairness in this letter. But I would like to make the following points: Unlike the occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has declared repeatedly that it does not have any territorial ambitions over the south of Lebanon, and that its presence there is directly related to the protection of its northern border. Contrast that with Syria’s official stance that Lebanon and Syria are one nation in two states (hence Syria’s refusal to exchange ambassadors with Lebanon since their independence from the French mandate), and that Syria’s presence in Lebanon is aimed at the “re-unification” of the two countries.
From the late ’60s, Israel’s northern villages have been the target of attacks by Palestinian guerrillas, and now by Hezbollah militants. Every agreement signed between the Lebanese government and the PLO to put that situation under control was breached by the PLO in violation of Lebanese sovereignty. While the response of Israel has been out of proportion to the attacks, it remains that Israel was constantly provided with the justification to intervene in Lebanon. Even today, Hezbollah leaders have made it clear that their struggle against Israel is ideologically motivated and therefore will continue even if Israel withdraws from Lebanese territory.
How about the fact that the southern half of Lebanon has been “cleansed” of its Christian population by the pro-Syrian Palestinian-Islamic alliance, and except for the Israeli security zone, no Christian village exists today on the map south of Beirut? To justify these atrocities as retaliations to the Phalangist militias’ massacres of Palestinians is tantamount to justifying Israel’s harsh occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a valid response to Ahmed Jibril’s or Abu Nidal’s attacks against Israeli targets.
Finally, while Ms. Marshall fails to mention in her long article the abomination of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Ms. Raschka does indeed handle that subject in her accompanying “Letter from Lebanon.” Syria’s ironic sponsoring of parliamentary elections in Lebanon this September against the will of at least half of the population and the leadership comes after Syria’s Abdel Halim Khaddam’s recent declaration that Syria will not keep its promise to withdraw its troops from Beirut and its surrounding areas. A million Lebanese exiles are denied the right to vote in their consulates abroad, and 350,000 displaced Lebanese cannot return to their villages in the south and cast their ballots out of fear, not of the Israelis, but of the Hezbollah and Druze militias.
It is one thing to tell the truth about Israel’s sordid record in the Middle East, but it is another to cover up for Syria’s abominable record in both Syria and Lebanon. Syria’s ultimate goal is to annex Lebanon; it is doing so with a patient mix of military and diplomatic maneuvering. With elections under current occupation conditions, a pro-Syrian parliament will inevitably legislate to merge Lebanon with Syria. The inevitability of this scenario is based on the precedent treaty of “Brotherhood and Cooperation” signed in 1991 between the two countries, in which Lebanon effectively ceded its sovereignty to Syria in deciding on its military, economic, educational, cultural and foreign policies.
The monster in the Middle East is not just Israel. It is also the oppressive and anachronistic regimes of most Arab countries. Your job is incomplete as long as you do not address the true longings of the Arab peoples: to become truly free from the worm within. A prerequisite for the liberation of Palestine is to liberate the Arab individual’s potential from the shackles of the dictatorships under which it has been decaying for decades. I fear sometimes that your approach to the Middle East is borne out of the same romantic Orientalist mindset Edward Saiid so eloquently described. It makes Westerners subconsciously deny the native Arabs an inborn responsibility for liberating themselves, placing the blame on the “Western” Israel as a means to rationalize the guilt, and thus perpetuating both the victimization and the need for the “Orientalists” to help the victim.
Youssef Hitti, Division of Biology and Medicine, Brown University, Providence, RI
Appended to my published letter is this mediocre comment by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA). Since Saudi Arabia has lots of the former and none of the latter, I think the Washington report is barking up the wrong tree. The following is the comment published by the WRMEA appended to my letter.
If we’ve been remiss, your letter will help fill the gap. We’ll take issue with two of your points, however, and offer two comments. The PLO had honored its 1981 U.S.-brokered agreement not to attack across Israel’s northern border for 10 months when Ariel Sharon broke the agreement with the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Also, it’s our impression that the unresolved Palestinian question constitutes a major threat to traditional Arab regimes, particularly those doing business with the U.S. Those exploiting the problem, in our opinion, are Arab military dictatorships such as those in Libya, Iraq and Syria.
As early as the 1960s, one worldwide phenomenon made clear who would win the Cold War. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, East Germany and others were building walls and fences and patrolling their borders and coasts to keep their people in. Countries with free economies that also respected human rights were doing the same thing to keep illegal immigrants out.
Perhaps, before glibly dismissing all Middle East states that do not have our kind of democracy, it would be more honest to apply a similar test. Which countries restrict emigration and which restrict immigration? And, to anticipate one reply, petroleum is not always relevant. Saudi Arabia has the largest oil reserves in the world and its problem, predictably, is to keep people out. Right next door, however, are Iraq, with the second largest reserves, and Iran not far behind. Neither can keep their people in. Perhaps the only real test of whether a regime is or isn’t exploitative is which way its people would go, if they had the choice. As for our own role, we air the views that cannot be aired through the mainstream American press. We aren’t needed to provide the U.S. public with documentation of human rights violations by Arab countries (but we nevertheless do so in our human rights column), since such violations are widely reported, we might even say exploited, by mainstream U.S. publications.
In February 1993, the WRMEA published this reply by one of the individuals who was the subject of my initial critique [Italicized bracketed comments are my own inserts]:
Reply to Dr. Hitti (By Rachelle Marshall)
In his letter in the November issue, Professor Youssef Hitti accuses me of suggesting that Israel is the only source of terror and instability in south Lebanon, and argues that Syria is at least equally to blame. He asserts that “Israel has declared repeatedly that it does not have any territorial ambitions over the south of Lebanon, and that its presence there is directly related to the protection of its northern border.”
In the good old days, whenever I criticized U.S. intervention abroad, say in Vietnam or Nicaragua, the stock response from super patriots was, “what about Soviet crimes? Why don’t you criticize Castro?” So, I’ll assert at the outset that I agree with Professor Hitti that Israel is by no means the only source of terror in the Middle East. Several Arab regimes are brutally repressive, not only exploiting their own citizens but those of poorer neighbors. They deserve exposure and condemnation. But the U. S. does not subsidize these regimes with billions of dollars a year, as it does Israel. Consequently, it does not have the same degree of leverage over them and there is not much an American citizen can do to change them other than to argue, as I have done publicly, that we should stop providing them with arms or any other kind of assistance.
[Ms. Marshall seems ignorant that US subsidies to Egypt amounting in the billions of dollars, the numerous military bases in the Gulf emirates, the Iran scarecrow, the rush to defend Kuwait against Iraq, etc. are all excellent leveraging tools to bring about human rights in Arab repressive regimes. Why does the US refuse to use them?]
In the article that Professor Hitti takes issue with, I discussed Israel’s actions in south Lebanon and not Syria’s, as he would have liked. One reason is that the article was specifically focused on Israel’s behavior in southern Lebanon, not on the political situation in that country.
[In her naiveté or hypocrisy, Ms. Marshall sees no connection between the abysmal internal political situation in Lebanon and the double occupation of the country by Syria and Israel].
Nevertheless, it is also true that despite the repressive nature of its government, Syria has not invaded Lebanon three times in the last 20 years or slaughtered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians in the process.
[Syria has invaded Lebanon only once in 1975 and never wanted to leave, until 2005 when it was forced to leave by an angry population in the aftermath of the Syrian-engineered assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri]
Syria is not currently conducting regular bombing raids that kill hundreds of Lebanese a year, including children.
[Here’s the same whataboutism that Marshall decried earlier in her reply. She responds to my critique of the Arab regimes, particularly Syria’s, s met by “what about Israel?” In any case, I personally lived through three sieges of the Christian sectors of Lebanon and Beirut – in 1976 in the Battle of the Mountain, in the summer of 1978 in Beirut, and in the spring of 1981 in Beirut, during which the Syrian occupation army indiscriminately bombed for months at a time Christian residential areas, killing men, women and children. All that Ms. Marshall needs to do to see what the Syrian regime is capable of, let her skim through what Assad and his Russian friend Putin have been doing since 2011 in Syria itself: barbaric raids against its own citizens: 600,000 dead, including children, 7 million exiled as refugees, including 2.5 million displaced into Lebanon].
Syria is not keeping hundreds of Lebanese men penned like animals, dying slow deaths, in order to barter for the return of a captured Israeli pilot.
[Syria has “disappeared” 17,000 Lebanese citizens who were kidnapped in their own country and transferred to Syria’s notoriously barbaric jails. Syria’s Hezbollah has kept dozens of western hostages – diplomats, Christian clergymen, academics, journalists… – penned like animals in dingy basements in order to barter them for concessions from a cowardly jaundiced West. In tandem with Iran and Hezbollah, Syria has truck-bombed US and French peacekeepers’ compounds in Beirut in 1983, not to mention the dozens of assassinations of Lebanese politicians, journalists and freedom-minded dissidents]
Syria was, indeed, invited into Lebanon in the mid-1970s by Christian factions in order to put down Palestinian and Muslim forces that were on the verge of winning the civil war.
[Baathist Syria needed no invitation: It has always ideologically claimed Lebanon as its territory that was snatched from it by the French Mandate, just like Saddam Hussein claimed Kuwait was once a part of Iraq that colonial Britain sliced off. As early as 1973, right after war criminal Henry Kissinger made a deal with Assad – trading Lebanon to Assad in exchange for giving the Golan to Israel – the Syrian butcher began dispatching terror groups across his country’s border – Saika, Aassfia, Yarmuk brigades, Palestine Liberation Army… all factitious proxies of the Assad regime that provided it with deniability: It’s not us, said the crooks in Damascus, it’s the Palestinians, it’s the Muslim radicals, and so on This remains Assad’s Modus Operandi today: dispatch a handful of his men disguised as ISIS to the Lebanese border to give its ally Hezbollah the glory of “liberating” Lebanon from ISIS. In the early 1970s, these Syrian-manufactured obscure groups would cross the border and attack isolated Christian villages and monasteries like Beit Mellat, Al-Qaa and others, carrying out massacres with the specific objective of stirring civil and sectarian strife. If Syria was so kind to respond positively to the Christians’ invite in 1977, why did it refuse to leave when the Christians asked it to leave beginning in 1978 and all the way to 2005 when the country was supposedly “pacified” by Assad’s worthless Baathist criminal army?]
….
Finally, Professor Hitti makes the vague claim that since Hezbollah leaders are ideologically motivated, “their attacks will continue even if Israel withdraws from Lebanese territory.” But evidence points to the contrary. Hostility to Israel from Shi’i in southern Lebanon did not manifest itself until well after Israel’s 1982 invasion, when Israel’s occupation policies proved cruel and humiliating. Those policies are today no less repressive and continue to fuel the resentments of the local Lebanese. If Israel were to offer complete withdrawal of its troops and surrogate forces in return for a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon, an increase in U.N. peacekeeping forces, or other assurances of security, I suspect those few zealots who wished to continue the bloodshed would soon find themselves with no support.
[I wonder if Ms. Marshall now sees that since 2000, even after Israel withdrew from the south, Hezbollah doubled down on its ideological warfare and refused to disarm. Hezbollah cares nothing for the Lebanese people in the south and exists only to satisfy the Iranian Ayatollah’s expansionist program. It is now linking the genocide in Gaza to its warmongering in south Lebanon. Will Ms. Marshall assert like an imbecile again that Hezbollah will disarm if a ceasefire is reached in Gaza? Or will she condone Hezbollah’s taking Lebanon to the edge of a devastating abyss by linking a potential war in Lebanon with the genocide in Gaza?
My point has always been to balance out the naïve idiotic, or hypocritical, American positioning vis-à-vis the war conditions in Lebanon by demonstrating that both Israel and Syria are Lebanon’s enemies, and that the entire five decades since 1975 have been the direct outcome of two regional hyper-militarized monsters persecuting a tiny, diverse and vulnerable country like Lebanon. American “experts” like Ms. Marshall are too dense to comprehend the complexities of the Near East, let alone Lebanon: On the right, they much prefer the “bad Arab” vs. “good Jew” cruel and simpleton equation, and on the left, the stupid but honest “Jew first” and “then Arab”. I just wish idiots like Ms. Marshall would concentrate on the state of California, and if the state is too complex for her, she can tell us about her little town of Stanford and its fascinating political questions.]
Rachelle Marshall, Stanford, CA
