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An Arab-American historian charges that the media's representation of the conflict in the Middle East turns reality upside down. By Russell Schoch Numerous critics charge that, in the United States, ignorant or biased reporting of the conflict in the Middle East leads to a common perception of Israel as a beseiged democracy surrounded by Islamic fundamentalists and Arab populations bent on its destruction, even as Israel repeatedly holds out the olive branch of peace. According to associate professor of history Beshara Doumani, this is a deeply flawed picture, and one that is not common elsewhere in the world. “It’s very frustrating,” Doumani says, “to live in a country where popular perceptions are so fundamentally removed from the realities that exist on the ground.” Doumani was born in 1957 at a pump station in Saudi Arabia, where his father, a Palestinian forced out of Haifa by the 1948 war, was working for a Gulf oil company. The family moved to a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon when Doumani was two, and remained there until he was 13. In 1970, they emigrated to the United States, settling in a low-income neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. Doumani’s first trip to a neighborhood playground taught him a lesson about racism in America—he was thrown to the ground and kicked in the face, his nose broken. “Camel jockey” and cruder epithets accompanied the beating. “It wasn’t until I came to the United States,” he says, “that my Arab identity became pronounced.” The Doumanis were one of the few non-African-American families in “the projects” in Toledo, where Beshara spent his adolescence. Although his high school was academically weak, at 15 Doumani received a full scholarship to attend Kenyon College, which was seeking to diversify its student body. Doumani was the only Arab student on the small, liberal arts campus, but he stood out for other reasons as well. “I must have seemed a bit weird at Kenyon,” Doumani recalls. “I wore double-knit, polyester, bellbottom slacks, large platform shoes, had a really sizable ’fro, and spoke the English I knew from the projects.” Doumani’s first college paper was returned with the comment: “If this is not a joke, come see me immediately.” Doumani slowly became acclimated to academic life, catching up with the rest of the students and choosing history as a major. In 1973, when war again broke out between Arabs and Israelis, a fellow student who had attended American University in Beirut during her junior year suggested to Doumani that they set up a table to collect money for all three medical groups providing aid to the casualties: the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and the Star of David. When they did so, the reaction was swift and ugly: “I wouldn’t donate my money to filthy Arabs!” was a common refrain. “I’m sure a lot of people saw me as representing everything that was bad and evil in the world, just because I was an Arab,” Doumani says of the experience. There was only one history course on the Middle East at Kenyon; taking it gave Doumani his first chance to carefully study the region. By the time he graduated in 1977, says Doumani, “It became clear to me that I wanted to do something that would make a difference, and that this would have something to do with the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination.” To that end, he headed to the Center for Arab Studies at Georgetown University, where he earned an M.A. in 1980. After a year in Syria on a Fulbright Scholarship, Doumani achieved what he had aimed for since college: a teaching position in his homeland. He taught there, at Birzeit University, for two years. “I felt immediately at home in Palestine,” he says. From 1986 to 1988 he lived in Ramallah and Nablus and has visited several times since. “Going to Palestine made me realize that this was a complex, dynamic society with all sorts of different groups and different opinions,” he says. “And it was a society that really hadn’t been studied.” Why, he wondered, were there so many books and articles on Palestine and the Israeli-Arab conflict, but almost nothing on the Palestinians themselves? In 1983, this question led Doumani back to Georgetown University, where he began to specialize in the social and cultural history of the Palestinian people. The book that grew out of his dissertation, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (UC Press, 1995), was the first social history of Palestine during the 18th and 19th centuries. It meets one of Doumani’s goals—to “write Palestinians into history”—by portraying the lives of those who lived on the land prior to the arrival of European Jewish settlers beginning in the 1880s. Doumani taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1997 and then spent a year as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies in Washington, D.C. before coming to Berkeley in the fall of 1998. Three years ago he founded the Middle East Social and Cultural History Association. Last spring he organized the first conference on the history of the family in the Middle East, an international meeting held on the Berkeley campus. He is currently at work on a history of family life in Greater Syria during the 18th and 19th centuries, comparing two cities, Tripoli in Lebanon and Nablus in Palestine. “My writing attempts to expose gaps in received knowledge, to show that there are other ways of looking at the past—and the present,” he says. In the following interview, conducted in Doumani’s Dwinelle Hall office, the soft-spoken scholar was asked to expose some of the gaps in our knowledge of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.  If someone who had never heard of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict came to your office and asked, “What’s going on in the Middle East?,” what would you say? At its core, it is about the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination. For the more than three million Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their homes during the 1948 and 1967 wars, it is about implementing their internationally recognized right of return. For the other three million or so living under direct or indirect Israeli military control in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, it is about the right to be free. That is, the right to an end of the Israeli occupation and to the establishment in its place of a Palestinian state. You, and many others, have criticized how the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is represented in the U.S. media. What is wrong with it? The framing of the conflict in the mass media in this country is different from anywhere else in the world, including in Israel itself. The U.S. media is curiously out of touch with the realities in the Middle East. There’s what might be called an “Israeli spin” on how the conflict should be perceived—a spin that is targeted at the United States, where it is accepted uncritically. Can you give an example? Well, the notion that the United States is or can be an “honest broker” in the Middle East is a ridiculous notion, and I think is seen clearly as being so everywhere in the world, except for here. Why is this a ridiculous notion? The U.S. government sends billions of dollars every year to Israel, in both economic and military aid—Israel receives the largest amount of U.S. aid of any nation in the world. The U.S. government has supported Israel on a diplomatic front almost alone against the rest of the world. One need look only at United Nations resolutions condemning Israel—for its invasion of Lebanon, for consistent violation of human rights, for its occupation of territories taken i |
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