The First Casualty

IT WAS A BAD SUMMER for journalism After being virtually shut out of the war in the Falklands because of geography and censorship, the industry went out of control when the Israel is invaded Lebanon Reports preposterous beyond belief came back in torrents. The Nazi blitzkrieg had nothing on the unfortunately named Operation Peace for the Galilee. Within no time, the Israelis had slaughtered a sizable percentage of the inhabitants of sunny southern Lebanon, and if you could believe many of the most respected news mongers in the world, as well as some world leaders and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the invaders had sent no less than every single inhabitant of the area--around 600,000 people--fleeing for their lives When it surfaced that the estimates were more inflated than the Hindenburg and the sources turned out to be Palestinian, few were contrite.

If there is a lesson to this massive embarrassment, it is that, the smug rationalism and First Amendment piety of the press not withstanding. American journalism is probably no more objective than it was in the days when Randolph Hearst could drum himself up a war south of the border. The technology of telecommunications has not only reduced exponentially the time needed for the transmission of information--it has increased the potential for propagating untruths indefinitely. The hooey of the old bought-off newspaperman is nothing to the lies of a rating-hungry television show.

The New York Times, if it didn't exactly keep its head, at least had the sense to wind up some of the string and pull it back into sight--despite even Anthony Lewis '48's incessant heaping on Israel of the kind of vituperation that might better suit Stalin or Pol Pot. The misinformation That may explain why now, in direct contravention with tradition, the Post is discussing its policies with some leaders of the American Jewish community.

And if you watched the major networks, you received one after another tantalizing, juicy piece of the apocalypse on your dinner plate. Or if you swallowed the articles of what can only charitably be called drivel which Alexander Cockburn published in The Village Voice, you ought to be a rabid anti-Semite. Only a few Martin Peretz, William Safire and Norman Podhoretz among them had the intelligence to announce that the Americans were being snarled in lies. Even today, when the miasma of Sabra and Shatila lingers heavily, few thoughtful people would claim to know what happened--or, for that matter, what is happening in Lebanon.

NOR HAS THE SPEWING stopped And the process has taken another depressing turn, with a famous near martyr who passes himself off as an Israeli pushing on a confused public a book of arrant nonsense. More saddening still because Jacobo Timerman's The Longest War, Israel on Lebanon was brought to light by two of the most respected institution in American letters The New Yorker and the publishing house of Alfred A Knopf.

It was rushed to press, first in The New Yorker (the magazine which is so circumspect it begins its baseball coverage in Novembers--seven weeks ago and now in book form (Knopf even managed to squeeze in a three-and-a-half page postscript dated September 21 on the refugee camp massacre in a frenzy of greedy haste. One expects this sort of thing from the cheapest of publishers, those who catalogue the incineration of every organ of every boy of the men who died in the Iranian hostage rescue mission for consumption three days after the fact. Not two firms with the reputation these enjoy.

Timerman, whose bestselling Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number recounted the two years he spent imprisoned and tortured in his native Argentina, must be a shrewd man. Jews revere their martyrs and heroes, and victims of political repression rightfully have a certain cachet these days.

With this book, Timerman banks on that cacher For from the beige and brown title on the front to the author's picture on the back, the book is singularly devoid of anything new in the way of facts, valuable impressions or lucid argument. It comprises 167 pages of maundering glop whose gloppishness ought to be abundantly evident to the most fanatical West Bank settler as well as any bomb-chucking PLO member, provided both have a half a frontal lobe in working order.

Before he got into trouble in Argentina. Timerman was ostensibly a journalist Judging by The Longest War, his current profession is conscience mercenary. That is, if a prospect of profit exists. Timerman will suffer, feel awful and decry all injustice. With sweeping flourishes. Timerman is a kin of prose Whitman who sympathizes with almost everything, "weeping dolefully" for the events in Lebanon and the decline of moral Israel. He does this by pretending he is an insider, a native with a bona fide claim to all the world's ills. He declares without hesitation that since his first reading of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, "I don't believe I have been spared any of this century's horrors."

PRESUMABLY, THIS INTIMACY with everything from the Armenian genocide to Dachau to Hiroshima to Cambodia confers on Timerman the right to suffer anywhere he please. Hence not quite three years after his expulsion from Argentina, he is a leading authority on Israel, having resided there in the interim. Countless sentences include the magisterial phrasing "We Israelis..." despite the fact that, as he readily confesses. "I have never been able to learn Hebrew."

Suffice it to say that this represents only the thinnest, topmost fuel for ad hominem attacks that The Longest War's incredible pomposity provides. The book's argument, or at least what one intuits is supposed to represent the argument, is far less substantial. Its basic premise reads "Menachem Begin is unbalanced," and "deep inside himself [Ariel] Sharon has reserved a war for Israel." Beyond this, Timerman follows the classic Vietnam scenario of an insidious bureaucracy intervening between the people and the demonic leadership, while managing a war no one wants. He supports this argument with one nebulous assertion after another of government impropriety lying, manipulating, concealing the truth.

Timerman may be right. But he never adduces a shred of evidence to prove government wrongdoing. He writes of Sharon. "He has been lying for several weeks, and the proof is irrefutable." And satisfied with this condemnation, he doesn't mention a single statement of Sharon's, much less prove it a fabrication.

In line with this vision of a blameless populace and an evil leadership. Timerman seems obsessed with providing a comprehensive case for the complete wonderfulness of Jews, Israeli and otherwise.

Thus, such lines, one imagines, would strike most Jews as simply insipid:

The Jew has explored all the possible meanings of his actions, his dreams, and his words. The intellectual rigor of the Jew cannot admit silence. Nor can he accept the silence of a people who have accomplished all their tasks motivated by just words, never by the irrationality of impulse.

And to compound problems, Timerman, possibly because of his language problem, never realizes that Begin would almost certainly have won a strong majority had an election been held up at any time up until the massacre. The Lebanese invasion unquestionably did not have the unanimous consent of earlier conflicts. But Timerman mistakes a significant opposition for national disgust with the war and the government. His misunderstanding is startingly fundamental and stems from a profound and inexcusable ignorance of the physical and psychological toll the Palestinian terrorists have taken on Israel.

TRULY, TIMERMAN misunderstands the Arab-Israeli struggle, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in particular; he only states clearly once the problem that gnaws at him, and then only near the end of the book. He writes: "Who gave us the right to decide that those civilians must die because they could not or did not know how to escape from the terrorists in time? Where did we get such omnipotence?" He has circled around it throughout the book, and having finally said it with a measure of clarity, he leaves it and moves on. Possibly if Timerman had a more informed sense of what the PLO actually is--he speaks of it, like many rational optimists, as though it were a benign bunch of rowdy children--his point would seem more credible.

He pooh-poohs the many tragic terrorist attacks by mentioning them only in passings, and he seems oblivious to the repeated border incidents which the PLO knew would eventually draw the Israelis into Lebanon. Is Timerman so naive, so purblind as to think the PLO hadn't intended to use the Lebanese they had so long terrorized as a spit on which to roust the Israelis in world opinion? It was an option they always knew they had.

As for the rest of the gluey mass in which this "argument" floats, it is equally bothersome. Timerman devotes a great deal of space to lucubrations on the relationship of Israel to the Holocaust, which he feels is inextricably tied up in Israel's militarism. Apparently, he spends a lot of time lying on a hill near Yad Vashem and comes eventually to some monumental understanding which appears either unfathomable or meaningless to lesser minds trying to get a peep of it:

I understand that at last I had removed a big tombstone off myself. It wasn't one of those from my interior graveyard, but the huge tombstone which covers the Jews. I could do it because it wasn't betrayal, or a subterfuge. I had discovered where to place it and how not to forget it. The country could accept the Holocaust as a measure of its destiny, not simply within the framework of remembrance and lament.

THE FINAL TOUCH Timerman tosses into his salad is the house dressing of pseudo-intellectual speak. The finest example of this blather comes when Timerman is discussing with a friend of his from Buenos Aires the friend's plans for emigrating to Israel. Drawing a parallel with Camus' Stranger. Timerman remarks when his friend tells him his mother was Christian:

I was not disheartened, and went on: "This makes you the perfect Stranger forty years later. A Stranger because you are a Jew, a Stranger because you're not a Jew. A Stranger because you believe that you have your place in life, and finding it will be enough. But once you find it, it will make you a Stranger for the rest of humankind. In brief, you are the Stranger who has never been and will never feel the Stranger because, for you, your life is identity and destiny. The world's indifference is, for you, sufficient reason to seek destiny, just as it was for Meursault to seek the guillotine. Forty years later you have a good identity. What does it matter if you are Christian? In these times only a Jew can move with such case in the realm of destiny and identity. But to accomplish this, one must choose--and you have made a choice. After a life of pleasant experiences, you arrived here, not some other place. It was a perfect choice. Perhaps as perfect as Meursault's in his indifferent assassin's cell."

This, one can easily see, is the kind of talk which could depopulate a country faster than any terrorist organization. It also contributes to the whole work's effort to make everything Timerman touches trite and annoying.

This monologue, like the rest of the book, brings us no nearer to the facts of the summer nor to the moral realities of the situation. So long as it remains the latest word on the Lebanese war and the condition of Israel, 1982 will remain a bad year for journalism.