Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Page 24

Special Report

Nader’s Courageous Middle East Positions Attacked By Hard-liners But Plant Seeds for Change

By Mitchell Kaidy

Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s forceful statements on the Middle East, however intended, were too much for some hard-line Zionists.

Here is what Nader said during one press conference: “In this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict you cannot take sides and be an honest broker. The U.S. is taking sides. You cannot be a friend of the Israelis…without being a friend of the Palestinians. You cannot be a friend of the Palestinians without being a friend of the Israelis.”

Nader, who through the years has been much less voluble about foreign affairs than on domestic issues, called on the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table. He minced no words, however, in adding, “The burden of restraint is more on the Israelis.The military superiority of the Israelis is staggeringly greater than the Palestinian rock-throwers…most of the deaths and injuries have occurred in the Palestinian territories.”

His call for a suspension of aid to Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state triggered racially tinged counter charges clearly intended to cow any candidate even faintly critical of Israel. Significantly, neither Vice President Al Gore nor Texas Gov. George W. Bush recognized or commented on the new Palestinian intifada during their presidential campaigns.

The most bitter and racist denunciation of Nader came, ironically, from one of his early supporters—Martin Peretz, publisher of the rabidly pro-Israel New Republic and longtime mentor of Democratic candidate Gore. Even Peretz, however, had to stretch mightily to sniff out Nader’s“anti-Semitism.” In a page-long New Republic editorial, Peretz cited an article about American business that Nader had published four decades ago in a long-defunct magazine, The American Mercury. The Nader piece, entitled “Business is Deserting America,” had absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East.

Still, Peretz condemned Nader for publishing in a periodical that contained an article entitled “Termites of the Cross.” What anti-Jewish information “Termites of the Cross” contained about termites or crosses is unknown either to insect exterminators or to cross-upholding Christians like this writer.

Shortly before Peretz’ heated denunciation appeared in the New Republic, the New York Jewish newspaper The Forward , after learning that Nader had called for suspension of aid to Israel, hit the Green Party candidate with the double whammy of being “a son of Lebanese immigrants [who] is said to be fluent in Arabic.”

Despite a report in The Forward that Nader was being pressured by “friendly” Democrats to back down, neither Nader nor the Green Party mounted the main counterattack to the spurious, not to mention far-fetched, charges. Instead, Nader was defended by Alexander Cockburn, editor/publisher of the leftwing weekly Counterpunch, who construed the attacks as branding Nader “a dirty Arab who wants to destroy the state of Israel.”

Even more troubling than the mainstream American media’s silence about the attacks on Nader, however, was the widespread failure to quote the Green Party candidate’s unprecedented call for suspension of U.S. aid to Israel. Nader’s path-breaking position could have emboldened future presidential candidates to speak the unspeakable.

Nevertheless, an American presidential candidate finally had criticized Israel, as well as U.S. aid to the Jewish state. Together with the American-Muslim community’s bloc endorsement of George W. Bush, the year 2000 was a ground-breaking presidential election year in the United States—a year in which the first seeds for a change in American Mideast policy finally were planted.

Mitchell Kaidy, a Rochester, NY-based journalist for 52 years, has contributed to the Washington Report since 1984.