Israel’s actions turn the world against the country, not a biased European media.

The Washington myth about Israel as a beleaguered little country under constant threat from the Arab world has been parroted so often by the U.S. press that reporters and editors are themselves incredulous that anyone thinks otherwise. So are others.

In “Muslims, media behind Europe’s growing anti-Semitic sentiments,” (Nov. 16), Herbert London reflects that mythology in blaming European criticism of Israel on bias, though his only specific evidence is anecdotal – someone’s comparison of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

That comparison thoughtlessly overlooked 100,000 Dutch Holocaust victims, and the Dutch suffered greatly under the Nazis’ rarely matched brutality.

The Palestinians are, as the Dutch were, an occupied country, resisting their occupier as they can. They, too, have paid. They have seen their economy destroyed; societal infrastructure smashed; homes bulldozed in collective punishment; movement to work, schools and hospitals denied; water reduced to a trickle; leaders assassinated; tens of thousands jailed, neighborhoods bombed. And they have been systematically dehumanized and humiliated.

London points to a European Union poll in which 59 percent deem Israel a threat to peace. In mythland, the fault is necessarily “rash and irresponsible” reporting and Muslim influence. These also supposedly explain why about half of Europe sees the United States as a threat to peace. London fails to note that about half of Americans do, too.

To any regular traveler to Europe, London’s argument won’t wash. Europe’s press and television are far superior, in seriousness, balance and breadth of viewpoints – the Middle East not excepted – to media in the United States. In March, on German television, I watched politicians, journalists, a general and high school students discuss the imminent Iraq war at length, without interruptions, shouting or moderator interference.

Speakers could actually develop a point. And everyone listened. The students asked better questions than the White House press corps.

Unlike London, Europeans were not taken in by Ehud Barak’s supposed offer of all Palestinians could want; had Yasser Arafat accepted Barak’s largesse, he would have been lynched, deservedly, on return.

Europeans are informed of Palestinian suicide bomber victims; what is different is that Israeli killings of three times as many Palestinians and the maiming of thousands more are also reported. Unlike Washington, Europeans see the illegal and repressive occupation as occasioning the despair and rage of the suicide bombers, not vice versa.

Anti-Semitism? Burdened by their Nazi history, even the best informed Germans have been loath to criticize Israel. They know that the U.N.-condemned, 36-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has become insufferable. The media report this, but audiences tend to see only Hitler’s Jewish victims and not their Palestinian victims.

That is changing. The expansion of Israeli settlements in the 22 percent of Palestine left the Palestinians in 1948, recognition that Israel opposes a Palestinian state, Ariel Sharon’s brutal excesses and recent al-Qaida retaliations have forced Europeans to recognize the wider implications. Reduction of the West Bank to a hundred prison-like communities whose residents cannot sustain themselves affronts Europeans’ sense of justice and humanity and inflames Muslims everywhere.

And now the wall, which will cut nearly half a million Palestinians off from their fields or from Palestinian society and gobble up nearly half of the West Bank, including its best farmland, compounds European outrage and Muslim rage.

London is correct that, for many Europeans, Israel does nothing right. As most Israelis themselves see, the occupation, settlements, military violence and the wall lead to no good. They lead only to Israel’s moral and economic bankruptcy and growing Muslim hostility toward both Israel and the United States. We bankroll and tacitly bless every Israeli depredation.

In Washington, Congress is worse than the White House. In August, when the White House threatened to cut Israeli aid spent on the wall, 11 senators, including Maine Sen. Susan Collins, protested that the wall “does no violence to the Palestinian people.”

As the United States has squandered the good will it enjoyed after Sept. 11, Israel’s violent repression of the Palestinians has squandered the good will Jews enjoyed world-wide after the Holocaust – good will that drove anti-Semitism into the remotest margins of ignorance. The present climate inevitably encourages hate-mongers to come out of the woodwork.

With half of Palestinian households reduced to one meal a day and malnutrition soaring, even Israel’s most loyal friends, including many of its own leaders, find silence impossible. Their words – in Israel, Europe and here – are not anti-Semitic; they are the words of justice, of decency, of humanity. The silence has continued for far too long.

A retired USM professor, William Slavick is coordinator of Pax Christi Maine, the Catholic and ecumenical peace movement.

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