Danny Rubinstein | May 2

Ha'aretz - For years now I've been buying Arab papers in East Jerusalem, at Abu Salem's newsstand near Nablus Road, across from the main gate of the Old City markets. Abu Salem mainly sells the Palestinian newspapers published in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Gaza.

The newspapers are an invaluable source of reports on and analysis of the events that affect Palestinians, with a broad variety of reportage from throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They contain all the usual sections - business, sports, culture - as well as paid ads announcing a child's university graduation or thanking a doctor for the dedicated care of a family member.

But there's one section in Palestinian newspapers that sometimes takes up three pages or more and probably has no equivalent anywhere else. It consists of translations from the Hebrew press. Every day, under the heading "From the Israeli press," are dozens of articles, mainly from the popular dailies - Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv - but also from the local weeklies, primarily Kol Ha'Ir and Yerushalayim, both of which are published in and for the capital.

No copyright

For the past few years, a considerable number of articles in Hebrew have been translated for the Palestinian press. According to the list I compiled with the help of a Palestinian newspaper editor, each Palestinian newspaper publishes about 10 op-eds and articles translated from the Hebrew papers. The Palestinian papers believe they are not liable to copyright restrictions because they print the pieces a day or two after the original was published in Hebrew.

I have often marveled at the phenomenon. For example, a column of mine appears in Monday's Haaretz, and on Tuesday it receives a prominent position in all three Palestinian dailies. The translations are quite accurate. Sometimes the Arab editors change the headline slightly, but usually the changes are not significant and do not distort the original intent. For me, the main thing is that Abu Salem's customers regularly read my columns in Haaretz and send me corrections and comments.

And I am not an exception in this. Nearly all the writers for Israel's three major dailies are translated into Arabic on a daily basis. The op-eds written by some of them, such as Ze'ev Schiff of Haaretz, are translated immediately after publication and are given pride of place. Sometimes Schiff's column appears on the front page, occasionally as the lead story to a Palestinian newspaper.

Before attempting to find out the reason for the abundance of translations from Hebrew, it should be noted that the Palestinian publications are not unique in this. In early March I was in London, an important center for the Arab media. On page nine of Al-Quds al-Arabi, I found translations of op-eds by Yaron London from Yedioth Ahronoth; Yoav Frumer, Eran Lerman and Guy Bechor of Maariv; Avraham Tal, Aluf Benn, and professors Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Hermann of Haaretz. Many translations from the Hebrew papers also appear regularly in Jordanian newspapers, and to a lesser extent also in Lebanese, Egyptian and Gulf papers.

Why are the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular translating so much material from the Israeli newspapers? It is cause for wonder, particularly as the same can't be said vice versa; there are no translations whatsoever from Arabic newspapers in the Hebrew press.

A few years ago I took part in a project to translate op-eds from Arab newspapers into Hebrew. Together with an East Jerusalem journalist, every week we translated a few op-eds from the Palestinian papers that we thought were significant and shopped them around to Israeli newspaper editors. Not a single one wanted them. They said the pieces were clumsy, boring and, above all, crude and superficial propaganda.

"We don't want to provide a platform for enemy commentary," they said. This was right out of the 1980s, when the state radio and television channels were prohibited from interviewing supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization. During that period it was also illegal for Israelis to meet with PLO members.

What is behind this difference in approach? Why is it that even today, Israeli newspapers are unwilling to provide a platform for Arab journalists, while the Arabs provide a broad platform for Jewish Israeli writers? After all, Israel is just a tiny island in an ocean of Arabs. Is it not important that we know what is happening with them? Is it not true that our fate is partly dependent on what happens in the Arab world?

Times have changed

The history of Hebrew-to-Arabic translations in the Palestinian and Arab press has undergone many changes over the years. During the first stage, following the 1967 War, there were few translations from the Hebrew press. The first translations were mainly of extreme right-wing Israelis. East Jerusalem's Al-Fajr, the first publication to support the PLO, published opinion pieces by Rabbi Meir Kahane calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and accompanied by doctored photos showing the Temple replacing the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. It was presented as an attempt to show the Arab public the "real face" of Israel and Zionism.

The few news reports translated from the Israeli papers at the time were those that portrayed Israel in a very negative light. Palestinian newspapers featured articles on discrimination in Israel against Jews from Middle Eastern countries, on the Israeli Black Panthers protest movement, on corruption scandals, on violence and on Israelis who had emigrated. A Palestinian reading these reports could have garnered the impression that Israel was a crumbling, racist society in a rotten state whose fate was sealed.

Times have changed. Beginning in the 1980s, the Arab press translated large numbers of opinion pieces written by leftist Israelis that described the hardships of the Palestinians and the injustices of the occupation. That era has also passed, and today everything is translated - op-eds from journalists who are considered mouthpieces of the left, as well as right-leaning Knesset members such as Uzi Landau and Natan Sharansky. The majority of the translated columns and articles deal with political issues connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When I asked about the reasons behind the steady flood of translations from Hebrew, I received the same response from nearly everyone, whether Arab editors and journalists from Israel and abroad or Abu Salem's customers: there is a demand for it; Arab readers are interested in Israeli writers. But this answer is not enough; the real question, of course, is why are they interested?

One of the standard responses is that Israel is a relatively strong country. The Palestinians and the Arabs are weak and want to stay informed about the strong. This is true, but it is insufficient.

A good answer came from Al-Masdar, a company in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat that translates items from the Hebrew press into Arabic. The translations editor said translations are often a way to get around the self-censorship that exists among Palestinians and perhaps also in the Arab states. In other words, Arab newspaper editors are hesitant to publish harsh criticism of their leaders. The solution? You find an Israeli op-ed piece that, say, exposes an incidence of corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and then publish it. One East Jerusalem journalist told me that during the intifada, the weaker the PA became the more translations there were from Hebrew.

What is the secret?

It may be that behind the large number of translations from Hebrew, especially in the past few years, is a more complex social and cultural picture. The Arab and Islamic nation, like other cultures, possesses historical awareness. They know that for hundreds of years the Arabs and Muslims were superior in every way to Christian Europe. Today, nearly every Arab in the Middle East is asking: What happened to us? How did we fall so far behind?

The situation in which the Arabs find themselves is more painful and more noticeable in the age of globalization. The world is smaller; information, ideas and news reach every corner of the world in an instant. At the last Herzliya Conference, the former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Haim Harari, presented examples of the growing gap with the Third World, and between the Arab states and Israel: The gross domestic product in Israel is nearly double that of Saudi Arabia.

Its petroleum resources have not helped Saudi Arabia compete in the arena of a much more important economic resource, knowledge and technology. Israeli scientists publish more scientific journals than their colleagues in 22 Arab states. These are just a few examples. That being the case, the translation of Hebrew articles is based on Arab curiosity. What is the formula? What is the secret of the little State of Israel, which in 1948 and even more so in 1967 succeeded in vanquishing and humiliating the Arabs?

Many Arab and Palestinian publications deal with the question of why the Arab world, which once led human civilization, is now lagging so far behind. Arab researchers examine the elements of democracy that could save the Arab world from backwardness. Is it enough to have free elections, or must one also have a decent level of education, equal rights for women, the rule of law and an effective legal system, freedom of expression and the protection of civil rights? They study Islam and its effects on society and ask whether the religion is an obstacle to progress.

But the Arabs also have other answers. They blame the Christian, colonialist West, imperialism, the aggressiveness and exploitation of the West - and the United States above all, which even today is destroying and debilitating the Arab world in order to control it. This mood has been conducive to cultivating conspiracy theories that are popular in the Arab world, including "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." According to those who believe in these theories, the Israelis are successful because they have a secret international network.

Israeli researcher Ilai Alon, who divides his time between Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago, and media personality Yoram Afek joined Palestinian researchers Assad Busool of the University of Chicago and Zuheir Fahum from Nazareth, in an effort to compile a lexicon of emotionally charged concepts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The two Israelis were surprised to discover the extent to which Palestinians accept the historical narrative according to which the conflict is a Christian European plot to cause its enemies - Jews and Muslims - to kill each other. Even their fellow researchers wrote that "Europe and America watch from the side and pour oil onto the flames of the conflict by supplying weapons of destruction to the parties."

The ones that don't translate

Along with the tide of translations from Hebrew caused by curiosity about Israel and attempts to find an answer to Arab backwardness, one can find those who do not translate from the Hebrew at all. In the Palestinian context, this means Hamas publications. An examination of the Gaza Hamas weekly Al-Risala and the London monthly Filastin al-Muslimah produced no translations from Hebrew. They contain an abundance of references to the Israeli enemy, of course, but they do not translate the articles as they originally appeared and do not mention the writer's name. So, for example, some time ago Hamas publications contained extensive reports on the crime family wars and traffic accidents in Israel, which were described as characteristic of Israel's defective society and its distorted morality.

This approach is typical of the Hamas worldview, a worldview that makes no attempt to learn from Israel's success, and certainly not to imitate it. "We do not want to be a poor imitation of you," is the way one of Abu Salem's customers put it. He pointed to photographs of the Palestinian officers and police officers being led away from Jericho Prison with their hands in the air and wearing only underpants, saying: "Look what happens to the heroes of the Palestinian Authority who want to be like the Israelis."