This is a long article and I don't agree with all of it, but it's the best piece about the reporting of the Israeli-Arab conflict that I've read in years
A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so
wrong, and why it matters
The Israel Story
Is there anything
left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of
little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in
their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New
Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each
to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of
ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.
When the hysteria
abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as
particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians,
including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths,
or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a
turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars
with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different
in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy
in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a
country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid
civilian deaths.
The lasting
importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It
lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and
the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought
and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western
discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this
resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy
theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the
educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry;
decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.
While global mania
about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the
result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of
responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not
responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these
events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of
the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and
specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my
profession—here in Israel.
In this essay I
will try to provide a few tools to make sense of the news from Israel. I
acquired these tools as an insider: Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a
reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the
world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have
been reporting on it since 1997.
This essay is not
an exhaustive survey of the sins of the international media, a conservative
polemic, or a defense of Israeli policies. (I am a believer in the importance
of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s
policies.) It necessarily involves some generalizations. I will first outline
the central tropes of the international media’s Israel story—a story on which
there is surprisingly little variation among mainstream outlets, and one which
is, as the word “story” suggests, a narrative construct that is largely
fiction. I will then note the broader historical context of the way Israel has
come to be discussed and explain why I believe it to be a matter of concern not
only for people preoccupied with Jewish affairs. I will try to keep it brief.
How Important Is
the Israel Story?
Staffing is the
best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization.
When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers
covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more
news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50
countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number
of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the
“Arab Spring” eventually erupted.
To offer a sense of
scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence
in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s
editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that
of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which
makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink,
and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels
in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain
high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often
moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.
The volume of press
coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a
prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of
2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is,
roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem,
internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent
deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities.
In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated
190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever
died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations
have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for
example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193
of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party,
the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of
2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death
toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has
ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most
important story on earth, or very close.
What Is Important
About the Israel Story, and What Is Not
A reporter working
in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is
important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream
coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or
ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of
Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their
own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside
Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has
spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are
(understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they
want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of
the party that matters.
Corruption, for
example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian
Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the
subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was
“not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)
Israeli actions are
analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively
reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to
count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of
Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising
influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender
segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a
story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally
was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about
Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of
Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.
The Hamas charter,
for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews
and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both
world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP,
though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the
region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An
observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military
infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed
newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict
would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The
Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore
ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.
There has been much
discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of
the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action
myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I
personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians
and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our
reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that
the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the
AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas
intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has
not been published.)
But if critics
imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs
and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report
Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no
byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to
be.
The fact is that
Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of
Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is
to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the
essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and
often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous
grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and
fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need
Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they
have been sent to tell.
It is not
coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and
rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might
expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza
operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a
Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor
souls didn’t get the memo.
What Else Isn’t
Important?
The fact that
Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation
with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is
considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not
oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues
of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a
significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier,
and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been
reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the
year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a
map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the
story.
Some staffers were
furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were
moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the
Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that
narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did,
for more than a year and a half.
This decision
taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many
of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not
as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the
disposal of the side they like.
How Is the Israel
Story Framed?
The Israel story is
framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest
for a “two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is
“Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that
Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and
Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,”
or “Jewish-Arab”—that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and
300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “Israel-Muslim” would be
more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and
Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict
that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel
existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the
West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.
The
“Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle
East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit
assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will
be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This
definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a
serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what
it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.
A knowledgeable
observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a
volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various
incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village
on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical
Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave
in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in
Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, and so forth.
Hamas is not, as it
freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside
Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are
similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any
other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis
against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state
compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.
An observer might
also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle
East, all of which are under intense pressure from Islam: When minorities are
helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we
have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and
survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.
There are, in other
words, many different ways to see what is happening here. Jerusalem is less
than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone
that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are
absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to
anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the
volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.
The Israel story is
framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the
“Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political
universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about
current events. It is about something else.
The Old Blank
Screen
For centuries,
stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the
majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want
to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were
cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist?
In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of
the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European
society knew or cared about them in the first place.
Like many Jews who
grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such
ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and
I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people
in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and
militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most
countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a
country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial,
post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this
one.
When the people
responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’
war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of
Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible
justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their
enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is
that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils
that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International
press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.
Some readers might
remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout
from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever
killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously
condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not
long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon
or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called
“Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of
Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian
reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a
transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few
years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.”
And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy
hearing the Jews accused of genocide.
You don’t need to
be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on.
Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of
the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe
and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into
which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has
become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and
your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is
executed is the international press.
Who Cares If the
World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?
Because a gap has
opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions
are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by
events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown
of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign
Policy, “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician
foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been
rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to
be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone
was surprised.
Whatever the
outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with
Israel as World War II had to do with Spain
And there was the
Spanish civil war: “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly
reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship
which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written
not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according
to various ‘party lines.’ ” That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.
Orwell did not step
off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have
himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or
describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond
the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not
necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it
was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was
witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was
right.
Understanding what
happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise
of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It
requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see
themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to
understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant
force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an
empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting
forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region
under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able
to look around and connect the dots.
Israel is not an
idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner
parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting
scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood
in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories
in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region
in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had
to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry
an unusual emotional charge.
Many in the West
clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the
familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and
confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’
problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies
at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell
would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.
