Most readers know that I feel Israel, vis-à-vis its conflict with Palestine, has been given a raw deal in both world opinion and the world press. They also know that I don’t think that the country is blameless in the Middle East fracas (the settlements, for example, are unconscionable), but that they hold the moral high ground over the Palestinians, who are sworn to extirpate Israel and determined to kill civilians directly.  (Read the Hamas Charter, a document brimming with hatred and anti-Semitism, if you don’t believe me. It’s must reading for anyone who wants credibility on the conflict.)

At any rate, I spend a fair amount of time reading articles that excoriate Israel while ignoring the malfeasance of Hamas. The Guardian is especially vile in that respect, though the New York Times‘s reporting also seems unbalanced. I endure the calls of my fellow academics to boycott conferences in Israel, and for universities to divest in investments there.  All of the West, it seems, and many of my fellow academics as well, see Israel as predatory, and Palestinians as their innocent victims. In the meantime, anti-Semitic acts are on the rise in Europe (they’re a staple in Arab lands, of course).  I feel there is a connection between these things.

But I won’t fulminate today. Since I have read many, many anti-Israel and pro-Palestine pieces, I’ll ask you, if you think you’re open-minded on the issue, to simply read two pieces.  The first one is long, but, to me, worth it and meticulously researched. Both pieces show how the international press is in collusion with Hamas (or intimidated by Hamas) to produced biased reporting.

The first article, by Richard Behar in last week’s Forbes, “The media intifada: bad math, ugly truths, about New York Times in Israel-Hamas war,” is an eye-opener. Behar seems to have done his homework, and much of what he says is enlightening, particularly about the statistics about the dead on both sides. It’s not just about the Times‘s one-sided reporting in the region, but indicts nearly every other press outlet as well.

In The Tablet, a Jewish website, you can read a similar analysis (although a bit more impassioned) by Matti Friedman, “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 story is three pages long.) Friedman, who lives in Israel and worked there for the Associated Press, also faults foreign media for lazy reporting, collusion with or intimidation by Hamas, biases (many reporters are strongly anti-Israeli on their social media), and downright hatred of Israel. Like Behar, Friedman claims that this promotes a kind of slanted reporting that, in turn, has seriously heightened the world’s opprobrium towards Israel. His writing is very good, and I’ll give one longish excerpt:

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.

The last section of the piece, “Who cares if the world gets the Israel story wrong?”, which draws a parallel between current reporting in the Middle East and reporting during the Spanish Civil War when Orwell fought there, is very good.

I will say no more; I’m just recommending these pieces as balance for the vast bulk of anti-Israel reporting in the world press, and I’m sure people will give their opinions. But hell, I’ll put up an excerpt from the last section, too:

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.

Even if you don’t agree with the message, the writing is superb.

h/t: Malgorzata ~