Clearing out closets and file cabinets is always an experience filled with expectation. Who knows what one might come across, something sentimental, something you have no idea of how it got into your belongings, or folders of fabulous interesting stuff that you might spend days going through. This happened to me recently, I pulled a storage box from the back of a closet and found a trove of clippings from magazines, newspapers and brochures from the late 1980’s regarding Palestine.
One particular article caught my attention. A remarkable exposure by Robert Friedman that had appeared in the February/March 1987 edition of Mother Jones, revealing how israel’s Hasbara Project targets the U.S. media and publishing industry. It was a brave exposure and a milestone in articulating how pervasive israel’s pressure on manipulating news coverage of the Middle East was in the U.S. I remember the buzz and feeling of vindication the article created in the Palestinian solidarity movement, for years we had claimed that there was a clear bias in favor of israel.
I was drawn to the side bar “Confessions Of An israeli Press Officer” where Friedman shared how Menachem Shalev, the NY israeli consulate’s press officer from 1985 to 1986 had told him that:
“… there were a number of American Jews, ‘from network executives to bookers, who might have spent a year on a kibbutz,’ who were ‘more loyal’ to [i]srael than their employer and that it translated into ‘favors’ ranging from sympathetic coverage to getting negative stories about [i]srael killed. …These “Good guys” were to be found at every network and important newspaper in the country.”
If this wasn’t bad enough, Shalev revealed that these names were passed on from one press attaché to another. The stakes for israel—billions in aid and continued U.S. support—are very high, and for that reason press relations was the important priority for the israeli government. Hence, the role of the press officer was to help shape the American media’s perception of israel and the Arabs:
“We stress two points: that we are just like you, an essentially white, European people who fled persecution to build a Western-style democracy (emphasis added): that we are beleaguered by a coalition of 22 hostile Arab states determined to destroy [i]srael and the Jewish people. The Arabs emphasize that the Palestinian self-determination is the crux and the core of the Mideast problem. On the two issues the propaganda war is fought. Both propositions are true.”
The role of israeli press officers is to spend time promoting the Zionist line which requires de-legitimizing the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular. Shalev boasted of breakfasts, lunches and dinners with journalists, writers and authors; with individuals that not only resulted in many becoming friends, but the primary result was that he was able to turn his position of trust into a position of influence.
The “just like you, an essentially white, European people’’ paradigm
I have read and heard this absurdity so many times in regard to the West’s commonality with israelis. The Hasbara project has been quite successful in portraying israel as an “inherently European space” out of the broader process of challenging and constructing cultural and symbolic boundaries—such as those differentiating israeli (European) from the non-European (Arab); civilized from barbarian, present from past, based on Orientalist ideas that created the belief that Western culture is superior to other civilizations.
The Hasbara project has much to do with “appropriation” and “re-imagining” of Palestinians and determining whose voice is heard and whose is excluded within the context of the Palestine-israeli conflict. In an age where overt racism and stereotyping is considered inappropriate, derogatory and pejorative images of Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, continue to be a pervasive phenomenon. The political uses of misrepresentations are important not only because they operate according to tendencies within historical, cultural and sociopolitical context, but more specifically because representations significantly embody intentions and purposes that have real consequences. Furthermore, the word “representations” has political as well as aesthetic connotations, and one of the problems involved in the representations of Arabs has been the fact that the truth about the Palestinian problem has so often been submerged into a continuous barrage of misrepresentation, lies and deceits propagated by the Hasbara project.
Indeed, the very idea of Palestine, and the Palestinians has been suppressed to the point that until quite recently, it was axiomatic that everything said by the israelis was the “truth” and everything said by the Palestinians or Arabs was mere “political propaganda”.
A Chance Discussion about the Middle East
Some years ago when working on my MA thesis on the Political Utility of the Arab Stereotype, a chance discussion about Palestine with a New York High School teacher resulted my taking a different approach to my thesis than I had originally planned. The conversation got around to my interest and affection for the Palestinian people in particular and the Middle East in general, and that I was researching negative and racist images and representations of Arabs in American mass culture. I was asked if I had read Leon Uris’ Exodus since it was one of the “best historical and thought provoking books” available on the Middle East that the teacher had read. In fact, the teacher gushed; the novel and the movie were used in history and social sciences classes!!
When I remarked that it was a novel and a racist one at best, historically inaccurate in a malicious way, I was bluntly and forcefully informed in no uncertain terms that, not only was it a historically correct representation of israel’s “birth”, but an objective portrayal of Arabs.
The claim that Exodus mirrored “truth and reality” was astonishing and the fact that it had come from someone entrusted with teaching young Americans made it all the more so. Nevertheless, the claim led me to question whether the sheer lack of socio-historical-political inquiry and the unquestioning of Zionist myths from the “redemption of the promised land,” “making the desert bloom” or that “there had been no act of ethnic cleansing,” could be linked in some way to the continued presence of racist stereotypes of Palestinians and Arabs as “other”.
The logical place to start was to re-read and deconstruct Uris’ “truths” and “realities” and situate the Exodus (and the 1960 MGM Oscar-winning movie which I had not seen at that time) as ideologically contested terrain. If I could demonstrate that Exodus did not exist in some abstract sort of way, it would be possible to show a methodological approach to its historical context, its geographical location, where it came from, what is was pointing to, and how the stereotypes served Zionist Hasbara political objectives.
Stereotypical depictions of Arabs are common enough in the film and television industry. They also appear in cartoons, novels, comic strips, comic books, college and school textbooks, newspapers and novelty merchandise. Twentieth century visual culture added a practical dimension to the creative force of stereotyping and image creation. But what was it about the novel Exodus that made it suitable to be used in high school history and social sciences classes?
By understanding how knowledge of the Middle East is produced in mass culture, and how news is manipulated by thousands of Zionists involved in the Hasbara project, it is possible to determine the correlation between imagery and power whereby image-makers, including political establishments, corporate media, conglomerates, religious authorities, Zionist lobbies and academia conceptualize for their audiences images of Palestinians and Arabs that are racist.
We know that as a colonial settler movement Zionists realized the importance of portraying the Arab character in a negative light and of deprecating Arab rights in order to justify Zionist activities in Palestine. Without doubt the Arab stereotype is the product of Zionist ideology, to assist in the promotion of its objectives: the colonization of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing and permanent exile of the indigenous Palestinian people.
Beliefs about the origins and evolution of all nations are often fixed in the form of stories and myths. While it is true that long before the creation of the Zionist state on the land of Palestine, the Arab image had been formed by stories of the Holy Crusades against the “infidel.” Cultural products such as Leon Uris’ Exodus, the fictional account of the beginnings of the Middle East war, more than any other single expression, set the tone, or benchmark for the mass consumption of the contemporary Arab stereotype.
Narratives are never ideologically neutral; messages are stimuli that influence the emotions and sentiments. For this reason it is important to go beyond the literal level of the “meaning” of Exodus towards a textual reading in order to analyze how the character of Arabs is depicted, what it connotes, and how and by whom it should be consumed.
The novel’s narrative order of exposition underscores some of the more dominant elements in the process of stereotyping and the process of internalizing Zionist values that justified the colonization of Palestine, and the demonizing of the Palestinians as “Other.” Uris’ use of ideologically inflected Zionist discourse provides an abundance of very distinctive stereotypes based on racist assumptions about Arabs that clearly fall within the European colonial paradigm of their “civilizing” mission. Therefore, Exodus needs to be viewed as a Zionist text, not simply for the way in which it literalizes specific Zionist tropes such as making the “desert bloom,” but for how it translates the Zionist “master narrative” of a “land without people for a people without land”. In fact, Uris goes one step further to imply that Palestinian claims are artificially and mischievously inspired and therefore they may be ignored.
As mentioned previously, while the level of consciousness involved in stereotyping is a matter of debate, without question Exodus was a conscious act of racism by Leon Uris. While utilizing the European colonialist preference for figuring “native” populations in the lands they occupied as “half savage and half child,” Uris’ Eurocentric discourse in Exodus operates through narrating the indigenous Palestinian Arab population as alien, subversive, dirty and diseased.
That the racism in Exodus was a conscious act on his part is substantiated by the fact that in 1950, public relations consultant Edward Gottleib sought to create a more sympathetic attitude towards israel in what he considered an apathetic U.S. Art Stevens in his 1985 The Persuasion Explosion revealed how Gottleib commissioned Uris and sent him to israel with instructions to “soak in the atmosphere of the country and create a novel to popularize the country.” The result was Exodus, and according to Gottleib, the novel did more to popularize israel with the American public than any other single presentation through the media. Indeed, Exodus was powerfully placed as a disseminator of Zionist lies and propaganda. Through the novel, the movie, video availability and television reruns of Exodus several generations of Americans have been led to believe the Zionist narrative that israel is an inherently European space, a bridge between darkness and light.
It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine …
I will not elaborate on the portrayal of Arabs in the novel except to say that had they been portrayals of Jews they would be considered anti-Semitic. The existence of racist ideas and practices among Zionist Jews in israel and elsewhere had been ignored or avoided. I believe it is important to challenge the notion that the Jewish people cannot be racist. I do not wish to ascribe guilt for the sake of it, but one cannot ignore the fact that Uris exhibited extreme hatred and intolerance for Arabs in his writings. Exodus is rife with racist descriptions of Arabs; their culture, their villages, their physical appearances. What is most striking about both the novel’s and film’s narrative is that the term Palestinian is reserved for the children of European Jewish settlers born in Palestine, referred to as “Sabras.” The indigenous Palestinian population of Muslims, Christians and Jews are described as “Arabs.” The “Arab” label is particularly important, since it was a major factor contributing to the disappearance of the Palestinians and their absorption under the larger label of “Arab.” A former colleague R.S. Zahrana explained in Palestinian Leadership and the American Media:
“…Instead of referring to the native inhabitants of Mandated Palestine as ‘Palestinians’ all the people, including the large influx of Jewish refugees from Europe were divided along ethnic lines. Hence the descriptions: the ‘Jews of Palestine’ and the ‘Arabs of Palestine.’ Such labeling reinforced the image of conflict drawn along ethnic lines. By calling the Palestinians ‘Arab’ the Palestinians lost their own national distinction. They became part of a larger ethnic pool that spanned from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. Being part of this ethnic pool produced a perception of the conflict as one country, [i]srael, against the Arab masses. … The ‘Arab’ label also created for the Palestinian a dual image of both aggressor, ‘Arab armies’—and victim ‘Arab’ refugees.”
It was little wonder that the international community barely blinked in disbelief when Golda Meir stated that “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
In order for the world to perceive the Palestinians as a non-people, it was important to dehumanize them. It is always easier to dehumanize people than to deal with them as equals, and if the Palestinians “are animals walking on two legs” as deceased former Prime Minister Menachem Begin once said, or “cockroaches” as former israeli Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan described them, they cannot be right in their political claims, nor can they be treated as creatures capable of comprehending politics or human relationships in general.
The denial of Palestinian rights has been and continues to be central to Zionist designs on Palestine, and this accounts for the fact that Palestinians are not mentioned in either the novel or film of Exodus, but are described as Arabs, whose problems emanate primarily from their backward social conditions and from the hostility of the Arabs around them. The development of this theme and the correlative image of the Arab as backward and dangerous native who must be civilized are therefore inherent in the colonial situation as indicated in Uris’ rather long hyperbolic description of the wretchedness of the Arabs.
They are however, portrayed as ‘good’ so long as they accept the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The theme of Jewish ownership of the land is presented most radically through the mouth piece of Kammal, the muktar of a village, who explains that Palestine indeed belongs to the Jews, and that the Arabs in reality have no rights over the land, or alternatively that the Arabs began to migrate there only after the Jewish community began to establish itself in the country. Uris’ only positive Arab character, the ideal Arab of the future, is devoid of national and political values, lacking integrity and dignity.
Whatever claims Zionists present to justify their occupation of Palestine and the establishment of israel, the fact remains that the occupation is an occupation by Europeans, and is a form of settler colonialism which is being practiced in its most extreme form. The transformation of Palestine into israel is the result of military power, ideological manipulation, and the use of coercive strategies carried out by the Zionist Hasbara project. From this standpoint understanding the place of israel within the context of western imperialism is a necessary part of making sense of the persistence of racist Arab images.
The crude mental package of traits and characteristics combined together to delineate the “Arab” and the “Arab World” without reference to particular individuals, historical and social differences and histories provides a convenient shorthand in the identification of a particular group, as well as the basis for ethnic, religious or racial prejudice.
While the all-pervasive stereotype is embedded in the American psyche it is quite a huge leap of faith on the part of the Hasbara project and their toadies in the media to think every American or every westerner is sympathetic and identifies with israel. I have more in common with Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or wherever Palestinians are exiled than an israeli.
I should caution readers not to rush out and purchase the book, if you feel compelled to read it, borrow it from your library. The book is loathsome and vile and not worth the paper it is printed on … you have been warned!! Better you spend the money to plant an olive tree in Palestine.
Sources:
Friedman, Robert I. “Selling Israel to America.” Mother Jones February/March, 1987
Stevens, Art. The Persuasion Explosion, Washington: Acropolis, 1985
Uris, Leon. Exodus, Garden City: Doubleday, 1960
Zahrana, R.S. “Palestinian Leadership and the American Media.” Kamalipour,Yahya R. ed. The U.S. Media and the Middle East, Image and Perception. 1995
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