No other issue causes as much angst as the Israel/Palestine question. Soj has decided to omit the subject from her PDB’s, I prefer to disguise my true feelings on the topic, and the New York Times gets so much hate mail over it, that their ombudsman, DANIEL OKRENT, has decided to make a statement:
On this issue, love letters are as common as compromise, and The Times’s exoneration from charges of bias is as likely as an imminent peace.
NYT: Free Reg
:::more:::
He, like I, attempts to tackle the subject from a detached point of view. It may be unrealistic, and it is sure to anger people on both sides of the issue, but I think the approach has merit:
I can’t say I’m very good at it. How could I be – how could anyone be – when considering a conflict so deep, so unabating, so riddled with pain? Who can be dispassionate about an endless tragedy?
This doesn’t exonerate The Times, nor does the fact that criticism comes from each side suggest that the paper’s doing something right. But no one who tries to walk down the middle of a road during a firefight could possibly emerge unscathed.
I agree. Some people feel so strongly, that they interpret an attempt to ‘walk down the middle of the road’ as nothing less than an endorsement of the tactics of the Israelis, or a failure to condemn the use of suicide bombers by the Palestinians. However, I think such critiques are unfair.
It does not provide history lessons. A report on an assassination attempt on a Hamas leader in Gaza that kills nearby innocents will most likely mention the immediate provocation – perhaps a Palestinian attack on an Israeli settlement. But, says the angered reader, what about the murderous assault that provoked the settlement attack? And, says his aggrieved counterpart on the other side, what about the ambush that preceded the assault? And so on back to the first intifada, and then to 1973 and 1967 and 1956 and 1948 – an endless chain of regression and recrimination and pain that cannot be represented in a year, much less in a single dispatch in a single day.
This is an accurate description of the form most discussions on the issue take. It starts with an objective attempt to describe an incident, and it quickly moves back in time, as people appeal to one outrage after another…until we reach 1948, the Holocaust, and then the original Jewish settlers, Theodore Herzl, and eventually the Holy Books themselves.
What’s surprising, although it shouldn’t be, is that New York Times feels more threatened by accusations of anti-Semitism, than they do by accusations of pro-Israel sentiments.
If the reporters lived in Gaza or Ramallah, this argument goes, they would feel exposed to the daily struggles and dangers of life behind Palestinian lines and would presumably become more empathetic toward the Palestinians.
I don’t know about empathy, but I do know that the angle of vision determines what you see. A reporter based in secular, Europeanized Tel Aviv would experience an Israel vastly different from one living in Jerusalem; a reporter with a home in Ramallah would most likely find an entirely different world. The Times ought to give it a try.
It’s only a newspaper. It eventually comes to this: Journalism itself is inadequate to tell this story. Like recorded music, which is only a facsimile of music, journalism is a substitute, a stand-in. It’s what we call on when we can’t know something firsthand. It’s not reality, but a version of reality, and both daily deadlines and limited space make even the best journalism a reductionist version of reality.
In preparing to write this article, my conversations with Michael Brown and Andrea Levin, with various other parties of interest and with The Times’s editors consumed hours. My e-mail encounters with readers have consumed months. To all who would assert that squeezing what I’ve drawn from this research into these few paragraphs has stripped the many arguments of their nuance or robbed them of their power, I have no rebuttal. The more important and complicated an issue, or the closer it is to the edge of life and death and the future of nations, the less likely its essences can be distilled by that wholly inadequate but absolutely necessary servant, daily journalism.
A postscript:
During my research, representatives of If Americans Knew expressed the belief that unless the paper assigned equal numbers of Muslim and Jewish reporters to cover the conflict, Jewish reporters should be kept off the beat.
I find this profoundly offensive, but not nearly as repellent as a calumny that has popped up in my e-mail with lamentable frequency – the charge that The Times is anti-Semitic. Even if you stipulate that The Times’s reporters and editors favor the Palestinian cause (something I am not remotely prepared to do), this is an astonishing debasement. If reporting that is sympathetic to Palestinians, or antipathetic to Israelis, is anti-Semitism, what is real anti-Semitism? What word do you have left for conscious discrimination, or open hatred, or acts of intentional, ethnically motivated violence?
The Times may be – is – imperfect. It is not anti-Semitic. Calling it that defames the accuser far more than it does the accused.
I have always perceived the New York Times as being slanted pro-Israel. Perhaps my impression dates to A.M. Rosenthal’s reign, or perhaps I put too much weight on William Safire’s voice, and not enough on the hard reporting from the region. Either way, I do believe the Times makes a good-faith effort to be fair.
One postscript. Can we come up with another word that is better than ‘anti-Semitism’?
The word makes no sense in an all-semitic conflict.
Wonderful analysis of a truly insane situation, Boo. I’ve ended up with a rather pessimistic view of the entire matter… although there’s a smidgen of hope that some kind of resolution can be reached, even though it’ll make nobody very happy.
The solution is really very simple. But it requires making everyone unhappy, and it requires trust.
Building trust is the first step. And Sharon needs to be replaced before that can begin.
At Montreal’s Concordia University, no speaker from either side can be invited to give a talk. Invitations have been cancelled and stopped because of student riots.
Google “Concordia University Riots” and see if you can find an objective viewpoint from over 6K articles.
Even posting a link to one of them might start a riot on BooMan.
Yes, and there is quite a lot of controversy in the UK about the issue.
Soj says it is against US law to boycott Israeli businesses. I don’t think that is true of any other country, although I’m not sure.
The issue tends to make normal people insane.
Here is a good piece on the subject of “even-handedness.” It is long, even the snips are long, but well worth the read.
These two friends have recognized and are strongly protesting the sham of taking a neutral position between the two sides in this most unbalanced of conflicts. Neutrality in any conflict in which there is a gross imbalance of power is probably an impossibility and certainly immoral. Treading a middle path between one utterly powerless party and another party with total power, effectively removes all restraints on behavior by the powerful party. Yet this is the posture of those American peace groups that put themselves forward as advocates for Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation. They take no position between the Palestinians and Israel, but only promote peace plans such as the unofficial Geneva Accord. without also taking action or even speaking out forcefully against Israel’s occupation. The consequence is that these groups have given Israel the time and the license to devastate the land, begin its ethnic cleansing, and destroy any prospect for Palestinian independence. Their refusal to take a clear stand against Israel’s oppressive policies is a statement that might makes right, that oppressive policies are acceptable, and most particularly that justice for Palestinians is less important than power for Israel.
But when in history have decent people seriously accepted balance and neutrality as a proper response in moral conflicts or national conflicts that pit one very powerful party against a powerless party?
Consider this analogy: a group of well-meaning activists in late 1850s America hope to bring an end to the horrors of slavery without war. They propose that the two sides strive for reconciliation, that slaves sit down at the negotiating table with slave owners and attempt to work out their differences through negotiation. The activists believe that the institution of slavery is oppressive, a violation of human rights, and that it must end, but they also recognize the property rights of owners to their slaves, as well as the owners’ right to their lives and their livelihoods their right to exist and not be murdered in a slave uprising. The activists propose a middle way between the two sides, recognizing that both are responsible for the conflict (slaves have shown a propensity to rebel, causing the slave owners to tighten their oppressive grip) but believing that both slaves and owners have a right to free, peaceful, and secure lives and that the only way to achieve this is to avoid blaming either side.
Do we think this is absurd? Imagine a similar scenario involving an attempt to mediate in a balanced, blame-free atmosphere between Catholic priests and the children they have sexually abused. The absurdity of neutrality is equally obvious in this situation. What is most absurd in these scenarios and what links them is the notion of treading a middle or supposedly neutral path between two sides when there exists a total imbalance of power. Could anyone seriously suggest that slaves, utterly powerless except for the ability occasionally to rebel, should seek some kind of equitable solution between themselves and their overlords? Could anyone seriously suggest that abused children, utterly powerless except for the ability to kick and scream, should negotiate with their abusers?..
Yet this is essentially how virtually everyone public discourse in general, from opportunistic U.S. politicians of both major parties, to mainstream media commentators, to most peace activists proposes to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The notion of holding the middle ground, of being “neutral”, is soothing to most people because it is ostensibly fair, it is optimistic, it is positive, obviating the need for negativity and unpleasantness. But a balanced position in an unbalanced situation inevitably is a miscarriage of justice. In Palestine-Israel, it is a profoundly immoral stance to maintain neutrality between powerless Palestinians (who have the ability occasionally to murder innocent Israelis but no power to regulate or save their own lives) and an overpowering, overbearing Israel possessing all the military power, controlling all the land. Neutrality here is no different from refusing to take a stand between slaves and slave owners, or between children and abusive priests. …
Discussing the profound difficulties of ministering in any meaningful way to a congregation under occupation, Reverend Mitri Raheb writes in Bethlehem Besieged that with its talk of peace on earth, Christmas has become particularly difficult for him. The usual emphasis at Christmas is on what he calls a “cheap peace”, which is in fact merely “a bit of wishful thinking [engaged in] when one is not ready to do much”. For Palestinians, “peace talk” often turns out to be simply a formula for managing the conflict rather than resolving it a situation in which “the world continues to talk peace while Israel continues to build the wall”. With the beginning of the peace process, Raheb says, Palestinians had real hope, but in the last few years hope has evaporated. “Our vision of peace became unrealistic, justice was impossible, coexistence nothing but a myth. . . . A hopeful vision cannot be mere words, statements, or resolutions. In fact, people gave up hope because there was a clear discrepancy between what they were seeing and what they were hearing. They were hearing the false prophets say, ‘Peace, peace,’ but on the ground there was no peace. . . . Waiting, being passive, and feeling optimistic about the future these are false hope”.
The world’s obliviousness to Israel’s wanton destruction of property and lives and livelihoods at Rafah, and in general to the obscene oppression that is the occupation, is stupefying. Yet, although minorities of courageous Israelis and American Jews speak out in opposition, most self-defined centrists in the U.S., both within and outside the peace movement, still do not dare confront Israeli governments in any meaningful way. Centrists have clung too long to a misguided reluctance to deviate from what the Palestinian Mitri Raheb cynically calls the false hope of “balance”, passivity, and forced optimism. By their timidity, the centrists vastly strengthen those in the U.S. and Israel whose true goal is to rid Palestine of Palestinians.
link
The author makes many good points.
However, the equation or analogy of slavery is problematic. In the case of slavery we are all agreed that the issue was eliminating slavery as a legal institution. Good faith efforts to avoid war would have taken into consideration the compensation to slave owners for the loss of value that emancipation would bring. But the goal was emancipation.
To move that analogy back to Israel, we would say that the goal was eliminating Israel as a country. The argument is not about tactics, but about power dynamics.
That’s the problem with avoiding neutrality. I can condemn Sharon’s policies. I can condemn Hamas’ tactics. I can call one worse than the other. But that solves nothing.
If Israel is going to exist, we need to stop arguing over whether they ought to exist. If Palestine is going to have a country, we can condemn all actions that make an independent and contiguous, and viable Palestine more difficult to attain. All such actions that are taken by both sides of the conflict ought to be condemned.
Ultimately, the Israelis have to take the first step, as the more powerful party, and they must trust the outcome will result in acceptance, and an end to terrorism.
The problem we have now, is that every day that goes by without a resolution is a defeat for a future Palestine. They lose more land.
The dynamic of the status-quo is lop-sided against the Palestinians, which makes even-handedness a bit biased in Israel’s favor. But, at the same time, it also makes continued bickering lop-sided in Israel’s favor.
The fairest thing to do, is to stop bickering, stop assigning blame, and just hammer out an argreement and implement it. Surely we could get Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey to sit down and work out guarantees of peace, aid, water rights, etc.
It’s not so frigging complicated.
It will be as an independent, peaceful, law-abiding Middle Eastern country, a respected and responsible member of the community of nations, enjoying friendly and productive relationships with its neighbors.
The slavery analogy is apt if you consider that in all the various plans and maps and programs conjured up by western warlords and arms dealers and their henchmen, no slaves have been called to the table.
Although he will forever be the father of modern Palestine, and leaving aside his symbolic significance, Yasser Arafat screwed the Palestinian people royally and played Israel for a fool by letting his infatuation with swimmin pools and movie stars take precedence over his responsibility to be straight about what would and wouldn’t fly with the Palestinian people, since he was supposed to be representing them.
But the truth is that Arafat cared more about being the toast of Europe and everybody’s favorite new revolutionary and hobnobbing with a succession of US politicians than he did about his job, and so he told people what would get him the next trip, the next perk, and the Nobel Peace Prize.
As any Palestinian will tell you, neither illegal settlements or the right of return or negotiable, and that includes those Palestinians who don’t even KNOW it’s the law.
All of the various “accords,” Oslo, Camp David, whatever, are nothing but eyewash because they are all based on a false premise.
The question is not what Israel will give Palestine.
The land is not Israel’s to give. It is the other way around. The question is what Palestine will give Israel.
And you can go ahead and let out that breath with which you are about to go on about the United Nations and 1948.
Another false premise is that whatever happened with the UN and 1948 is anything more than an agreement between some rich western guys who had bought a few Arab dollahos.
A nation is not defined by a piece of paper written on by people in Washington and New York.
And if Israel really puts all that much stock in a New York piece of paper because it is stamped UN, there are at least 69 more of them that they seem to feel less reverence for.
People don’t like to hear it, but the US screwed Israel from the get-go, but just as Arafat went to what was supposed to be a negotiating table with nothing in his mouth that had anything to do with reality, decisions made in the US do not now and did not in 1948 have anything to do with the reality of what has been going on on the ground in the Levant.
It probably would have been possible to negotiate an Israel for people who wanted to go live there for religious and historical reasons, but a different choice was made.
The Naqba was every bit as much a holocaust as the Holocaust, and today, there are kids who were born in refugee camps who are the GRANDCHILDREN of the people who were ethnically cleansed by the US and the UK, who took advantage of European Jews in the wake of WWII and installed them there for the express purpose of creating a guard dog for the oil, which the war had made plain to the western money boys was the stuff to get hold of.
European invasions of ancient lands have never been popular with the invadees, and that is the name of the game here. I don’t doubt that there are many Israelis with sincere religious beliefs, and there were Dutch with sincere religious beliefs in Indonesia, and in fact, the pope wrote to the Spaniards in Mexico and practically BLESSED the wholesale rape of Indian women, telling them they were creating “la santa raza,” “the holy race.”
That did not make the rapes more popular, and it did not make the people who were enslaved meek and obedient, and it did not comfort the mothers whose children were murdered.
Not in Indonesia, not in the Americas, not in Africa, not in South Asia, and not in the Middle East.
Israel as it exists today, is a greater threat to its own existence than any external entity.
The only way to save Israel, like the only way to save Iraq, Afghanistan, Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and a laundry list of other places, is to remove the US.
Do the Israeli people deserve less than the independent, peaceful country described in paragraph 1?
My biggest disagreement is this:
There is a power dynamic involved that you are glossing.
Israel is powerful enough to maintain the status quo indefinitely. And the status quo involves gobbling up acre after acre of land.
In this context, they have the land, they surely can keep it, and add to it. So, how exactly can the Palestinians grant them land they already occupy?
This is an amoral argument. There is no ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to it. You might as well go back in time and inform Sitting Bull that it is up to him whether he would like to give the white man the Black Hills.
Framing the argument this way might make sense from a moral perspective, but it doesn’t reflect the cold, hard, reality.
Ultimately, I don’t see a solution that satisfies those outraged by, or ‘makes right’, the initial land grab. We will not be giving the black hills back to the Sioux anytime soon either.
The two cases are not exactly analagous, but they do share important commonalities.
If Israel is ever going to live in peace, they will need to make a deal along the lines proposed in 2000. In my opinion, they will have to more generous than they were prepared to be in 2000.
To get them to that point, I would suggest a multinational negotiation that involves all relevent issues, and lots of investment commitments, trade and security agreements…
If Palestinians hold out and insist that ‘neither illegal settlements or the right of return are negotiable’ we will see a lot more heartbreak, and it is doubtful anything productive will result.
Israel’s “power” consists of what Sugar Daddy gives his fat little pitbull. Never mind that 25% of so of Israeli children go to bed hungry, never mind the unspeakable emotional and moral damage being done to that generation – from time to time there are even editorials about this in the Israeli press – what kind of existence can a people hope for, what kind of a nation can they hope to have, if they are forever condemned to live as authors of atrocity, if every step they take touches ground on which innocent blood has been shed?
One cannot simply decide that something is immoral but let’s go ahead and keep doing it anyway and expect any change in the situation, much less a positive outcome, in Iraq, in Palestine, or anywhere else.
The US is a pretty apt analogy. Look at the state it is in today. The great hope for the US is the reclaiming of the continent by the sons and daughters of the indigenous people of the Americas. Revanche du berceau is inevitable in Israel, too, but there must be a planet for those babies to be born.
Unfortunately, it has come to that. The stake is not only the survival of Israel, or even the US, but the world itself.
The culture of spend a dollar to kill my neighbor’s child instead of a dime to feed my own is simply not compatible with human life, especially in a world with such a generous supply of arsenals that are capable of destroying the entire planet.
very much that it would make any material difference in the relative power of Israel vis-a-vis its neighbors, if the U.S. stopped subsidizing Israel.
Nonetheless, I am all for eliminating all military aid to all of the region’s regimes and intelligence agencies.
Conversely, I would happily support a bilateral common defense pact between the US and Israel if it was part of a successful final settlement of the Palestinian issue.
If Israel is truly afraid to revert to pre-1967 borders, we could alleviate any such fears quite easily.
I agree with the seriousness of the problem, and that is why I am not interested in participating in another round of recriminations. If something can be done to bring peace, it must be done within the context of the possible. And that is my real point.
I agree with you on that. In fact, I think it is imperative.
Possible? I don’t know. It is imperative that the US cease aggression and disarm, period, and that will be done.
I believe it would have been better for most Americans if the US had done that long ago, and it would be better today, if it were done voluntarily, as opposed to being externally imposed.
To return to your topic, namely the media, if someone’s only source of info is the CrusadeNets, Israelis are all scary looking wild-eyed shrilling banshees with Russian accents.
Even American Jews, with exception of the notable, fleeting and singular flash of Adam Shapiro, are portrayed as extremist bloodthirsty zealots.
No mention is ever made of the Jews who risk their lives to save Palestinians from sharon’s thugs, smuggle in medicine, even claim Palestinian children are theirs, just to be able to get medical treatment for them. A while back there was a little Reuters spurt about some Rabbis that got beaten up by settlers, it was studiously ignored by CNN and co.
I think I have seen Yuri Avnery once on CNN since 2000, even Michael Lerner only once, and that was to discuss theology, I think. A visitor from space would never guess that there are Ethiopian-Israelis, Moroccan and Yemeni-Israelis, etc.
Right before the invasion of Iraq, I think they trotted out one or two Iraqi-Israelis to spout the party line, but you never see interviews with elderly indigenous Jews who left Israel when the Europeans came.
They are Middle Eastern people, who pray in Hebrew, but buy carrots and discuss sports and the neighbor’s new baby, scold their children and whisper words of love to their spouses in Arabic. They do not speak Yiddish, and they do not care for borsht.
When the thief parks his moving van in your driveway and starts loading your furniture into it should you enter into negotiations to retain “your half”? Should the “neighborhood watch” call a neighborhood meeting to discuss a “balanced” solution to the “dispute”?
And when, despite your protests, the thief loads all your furniture and drives away after how long a time does the furniture become his (in recognition of “facts on the ground”)?
What were the arguments against “white rule” in South Africa”?
What are the arguments against a “Christian State” in North America?
What was wrong about Aryan exceptionalism?
What is wrong about American exceptionalism?
How can one take a principled position against any of the above and still support . . .
These are all valid points. But let me try to state my position one more time.
The PLO has recognized Israel’s right to exist. Arafat accepted this. He didn’t suddenly change his mind about the legitimacy of the establishment of Israel. He faced facts.
We ought to be able to, at least, start a discussion by facing up to the same facts. But this is rarely done. Instead, Israel is compared to a thief, and therefore, they lose all claim to exist, even on the UN approved property they were given in 1948.
Israel will exist. That is a fact. We are all agreed, I hope, that Palestine will eventually exist.
Now, what will it take for Israel to provide for a viable, contiguous Palestine?
Fair or not, that’s the question. Every day that goes by arguing about history, is a day a new settlement is built or expanded, a new grievance is put in the heart of another Arab or Israeli.
Get on with the agreement. That’s my position.
Let us schedule a meeting, then, where I can tell you which half of your furniture is mine . . . might as well get this thing over with before it turns into a “confrontation” . . .
DH-
I’m asking this in all sincerity. Do you have a realistic proposal to offer that would end the violence?
And do you see the Palestinian’s interests as being advanced or undermined by the failure for an agreement to take place?
Sure. The Palestinians can commit mass suicide. Or they can all move to Jordan. Israel doesn’t need them, now that they’ve found that they can import South Asian “laborers” cheaper. And Israel can live happily ever after with everything west of the Jordan, until they want more, which won’t be long, because they already have all of the water and it’s not enough.
In all sincerity, I do not believe that rewarding evil is a solution to anything.
Should we “agree” to the Bolton nomination (just to put an end to the “fighting”)?
and I understand it.
My position is that sometimes the best thing to do is not available as an option. Sometimes, you have to accept that a just settlement of an issue cannot be arrived at. And then you have to do your best under the circumstances.
This applies to many legal disputes. It applies to personal relations. And it applies, IMO, to the Middle East conflict.
Sometimes the best solution is just to stop beating your head against a wall, and try something different.
If Israel is defined by the 1948 partition, and will accept that definition, and withdraw from all territory occupied subsequent to that partition, the “problem” in Palestine is over. That regardless the question “what gave the UN the right to “give” a part of Palestine to a race”.
that Israel could probably end the violence by agreeing to those terms, presumably in return for a series of security guarantees, trade agreements, water rights agreements etc.
But they won’t agree to do this. I don’t think any American President could convince them to agree to it. And I don’t think any American President could survive (politically) a serious effort to convince them to accept it.
Of course, anything is possible, right? However, a key word in my questions was ‘realistic’.
Realistically, I think pre-1967 borders with some land-swapping to allow for the suburban Jerusalem settlements…etc…is about as good as Palestine can get.
The important thing, for me, is that they get, not what is fair, but the best deal that is available. IMO, the best deal available is a worse deal with every passing day. That makes it all the more important that a deal is struck soon.
Before long, and the day may already be past, there will no longer be any sense in Palestine seeking the paltry state that is left to them.
There already is not even a “paltry state that is left to them” (under the sort of “agreement” that you propose).
What is the next “proposal” going to be . . . that the Iraqis agree to permanent US bases, American control of Iraqi airspace, and American control of Iraqi foreign and economic policy (and oil) because that’s the “best deal available”?
I disagree. The flaws of the 2000 proposal were mainly related to water rights, air space, and the quality of proposed land-swaps.
I also think the agreement suffered from too little coordination with all the regional parties.
Essentially, the agreement would have left Palestine as too dependent, and it would have left Israel feeling too isolated and too insecure.
But the actual landmass of the proposed Palestine would have exceeded ‘paltry’.
Getting terms as favorable as those proposed in 2000 will be very difficult now. I blame the Bush administration just as much as I blame Arafat and Sharon for this. They all have taken giants strides in the wrong direction over the last 5 years.
What percentage of the arable land, and of the water, was to have been “Palestine”?
I suggest that you examine the population distribution (Jew, Christian, Muslim) in Palestine at the time of the transfer from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate (or even at the time of the UN partition, for that matter) . . . and explain the shift to the land distribution in the 2000 proposal.
5-20 years (usually closer to 5), depending on the statute of limitations. 20-40 years for real estate.
Not that I think that it is right, or has any bearing on the Israel-Palestine situation. But you did ask.
Long term? I think a secular Jewish-Arab state may be the only viable solution in the long term. If you want to create a model democracy, that is the way to do it. Plus, despite the eventual demographic shift to a non-jewish majority, one could expect other than sectarian political alignments to develop in the intervening generation; Palestinians are often Christian or secular- and many Israelis are quite secular.
and, of course, on whether the adverse possession is contested . . .
But Israel claims that there is no limitation on property claims against the Nazis . . . so there should be no limitation on property claims against Israel, eh?
I have to say this is the most civil conversation I’ve seen on the issue lately and one of the most informative besides. Points to everyone I say! Lots of points!
That said, I have nothing much to add except that the quicker this is settled, even if it’s not a perfect solution, the better. At the rate Palestinians are being killed some thing has to be done as soon as possible.