“STOP writing about the Middle East or we will throw acid in your face and your son’s.”
Such was the threat shouted through the front door of our New York City apartment, where my mother and I lived in the 1950s. There was also frequent pounding on the door at 3am with further threats and obscenities.
My mother’s offence? Being one of the first female journalists to cover the Middle East, a region barely known at that time to most Americans.
My mother Nexhmie Zaimi was born in Albania, a former province of the Ottoman Empire. She was the first girl in Albania to go to high school, which was run by Presbyterian missionaries.
She was also a natural-born rebel. She scandalised the capital, Tirana, by refusing to wear a veil and speaking of emigrating to the United States.
She managed to get to the US
and, somehow, was enrolled at the prestigious Wellesley College. There, she wrote a stellar book, Daughter of the Eagle, about growing up in semi-feudal Albania. It became a national best-seller.
My mother then attended Columbia University Journalism school, when it was still a bastion of free speech. She met my father, a New York City attorney, married him before the war and soon became a journalist and lecturer.
She also worked with the predecessor of the CIA in early post-war years, then began reporting on the Middle East for the US State Department. In the 1950s, she warned Washington that unless the Palestine problem was resolved with justice, the Middle East would erupt in fury against the US. That came in 2001.
My mother was a star journalist despite her grave eye problems. On her own, with no support, she managed to interview Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s old ruler King Farouk, Egypt’s former president Anwar El-Sadat, Egyptian army officer and statesman General Naguib and Iraq’s former prime minister and strongman, Nuri al-Said.
While travelling in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, my mother was shocked
to discover hundreds of thousands (750,000 in total) of Palestinian villagers who had been driven from their homes at gunpoint or by premeditated massacres by Jewish regular and irregular forces. These refugees were living in cardboard boxes or metal sheds, many starving and ill.
My mother began writing and lecturing about their plight. What had become Northern Israel (the Arab region of Galilee and Haifa) “was a land without people for a people without land”, as the Zionist party line went. A catchy phrase but wholly untrue.
Israeli historians have amply chronicled the ethnic cleansing of northern Palestine. Many of its people ended up in the open-air prison camp of Gaza, where they are today victims of brutal ethnic terrorism.
Pro-Israel advertisers in the newspapers and radio stations that carried my mother’s reports threatened to stop their advertisements unless she was silenced. She refused to be quiet – until the threats came to throw acid in my face.
I have had my columns and broadcasts blacklisted by major US
and Canadian newspapers, radio and television for my heretical pro-peace views on the Middle East – and my life threatened numerous times. After 60 years of threats and intimidation, I have learned to live with them.
Even many former right-wing partisans of Israel are beginning to re-evaluate their thinking as the world turns against Israel’s final solution to the Palestinians, who have become martyrs.
I am firmly in the camp of those Israelis who understand that they must, some day, live with their Palestinian neighbours.
I salute the great Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who advocated this peaceful course for decades.
The partisans of ever greater Israel are on a road to nowhere. They have managed to get their strongest supporter, President Donald Trump, into the White House but where does he go from there?
My mother died in 2003 in Santa Barbara, California, where she had retired. At that time, she was nursing Bosnian children wounded in the Balkan War. Many hailed her as “the first lady of Albania”.
Eric S. Margolis is a syndicated columnist. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
