Bob Schaible

“The Big Lie” has been everywhere in the news recently. But another big lie has long been doing great harm, and among Maine’s congressional delegation, only Congresswoman Chellie Pingree has responded with integrity and a mind open to the unfamiliar truth.

The Big Lie about a fraudulent election is still peddled by Trump and his supporters. This lie undermines American faith in democracy and led to the Jan. 6 insurrectionary violence at the Capitol.

The other Big Lie undermining not only democratic values but also the human rights of millions is told by America’s top ally in the Middle East: Israel. This Big Lie says Israel always seeks peace but has “no partner for peace.”

Mountains of evidence, of facts, say otherwise.

This second Big Lie has caused unconscionable suffering by Palestinians, who have lost most of their land, their water resources, and thousands of homes bulldozed or confiscated for religious Jews. The lie gives Israel leeway in Gaza to destroy water treatment and power plants, limit food and medicine (60% of pre-school children in Gaza are anemic), and bomb mercilessly, killing and maiming thousands of children and adults, whenever Gazans resist Israel’s illegal siege and specific provocations with rockets that virtually always fall harmlessly into the desert.

Today, Israel ruthlessly refuses to share the COVID vaccine with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has destroyed COVID health centers built by Palestinians.

Though Israel’s Big Lie is not as noticed by Americans as Trump’s, anytime leaders sustain a lie, that lie becomes corrosive to democracy as supportive policies accumulate and scarce financial resources are used to reinforce it. (Over $73 million of Mainers’ federal tax dollars go annually to Israel.)

Our grassroots group, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, has tried in multiple ways for two years to engage Sen. Angus King regarding Israel’s false narrative and brutal policies. We focused on King, since we believed he would entertain new information and alter his heretofore-ardent support of Israel. We were wrong.

King is well versed in the standard defense of Israel, and speaks of consulting with “experts” and meeting with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. However, he seems never to have read leading historians who debunk the Israel-as-victim narrative, or to have visited a refugee camp, where he would meet ordinary Palestinians and learn that Abbas is seen as primarily serving Israel’s interests in the West Bank.

Using once-secret archives, leading Israeli historians revealed that Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, the key Zionist leaders at the turn of the 20th century, were always intent on expelling Palestinians and taking their land for a Jews-only state. Palestinians were hostile because Zionists’ actions made this aim abundantly clear, even as they told lies publicly in order to win the world’s support.

Among many other efforts, we prepared and sent a carefully-researched document relying on highly-credible sources, making the case that Palestinians have long sought peace, while Israel, according to Israeli scholar Avi Raz, among others, has used “a diplomacy of prevarication” to “mislead the Americans into thinking Israel was seriously trying to resolve the … conflict.”

We invited our senator to respond to six core questions arising from this document. We waited five months before receiving only a brief letter relying on standard boilerplate. He refused to answer our questions or engage with the substantive evidence we presented. Responses to other communications were equally superficial, or nonexistent.

Serious constituents who do their homework and engage faithfully to influence a public servant deserve better than this: not that he (or she) agree with them, but that he participate with them in thinking about any matter of serious consequence.

Recent polls suggest Americans, notably Democrats, increasingly doubt Israel’s habitual lies, its casting of itself as victim rather than perpetrator of evil, and want their leaders to rethink their automatic support of everything Israel does. Sen. King can be admired on so many issues that we dared hope he would be willing to do this.

We wrote this op-ed, however, after concluding that Sen. King suffers from what John Stuart Mill once called “the profound slumber of decided opinion.” Clearly no amount of truth-telling is going to wake him up.

Bob Schaible of Portland is chairperson of the Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, and professor emeritus at the University of Southern Maine, Lewiston-Auburn College.