DAVID SHIPLER'S NEVER-NEVER LAND

by Arlynn Nellhaus

David K. Shipler, author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits In The Promised Land and the New York Times's man in Jerusalem from 1979 to 1984, wrote recently in the paper's Week In Review section that Israel feels now it can teach "its own history honestly enough acknowledge the victimization of Palestinians."

Victimization of the Palestinians?

Just what is Shipler talking about? He brands Israel as oppressor wholesale -- without ever being specific, which makes it difficult to respond to his charges.

Is he talking about events during Israel's War of Independence?

Perhaps.

He doesn't give a date. There is controversy over that period in Israel. Former Israeli Education Minister Yosi Sarid of Meretz just introduced new textbooks in which Israel's 52-year history is turned on its head. In the new books, any Israeli looked on as a hero is splattered with mud (perhaps so the Yosi Sarids of Israel happily can beat their breasts with imagined guilt).

But Shipler doesn't mention, and the Yosi Sarids want to forget, that it was local Arabs (they didn't call themselves "Palestinians" then) who were attacking and killing Jews as early as the 1920s.

They were attacking and killing under British rule, while the English turned a blind eye to the murders in once-Jewish towns like Hebron.

When half a dozen Arab armies invaded Israel upon its Declaration of Independence in 1948, the result was all-out war designed to drive the Jews into the sea. What would Shipler expect Israelis to do while under fire and fighting for their very lives? Say to their attackers, "After you, dear Alphonse?"

Does Shipler believe that when a person shoots back at someone shooting at him, he is "victimizing" his assailant?

Incredibly, Shipler tries to downplay the recent history of Jew-hatred (the Mufti of Jerusalem was an ally of Adolf Hitler) by saying merely that Palestinian textbooks "have remained mostly unrevised, much of their media vitriolic in tone."

Let's be specific. Palestinian textbooks -- and there are new ones under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority that certainly have been recently revised -- teach that "Jews are the usurpers" and that they must be expelled.

As for the media, more than a "vitriolic tone" is heard when even the Palestinian Authority's communication minister promises, "The Occupation State will cease to exist, and the historical Palestine will be restored."

Yet, Shipler sweeps his broad brush painting Israel as oppressor, saying instead that the Arab Israelis have long been "subjected to discrimination." Where? How? Why? It is true that their villages' infrastructures and educational facilities have been neglected. It is a situation that drastically needs fixing, as most Israelis admit.

But that is only part of the picture.

Shipler, in his "Have you stopped beating your wife" style article, doesn't note the hospitals with Arab nurses and doctors -- one Arab Israeli the head of a surgery department at Hadassah Hospital, or the universities with their many Arab students, or the offices, banks and elsewhere Arab Israelis work.

And this without having to give up almost three years of their young lives and a month annually until middle age to serve in the military -- not even to spend time in community service.

Incredibly, Shipler writes that after Palestinians recently swarmed over a Jewish holy site to set fire to Joseph's Tomb near Nablus, burning its books and furnishings, hacking away wildly at the building, itself, "The Palestinian Authority knew enough to begin repairs promptly."

Sure.

The dome has now been painted green -- to symbolize Islam.

No move has been made to return it to the Israelis, as promised before Israel evacuated the few soldiers guarding it. For whom is the Palestinian Authority repairing the building? Shipler doesn't say.

Shipler claims that the almost three weeks of violence that erupted on the Temple Mount, were because "Muslims have long feared a Jewish takeover, despite Israel's firm policy of leaving the site in Muslim hands."

Note that desite Muslim concern for their holy sites, they have no compunction about destroying other people's sacred shrines -- for example, the synagogues bombed and destroyed across the world by Arab terrorists, including an ancient synagogue dating from Byzantine times currently under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction in Jericho, and the Trappes synagogue in Paris, France.

Yet somehow, burning synagogues and murdered Jews don't seem to bother Shipler or his editors very much.

Nor do Arab calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and the expulsion and murder of Jews.

Once again, when the New York Times writes about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, we are in Never-Never Land. If Palestinians and their fellow Muslims are paranoid, Israel can't be their psychiatrist. They'll have to find their own.

When I first arrived in Israel from the United States, within half an hour after I got out of the airport, I engaged my driver in a discussion of things I had read in preparation for my trip. Among them were things that David Shipler wrote. I wondered about his claims that that Sephardic Jews from Arab countries hate Arabs, and whether they have no respect for democracy.

My taxi driver, of Yemenite background, laughed at my questions.

He said, "I don't hate Arabs. I just don't want them to kill me. As for not respecting democracy, I was born in Israel. I've known only democracy all my life."

I thought, so much for David Shipler.

Maybe, someday, the Palestinians will discover the difference between reality and fantasy -- and so will David Shipler and the editors of the New York Times.

Arlynn Nellhaus is a former Denver Post reporter now based in Jerusalem and the author of Into the Heart of Jerusalem.