12 Friday, March 2, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Israel's Role as Democracy in Warfare Portrayed by 2 Journalists Eliahu Salpeter has an established record as one of Israel's best known foreign correspondents. As the Haaretz correspondent in Washington and author of many articles on the situa- tion in Israel, he is judged as an authoritative interpre- ter of developing conditions. Similarly, Dan Bavly, who served in the office of the Israel military spokes- man during the Lebanese war and as an author, is considered most knowl- edgeable on the issues. In "Fire in Beirut" (Stein and Day), these two jour- nalists delve deeply into all the areas of the conflict and cover a vast field relating to Israel's many involvements and the status of the Jewish state under prevailing con- ditions. Covering the many difficulties encountered, the conflicts with the United States and with the public, both in its realities as well as the distortions in the media, this joint effort must be treated as perhaps the major evaluation of what has occurred and the continuity of events. The two authors are not apologetic. They are fac- tual. They deal not only with warfare but also with the position of Israel in the world arena, the economic plight of the nation, the ten- sions created by the horrors of warfare and the miscalcu- lations in the press and in government circles. There is a sad admission at the very outset, in the authors' preface, that Israel failed in the current mili- tary activity. They declare: "The announcement by Prime Minister Menahem Begin at the end of August 1983 that he intended to re- sign coincided, in effect, with the realization that Is- rael had failed to bring about a new Lebanon. It was not yet the last and final chapter of the war, since Is- rael and Syrian troops still occupied more than two- thirds of that tragic country and the civil war had flared again in its full cruelty, this time between the Chris- tians and the Syrian- supported Druze. There was no indication as to how long Israeli soldiers would be positioned in their new, shortened lines in southern Lebanon, to prevent it from becoming PLO country again. "The Israeli govern- ment's political targets and ambitions that fol- lowed the 1982 move into Lebanon had not been fully achieved, and Be- gin's resignation marked an implicit but clear ad- mission of failure." The conclusions reached by the two eminent news- men do not strike a happy note. They indicate the obs- tacles, they concede to diffi- culties. As they assert in a viewpoint with an applica- bility to a measure of pes- simism: The retreat, and the re- newed civil war and mas- sacres that followed, under- scored also the failure of Is- rael's political aims and ambitions in Lebanon. Two of Israel's three war aims have clearly not been achieved, and the third was in danger: the establish- ment of a free, strong cen- tral Lebanese government, master of the country's fate and able to reach a peace settlement with Israel, seemed more than ever to be mere wishful thinking. Gemayel's troops were fighting in the outskirts of Beirut, and the country ap- peared to be destined for a long division, among foreign armies and warring religious and ethnic militias. "The removal from Leba- non of Syrian physical presence and political influ- ence seemed as distant, if not more so, than it was be- fore the Israeli tanks rolled across the border in June 1982. Damascus, in alliance with the Druze, had set out to prove that not only could it prevent the implementa- tion of any Lebanese set- tlement contrary to its wishes; it had come close to being able to force solutions to its liking. "The power of the PLO has, indeed, been broken and the West now ap- peared to pay, more re- luctantly than before, only lip service to the MENAHEM BEGIN `Palestinian cause.' But in the new-found, possi- bly only temporary al- liance with the Druze, the Palestinian terrorists may have found a path back to Beirut and to the western-central parts of Lebanon. "Israeli Chief-of-Staff General Moshe Levi con- ceded in an interview in September that 'it is possi- ble that the terrorists will establish a new infrastruc- ture in Lebanon.' " As highly trained and a. complished journalists, the views of Salpeter and Bavly are especially impressive in their analyses of Israel's democratic approaches to freedom of the press. The Jewish state had been as- sailed on grounds of practic- ing censorship. Therefore, their views on the subject are especially valuable, in their comparison with those who criticize and with the Third World and the Communist treatment of the press. And they assert: "The most universal im- plications of Israel's media experiences in Lebanon stem from the consequences of modern mass- communication reporting from an open society. There were no restrictions on the number of newsmen, who rushed in to Israel. to cover the war. Every public figure in the country was ap- proachable, and after brief initial hurdles the war zone was, practically speaking, wide open to the press. Consequently, some of the reporting suffered from a lack of profes- sional standards and ex- pertise. Approximately 1,500 journalists came and went in-the three months of active warfare. (In comparison, in the entire Soviet Union there are only about 26 accre- dited American corre- spondents and about the same number of other Western correspon- dents.) "Some correspondents stayed for several weeks, but most spent only a few days in the region. A few / were old Middle East hands, but for many others, it was their first assignment in the area. This accounted for their lack of background knowledge, their super- ficiality, and the unusual credulity displayed by a great many of them. "It probably was no coin- cidence that veteran report- ers and commentators were considerably more re- strained in chastizing Is- rael. Similarly, by and large correspondents who had served in the Soviet Union or in Southeast Asia and who had experience with the press restrictions of to- talitarian regimes, on the one hand, and the sufferings caused by war and terror, on the other, were the most careful to check their facts and their emotions when reporting from Lebanon. "The ignorance of the newcomers and the bad con- science over their past si- lence of the old Beirut hands perhaps explains the fact that while Israeli military censorship was emphasized constantly, the 'censorship of exclusion' practiced in areas, PLO-controlled though much more effec- tive, was left practically unmentioned. With a little cheating, every reporter could easily avoid Israeli censorship, and many did. But, as in the Soviet Union or Red China, very few correspondents in PLO- controlled areas dared go where the authorities did not want them to go nor did they see what officials did not want them to see. "This is particularly important in our age of electronic journalism. Unlike the newspaper- man or even the radio correspondent who re- ports his observations and conclusions (the dif- ferences between the two still being observed by many), television report- ers can film — and their audience can see — only where the authorities en- able them to set up their bulky equipment. "Nobody filmed the thousands of victims of Sy- rian vengeance in the city of Hama in February 1982, when President Hafez al- Assad destroyed all the mosques in the city center and ordered not only the kil- ling of rebel Moslem Brotherhood members but also of thousands of inno- cent civilians. Nor has any- one filmed the two million people or so living in the gulags of Communist China, or the tens of thousands killed in the Iraq-Iran war. The rulers of Damascus, Peking, Baghdad, and Teheran sim- ply do not permit journalists to roam about their coun- tryside, carrying cameras. "In the electronic age, free societies are thus con- fronted with a crucial di- lemma: restrict the freedom of the press or help distort the balance of perception in favor of the totalitarians who do not allow the world to see the facts. "Never before have view- - ers in every corner of the world been able to receive such a stream of images di- rect from the battlefield `where it happens, when it happens' as they did during the war in Lebanon. Never before has this immediacy created so many distortions and potentially long-lasted political consequences. "With the new com- munications technolo- gies, this represents addi- tional potential for man- ipulating public opinion and limiting its indepen- dence of judgment. "It is not only the general public which is thus super- ficially impressed. Secre- tary of State George Shultz remarked during the siege of Beirut that 'the adminis- tration has seen the pic- tures and has been affected by them.' Thus, we come close to completing the vici- ous circle: a retired film ac- tor, elected president with the help of the visual art of electronics, is making his decisions on the basis of what he is shown (or not shown) by the electronic media. What is seen on the TV screen exists for decision-making purposes; what is not seen may or may not exist. "It raises some crucial questions: Are the democ- racies being disarmed by their natural revulsion for images of war in their living rooms? Can an open society, any open society, wage a just but protracted war in an age of instant electronic media, or is this ultimate instrument of politics now reserved for dictatorships? "Was the Lebanese war the last in which the elec- tronic media were allowed to watch and report fully and freely?" Thus, "Fire in Beirut" is a valuable document, an ex- cellent study of a tragic world experience. It may well be viewed as one of the major works dealing with Lebanon and the horrors in the treks of this nation, with emphasis on Israel's unfor- tunate involvements. —P.S. Canadian Jewish Community Migrating from Montreal By ARNOLD AGES TORONTO (JTA) — The Canadian Jewish Commu- nity is undergoing some startling political, demog- raphic and religious changes. American Jews, accustomed to thinking of their northern neighbors as near clones, tend not to realize that there are some basic differences between the two communities. The Jewish population of Canada has undergone some important shifts within the past 10 'years. Montreal, which used to be the major Jewish center in Canada, is now second to Toronto in population. Accurate statistics are dif- ficult to obtain but Toronto is now said to have about 125,000 Jews versus Montreal's 115,000. The reversal in demog- raphics is directly attribut- able to the Parti Quebecois, a nationalist political movement in Quebec which, since its rise to power in 1976, has stressed the pri- macy of French language and culture in the province — to the exclusion, some would argue, of English. While the Parti Quebecois has attempted in recent months to miti- gate somewhat the harshness of its legisla- tion bearing on the use of French in the province, the move has come somewhat late to prevent the hemorrhaging of a significant number of Montreal's Jewish popu- lation. Not all of the Montreal Jewish "defectors" have ended up in Toronto but enough of them have and their presence in the On- tario capital is making a dif- ference in the cultural and religious configuration of the city. When one adds the new Montreal component to To- ronto's burgeoning Russian, South African and North African Jewish immig- rants, the city, which lies astride of Lake Ontario, takes on a new dynamism. To this new melange one must also add the solid block of Israelis (estimates range as high as 10,000 who have chosen Toronto as their home. There are a number of signals which identify To- ronto's growing Jewish presence. For years the city got along with one kosher restaurant under rabbinical supervision. Now Toronto boasts of half a dozen, in- cluding a Moroccan eatery. The city also claims a fast food restaurant modeled on McDonalds but under strict kashrut controls. While Toronto and Montreal are Canada's two major Jewish centers they are not the only cities to have experi- enced demographic changes. The tiny Jewish community of Ottawa, the country's capital, has also experienced impres- sive growth. Ottawa's Jewish community is be- ginning to climb towards the 15,000 mark after years of stagnation. Ottawa's Jewish profile has been enhanced in the past decade by the arrival in the city of large numbers of professionally trained ob- servant Jews who have par- ticipated in the synagogue life of the community. Last year, for the first time, a yeshiva began to operate in an environment which had never had an institution of higher Jewish learning. Winnipeggers cannot yet make a similar claim. This dynamic Jewish community (which has produced some of the ablest Jewish leaders, rabbis and entertainers on the North American conti- nent) remains demographi- cally stagnant at' about 15,000 souls. Winnipeg is still a place to come from rather than go to — insofar as the Jewish community is concerned. This may be a function of the city's uncon- genial climate where –30 degrees is not uncommon in winter. Despite the absence of vigorous growth, Win- nipeg's Jewish community maintains a strong profile. Until recently, the city had three weekly Jewish news- papers, two in English and one in Yiddish. The latter folded two years ago but the surviving English weeklies provide ample column space for the "mamaloshen."