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"Order the Inquirer and Help Israel Celebrate" is the headline of a brochure that the Inquirer is now circulating among potential subscribers. If you subscribe now to the Inquirer, the newspaper says it will make a small contribution to help underwrite forthcoming local events celebrating Israel's 50th anniversary. The idea of a link between the Inquirer and pro-Israel events would seem incongruous in view of the Inquirer's long record of publishing news articles, op-eds, editorials, and cartoons that are slanted against Israel. But what makes the Inquirer's attempt to capitalize on Israel's 50th particularly offensive is that its recent front-page news story and editorial concerning Israel's anniversary were, once again, marred by harsh anti-Israel bias.
The front-page news report, on January 18, was headlined "Israel at 50: Less--and More--Than Envisioned." The sub-headline gave more of a clue as to the Inquirer's real point: "While Its Accomplishments Are Large, It Is Not the State Its Founders Imagined." Get it? Israel may have some accomplishments, but.... and Israel's founders had a dream, but Israel didn't live up to it...
By the fifth paragraph, correspondent John Donnelly, reporting from Israel, was reeling off the kind of inaccuracies and generalizations for which the Inquirer is infamous when reporting about the Jewish State: "Israel's defense forces have made the nation the Goliath of the Middle East, not the social melting pot envisioned by the pioneers of 50 years ago," Donnelly wrote.
The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite. Israel is a social melting pot, and it is not a "Goliath" arrayed against Arab "Davids." In the first, fragile years after its establishment, Israel successfully absorbed more than half a million Jewish refugees from Arab countries--an incredible accomplishment, in view of young Israel's lack ofresources and the fact that the refugees were penniless, because the Arab governments stole their property and assets before expelling them en masse. (Donnelly made no mention of how the Arab regimes treated their Jewish citizens.) Donnelly's Goliath vs. David analogy is equally absurd. Israel is surrounded by 22 Arab countries, whose combined military manpower far outnumbers Israel's. All of the Arab regimes --including the three that have peace treaties with Israel-- are stockpiling advanced offensive weapons. Some of them are developing chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, and openly threatening to use them against Israel.
How does Donnelly describe the glorious moment of Israel's creation, the event that the Inquirer is supposedly "celebrating" ? "Israel won the war, forcing several hundred thousand Palestinans to flee." Nonsense. Israel didn't "force" the Arabs to flee. With a few isolated exceptions (which occur in every war), those Palestinian Arabs who left Israel did so either to get out of the way of the fighting --fighting which the Arabs initiated-- or at the urging of Arab leaders, who didn't want the local Arabs getting in the way of the advancing Arab armies.
After a brief description of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, Donnelly rushes ahead to the Oslo accords and the Rabin assassination. No reference to the Arab aggression against Israel in 1956, 1967, and 1973. No reference to the decades of PLO massacres of Israeli women and children. For Donnelly, all that seems to matter is getting to 1996-1997, so that he can make it seem as if Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame for the absence of peace in the Middle East. "Netanyahu disdains the agreement with the PLO," Donnelly writes. "His government's commitment to negotiations with the PLO remains open to question."
The fact that Netanyahu had concerns about the Oslo accords is hardly a cause for surprise; most Israelis had similar concerns. But to suggest that he "disdains" the accords, and if he has not honored them, is utterly false. The Netanyahu government has implemented every one of Israel's commitments in the accords, including some that his Labor Party predecessors had not yet honored, such as the withdrawal from 80% of Hebron and the release of female Arab terrorists. To say that the Netanyahu government may not be committed to negotiating with the PLO is nonsense, too; those negotiations have continued uninterrupted --sometimes in public, sometimes in private-- since the day Netanyahu was elected prime minister.
Donnelly completed his "celebration" Israel's 50th with a portrayal of "most Israelis" --that's how he put it-- as experiencing "a surge in wealth and a hunger for the spoils." According to Donnelly, "the old egalitarian ways continue to fade," and Israel has degenerated into a selfish society where nobody cares about anything except making money. Donnelly managed to find a grand total of two --that's right, two-- Israelis whom he could quote making statements to buttress his point of view: a teenager and her kibbutznik father, who says that young Israelis "are not interested in society's problems; they are interested in their own problems. This is Israel today." And that's how the article ends, so that the final image with which readers are left is of a corrupt, selfish Israel.
Of course there are some Israelis who are selfish; there are some people in every country who are selfish. But to say that "This is Israel is today" is outrageous. Israel is also a country of people who feed the poor, visit the sick, and welcome strangers into their homes as their guests. It is a country where people will go to incredible lengths to help someone find their way to a particular street or store. It is a country where people practically leap from their bus seats to make room for the elderly or the infirm. And it is a country where young men and women proudly spend three years risking their lives to defend their nation and their people. In an age when patriotism is a rare commodity and cynicism is the rule, a country where 18 year-olds engage in such self-sacrifice has a great deal to celebrate. Too bad the Inquirer doesn't understand that.