Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sits down for an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Credit: Creative Commons/IsraelinUSA
It has now become a full fledged campaign: stifling criticism of Israel by warning of a new wave of anti-Semitism that is seizing the planet. The latest entry comes from French philosopher, and life-long Israel defender, Bernard-Henry Levy in (naturally) the New Republic who screams that anti-semitism in 2014 is a “ticking time bomb” that, if not countered, will inevitably lead to Binyamin Netanyahu’s vision: the return of 1942.
Like all opinion pieces of this genre, Levy’s case is built on the idea that there is no causal relation between Israel’s actions and the outbursts against Jews that he describes.
In its essence, the argument goes like this: Anti-Semitism is not caused by anything. It is innate, a poison that lives in the hearts and minds of evil people, needing only a pretext for it to explode. Israel’s actions can’t cause anti-Semitism. They can only be a pretext for it.
A subset of that same argument is that extreme animosity to the State of Israel is itself sometimes a manifestation of anti-Semitism which is, no doubt, sometimes true.
But so what?
Let’s assume that a certain percentage of the population is always going to be anti-Semitic. In good times and bad, a small percentage of people will hate Jews and will use Israel’s actions as a pretext for their hate.
But what about the rest, who start thinking ill of Jews because of actions taken by Israel? Like its war against Gaza.
This manner of thinking is not right and it is threatening. But at the same time it is not surprising when it is diaspora Jewish communities themselves who are always expressing their “solidarity” with Israel and its actions.
Think about it. During the recent war, even J Street sponsored solidarity rallies with Israel, eager to demonstrate that, as much as AIPAC, it stood as one with Israel (while Israel was leveling Gaza).
In my own community of Greater Washington, D.C., almost every synagogue is adorned with a big permanent sign that features an Israeli flag and the words: “We Stand With Israel In Its Struggle For Peace and Security.” No mosques in this area proclaim their one-ness with Palestine, understanding as the synagogues choose not to that houses of worship are for prayer not politics and also understanding, and as the synagogues do not, that such proclamations could endanger their own congregants. If a mosque in this area did announce its solidarity with Palestine on a sign out front, the Jewish organizations here would go ballistic and the sign would not last a week.
Over and over again Jewish organizations insist that those of Jewish faith “stand as one” with the State of Israel. In fact, those who question that bond are themselves criticized as “anti-Israel,” “self-hating Jews,” or worse.
Is it then any wonder that those who don’t quite grasp the nuances of Jewish identity react negatively when Israel behaves terribly. This does not excuse repulsive and violent instances of anti-Semitism which, like hate crimes against any group, must be condemned and, where possible, prosecuted.
But it’s a lie to say that Israel’s behavior does not affect attitudes toward both Israelis and Jews.
Today Binyamin Netanyahu is perhaps the most reviled leader of any country in the world and Israel, as a country, isn’t doing much better. Jews in diaspora are themselves feeling the ugliness growing.
If, however, none of this had anything to do with Israel’s behavior, the level of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel feelings would be constant, unaffected by the horrors in Gaza. To accept the logic of the various Jewish organizations (like the ADL) requires believing that the hate is always out there, unattached to anything except the anti-Semite’s psychosis.
If that was true, then why was it that apparently both anti-Semitism and anti-Israel fervor dropped dramatically during the period that Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister of Israel and was pursuing peace with the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin meeting with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Credit: Creative Commons/Government Press Office
The “world” may hate Netanyahu but it revered Rabin. Poll after poll showed that he was admired throughout the world, approaching levels achieved by Nelson Mandela. When he was murdered more foreign leaders (including Muslim and Arab leaders) gathered in Israel for his funeral than had gathered for any such event since President Kennedy’s funeral in 1963. And Jews benefited from the high regard in which Rabin was held.
Perhaps Rabin’s pursuit of peace should not have affected attitudes toward Jews at large, but they did. By the same logic (the imperfect logic of human beings), Netanyahu’s war on Gaza affects attitudes toward Jews at large. You can’t keep saying “we are one” and expect anything else.
It also must be noted that the “new anti-Semitism” that Levy and the rest harp on emanates largely from Muslim youth, primarily Middle Eastern immigrants living in Europe. It would be one thing if it emanated from the traditional sources of Jew-hatred on that continent (and especially France) which was the church and the right. But it doesn’t. It comes from among those who care nothing about who crucified Jesus or who practices usury but from those who are outraged and heartbroken by seeing their fellow Arabs slaughtered in Gaza. This does not excuse their behavior or make it less threatening but it does point to its source: Israel’s war against the Palestinians.
It is not surprising that Israel’s defenders pretend not to understand this. After all, if they admitted it, they would be conceding that Zionism has failed in its primary goal. Rather than deterring anti-Semitism, it is producing it.
In fact, it is not Zionism that is the anti-Semitism factory. It is its rightist aberration represented by Netanyahu, the settler movement, and the religious nationalists. If, by some miracle, another Rabin comes on the scene who dismantles the occupation, the “new anti-Semitism” will be relegated to the dustbin of history along with the old.
Sadly, that is unlikely. And that means that the new anti-Semitism” may be here to stay, a product not only of bigoted minds but, even more, of the “new Israel” of Netanyahu and his “We are One” defenders in the diaspora.
Unfortunately, the idea of ethnic nationalism, a country established on the basis of religion or ethnicity, carries with it the idea that those within the national boundaries who do not share the ethnicity or religion basic to the state is a second-class citizen. The logic is inexorable. I would not want to be an Arab or a Turk in a Kurdish state nor a non-Jew in a Jewish state. However, the position of a Kurd in a Kurdish state or a Jew in a Jewish state is not pleasant either if the Kurd or Jew is bothered by the discrimination against non-Kurds or non-Jews. There simply is no substitute for a state which does not discriminate among its citizens on the basis on ethnicity or religion. The USA can take pride in the fact that a country with a white majority can elect a non-white president. It is a milestone in the struggle against racism in the USA. Israel or the proposed Kurdish state will never have a non-Jew or a non-Kurd as chief executive. I am a Jew who is a dual citizen of the US and Australia. If either became a Christian country I would become a second-class citizen. As I cannot in good conscience support a Christian state I cannot in good conscience support a Jewish state.
There are a few western Democracies with an official state religion. Norway is a Lutheran nation, the UK is Anglican and Austria is Catholic. No Muslim suffered as a result
But David, can the US ever have an atheist president? I think maybe, but not in my lifetime. I seem to remember that more Americans believe in angels than in evolution. And I’m speaking as a deist. Separation of church and state was and is a great concept but as Jefferson would agree, it must be maintained by constant vigilance. Can sane people retake control of Israel? Sadly, I would bet, not in my lifetime.
There seems to be only one sane country in the Middle East currently, Israel.
Israel the only sane country in the middle east? Slaughtering 500 Palestinian children in 7 weeks is sane? Targeting hospitals, schools, refugee centers, homes for the aged and disabled, water and power plants, marketplaces, homes of innocent civilians is sane? Stealing lands of Palestinians as well as Bedouins is sane? Turning the dream of Zionism into a fascist state — censoring news, allowing cops to stand by as Israeli protestors are beaten–is that sane? “Leftists” mocked and sometimes beaten for wanting fair treatment of Palestine, sane? Having separate laws (and NOT equal) laws for Arabs living in Israel, sane? Disallowing Palestinians from the West Bank to marry Palestinians from Gaza, sane? Illegally continuing an occupation, sane? Allowing illegal settlements to be built and roads for Israelis only, sane? Bulldozing hundreds of Palestinian homes and thousands of hectares of olive, fig and orange groves, sane? The summer attack on Palestine is, as Rabbi Siegman calls it, the slaughter of innocents. Sanity?
Can you back al this “facts ” up? We”ll strt with your claims if censorship.
This is wonderful, Mr. Rosenberg — and so needed. Your succinct reasoning and presentation of this statement makes sense. Thank you – for this – and for your efforts to see things as they are and to share them with others.
Thanks Alice.
Israel’s behavior is appalling,
M. Rosenberg thinks Israel defending ones self against missiles and tunnels into the country is “appalling”. Hamas using human shields, I guess, is not appalling. When London was bombed, the British turned turned every German city into rubble. Was that appalling as well? [Personal attack removed]
Please check your facts. Hamas has not used human shields, according to the Geneva Convention definitions. However, Israeli soldiers who served in the Territories have testified that women and even young children were forced to become human shields for the IDF. For example, it was common practice to force innocent civilians to enter potentially booby -trapped houses– before the soldiers entered . . . or even before sending in their dogs.
Pushkin, The use of civilians as human shields by Hamas in Gaza is well documented and would certainly stand up in an international court of law.
As for israel, a case came up where an Israeli office used a human shield. He was tried in court and convicted. The supreme court supported his conviction.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/03/israel-soldiers-human-shield-palestinian
For Alice and MR – and almost as appalling are the American Jews who you could call “PEP” — Progressives except for Palestine. They as well as the Netanyahu followers (as well as the Yahoos in the U.S.Congress) undermine the wise and compassionate heritage of the Jews — their sense of fairness and
justice, their wisdom and humanity (and nice sense of humor, too).
Israel has a right to defend itself against rocket attacks
And do Palestinians have a right to take offense over two-thirds of a century of displacement and oppression?
Alice, sadly my community chooses not to apply the standards it applies to the US (or to any other country) to Israel.
The hypocrisy is nauseating.
What community are you talking about [personal attack removed]
Oh, really, Bill–can’t you come up with a better argument! No, name calling isn’t even argument–it’s the refuge of those who cannot rationally discuss an issue.
As the writer of the Argentum Post, I can share the following opinion and personal experience.
The reality is that there is a relentless toxic and usually secretive insidious attempt by Zionist Jews to (a) block exposure of historical reality as to the genesis of the nationalization of the Judaic religion which led to the synthesis of that pseudo-state entity called “Israel” , and (b) there is the same relentless attempt by the same toxic cabal to discredit and muzzle legitimate Jewish dissenting criticism of Israel’s policies and actions, and that means that Jews in Israel and outside of Israel who criticize Israel are characterized as “self hating Jews” or “Palestinian Jews” (thousands of which signed a petition sent to Woodrow Wilson imploring that he not go along with the Zionist plot to partition Palestine), or simply and simplistically as “leftists”.
I was thusly characterized and on one occasion at a reception for journalists a member of the Knesset approached me and then told my then wife, that I was a traitor to my “race”. These are desperate attempts by desperate, vilifiers who attack the messenger when they cannot stand the message.
The good news is that now there is developing an avalanche of highly scholarly, decent, humanist, rationalist, good Jews who are saying “Basta”. Enough is enough, and the Zionist power structure knows that the days of their dishonest and now bankrupt narrative are counted, so the worst in them is now coming out by their mindless characterizations of Europeans and particularly French critics of Israel as “anti-Semites”. These charges are grotesquely broad and encompass Jews, and this is therefore in this case as well an oxymoronic and non-operable characterization.
And yes, of course, there are always the opportunistic racist, neo-nazi, mindless hate driven types who take advantage of Israel constructive and valid criticism to inject their poison.
Wow! You really seem to be advocating the replacement of one national state for another and based on the worst of intellectual dishonesty. I really so not know who you write for and were you get you history, but it was not form a very reliable source, It really saddens me to read this. I wil help[ you, though, the 1st partition of British Mandated Palestine was in 1922 when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was created. Wilson was out of the picture by then. I’ll help you about the current situation. The most atrocious bloodshed in the Middle East does not involve israel or the US for that matter.
I admire your intelligence and your courage.
Pushkin is NOT referring to Phil but to the historian who seems to know his facts and can write about them clearly.
It’s a win-win for Zionism. It wants and needs anti-Semitism to enable Israel’s leaders and their traitor agents in Congress to say, “This proves what we have always said – the world is, always was and always will be against us. This is why we do what we do. World go to hell!”
You conveniently ignore that antisemitism existed before the Occupation, and it existed after the occupation, and continues today. You are arguing that antisemitism would diminish if the occupation ended, but history suggests otherwise.
You also conveniently ignore that boycotts, double standards, and Israel-hatred all provides a welcoming platform for those looking for a vehicle to effectuate their Jew-hatred.
I wanted to offer a comment based on the fact that I and my family have always had Jewish friends, we have participated in Sedars, and have even been invited to High Holiday services. However, this latest conflict with Gaza created in me a cognitive dissonance. Many of my Jewish friends supported the killing of innocent Palestinians by Israel citing the rockets from Hamas, and I was horrified. Let me also point out that other of my Jewish friends were equally horrified by the slaughter in Gaza and understood the rockets from Hamas. Since then, I have taken great pains to study the history of Israel and Zionism, and have come to the conclusion that the early Zionists were so eager to garner territory and a “homeland” that their aggression forcefully and violently expelled the Palestinians to the point of it being termed “ethnic cleansing.” Since 1948 the occupation and continued violence against the Palestinians has not stopped. To this day the history of the Nakba (the crime against the Palestinians) is never discussed by Israeli Zionists. It is called “Independence Day” and Israeli settlements are still being built in the West Bank, a UN recognized Palestinian territory. I imagine those reading this are thinking…”see she’s another anti-semitic one” but actually, no. I do not accept that characterization because it is absolutely not true. I am critical of Israel’s policies, yes. I think Israel would do itself a favor by telling the truth about its violent history toward the Palestinians and to finally make peace by affording the Palestinians a homeland as well where they have the Right of Return and full sovereignty over their territory, water and natural resources without fear of invasion by Israel. The use of the term “anti-Semite” is a way for pro-Israelis to stop the dialogue and discussion about Israel/Palestine through intimidation. I have never and will not accept that terminology to describe those who disagree with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
1. Jane, I am quiet sure your Jewish friends we will all for your sake,[personal attack removed], did not express support for killing Gazan children. I would guess they said that Israel has the right to defend itself from rockets showering down on Israel with the intent of killing Israeli civilians. I am also sure the shared the alarm of Israelis that Hamas used human shields. No, it’s not propaganda, it’s well documented. Don’t be fooled that Hamas fights on behalf of Gazans, they are fighting for themselves using Gazans as a propaganda weapon. Yeah, it the casualties were horrific, but guess what, Hamas is responsible for them.
2. Now for your faux history. Not even President Abbas would support your claims anymore. UYour argument of intentional ethnic cleansing is an old and tired argument. Abbas said and it was support by others that the Palestinians made a mistake to reject partition and trying to make a grab for everything. Even with this claims of ethnic cleansing, it is quite amazing that 20% of Israel’s population is of Arab decent. After the war of independence was over, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was seized and later annexed ( 1952) by Jordan. Gaza fell under Egyptian military occupation. The Palestinians could have had those lands long ago as their own state but…
3. Oh yes, Israel celebrate independence day as any other normal nation in the world. yes it’s a source of pride, not shame and many Israeli’s dies defending that independence. That’s why Memorial Day is celebrated the day before.
4. How many Jews were able to stay in the Arab states who were a party in the 1948 invasion of Israel? Should they also share in “Naqbah?
I suggest you do more reading rather than using a script. It’s not working out too well for you,
You’d better do a little more reading, too –your historical references are dated as more and more of the true facts are being revealed by conscientious historians.
Pushkin, Does dated mean, I should step aside for your revisionist version. President Abbas said that the Arab works and Palestinians made a mistake not accepting partition. Do you disagree with him?
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Abbas-Arabs-erred-in-rejecting-1947-partition-plan
Anyone who defends the killing of kids, whether settler kids or Gaza kids, is utterly lost as a human being.
Suppose Hamas did indeed shield weapons with their own kids (which they didn’t) why does that excuse Israel killing the kids to destroy the weapons.
It is not like they destroyed ALL the weapons Hamas has. The choice to kill the kids to take out the weapon is a Nazi choice not a Jwish one.
This is what God says: “He who appends the word BUT to any sentence that begins ‘of course I oppose killing kids in Gaza is no Jew.”
Really, Michael? You are comparing what Israel did in Gaza to Nazi atrocities? You’ve lost all credibility.
MJ
“Suppose Hamas did indeed shield weapons with their own kids (which they didn’t) why does that excuse Israel killing the kids to destroy the weapons”
You really do not get it, do you? What do you do when your enemy is shooting at you. Who is responsible to civilians casualties when human shields were used? Come on. Try for once to blame Hamas. I dare you to be honest, because that seem to be missing in your blogs. Israelis do not want dead children.
MJ
“It is not like they destroyed ALL the weapons Hamas has. The choice to kill the kids to take out the weapon is a Nazi choice not a Jwish one.”
When London was bombed by Germany in WW 2, the RAF turned every German city into a pile of rubble. I am sure many woman and children were killed. Were the British Nazis in disguise. MJ, that just sick on your part, I mean really. A Nazi choice is to round up civilians and gas them in a death camp. I know you wee poor at this, but I really did not think there was a slime factor to your blogs. Well, here it is.
With all that concrete Hamas imported to build tunnels, none of it was used to build bomb shelters. Considering their hunger for war, building shelters would make sense. Hmmmm…
MJ,
When you label respondents Nazis, you lost the argument. Is Amos Oz a “Nazi”?
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/2/5962103/amos-oz-to-israel-s-critics-what-would-you-do
Amos Oz
Amoz Oz: “I would like to begin the interview in a very unusal way: by presenting one or two questions to your readers and listeners. May I do that?
Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?
Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
With these two questions I pass the interview to you.”
I don’t care whether it’s the US in Iraq or Israel in Gaza or Hamas in Palestine, those who kill innocent kids behave like Nazis.
Those who defend that behavior are like the good Germans who cheered the fuehrer.
Jeez, the term Nazi is not the holy of holies. We can use it when the term applies.
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide?all=1
An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth
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.”
No, MJ. The Nazis are in a class by themselves. That is obvious. Your use of the term Nazi here is a tactic similar to the overuse of the antisemitism charge. In both cases, the objective is to shut down debate, because it can’t be won on the merits.
You make some good points; this isn’t one of them.
M.J. is right. Israel high-tech slaughtered 586.Palestinians children, many while they slept and Israelies danced the hora on hilltops, ate popcorn, knowing full well that Netanyahu & Co. were titillated by these grisly horrors that would shame the Waffen SS. I love the way Phil, and David and all these other hasbara scrofula twist themselves like wet pretzels to lie away Incremental Genocide that.is the very picture of Nazi-ism. “Oh, can’t call.it Nazi, shandah, shandah, oy vey!”.And,bthen blaming Hamas,,an extra-legitimate Resistance Organization who fight the way the Shoah Jews should have fought and thats why they are so hated, bilious jealousy and shame. You people all blaspheme the Holocaust with your ever more desperate mendacity and you are so.much.worsebthan Good Germans many whom had no access to news whatsoever.
Jews suffered persecution in Europe and Muslim countries for the past 2000 years culminating in the Holocaust. Hamas is responsible for the horrible carnage in Gaza just like the National Socialists in Germany were responsible for the carnage in German cities bombed by the allies. The author removes context, history and facts from this article to create a pretext to justify anti semitism and discrimination against Jews. And, it is true the left is now the new home to intolerance, bigotry, anti semitism and racism.
Agree.
Then you have this:\
Tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide?all=1
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.
***
The Left, the Right, The Center, anyone who cares about what Nelson Mandela called “The moral cause of our time” (Palestinian Self-Determination) is the home of beauty, and truth, and moral passion. Anyone who’s still defending Israel is the kind of Jew or shabbos goy who corrupts and endangers other Jews. Your neurotic fears that moral.outrage against Israel.is a mortal threat to your soul.is the existential trap you are in. If it wasn’t so pathetic it’d be risible.