These facts are unacceptable. Accordingly, they quickly disappeared from official history and have remained unmentionable. The same is true of the unanimous endorsement by the Palestine National Council (PNC) in April 1981 of a Soviet peace proposal with two "basic principles": (1) the right of the Palestinians to achieve self-determination in an independent state; (2) "It is essential to ensure the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel." It has also been necessary to suppress a series of initiatives over the years by the PLO and others to break the diplomatic logjam and move towards a two-state peaceful settlement that would recognize the right of national self-determination of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, regularly blocked by U.S.-Israeli rejectionism.

The general Washington-media position has been that Palestinians must be satisfied with Labor Party rejectionism, which grants Israel control over the occupied territories and their resources, while excluding areas of dense Arab settlement so that Israel will not have to face the "demographic problem," a term devised to disguise the obviously racist presuppositions. In these areas, the population will remain stateless or be administered by Jordan. These options are overwhelmingly rejected by the people of the territories, but that fact is deemed irrelevant on the traditional principle that people who are in our way are less than human and do not have rights.

During these years, the rejectionist stand of the United States has been taken as a historical given in the media and the intellectual community generally, hence not subject to discussion. Thus, Times correspondent Thomas Friedman writes that Arafat "has to face the choice of either going down in history as the Palestinian leader who recognized Israel in return for only, at best, a majority of the West Bank or shouldering full responsibility for the Palestinians' continuing to get nothing at all."⁶¹ These are the only choices, for the simple and sufficient reason that only these options are permitted by the United States. In a Times Magazine article of October 1984 deploring the growing strength of "extremists, and all those in the Middle East who reject compromise solutions," Friedman places primary blame on the Arabs, particularly Yasser Arafat: "By refusing to recognize Israel and negotiate with it directly, the Arabs have only strengthened Israeli fanatics like Rabbi Kahane, enabling them to play on the legitimate fears and security concerns of the Israeli public," which still has "a majority for compromise." This was a few months after Arafat had quite explicitly called for negotiations with Israel leading to mutual recognition, a call officially rejected by Israel, dismissed without comment by the United States, and unreported in the New York Times, which even refused to publish letters referring to it.⁶² But no matter: Arafat's call for negotiations and mutual recognition is an "extremist" refusal "to recognize Israel and negotiate with it directly," and the refusal of the Israeli Labor Party to consider this possibility is moderation and search for compromise. Pursuing the familiar conventions, Friedman writes that "it took Anwar Sadat to bring out the moderate in Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin," referring not to his rejected peace offer of 1971, which is ideologically unacceptable and therefore does not exist, but to the less forthcoming proposals of 1977, admissible to the historical record because they were issued after the United States and Israel had recognized that their larger goals were unattainable.⁶³

For the Times editors, the willingness to accord both contestants equal rights is defined as "rejectionism"; that is, nonrejectionism is rejectionism, another example of the utility of interpretations. It is fair, they say, to criticize "Israel's hard-fisted repression," but it is necessary "to complete the record" and recall the background reasons, specifically, the "sterile rejectionism" of the Palestinians, and the Arabs generally, which leaves Israel little choice. Deploring the "intransigence" of "the Arab heads of state" in June 1988, the editors write that "while they didn't reject the Shultz peace plan outright or insist on Palestinian statehood, they hardened their stance on the need for Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories." This is unfortunate: "Rejectionism is a formula for endless paralysis." "Rejectionism" here means not rejection of the right of one or the other of the contending national groups to self-determination, but rather rejection of the Shultz peace plan, which denies this right to the Palestinians but is moderate and forthcoming by definition, because it is advanced by the United States. The editors call upon "the West Bankers," who "have been ill-used by PLO exiles and their let's-pretend declarations" calling for Palestinian self-determination, to go beyond "defying occupying soldiers" and "to take the harder step," that is, to accept the U.S.-Israel conception of peace without Palestinian self-determination. The editors even state that "Israel can't be blamed because Palestinians spurned Security Council peace plans"; for example, the two-state Security Council resolution supported (or "prepared") by the PLO in January 1976, and vetoed by the United States -- but nonexistent, because inconsistent with ideological requirements.⁶⁴

The attitude is reminiscent of a stubborn three-year-old: I don't like it, so it isn't there. The difference is that in this case, the three-year-old happens to be the information services of the reigning superpower.

The option of a nonrejectionist settlement that accords Palestinians the same human rights as Jews does not exist, because the United States and Israel oppose it; that is a simple, unchallengeable fact, the basis for further discussion. Similarly, it has been taken for granted that the Palestinians, unlike the Jews, do not have the right to select their own representatives, a particularly extreme form of rejectionism. The "peace process" must be crafted so as to protect these principles from scrutiny and awareness. Success has been brilliant, as I have documented at length elsewhere.⁶⁵

As the quasi-official Newspaper of Record, the New York Times must be more careful than most to safeguard the preferred version of history. As already noted, when Yasser Arafat issued a call for negotiations leading to mutual recognition in April-May 1984, the Times refused to print the facts or even letters referring to them. When its Jerusalem correspondent Thomas Friedman reviewed "Two Decades of Seeking Peace in the Middle East" a few months later, the major Arab (including PLO) initiatives of these two decades were excluded, and attention was focused on the various rejectionist U.S. proposals: the official "peace process." Four days later, the Times editors explained that "the most important reality is that the Arabs will finally have to negotiate with Israel," but Yasser Arafat stands in the way "and still talks of an unattainable independent state" instead of adopting a "genuine approach to Israel" to "reinforce the healthy pragmatism of Israel's Prime Minister Peres" by agreeing to accept King Hussein as the spokesman "for West Bank Palestinians" -- regardless of their overwhelming opposition to this choice, irrelevant in the case of people who have no human rights because they stand in the way of U.S. designs. That Peres's "healthy pragmatism" grants Israel control over much of the territories and their resources is also unmentioned. Shortly after, in yet another review of the "peace process" under the heading "Are the Palestinians Ready to Seek Peace?," diplomatic correspondent Bernard Gwertzman asserted -- again falsely -- that the PLO has always rejected "any talk of negotiated peace with Israel."⁶⁶

⁶¹ Friedman, NYT, Aug. 7, 1988.

⁶² For details, see Pirates and Emperors, chapter 2, note 58 and text, and sources cited.

⁶³ Friedman, "The Power of the Fanatics," NYT Magazine, Oct. 7, 1988.

⁶⁴ Editorial, NYT, June 13, 1988.

⁶⁵ See references of note 59.

⁶⁶ NYT, March 17, 21; June 2, 1985.