Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, February 1990, Page 25

Seeing the Light

Middle East Facts Won't Fit into the Idealogical Baggage We Carry

By Mary E. Neznek

June 1967 marked the heady success of a supposed David of an Israeli army against a Goliath of Arabs in the "Six-Day War." There was dancing in the streets in the United States, and I found myself "celebrating" by proxy and by virtue of being in a pub in an upstate New York college town. It all seemed so stunning, with a remarkable victory for the brave Israelis against the swarming hordes of warring Arabs.

This happened at a time when the Vietnam War was beginning to take more and more hapless young American high school and college-aged men to that mean little war in Southeast Asia. itw as also a time of heightened awareness for me as an 18-year-old recently exposed to conditions in the rural South and in small town and urban ghettos.

The Middle East war seemed like one place where good triumphed over evil. The next year I was chosen through the Earlham College Near Eastern Stud ides program to study in Lebanon. At first I did not make the connection between the June 1967 war in the Middle East and conditions in Beirut. Beirut seemed like an opportunity to view the United States from a different vantage point.

At 19, according to Eriksonian developmental theories of psychology, one's values are forged and defined. Those crucial years between 18 and 21 took me to rural Appalachia in Kentucky, a black high school in then segregated Alabama, and finally to Lebanon as one of 20 19-year-olds chosen to study at the American University of Beirut. That chance to study in Lebanon set my way of thinking apart from friends and family for many years.

Unspeakable domestic US poverty and unacceptable violence in international policy first connected for me on a student orientation trip to the Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre. This was the same Tyre referred to in Sunday School biblical stories. But who were these Palestinian refugees we saw in this part of the "Holy Land," and why were they there? Why did swarm around our tour bus and give me an uneasy feeling that they were angry with Americans?

The year was 1968, one year after the mythic Israeli victory against the Arabs. Suddenly, I had the sinking feeling that what I was learning from my new Mideast vantage point would no longer fit into the neat ideological package I had mentally prepared. That was the starting point of a personal journey towards a better understanding of US-Arab relations. It wasn't just Sami Hadawi's book Bitter Harvest, or lectures by well respected Arab scholars which pierced my layers of ignorance. It was also recognition of my own careless ignorance of what really had happened between the Palestinians and Israelis that crystallized after that first searching glimpse into a Palestinian refugee camp.

That year I also made friends with men and women from a variety of non-Western backgrounds, with whom I shared classes and living quarters in Beirut. We huddled through an Israeli air raid on the Beirut airport. We broke the curfew together during successive crises precipitated by the destabilizing presence of thousands of Palestinian refugees and an American-backed Israeli army in hot pursuit.

After the end of the school year, I ventured to Israel to meet Israelis and Palestinians on their own grounds. What I found was myth and repression. This was brought home to me on an Israeli Ministry of Tourism junket. Being short on time and traveling alone, I thought a tour bus would offer the best way to see the area. Sitting on the bus with the other "Holy Land tourists," I realized how distortions perpetuate themselves.

Our guide, a Jewish former resident of Beirut, told of persecution of Jewish citizens in Arab countries. There was little or no mention of the centuries of harmony between Muslims, Christians and Jewish peoples in the Middle East, nor that this was ended by the violent incursion of Jewish refugees, motivated by their persecution in Europe to despoil lands and lives in pursuit of a violent nationalism of their own.

For the first time I experienced what I would feel over and over -the deliberate use of untruths to justify a violation of Palestinain basic rights.

When I returned to south Lebanon in 1972 to teach for a year in rural farming village, I was exposed to the "have nots." My students were poor Shi'i and Christian farming children whose academic year was interrupted by the cycles of back-breaking planting of harvesting of tobacco. They lived a half kilometer away from Israel, and a few kilometers away from the teeming refugee camps in Tyre. The frustrations of all of these people were laying the groundwork for 15 years of sporadic civil war that was the explode only two years later.

In 1973, upon my return to the US from teaching in the village, in Albany, NY, newspaper published an interview containing my observations in Lebanese-Palestinian problems kept alive by unresolved grievances left from the establishment of Israel. Two Israeli academics verbally lambasted me, and the newspaper which published my interview was censured, along with my credibility for challenging the conventional wisdom about Middle East problems.

My life reconnected with the Middle East in 1977, during the third year of the Lebanese civil war. The lack of information about its causes pricked my conscience and led me to begin my study of Arabic. I also worked with my former AUB professor, Dr. Walid Khalidi, on his book about the Lebanese civil war, which was supported through the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In 1978, I transferred to Georgetown university to focus on conflict resolution and theories of nonviolence.

Being in Washington has made me realize that the part played by the United States in the continuing violence in the Mideast cannot be ignored. I spent two years researching a book that looked at domestic US foreign policy formulations vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I learned still more about the use of misinformation and myth by Washington's infamous Israeli lobby.

This process of insight has brought me back to Pogo's observation that "We have met the enemy and he is us." It is up to us t exercise our right to participate in political life, accepting responsibility to correct lies. This is the only way to replace a US Middle East policy based upon a military strategic myth with a far sounder strategy based upon human rights and self-determination. The only way to achieve self-determination for Palestinians in their homeland is to restore self-determination for Americans in the US. 

 Mary E. Neznek is a founding member of the Presbytery Middle East group in Washington, DC, where she works with religious and peace groups on Middle East issues.