BOOKS
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To get round such trifles, Mr. Timerman is forced to talk
about the undemocratic use by Mr. Begin 's government of "a
merely circumstantial majority"; to insult Israel 's Sephardic ma–
jority on the grounds that he has "seen their counterparts in Ar–
gentina, solidly behind Peron even when the Leader was drown–
ing them in alienation and in an economic crisis"; to deny that
the Sephardim had ever been persecuted in Arab lands; to dismiss
Israe l 's democratic opposition and its free press (from which he
culled much of his information); and to denounce the entire na–
tion for being incapable "of recognizing the high degree of crim–
inality in their army's campaign against the Palestinian people."
How emp ty these accusations really are can be seen by a
look at Mr. Timerman's postscript on "The Massacre," whose
level of accuracy aptly sums up the book. Here, the author claims
that there was scarcely any reaction in Israel to what happened
in Sabra and Shatilla, that he had to rely on the BBe for relIable
information, and that "all of us realized it had been organized by
our army." (Did Timerman take a poll, was he even in Israel at
the time?) Not content with these pathetic distortions, he attacks
the integrity of the Israeli journalist Zeev Schiff for going to the
top in Israel to try and get the massacres halted rather than run–
ning to the international press (is that what Timerman would
have done?), and then to cap it all he dismisses the September 25
rally of four hundred thousand Israelis in Tel Aviv in a derisory
footnote: "The crowd was almost entirely composed of the inef–
fectual minority that has always opposed the Begin government.
I believe that a majority of the people at the rally had been sup–
porters of the invasion up to the time of the massacre."
This concluding postscript is not merely insensitive and
wrongheaded, not merely an insult to the people of Israel in
whose name Timerman purports to speak, but it shows how little
the author really understands about the democracy whose soul he
wishes to save. For unlike the Americans during the Vietnam
War, the British during Suez, or the French at the time of the Al–
gerian war, the Israeli public made their protest immediately, in
the midst of a
vic torious
war, in spite of the real and constant
threa t to their survival from bordering nations and terrorists
who have yet to renounce their aim of eliminating Israel as an
independent state. Where else, in such a situation, can Timerman
point to soldiers and officers at the front questioning their orders
in the midst of combat, feeling moral responsibility for the de-
