Special Report

 

U.S. Discourse on Palestine: Perception vs. Reality

 

By Kathleen Christison

A day before President George W. Bush’s inauguration, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sent Bush some gratuitous advice on how to handle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Bush should simply do nothing, Friedman recommended, in order to push the intransigent Palestinians toward compromise. The plain fact, according to the Friedman diplomatic bible, is that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership “cannot unequivocally accept Israel….What Mr. Arafat has never—ever—done is to offer a peace plan of his own, that explicitly lays out for Israelis how their own Jewish state will be accepted by Palestinians.”

Friedman went on to quote approvingly a frequent source of his, Stephen Cohen of the Israel Policy Forum, as saying that Palestinians “appear incapable of developing a consensus peace plan and delivering it to Israelis in a way that would actually make Israelis feel that Palestinian intentions have fundamentally changed.”

This is the way Middle East policy is often made in Washington—through the commentary of leading opinion-molders like Friedman whose critical position at the center of public discourse enables them to influence public thinking about Israelis and Arabs and at the same time to reflect that thinking and transmit it upward to policymakers. It is unknown at this point how much Bush administration policymakers are likely to be influenced by thinking such as Friedman’s. He is probably the leading diplomatic commentator in the United States, however, and he clearly had an impact on the thinking of recent administrations: he was listened to by former President Bill Clinton, and he was well plugged in to the administration of the elder President George Bush, particularly with Secretary of State James Baker.

Even if Friedman himself does not have a direct influence on Bush administration thinking, the line he pushes is so widespread that this is virtually all one can read on editorial and op-ed pages or hear in television commentary. Friedman and his friend Cohen are expressing a view that has become pervasive at all levels of U.S. public discourse since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. The prevailing attitude is that the uprising clearly has shown the Palestinians in general and Arafat specifically in their true colors, as untrustworthy peace partners, unwilling to make concessions for peace and ultimately still bent on Israel’s destruction.

 

Ascribing the Palestinian uprising to “hate” delegitimizes it.

The intensity with which this viewpoint is put forth varies with the political inclinations of the speaker or writer. Right-wing columnists tend to push the line fervently, expressing deep alarm—or what purports to be alarm—over Israel’s endangerment, while liberal commentators like Friedman generally de-emphasize the danger to Israel, lamenting instead the lost opportunity for peace and heaping scorn on Palestinians for failing to grasp the opportunities supposedly offered them by Israel and the United States at Camp David and afterward. Whether right-wing, left-wing or politically neutral, however, commentators and editorialists almost universally treat the Palestinians as fundamentally violent and racist. Therefore, according to this syllogism, they are incapable of ever accepting and living peaceably with Jews in their midst.

Five months on, the al-Aqsa intifada has exposed an undercurrent of anti-Palestinian animosity—among ordinary Americans, in the media, and even to some extent in the government—that is surprising in its virulence. Perceptions rather than reality have governed American thinking throughout most of the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the image of Palestinians as motivated solely by hatred of Jews rather than by reality-based grievances is not new. But after years in which the Palestinians had begun to be accepted by public opinion as legitimate participants in the peace process, what is new and striking about the poisonous atmosphere prevailing today is its extent and its intensity.

At the most basic level is the sense that Palestinians are alien. One friend says she “disassociates” when she sees “draped women” shouting hatred of Americans for television cameras and “terrorists riding through the streets shooting their big guns in the air.” She sees Palestinians as an undifferentiated horde. Presumably on the basis of a lifetime of internalizing images of Arabs as barbaric, she automatically categorizes all Palestinians, certainly any carrying guns, as “terrorists” and all veiled women with unhappy expressions as America-haters, even if what they are doing is mourning their dead children. For most others as well, Palestinians are “fanatics” or “hate-filled” or, among the most unrestrained, “animals.”

 

Americans’ Personal Demon

For those many Americans who need a personal demon in their thinking on foreign issues, Yasser Arafat is the ultimate symbol of the hated and hate-filled Palestinian, an “animal” himself motivated only by an ugly hunger to swallow Israel. Just as with Iraq and Saddam Hussain, the demonization of Arafat, made easier by his personal demeanor and his leadership inadequacies, allows many Americans to justify capriciously denying an entire people their political rights.

In much of the United States, there is no depth of understanding either of the issues involved in negotiations or of the realities and the real grievances that have motivated the intifada. Mystification about why the Palestinians would resort to violence in the midst of the peace process is widespread. The automatic assumption is that violence of any sort in these circumstances is illegitimate, certainly violence against Israel. Americans appear to have little or no awareness of the Palestinian sense that violence is the only way to bring their long-simmering frustrations with the pace and direction of the peace process to Israeli and U.S. attention.

Nor does there appear to be any understanding—where Palestinians are concerned—of the long and usually honored tradition throughout the history of warfare of fighting one’s enemy while negotiating with him. Americans raised from their earliest years on the notion that revolution against a foreign occupier is a noble endeavor, Americans who poured into the streets in the 1960s to defend the Vietnamese right to use violence against U.S. forces—and to use it while engaging in peace negotiations—seem incapable of transferring their sympathy for American revolutionaries and Vietnamese guerrillas to Palestinians.

“Hate” is a word often used in the media to describe the intifada’s causes. Time magazine, for instance, headlined several articles on the uprising “The Fires of Hate,” “Ancient Hatreds Reignited,” and “At the Speed of Hate.” Ascribing the uprising to “hate” delegitimizes it. Not generally a word used to describe the motivating force behind any other political, ethnic, or religious conflict in the world, “hate” conveys a clear message: by repeatedly drumming the word into readers’ and viewers’ heads, the media are saying that Palestinians have no motivation but hatred, that substantive grievances do not drive them and no sense of injustice or oppression motivates them.

The idea that Palestinians could have legitimate grievances despite the existence of a peace process—and indeed specifically because the process is not bringing peace—does not enter the calculations of most Americans, whether they are ordinary citizens, supposedly knowledgeable commentators, or current or former public officials. Few seem to take into account the fact that Palestinians have been living with the daily humiliations, the land confiscations, the increasing Israeli settlements, the extensive Israeli road network, the house demolitions, the checkpoints of the occupation, as well as the depredations of Israeli settlers, for decades, futilely expecting imminent independence for the last seven years and enduring the dead-slow pace of a peace process that never comes to fruition. Because most Americans do not seem to comprehend why Palestinians are rebeling, the facile explanations they devise are that Palestinians simply want to destroy Israel and have not made a “strategic decision for peace.” This line allows those who peddle it to relieve Israel and the U.S. of any responsibility for policies that cause the discontent or for interminably prolonging the peace process.

Much of the reason for the widespread misperception of Palestinians as uninterested in peace and unwilling to make concessions for peace lies in another serious misperception: the widespread belief among Americans, even those who should be better informed, that the Palestinians obtained virtually everything they wanted when the 1993 Oslo agreement and its subsequent implementing agreements were signed, excepting only some minor finishing touches that could easily be resolved at Camp David. In the world of sound bites and superficial headlines from which most Americans absorb their news of the world, the realities of Palestinian life under occupation, the realities of a peace process that never brings peace or genuine independence, and nuances such as the doubling of the numbers of Israeli settlers and settlements in occupied Palestinian territory since the Oslo accords were signed are glossed over. In a public mindset focused almost exclusively on Israel’s needs and Israel’s security interests, the realities of Palestinian needs and Palestinian security tend to be lost. Israel portrays itself as weak and vulnerable, and Americans, even policymakers, operate from this perception.

 

Misperceptions Become Policy

The rote assumptions and misperceptions that shape much of American public thinking on Israelis and Palestinians have always ultimately re-emerged as policy. By their nature, rote assumptions are rarely questioned and rarely change, with the result that the basic policy approach of all U.S. presidents and administrations, no matter what their political leanings, varies only slightly and only in the degree of pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian sentiment that governs it.

The Palestinian image has passed through several stages over the last half-century, influencing policy at each stage. In the years after Israel’s creation, when Palestinians were forgotten in the popular imagination and, later, when they turned to terrorism and were portrayed as monstrous Israel-haters, U.S. policy reacted accordingly, ignoring the Palestinians as a political issue in the early period, and later adopting a policy of active hostility to Palestinian concerns. Public sympathy for the Palestinians grew during the first intifada, with the result that policymakers as well began to pay heed to the Palestinians as a political issue, finally bringing them into the peace process.

With the start of the al-Aqsa intifada, however, public discourse has reverted to the dark images of the 1970s, and policy again appears to be in accord with popular thinking.

Image formation is a two-way street, and policymaker perceptions influence public thinking as much as the public influences policymaker views. Throughout the recent crisis, Clinton administration policy was formed in sound bites that play well to a television culture: Clinton described Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposals on Jerusalem at Camp David as incredibly generous and courageous; numerous administration officials attributed the intifada to extremists and enemies of peace; Clinton expressed mystification about why the intifada erupted; and administration sources told the press that Arafat was an enigma to them and was trapped in the perverse romance of victimhood.

Never mind that few of these sound bites took account of realities on the ground—that Barak’s offers, although generous in relation to what had gone before, were minimal in actuality; that the intifada is not an extremist movement but an expression of deep substantive grievances by the mainstream of Palestinians; that there is nothing mystifying about the intifada or about Arafat’s thinking. The characterization of the intifada as instigated by enemies of peace, like media assessments that attribute it to hate, indicates a refusal to accept the real Palestinian grievances that are its root cause and essentially discounts the uprising as illegitimate. These sound bites reflect a constricted perspective focused solely on Israel, but they come across to the American public as gospel and have a lasting impact on public perceptions.

Despite Clinton’s supposedly close ties to Arafat, the Palestinians are essentially alien to American policymakers oriented toward Israel and Israel’s perspective. In a particularly revealing comment, one unnamed Clinton aide told an interviewer just before the Camp David summit last summer that, despite the ties between the president and Arafat, the American team of National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Mideast envoys Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller believed Arafat remained difficult to understand “because of who he is and where he has been.”

This statement was reported without elaboration; the reporter evidently understood its meaning and assumed readers would also understand without further explanation—the idea apparently being that, no matter how often he visited the White House, Arafat remained an enigma for normal people because he is a revolutionary leader, or perhaps simply because he is an Arab, and because “where he has been” includes places that Israelis and Americans don’t go. The huge cultural gap implied by this statement says a great deal about policymaker assumptions and thought processes.

On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than on most foreign policy issues, attitudes and perceptions are ingrained and highly emotional. For this reason, change in Washington, if it occurs at all, tends to be superficial. The facile images in most American minds, chiefly of Arabs as barbaric and violent and of Israel as always endangered, are never far from the surface and are readily called up when Palestinians seem to oppose Israel. It is no different with policymakers. While the Clinton administration was characterized by its preponderance of pro-Israel partisans, political scientists have long noted that policymakers, like the rest of their contemporaries, absorb the ideas and beliefs that dominate society as they come of age. These ideas later structure the frame of reference through which they view world events and shape policy. Since the early 20th century, no generation of American policymakers has ever grown up without internalizing an extremely negative image of Arabs absorbed from the perceptions prevalent throughout society.

Perceptions are not likely to be significantly different in the administration of George W. Bush. It would take a statesman of rare leadership abilities to stand up to the pressure of public opinion as it is now evolving.

Because Palestinians do not have the political muscle to push Israel to make concessions, reaching any truly equitable solution will require substantive, not simply process-oriented, U.S. involvement to force those concessions. Policymakers, however, show little sign of altering their essentially Israel-focused policymaking perspective—or of being able to shed the simplistic notion that Palestinians are “different,” appearing, at least in the American subconscious, inferior to Israelis and therefore not quite equal to Israel as a partner in a mediated peace agreement.

Kathleen Christison is the author of Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, available from the AET Book Club. Published by the University of California Press in 1999, her book is being updated and will be reissued in paperback this fall.