By Matti Friedman
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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 been 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.
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.
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