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by Eric S. Margolis
September 27, 2025
‘Stop writing about the Mideast or we will throw acid in your and your son’s faces.’
Such was the threat shouted through the front door of our New York City apartment where my mother and I lived in the 1950’s. Then there was frequent pounding on the door at 3 am with further threats and obscenities.
My mother’s offense? Being one of the first female journalists to cover the Mideast, 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 scandalized the capitol, 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.
Mrs. Zaimi 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 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 Mideast for the US State Department. In the 1950’s, she warned Washington that unless the Palestine problem was resolved with justice that the Mideast would erupt in fury against the United States. 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, King Farouk, Egypt’s old ruler, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Gen. Naguib and Iraq’s strongman, Nuri al-Said.
While traveling in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, Mrs. Zaimi was shocked to discover hundreds of thousands (750,000 in total) Palestinian villagers who had been driven from their villages 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 to be sure 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 ads unless she was silenced. She refused to be quiet - until the threats came to throw acid in my face.
I’ve had my columns and broadcasts black-listed by major US and Canadian newspapers, radio and TV for my heretical pro-peace views on the Mideast – and my life threatened numerous times. By now, after sixty years of threats and intimidation, I have learned to live with the threats and being blacklisted.
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 Palestinians. They have become a martyr people. I am firmly in the camp of those Israelis who understand that they must some day manage to live with their Palestinian neighbors. 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, 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.’
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2025