SF Chronicle bosses Dumped Scheer For Criticism Of Israel-Treat Palestinians Like Jews

SF Chronicle Bosses Dumped Scheer For Criticism Of Israel-Treat Palestinians Like Jews

SF Chronicle bosses Dumped Scheer For Criticism Of Israel-Treat Palestinians Like Jews
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/treat_palestinians_like_jews_20100602/

Treat Palestinians Like Jews

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: June 2, 2010

It was an act of international terrorism, pure and simple. There can be no
valid claims of self-defense on the part of Israeli commandos who attacked a
ship of protesters in international waters, killing nine civilians and
kidnapping more than 600 others-including 15 international reporters who
were prevented from filing their stories by a nation that claims to be the
beacon of democracy in the Mideast.

Trust me, I do not come to this viewpoint lightly. This is an issue I have
written about with anguish ever since I visited Gaza and the West Bank
immediately after the Six-Day War 43 years ago, and the fact that those
apartheid zones still stand in oppressive isolation from the norms of human
rights is a sad commentary on our profession. There is no subject on which
American journalists so disgrace themselves by embracing a double standard
or about which our politicians are permitted the kind of hypocritical
cop-out once again demonstrated by the tepid response of the Obama
administration.

If nothing else, this assault on decency by the Israeli government was
clearly intended to derail the peace talks that President Barack Obama has
encouraged. But instead of calling Israel on its savagery, the U.S. is
virtually alone in the world in its embarrassingly mild rebuke. The
politicians cave so shamelessly because they know that media will be
obsequiously tolerant of such immoral equivocation.

The last time I wrote about Israel and Gaza, the San Francisco Chronicle
suddenly decided to stop running my weekly column. No great hardship-I have
other outlets-but I would be lying if I denied the apprehension I feel every
time I dare write critically about Israel and brace myself for the charge
that I am yet another "self-hating Jew." A charge certain to be leveled
against even Hedy Epstein, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who at last
report was attempting to board yet another aid boat, the Rachel Corrie,
named after a heroic American protester who was bulldozed to death by
Israelis in 2003.

The first time I encountered that bewildering criticism of Jews who dare to
be morally consistent-despite that being our historical obligation-was when
I was an editor at Ramparts and nearly bankrupted the magazine in attempting
to cover the Six-Day War, during which Israel grabbed control of Gaza and
the West Bank. We had assigned the legendary journalist I.F. Stone to write
about the war, thinking it a wise choice, given that he had accompanied the
first boats of Jewish displaced persons from World War II traveling to found
the state of Israel. Back then he celebrated that quest: "These Jews want
the right to live as a people, to build as a people, to make their
contribution to the world as a people. Are their national aspirations any
less worthy of respect than those of any other oppressed people?"

But then he wrote after the Six-Day War that he felt compelled to deal also
with the oppression of the Palestinians and their desire for a home. His
report was balanced and fair, which of course was a problem to some of the
Ramparts investors who strongly favored honest journalism on every subject
except Israel.


I upset them further by traveling to Egypt and Israel at the end of the
Six-Day War and visiting newly occupied Gaza, where I questioned the
assertion of top officials, including Moshe Dayan, that they would bring
freedom to the Palestinians there that the previous Egyptian and Jordanian
occupiers had denied. It never happened, because the intentions of occupiers
to improve the lot of the conquered become moot if the occupiers insist on
continuing their reign of power. How easy it is to forget that the
Palestinians were not the ones who attacked Israel at the time of the
Six-Day War. On the contrary, it was their previous overlords, Egypt and
Jordan, with which Israel has long since had relatively good relations. An
accommodation of occupiers made above the head of the occupied.

There is no such thing as a morally acceptable occupation, and as the
oppressed resist they will become more violent in their desperation. In turn
the occupiers will show their true colors as oppressors. As the great
Israeli writer Amos Oz wrote in Tuesday's New York Times, " . Ever since the
Six-Day war in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force." He
excoriates the prevailing Israeli view "that the Palestinian problem can be
crushed instead of solved." That is the essence of the problem and the
solution: End the crushing occupation and begin to solve the problem of
providing the Palestinians, as well as the Jews, with a viable homeland.

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