War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

More Happenstance

MORE HAPPENSTANCE UP TO I 9 67 everything I knew about the State of Israel and conflict in the Middle East came from Fox and Hearst movie newsreels and two acquaintances of disparate personalities: Gallagher, a man about the University ofWashington campus, I9 50 to I954, told tales of Israel's War of Independence in I948; David Hirsch, whom I knew and admired as a civil rights activist in Dallas in the late I950S, lobbied for the anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism. Gallagher was somewhat unusual among my circle of working students. His first name is missing from my memory bank, but not his campus presence. He had a Plymouth convertible, smoked a pipe, and wore a tweed coat with leather patches at the elbows. He also drank beer at the Blue Moon Tavern, a free-thinking place frequented by students, the painter Morris Graves, poet Ted Roethke, several notable professors, and once, it was said, by the Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky, later liquidat~d by Josef Stalin. Gallagher claimed he did a stint as a mercenary gunman for the Stern Gang, shooting up Arab villages in an early, unauthorized version of ethnic cleansing. As he told it, with Irish gusto, this was an updated version of Cowboys versus Indians. True or not, these tales made noble the return of Jews from Hitler's holocaust to their homeland of antiquity. The tales excused the excesses of this return. Arabs who were dispossessed, like Indians, had no standing in the American conscience of that time, a result of ignorance, and no standing in our social life, a result of their absence from it. I I I I I 2 / MORE HAPPENSTANCE The Jews of my youth in the agrarian South were professionals -merchants, lawyers, storekeepers-and thus of the same social rank as the town and country gentry. Although it may have been different in the city, these folk drank together and laughed together; humor is the grace of people who have been whipped and lost. Despite the difference in religious practices, we were spared the special curse of anti-Semitism, although, Lord knows, we compensated with the most rigorous economic and social discrimination against blacks. Arabs? Palestinians? One might have learned something about them from State Department briefing papers. The department, headed by the most exemplary American, George Marshall, opposed U.S. recognition of the Jewish state in I948. President Truman decided otherwise and most Americans applauded-and still do with some qualifications. When he wasn't picketing segregated facilities in Big D with a handful of liberals, usually the sum of their numbers in that redneck, reactionary city, Dave Hirsch quietly preached an anti-Zionist gospel : the creation of Israel was a grave, even tragic mistake, a case of victims (Jews) victimizing others (Arabs) with no good to come to any of us. Because I admired Hirsch as much for his courage as his intelligence, I listened and, respectfully, argued; the westernizedJews would, in time, elevate backward Arabs from their wooden plows and donkeys to a higher economic level-tractors and Fords. Besides , Jews deserved the land of Palestine as compensation for their suffering in World War II. In a manner perhaps too gentle for his lobbying craft, Hirsch countered: Zionists were placing a religious state in a region where population numbers overwhelmingly favored Arabs and Muslims. He could only forecast wars and tribulations, in place of peace and accommodation-accurate unto this day, of-course, but a forecast insufficient to affect the support of Americans for the State of Israel. This was all long behind me when I went to Olympia to cover the state legislature for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in I967, my third state capital beat as a reporter. The legislature was in the heat of battle over Governor Dan Evans's proposed income tax that winter when Gideon Saguy, the stately Israeli consul-general in San Fran- MORE HAPPENSTANCE I I 13 cisco, came to the statehouse with an invitation: an all expense paid trip to Israel, where I could travel, observe, and, naturally, write anything my heart and mind desired. No strings, of course. I jumped at the invitation. So did my editors. There are two schools of thought on such government-paid freeloads: okay and no way. Jack Doughty, a conservative relic of the The Front Page, and Louis Guzzo, the P-I editors, held the former view...