Yesterday, an editorial page editor at USA Today sent me an invitation to write a short (375 words) piece for USA Today. They sent me the gist of the editorial that was going to appear in the paper with my response. I have not been interested for years in US media, but I thought that I would do it. I wrote a short piece and sent it to them although I did not like word limit. Today, I received a message saying that they won't be using my piece and that they asked Richard Falk instead. I asked them why they did not bother to tell me. So here is what I sent (on top, is the editorial that they sent to me to respond to):
"USA Today’s view: No doubt Israel's military
operation in Gaza will achieve its objective. It will degrade the ability of
Hamas on other radical groups to launch rockets like those that prompted the
attack. But the longer the operation continues and the more aggressive it becomes,
the greater the chance of other outcomes in the rapidly changing Middle East,
including jeopardizing Israel's peace treaty with Egypt. Yes, Israel has a
right to defenc itself, but for everybody's sake, U.S. diplomacy should push to
bring the conflict to a rapid end.
My view:
US media always seem to go along with Israeli claims and
pretentions. And Palestinian voices and viewpoints are
rarely permitted in mainstream media.
You can’t judge the war on Gaza without placing it in a historical
context: that the Zionist movement has been trying for over a century to impose
violently a political entity and occupation upon an already existing population—the
defiant Palestinian people. This is not
about Hamas or about Islamic Jihad: those organizations did not even exist
prior to the 1980s. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Israel did not claim that it
was fighting “the Bin Laden’s”—as its officials have been claiming this week in
US media. Back then, Israel claimed that
it was fighting communist terrorism—because the dominant Palestinian
organizations were then leftist and secularist.
Israel picks the enemy-of-the-day of the US and then casts the enemy
label on the Palestinians. But what is
missing from the coverage is that the Palestinians don’t feel that Israel is retaliating
in its recent attacks; they feel that Israel had begun the attacks with the
violent imposition of Israel and its occupation upon a resident population with
continuous roots in the lands that extend over centuries. US media did not cover that in the last few
weeks alone, Israel bombed Sudan, Gaza, and Syria, and this was prior to the
Hamas rockets that are regarded as the spark for this crisis. In my own lifetime (I am 52), Israel has
bombed Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. Do readers really believe that all those
attacks were defensive or pre-emptive and justified? My grandfather’s house in Tyre, Lebanon (one
of the oldest in an ancient city) was bombed three times by Israel, and it
never housed “terrorists”.
Israel believes that once it kills more leaders and more
commanders, it will prevail. But it has killed thousands upon thousands of Arab
civilians, commanders, and soldiers and yet has never prevailed. The Arab world is changing fast and the Arab
people won’t subscribe to US myths about the Arab-Israeli conflict. They will
not express faith in the US-led “peace process” when the US government supports
every military action by Israel—without any exception. Arabs are asking daily: how many civilians
have to die in Gaza before the label “terrorism” is applied once—only once—on Israeli
actions?"