Jacobo Timerman, 1923-1999

By Richard H. Curtiss

Jacobo Timerman was a journalist's journalist, and a personal hero of mine. A big man physically, crackling with intelligence and equally at home in Spanish or English, he was both intimidating and endearing, often in the same encounter, but always true to his own strong convictions about virtually everything. Born in the Ukraine, he was only 12 and living with his family in a single room in Buenos Aires when his father died, forcing Jacobo to help support the family.

Motivated by grinding poverty, his restless energy, larger-than-life personality and obvious brilliance propelled him rapidly to the top of his chosen profession. He became a leading Argentine editor, publisher and radio and television commentator. Then, in 1977, he was arrested and his daily newspaper, La Opinion, confiscated for daring to criticize the military junta then ruling Argentina.

While at least 15,000 potential "enemies of the regime" disappeared forever in that dark period, Mr. Timerman emerged after being held without charges in five prisons, followed by house arrest for a total of 30 months, during which time the government went to extraordinary lengths to depict him as a mastermind, or at least a key conspirator, in Leftist or Jewish plots to overthrow the Argentine government.

Thanks to his wife, Risha Midlin, whom he had met in a Zionist discussion group, and American friends, by the time he was released he had become perhaps the best known among Argentina's thousands of political prisoners. That may explain why he was allowed to emigrate to Israel where, in 1981, he brought out his best-known book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, describing his experiences in clandestine torture cells suffering excruciating pain and unending debasement and humiliation, while always expecting execution.

Timerman was already known throughout the world as an authentic hero. Then the book, described by European Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a "vivid and often bloodchilling" description of fiendish torture, resulted in his lionization on the lecture circuits of Israel, Europe and, especially, the United States and Canada.

When Jacobo Timerman died at home of a heart attack in Buenos Aires on Nov. 11, 1999 at age 76, all of this was well covered in leading U.S. newspapers. I searched in vain in those newspapers, however, for what happened to him after 1982, when Timerman was invited to join other Israeli journalists as guests of the Israel Defense Forces shortly after their June 6, 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Knowing of the American journalistic taboo on news that puts Israel in a bad light, I was not surprised at the total omission from obituaries in the mainstream American press of any reference to the next book Timerman wrote. It was called The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, and published in 1982, just three months after Timerman personally observed the horrors in Lebanon, and then joined other Israelis in taking to the streets to protest them.

It was more surprising, however, to observe that even the weekly U.S. Jewish community newspapers I consulted were almost as reluctant to acknowledge the events that convinced Timerman, a life-long Zionist up to that point, to leave his adopted Israeli homeland after less than three years in 1983 and return to Argentina, the scene of his physical torture, and resume the life of a publisher and editor there.

In a half-page obituary headlined "Legendary Argentine Jewish Activist Dead," The Washington Jewish Week of Nov. 18 summarized Timerman's Middle Eastern interlude with two dismissive statements that "he did not shy away from criticizing the Jewish state, particularly Israel's role in the invasion of LebanonÉBut he was also not shy of attacking Palestinian terrorism."

A full-page article in the Nov. 19 issue of The Jewish Week of New York by Naomi Meyer, the wife of an American rabbi and a former resident of Argentina, alluded to Timerman's entire Middle East experience in only one sentence: "He went on to publish several more acclaimed books: about the 1973 coup in Chile, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (for which he was vilified by many Israelis) and the Cuban revolution."

And in a half-page obituary in the Jewish Journal of Florida, a sometimes-liberal columnist, J. Zel Lurie, devoted four paragraphs to Timerman's Middle East book but noted that a reviewer, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg "found [Timerman's] criticism of the Israel Army exaggerated."

In short, while U.S. obituaries recalled the physical tortures inflicted upon him in Argentina, they ignored the psychological torture endured by Jacobo Timerman when reality in the Jewish homeland to which he had emigrated with his wife and three sons clashed with his Zionist dreams.

The following, therefore, are some observations gleaned from his book, and from an interview with him by the writer in Buenos Aires in 1984, shortly after Timerman's return there. A full account of the interview (checked for accuracy with Mr. Timerman before it was published) and my review of The Longest War were published in the April 8, 1985 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. They are available on the magazine's Web site: http://www.washington-report.org.

After viewing shattered Tyre and Sidon on a 1982 Israeli military press tour, Timerman wrote: "Two cities demolished in a painless and insipid operation. Neither blood nor bad taste in the mouth. We could look but it was impossible to see. To see we should have talked to mothers seeking sons lost when the Israeli Air Force bombed open citiesÉWe should have sifted through the rubble and touched carbonated bonesÉ"

Back in Israel, after standing with his grandson on his shoulders at a Peace Now rally at which 100,000 Jews protested the invasion, he wrote: "How many years remain for me to try to stop the war that the state army will send my grandson to fight?"

As the Israeli noose tightened around the Palestinian fighters and Palestinian and Lebanese civilians trapped in West Beirut, Timerman recorded his fury at the senseless destruction of a great city and its helpless inhabitants: "I know the significance of those helicopters that each minute head north or return from the north. They go to kill in Beirut or to bring back the wounded. They enrage me. So do the Palestinians, because they were so stupidÉAnd I'm angry, too, with us, with the Israelis who by exploiting, oppressing, and victimizing them made the Jewish people lose their moral tradition, their proper place in history."

Then, as the war dragged on, Timerman made successive entries in his journal:

"When the soldiers came back to Israel in the seventh week of the warÉthey brought, besides their own anguish, euphoria, or weariness, the exploits, the heroism of the sacrifices of the other, of the Palestinian with whomÉthey had the chance to speak for the first timeÉ

"In the second month of the war, more children were killed in Beirut than during 30 years of terrorism in IsraelÉAs we enter the eighth week, what remains? We, the Israelis, remain. They, the Palestinians, remainÉWe have denounced and insulted each other, we have murdered, persecuted, and beaten each other, but we remain the same, and we are stuck in the same placeÉ

"Despite all of our government's effortsÉto hide the factÉthe Palestinians were preparing to recognize Israel before we invaded LebanonÉWhat this war has demonstratedÉis that only one new opportunity has emerged: The mutual recognition of the two peoples, Israeli and PalestinianÉPeace is the only opportunityÉIn these past two months I have left behind many illusions, some fantasies, several obsessions: But none of my convictions."

Then, after the massacre of Palestinian men, women, and children in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Timerman wrote:

"Psalm 137 says I should never forget Jerusalem. I have never forgotten her. With the same fervor and tenderness, I will never forget BeirutÉ"

Impatience With U.S. Inaction

And, finally, in his book Timerman expresses his growing impatience with the refusal, for domestic political reasons, of the United States to intervene: "I [do] not know of a single case of such a complex conflictÉresolved without the outside intervention of a single power or several powersÉHistory will not forgive the United States for not having taken a hand in the conflict long before 1973, as would have been proper for the leading power at the time."

After publication of his criticisms of Israel's invasion of Lebanon Timerman suddenly became a non-person, not only in Israel but also on the lecture circuit in the United States. Interviewed by this writer, an American, after his return to Argentina, Timerman resumed his criticism of the United States and its Jewish community:

"How can I predict what the future holds for Israel when it depends on your policy and your policy depends upon the Jewish community in the United States? When I was in Israel as an Israeli, I had nothing to say about my country's future. In fact, Israel can never have a rational policy in the Middle East or in the world until American Jews come to their senses. Jews in Israel or Jews anywhere else can have no influence so long as American Jews coerce the U.S. government into backing the craziest Israeli policies and the craziest Israeli politiciansÉ

"Once when my wife had just arrived for a visit in New York, the taxi driver, an American Jew, asked her where she was from. She said Israel. He said her accent didn't sound Israeli. She explained she was Argentine before she was Israeli. 'Do you know Jacobo Timerman?' he asked her. 'Yes,' she said, she knew him. 'Maybe you can tell me then,' he said, 'why he writes all those bad things about Israel.'' 'Aren't they true?' she asked. 'Of course they're true,' the taxi driver said. 'But why does he have to tell the truth to the goyim?'

"That's the trouble now. Many Jews, even in the U.S., know some things have gone wrong in Israel. But if anyone says even a word against Israel where non-Jews might hear it, the whole community goes crazy."

Explaining to me why he and his wife returned to Argentina, Timerman said one of his sons "went to jail twice because he would not act as a jailer in Lebanon." He continued: "People like me do not have a chance in Israel because you support the other kind. Perhaps we in Israel live in a banana republic, but if so it is the only one that imposes the condition that the U.S. must act against its own best interests, against the best interests of the whole world, and in the long run, perhaps, against the best interests of Israel as wellÉ

"How am I received now by those American organizations that gave me awards a few years ago? My old friends meet with me and whenever I visit the States I'm still invited to speak to some Jewish groups about the problems with Israel. Privately many of them agree that Israel isn't everything we wanted it to be. What they don't realize is that if we want it to change, we have to say so. Until the American Jewish community realizes this, there's no role in Israel for people like me."

Jacobo Timerman was devoted to his wife and three sons, Daniel, Hector and Javier. When I met him his first words were, "you can be the first to congratulate me on the birth of my granddaughter in New York. She's my third grandchild and the second American. The first was born in Israel."

In contrast to his defiance of Jewish critics who rejected his warnings about Israel, his wife's death in 1992 sent Timerman into a deep depression, from which his death may have come as a relief.

I believe he would have been disappointed, but not at all surprised, at the deliberate omission from the American media of his warnings, aimed at sparing his children and grandchildren and their contemporaries in the Middle East from further grief and bloodshed.

Nevertheless, he was twice an authentic hero: first for his willingness to lay down his life for truth and justice in Argentina, and again for sacrificing the adulation he had earned in Argentina in order to tell the truth about Israel and the malign influence on it exercised by leaders of the American Jewish community. Unlike the U.S. journalists who refuse to tell the whole truth about this "legendary Jewish activist," Jacobo Timerman long ago earned the right to rest in peace.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.