Dear Editor
Dear Editor I. F. Stone I.F. Stone's advocacy of reticence for those who disagree with his position on the Arab-Israeli conflict cited by Walter Goodman ("Jews. Israel and I.F. Stone."...
...Anatole E. Konstantin Kudos I take a number of periodicals and the quality of them fluctuates at best, but yours is consistently excellent...
...John Rehfisch Lebanon Stephen Oren's "The Struggle for Lebanon" (NL...
...The Germans couldn't speak up for fear of their lives, while we remain silent out of a moral numbness and a view of the world based on the wishful thinking of our media mentors...
...May 12), relegated to positions of somewhat less than prime importance in your magazine...
...Vietnam I was surprised and chagrined to see your two analyses of our recent loss in Southeast Asia by Donald Kirk ("The Final Tragedy of Vietnam...
...In the 1930s, a number of parties were established-Syrian nationalist...
...Chevy Chase, Md...
...I hope that the "honorable" ladies and gentlemen hear the cries of their victims night and day...
...I don't think those adjectives apply to Lebanese politics...
...Berkeley...
...Nevertheless, within the apportionment framework there has been significant improvement in the Moslem position...
...and many Lebanese of all religions, especially the younger ones, view it as increasingly anachronistic...
...George Orwell, who had been a volunteer member of the POUM militia, refused to suppress the story and wrote-Homage to Catatonia...
...Moslems won an equal share of high bureaucratic appointments...
...We are asked to believe that the Lebanese economy is sagging because, among other things, "a recent visitor to Beirut, after a 10year absence, was surprised at the city's seediness...
...I believe that the subject deserved a much more prominent location than it received...
...I would find it quite difficult to be without your magazine...
...Now that we have handed to the executioners millions of people whom, rightly or wrongly, we had enticed to support us...
...As Walter Goodman suggests, it is unlikely that Stone would have recommended silence on the Arab-Israeli matter if he had agreed with the position that was being expressed...
...Lebanon's principle problem now is not sectarianism, but Israel...
...The Sunnis are not concentrated mainly in North Lebanon: they are found all along the coast, from Tyre in the south to Tripoli and the Syrian border in the north...
...In an interview published in the August 10, 1974 issue of the Manchester Guardian Weekly...
...Interestingly enough, the relevant documents of that era are still unavailable for perusal...
...This is not the first time we have delivered large numbers of innocent individuals into the hands of executioners...
...Demographic trends may have outdated the 6:5 Christian formula of 1932 (built on a census, not a lie), but Lebanon doesn't have the only electoral procedure that requires adjustment from time to time...
...O, where was your flaming conscience then...
...Such differences are related to sectarian and regional interests, and cannot be reduced to Israeli "intrigues...
...Of course...
...in fact, the newly enlarged port is desperately overcrowded...
...After the creation of Israel in 1948, Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist and Socialist doctrines have come to play a very important role in Lebanon...
...Others, such as the ideological/personalist orientation of the Progressive Socialist party, would seem more a matter of emphasis...
...Yet one need only read the newspapers produced by the same men to discover that official corruption in high places is not endemic to Southeast Asia-and that the people living under such governments do not necessarily deserve to die...
...Iraq and Egypt...
...Lebanon is the only one of Israel's neighbors whose land frontier may be used by the PLO for launching attacks (which is what I meant by "operate...
...Tourism has risen well beyond the pre-1967 levels, the decline in European travellers being more than compensated for by an increasing number of Arab visitors...
...Yet there is, as I sought to explain, great debate in Lebanon over what part it should play in the Mideast struggle...
...One wishes that Stone had learned more from Orwell and less from Marx...
...Beginning with the Beirut airport attack of December 1968...
...Do President Qaddafi or King Khalid regard Lebanese Christians as Arabs...
...Instead, they appear to be propelling Lebanon into greater solidarity with the Arab world...
...April 28) and Carl Landauer ("The Need for American Self-Confidence...
...lacking any sense of community or ideals that might be worthy of respect...
...Lebanese of all sects and factions are "anti-Israel...
...is not inconsistent with his principles...
...and the Moslem fundamentalists: and Lebanon has more than its share of provocateurs...
...Now that we have the moral equivalents of Adolf Eichmann in our high places...
...Lebanon has enough troubles without being subjected to such disparagement...
...2. Minor emphasis on Israel's role...
...Could it be that they contain some familiar names...
...Israel's brutal assaults have left well over 300 Lebanese civilians dead and hundreds more wounded and homeless, while generating additional strains on an already delicate political structure...
...Having interviewed scores of Lebanese representing many factions, I find an overwhelming consensus that Israel is the real enemy...
...Oren declares that Christian leaders are preventing a new census...
...Everett, Wash...
...In the third part of Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn writes: "O...
...Several of these ("e.g., that Sunnis are found along the entire coast, the increased Moslem role in government) were in my original manuscript but had to be omitted for space reasons...
...NL, March 17...
...May 12) portrays that beleaguered country as a mere collection of bigoted and feuding clans...
...Norwalk, Conn...
...Stone's reputation among his admirers for great frankness would seem to be exaggerated, since political objectives-in the above case, whitewashing Communists-can have a higher priority for him than uncensored reperting...
...It is safe to infer that they do: and so, increasingly, do Lebanese Christians...
...Similarly, where are the flaming consciences and liberal bleeding hearts now...
...in fact, there has been surprisingly little demand for one by Christians or Moslems...
...Stone stated that in 1938 he suppressed the story of the persecution of the POUM (a small Spanish revolutionary party) by the Communist party, its supposed ally in the war against Franco...
...Leonard Gurian...
...Bertrand Russell...
...A fairer description than a land built on a lie, to put it mildly, would be a land built on a tradition of accommodation...
...It is simplistically cynical to consider Kamal Jumblat and his Progressive Socialist Party as exclusively personalist or feudal, devoid of ideological substance...
...Oren asks rhetorically...
...3. Deletions of detail...
...As for the notion that Arabism is giving way to a primarily Islamic identity, thereby freezing out Lebanese Christians, surely the opposite is true...
...But it should also be mentioned that PLO and Phalangist spokesmen have striven hard to establish amicable relations, each recognizing that Israel is the chief beneficiary and prime instigator of domestic conflict...
...Perhaps now it will be easier to understand the behavior of the Germans during the War: or perhaps not...
...Contrary to Oren's implication, the city is still the entrepot for the entire Arab hinterland...
...The words "bigoted...
...The Lebanese do differ as to whether this activity should be permitted to continue, with the PLO and the Phalange taking opposite positions...
...Lebanese of all religious persuasions are coming to realize that it is in this dramatically developing bloc that their country's values, interests and security lie...
...Oren further asserts that Lebanese politics has traditionally been a nonideological game: but ever since its establishment as Greater Lebanon under French mandate in 1920, there has been a deep ideological cleavage between Arab nationalists (mostly Sunni) and Lebanese nationalists (mostly Maronite...
...and, like Macbeth, are unable to wash the blood from their hands...
...After the 1958 civil strife, for example...
...Michael C. Hudson Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Stephen Oren replies: Michael C. Hudson's long and cogent letter objects to my article on three counts: 1. Perjorative attitude...
...The PLO "operates" not only in Lebanon, as Oren writes, but also in most of the other Arab states-including Syria...
...Moslem fundamentalist and Socialist, as well as the Christian Phalange...
...As for my somewhat tentative use of "lie," even Hudson agrees that the 1932 census does not reflect present Lebanese realities...
...NL...
...Certainly there are chauvinistic elements among the "Phoenician" Right wing, the pan-Arabists...
...What has happened to the "investigative reporters" we've been hearing so much about lately...
...feuding" and "chauvinistic" are Hudson's and not mine...
...O, Hewlett Johnson...
...At the moment...
...It is easy to be longwinded: much less easy to be as concise and cogent as most of your articles are...
...Yet the Israelis have not achieved their aims of separating Lebanon from the other Arab nations and crushing the Palestinian movement...
...Calif...
...The system is not quite as rigid or absurd as Oren implies...
...It is unbelievable that those who oppose capital punishment for persons making a business of addicting our children to lethal drugs could, despite the entreaties by President Ford, condemn so many innocent people to death...
...If Beirut is in fact "seedier"-a debatable point-it is because of explosive economic growth...
...But even if they were all in the north they would not be far from Israeli retaliation, for the Israelis have proven quite as capable of killing Palestinians and Lebanese in Tripoli as in the defenseless villages adjacent to their border...
...It was they who originally convinced the public and the Congress that the South Vietnamese government was not worth aiding, primarily because it was corrupt...
...At the end of World War II, Britain and the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs to a certain death...
...To suggest that the Lebanese, whether Christian or Moslem, rate the PLO as bad or worse than Israel, to suggest that they support the Palestinians mainly out of economic self-interest is to seriously misunderstand the reality of wide and intense support on moral grounds throughout Lebannon for the Palestinian cause...
...More significantly, Stone added, "I'd do the same again...
...An accurate reapportionment has been less an issue than sectarian apportionment itself...
...Several other points seem less than accurate...
...Israel's repeated attacks, recently resumed after a lull, have obviously exacerbated Lebanon's internal tensions...
...Arabism is growing, and the Arab-Israeli conflict that is helping it grow is one of secular nationalism, not religion...
...The media are playing down the horrors in Indochina, and with understandable reason...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 12
