It is hard to put into words how my decade of
involvement with the Vietnam War now leaves me sort of
"in bed" with people that used to made be sick. I am
in an intense soul searching to see how-- if it indeed
is so-- consistency of mind made me a hawk on Vietnam
and a dove on the Middle East. Allow me, please, to
note some preliminary observations in the hope that
you might see how the "latch-catch catastrophe" I
addressed in a previous posting will permissively be
made possible through the policy self-rationalization
of the US press, based on the arguments advanced by
American Jews like Mr. Stone.

American editors, as gung-ho idealistic cub reporters
just landed in Vietnam realized, are not boxed in by
ideological and moral issues. Thus, in the case of
Israel, US press support is based on a calculation of
width and breadth of public reaction. It is also based
on "scooping," as the other side of the "media
dialectic." Thus,, on the one hand, there is the issue
of the readers' reactions and on the other the
reactions of those who make the news. Unlike South
Vietnam-- whose censorship of US media was impeded by
MACV and JUSPAO-- Israel has been quite good at
reigning in and intimidating the foreign press. IDF
troopers shooting at journalists or literally putting
up a smokescreen with smoke machines, would have been
unheard of in Vietnam. But Israel is an
independently-minded country, its economic dependence
on US aid notwithstanding, that knows that it can
control the news by controlling the reporters' access.
It also knows that it can depend on its American
Jewish minions to  mount "boycotts," such as that
being waged against the WASHINGTON POST, to protest
the reports of American Jerusalem-based reporters.

Making the business side of the equation, the American
editors generally are determined to avoid
controversial articles that might negatively impact on
their already anemic side of the ledger. Well
organized pro-Zionist pressures do the rest. As a
result, Mr. Sharon has had a very military man's
reaction to the press. The economically less
vulnerable European press-- such as LE MONDE
DIPLOMATIQUE, which has published hundreds of articles
by the Israeli left's intellectuals, has allowed
Israel to be exposed and attacked much more openly,
resulting in a damning image for the regime of Mr.
Sharon. As a result, Europeans have felt that shades
of Hitler and Stalin are here and there suggested by
the mechanized Israeli "Goliath" acting against the
Palestinian "David." Mr. Sharon's response has been
constant: all this is "blood libel," as if to equate
the European press reports with the "Protocols of the
Wise Old Men of Zion," an anti-semitic fabrication
claiming to be a manual for Jewish ritual use of the
blood of goyim children.

But more ominous is the relationship between Sharon
and HAMAS, Hezzbollah and other organizations (now it
is even a matter of individual initiative, unorganized
and undirected), which make possible massive
suicide-terror. Like Mr. Stone, I experienced the Viet
Cong terrorists in Vietnam and the PLO terrorists in
Israel. But these were guerrilla soldiers whose
mission was deemed successful only if the well trained
commandos and their gear returned after completing a
mission. Suicide-terror is not just the killing of
innocent civilians-- all terror is that-- but it is
the novel deliberate self sacrifice by the terrorist,
usually an educated youth. This baffles and impresses
most journalistic observers, privately too amazed to
condemn it out of hand as they condemned past Viet
Cong or PLO terror. There is a certain holiness to all
this that, to baffled American journalists hiding out
in their Jerusalem and Tel Aviv hotel rooms, seems
almost saintly. Its effectiveness in panicking
Israelis and provoking massive in-discriminant
retaliation against people who clearly would or could
never do the same thing, turns many away in disgust.
This leads to a re-examination of the whole
Holocaust-survivors image of the Israelis. As is the
case of with US DoS officials, Sharon's omnipresence
to decry anything short of pro-Israel sycophancy (and
to punish criticism with not-so-subtle retaliation--
provoked many journalists to undergo de-mystification
from their awe of the Jewish state, recalling Lebanon
and the words of the US chief diplomat trying to make
peace and end the bloodbath there, Philip Habbib:
"Sharon was a killer, obsessed by hatred of the
Palestinians. I had given Arafat an understanding that
his people would not be harmed, but this was totally
disregarded by Sharon whose word was worth nothing."

Now, for the first time in a confrontation between a
friendly occupying power and the weaker occupied
people, US correspondents are forced to return to
their history books in order to try and understand why
young Palestinians are so ready to destroy themselves
in their "sacred mission." Unfortunately, this comes
at the same time that Israel's history is being
re-written from newly de-classified materials.
Furthermore, far more impact has the "martyrdom" of
one time hit-and-run Palestinians than even the
bravery of Viet Cong guerrillas. And, looking back at
the history of the recent past, the IDF comes to seen
not only to have clay feet but to also look a lot like
the German and Soviet forces bringing "order" to what
seemed to be a passive peasant mass.

Mr. Stone's reaction is not only that of an American
who as a combat veteran of Vietnam feels that he was
deceived into participation in an immorally excessive
use of force to immorally crush a war of supposedly
"national liberation," but, as a Jew, he feels shamed
by the way Israel has turned from a way to peace to a
way to bloodshed, after one of its own gunned down the
peace candidate, PM Rabin.

Such moral revulsion, I found in debating Vietnam, is
best dealt with through "meaningful dialogue," the
demand of the US New Left when it wanted a national
discussion of US policy in Vietnam. But the reaction
of the present regime in Israel and its American
supporters has been to throw around the label
"antisemite," much as an octopus inks the water in
order to effect an escape. Only the editors who weigh
the fiscal dialectic of their respective newspapers,
have been literally censoring Stone-like revulsion to
the Israeli reaction to the suicide terror from their
correspondents on the ground. This is, as pointed out
by Prof. Said, in contrast to Israel, where critics
are much more tolerated and dialogued with (the Pappe
case a recent shameful exception).

But what will happen when the editors note a shift in
popular perspective or will be signaled of the
business community's realization a realization (on
whose ads newspapers survive) that support of Israel
costs more than it is worth? 

I predict that the editors will then "release from
inhibition," to use a neurological term, their young
reporters, who will (as they did with Vietnam) push a
massive revisionist post-Zionist historiography to
explain that the evils of Israel today are
manifestations of the Zionist "original sin" of
avarice, aggrandizement and Boer-like crushing of the
Palestinian natives. As during Intifada I, many of the
Jewish Americans will take the attitude: better to
break with Israel's policies than to provoke
anti-semitism at home in America. The "catch-latch
catastrophe" will then manifest, much as it did with
Vietnam.

I present this scenario in the hope that Israel's
tough-guy hubris can be dampened somewhat and the
provocative image promoted by ultra-orthodox "crazies"
will not feed this derailment of the Israeli-American
friendship. Perhaps, by working with the Bush
proposal, rather than trying to manipulate it for the
advantage of a greater Israel, which deems the 1967
conquered territories as "liberated" territories,
Israel can control the inevitable two-states process
in such a way as to make it predicated on real peace
and regional integration. As with Vietnam, over the
coming year or two, Israel will find that it is in a
press-war, one which Vietnam lost to its demise.
Mishandling that war, Mr. Stone's and other left Jews'
position have shown, can be more devastating to
Israel's future than all the suicide bombers. Thus, in
conclusion, the only way that Israel can control the
peace process and its concomitant press image, is to
be in front of both, honestly and openly.