reporting Israel and the Middle east

A thoughtful and fascinating think piece by a former AP reporter.


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

By Matti Friedman * |August 26, 2014 12:00 AM



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 [1] 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 [2] (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet [3] by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo [4] (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic [5], and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000 [6]), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India [7] or Thailand [8]. 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 [10] 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 [12] 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.

***

* Matti Friedman's work as a reporter has taken him to Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington, DC, and to conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and his second, about Israeli infantrymen holding an isolated outpost in Lebanon, will be published next year. He lives in Jerusalem.

And the sorry story continues...

Israel appropriates West Bank land for possible settlement use:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0GV0D020140831

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Prospero

A thoughtful and fascinating think piece by a former AP reporter.

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There is little insight and nothing fascinating in the garbage Prospero so kindly reproduced above.
To get the factual errors out of the way, the quote from Orwell is from the essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, published in 1943 not 1942. The claim that Ehud Olmert, Israel's former Prime Minister (convicted of bribery, is he still in jail?) offered a reasonable peace deal to the Palestinians only makes sense if one accepts that the Palestinians can only respond to Israel's offers because their own are not worthy of debate -which is what happened when Mahmoud Abbas contested the volume of land distribution Olmert offered....

The crux of this pseudo-journalism is that truth is the first casualty of war. That this might be a revelation to an Israeli in 2014 is of no surprise to those of us who think many Israelis live in a parallel universe in which Israel is not in the Middle East but some Americanized Middle Earth. You will not find in the article any mention of Netanyahu, or Liebermann - or Israeli Arabs because even though the latter have 'their own' Members of the Knesset, they don't really count as Israelis, not being Jews. Same goes for those thousands of domestic servants (are they from Sri Lanka, the Philippines? Who cares?) , maybe the ones who clean Friedman's apartment, do his laundry, and clear up after his wild journalist parties, not to mention the farm labourers from Thailand and China who pick the fruit on his table for a monthly wage that wouldn't cover a weekend in a Haifa disco.

No, this is not a story about Israel at all, but 'Jews', because anyone else living in Israel is a non-person- and this is from a liberal?

One wonders when Friedman was born. For most of the last 70 years the Palestinians have been the losers in the moral war. There was a time when people who wanted to be friends of the Palestinians were in despair at the way their military squads hi-jacked aeroplanes, murdered Prime Ministers, gunned down innocent passengers in airports, and kidnapped and murdered Olympic athletes -sympathy? Not really. Arafat a man of principle fighting the wicked Israelis? Are you serious? It was not until the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 and the first Intifada in 1988 that people began to wonder if the Palestinians had the raw deal. Some, not just me, thought that having Arafat as a leader was a raw enough deal.

The focus on Hamas doesn't tell us much either -no discussion of the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and why it has such a 'unique' view of Islam even though after 9/11 so many people became 'experts' on Islam but still don't know Osama bin Laden's political career began not with the Wahabi maniacs of his birthplace but the Brotherhood, until he broke with them because he thought they were too soft. And nothing about the role Israel itself played nurturing Hamas.

Just a sob-story from an idiot who should do his homework.

Let us not be blind to the true nature of Hamas and what they believe....
Here are someof the key sections of the Hamas Covenant regarding their views on the Jews (not just Israel). Following on, lest I be accused of being selective, the entire covenant. (and ps rude and abrasive Stavros - you want a post and lecture about Qutb?)


Article Twenty-Two:
For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
"So often as they shall kindle a fire for war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers." (The Table - verse 64).
The imperialistic forces in the Capitalist West and Communist East, support the enemy with all their might, in money and in men. These forces take turns in doing that. The day Islam appears, the forces of infidelity would unite to challenge it, for the infidels are of one nation.
"O true believers, contract not an intimate friendship with any besides yourselves: they will not fail to corrupt you. They wish for that which may cause you to perish: their hatred hath already appeared from out of their mouths; but what their breasts conceal is yet more inveterate. We have already shown you signs of their ill will towards you, if ye understand." (The Family of Imran - verse 118).
It is not in vain that the verse is ended with Allah's words "if ye understand."

Article Twenty-Eight:
The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.
Arab countries surrounding Israel are asked to open their borders before the fighters from among the Arab and Islamic nations so that they could consolidate their efforts with those of their Moslem brethren in Palestine.
As for the other Arab and Islamic countries, they are asked to facilitate the movement of the fighters from and to it, and this is the least thing they could do.
We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that "Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women."
Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."

The Hamas Covenant in full……
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

ref Stavros...."The first casualty...." is not the crux of his piece... rather more interesting is the light he shines on the vast journalistic forces deployed to cover israel compared with other parts of the region and the vast attention given to Gaza (the brutality of the attacks on which i do not defend ) when there is the largest refugee crisis in modern history as a result of Government action in Syria, (and approaching a quarter of a millon dead in Syria at the hands of its own government.) When people are being butchered in cold blood across iraq by the new Jihadists of ISIS, when this group who share common ground in its beliefs with the Brothehood and Hamas and other groups are destroying an order which survived Saddam, which survived the illegal US?UK invasion. When similar fundamentalist groups are committing atrocities in Africa and other parts of the world. How many terrorists adhering to Judaism have carried out mass murderous attacks in New York, Bombay, London, Madrid, Bali, Africa, Moscow etc....kidnapped vast groups of innocent women to turn them into "wives" (i.e. sex slaves) marched their prisoners enmass into the desert to behead them, posted pictures online of their not even adolescent sons holding the severed heads of the kaffir.....

Regarding the Filipinos, et who work as domestic servants, this is equally true across the Gulf in saudi Arabia and the Emirates, in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in Qatar and elsewhere in th Arab wold.

But of course the old hatred has never died and is constantly resurrected under a new name - and latches onto a cause on which all fair minded liberals can agree. It is more naked in Europe as the old fascists regroup. Consider the growing wave of attacks on jews around the world now. The burning of shops and synagogues etc.

I disagree with Israel's actions on many fronts. But when I hear the hyperbolic language used to describe their actions, I often think it reflects dislike of Jewish people more broadly.

The Nature of the Rallies, and the Explosion of Hate Crimes

Why do so many people at the rallies engage in discussion of gas chambers or yell at the top of their lungs "Hitler was right"? This is taking place in Britain and in France. People identified as Jewish are subject to routine harassment and in rare circumstances violence.

If an individual actually had a flag of Israel there would be people claiming this is a provocation for violence. If they were attacked, there would be people claiming the attack was politically motivated and not based on deeper-seated prejudice. Yet nobody would defend the right of an individual to attack someone carrying the flag of any other state.

There are also no-go zones for Orthodox Jews now throughout major parts of Europe and probably much of the Middle East (excepting Iran and other places where there are Jewish populations). The other day someone argued to me that a Western Jew being followed by someone hissing to simulate the sound of a gas chamber didn't deserve sympathy because the Palestinians are suffering more. But this in itself presumes that this Jewish victim is somehow culpable for the acts of Israel. Why else would the two be juxtaposed like that?

On this latter point, I often hear anti-zionists say that there is a difference between Zionism and Judaism and that they can be anti-zionist without being anti-semitic. Well this is true in the abstract. But if there is a rise in violence against Jews in response to Gaza and the causes of that violence are trivialized because of the conflict in the Middle East, that distinction is completely blurred.

Invoking Genocide

The people who accuse Israel of committing genocide, or who pretend they've invented a nifty way to talk about genocide and the third reich at the same time as Israel are engaging in bad faith discourse. If we can agree that Israel is not committing genocide by any reasonable definition we've come up with, then where is this accusation coming from? Is there a tendency to label all such conflicts genocide when they're not? If it's not random it must come from somewhere.

In my view, claiming Israel is committing genocide is a veiled way of undermining what was done to Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Those doing it are basically tired of hearing about anti-semitism or the Holocaust. They want to be able to say, "Look at these massive hypocrites. They complain about genocide but are committing it themselves." I've even heard it used as a retroactive justification for the Holocaust. "Look at what they're doing in Gaza...we can understand where the Nazis were coming from."

Now, you may be thinking these people are marginal. But what if they keep these views to themselves in respectable circles but express them freely when surrounded by like-minded folks?

Consider that in the thread about Israel, three people claimed Israel was committing genocide. In the thread about Syria, which has been ongoing I imagine for over a year, zero people made the same charge. We can always point to minor differences in the nature of the conflicts, but this is really casuistry. Nothing in politics is subject to perfect comparison.

Ask yourself: If the response to Israel in the media and on the streets were subject to empirical analysis, would that analysis find that it was muted, proportionate, or loud? If you compare it to other conflicts, is the treatment of Jews in the diaspora similar to how Russians, Syrians, and Muslims are treated during similar conflicts or is it characterized by more intemperate rhetoric, calls to violence and collective punishment? Because hate crimes are measurable.

I for one cannot imagine a Russian supermarket being ransacked, a Russian community center being vandalized, and people invoking the name of some historical mass-murderer of Russians on the streets because of Russia's actions in Crimea.

As for the original article, I guess it's no surprise that my views trend towards Stavros' response. As I read each "theme" of the author, the word victim sprang into mind each time. It's like a mindless divining rod that guides some writers. Oh, and the author has the balls to think he's revealing some hidden truths. By the way, as much as I criticized the Amos Oz interview, Oz is smarter and more perceptive than this guy.

As is often the case, the debate is better than what ignites it.

Broncofan, when you ask for proportionality, I have to ask for context in response. In what other part of the world in any other era of history, has 6 million people moved in on a populated area, took the land, received $100 billion of aide from a benefactor to assist them in keeping the land, and received virtually no criticism from the benefactor for hostile actions relative to the indigenous people.

I'll say this for my fellow Americans, when they engaged in hostile actions toward an indigenous people in return for land, they did it on their own dime.

So yeah, if I'm the head of AP, I pay 40 people in Israel and 1 in Syria. Well, maybe not 40 to 1, but is 10 to 1 not reasonable considering the context?

As for attacks on Russian markets in retribution for its actions in the Crimea, I don't think it's a good analogy. Think about American's reactions toward the Japanese in the early 40's or Muslims/Arabs after 9/11. In fact, compare the reaction of WWII era Americans toward Japanese vs Germans. Big difference. The Gerrys never actually touched the home country so were given a pass, stateside. Who knew we would care so much about a then, US territory that would be the birthplace of Barack Obama.

Upon re-read, my analogy might not be so good either, as you were talking about Jews abroad being subject to taunts and violence from people who aren't necessarily directly connected to the Palestinians and neighboring countries. I guess the directness or indirectness of the impact of the I-P conflict justifiably relates to distance. Not sure the violence against Orthodox Jews is quite as extreme in USA or Australia as it is in Europe where the impact is probably much more direct.

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Originally Posted by Odelay

Upon re-read, my analogy might not be so good either,

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I don't know what you mean when you say either. I was talking about minority populations in countries that are not parties to the conflict. The fact that the United States has interests that are openly adverse to Russia only bolsters my point, since I don't imagine people of Russian background would be threatened here despite that.

I am also talking about acts of violence and intimidation against Jews that span entire regions. Many Middle Eastern countries have no Jewish population but had significant such populations in the past. I don't buy the claim that Zionism provided an impetus to move since Jews in other regions tended to stay when welcome (see France where only now significant aliyah is taking place). With the exception of the West Bank where there are indeed a lot of Orthodox extremists, I imagine Muslims are fairly safe in Israel proper. How safe would a Jew be in Gaza? If we expand outside the conflict zone, how safe would an Orthodox Jew be walking around in the evening in Egypt? I hear suspicious foreigners in Egypt are referred to as Jewish spies...Egypt has had a peace treaty with Israel for 25 years.

The taxpayer argument strikes me as very weak. The amount of money we spent on Iraq in the last decade probably exceeds everything we've ever given to Israel. We also give significant aid to Egypt and to Pakistan. The conflict in Syria has spilled over into Iraq. Iraq doesn't just differ by number of dead but also by character. We are talking about killing fields...trenches where people are forced to lie down and are shot in the head. Others are beheaded. If people don't see a qualitative difference between this and Gaza there is really something wrong. Britain and France also have invested in Iraq. The taxpayer argument works best on the United States but falls apart in other regions where Jewish people are subject to even worse violence and the noise level and protests of Israel are even more severe.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Odelay

The Gerrys never actually touched the home country so were given a pass, stateside.

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That's right. An injustice was committed against the Japanese at internment camps. It's recognized by everyone (everyone who is rational: not the Supreme Court at the time or Michelle Malkin) as an injustice. It also took place during a war between the United States and Japan, which does nothing to justify it but does justify the distinction when making an analogy.

Edit: I want to point out not only are suspicious foreigners called Jewish spies in Egypt but when Lara Logan was attacked in Tahrir Square she was called a Jew...and I've heard Western journalists in the region are frequently called Jews so I am not talking about any sort of rational suspicion of Israeli spies. I know Israel has an intrusive system of espionage.

Financial cost of the Iraq War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Broncofan, you do realize that Jihadists aren't exclusively clustered around the borders of Israel, right? They're all over Europe. Far less so in America - with that ocean thing and billions spent on homeland security. You don't see European Jihadists motivated by Israel actions against Palestinians? You don't see Europeans maybe having some rational fear about the Jihadists amongst them, and rational pique against Israel who seem to motivate them?

And as for Jews being not affiliated with Israel, how does that work? No matter where you live in the world, as a Jew, you're automatically conferred dual citizenship in Israel. I don't think I've ever seen the t-shirt stating "I'm a Jew but I disavow my Israeli citizenship".

My analogy might have been clumsy, but Broncofan I find it interesting that you ignored the first part of the context that I stated, i.e. a people invading the indigenous territory of another people, and never bothering to stop. Does America deserve shame for its actions in enacting manifest destiny in its early history? Absolutely. But that doesn't absolve Israel's actions just because we haven't shined a harsh enough light on America's history.

I know the concept of worse violence occurring outside of Israel's borders is a big deal for you, but I ask why? Violence by Israel against Palestinians is violence against another people. How is any violence excusable?

No violence is excusable. Where have I justified violence against Palestinians? I said the claim that violence against Jewish people and Palestinians needs to be juxtaposed is often an excuse to downplay anti-semitism. What is being done is that Israel takes an action and those who do not have a say in their democracy are blamed for it. That should be counter to any decent person's concept of fairness. Being eligible for citizenship does not mean a person is a citizen.

I find your last two statements puzzling. I said I disagreed with Israel's actions in Gaza, and that I thought their policies have been severely wrong-headed. I am against any form of collective punishment. I think your attitude is one of accepting a blurring of boundaries of personal responsibility. In two threads, your stance seems to be that I should condemn Israel's policies (which I've done), say nothing when people misguidedly label it genocide (which I don't do), and pretend that harassment and violence against Jewish people in Europe is somehow natural or acceptable (which I also don't do).

What you say about Jihadists in Europe being upset by Israel is perfect victim blaming. People don't claim that a rape victim wearing a short skirt should not be blamed for wearing the short skirt because they don't think a woman wearing a short skirt might be more likely a target of a rapist. They say it because people are responsible for taking wrongful actions regardless of how enticed they feel by their victim...and women have a right to wear short skirts. In the case of Israel, if someone feels that Israel's actions give them an excuse to firebomb a synagogue in Paris, the onus is on them for taking that action. Is the firebombing more likely to take place during a conflict with Israel? Of course. Someone is more likely to be a victim of mugging in the evening. But people take walks in the evening, and Jewish people as individuals have little (frequently zero) control over what Israel does.

I haven't seen that t-shirt because it would again be counter to any decent person's concept of social justice to require someone to disclaim allegiance to another country (or citizenship they are eligible for but have not availed themselves of) because of their ethnic and religious background. It would also be wrongful to make Muslims speak out against ISIS when there should be no assumption they support it.

The reason I ignored your comment about the founding of Israel is because I found it unclear whether you were talking about the founding of Israel pursuant to the partition plan or the occupation.

The reason I am against juxtaposing violence against two distinct groups is because I am against collective punishment. If an extremist Muslim organization kills five hundred people and some nut in the U.S decides to take the life of an American-Muslim, the response is not that the extremists Muslim organization killed more people. I can't make you see that if you don't.

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Originally Posted by Prospero

ref Stavros...."The first casualty...." is not the crux of his piece... rather more interesting is the light he shines on the vast journalistic forces deployed to cover israel compared with other parts of the region and the vast attention given to Gaza (the brutality of the attacks on which i do not defend ) when there is the largest refugee crisis in modern history as a result of Government action in Syria, (and approaching a quarter of a millon dead in Syria at the hands of its own government.) When people are being butchered in cold blood across iraq by the new Jihadists of ISIS, when this group who share common ground in its beliefs with the Brothehood and Hamas and other groups are destroying an order which survived Saddam, which survived the illegal US?UK invasion. When similar fundamentalist groups are committing atrocities in Africa and other parts of the world. How many terrorists adhering to Judaism have carried out mass murderous attacks in New York, Bombay, London, Madrid, Bali, Africa, Moscow etc....kidnapped vast groups of innocent women to turn them into "wives" (i.e. sex slaves) marched their prisoners enmass into the desert to behead them, posted pictures online of their not even adolescent sons holding the severed heads of the kaffir.....

But of course the old hatred has never died and is constantly resurrected under a new name - and latches onto a cause on which all fair minded liberals can agree. It is more naked in Europe as the old fascists regroup. Consider the growing wave of attacks on jews around the world now. The burning of shops and synagogues etc.

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Prospero, as a reasonable and intelligent man you have seen for yourself how in your lifetime both the Arabs and the Jews have been targets of vitriolic abuse and violence, just as there have been times when they were the guilty parties, as if each side is condemned to mimic the other, as if there was no other tune to dance to.

You have been selective by quoting the Charter of Hamas rather than, say, the Charter or Constitution of Likud (consider the meaning of 'The land of Israel' in that document) in your desperate need not to be associated with any real criticism of Israel, perhaps because you have been drawn into the vortex of the existential fallacy that has been an essential part of the Likud's war against freedom since it was first elected in 1977.

Begin, Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu collapsed the whole of the politics of Israel into this existential dilemma in which everything that happens in Israel is an either/or life or death struggle. Thus, if someone criticises Israel, because Likud insists that Israel is a Jewish state, then they argue that in fact it is not Israel that is being targeted but Jews, and that this then becomes part of the 'old hatred'. But what this does is make a sound critique of politics almost impossible, and also has the effect for the foreign audience for whom this is intended, of diverting attention away from real political issues which matter for many Israelis, such as immigration, the incorporation of Orthodox Jews into the military, or the lack of affordable housing for young couples in the metro area around Tel-Aviv.

The question which a good journalist would ask next is -Why is the Likud so obsessed with external affairs, as if nothing else mattered? Because the whole pivot of Israeli politics since 1967 has been skewed by the occupation, by the catastrophe of occupying a land in which Israel is hated by 99% of the people under its control. To understand the tragic nature of this situation you need to accept that the whole of the debate on modern Israel is now seen through the prism of the 1967 War and its aftermath.

Since that time, the original, Zionist humanitarian elements that were embedded in the foundation of Israel in 1948 (even though Zionism is a problematic mix of ideas), have been sold out for a crude nationalism that was always there, and was the ideology of the most violent and uncomprising 'terrorists'/'guerillas'/'freedom fighters' (eg the Lehi), but was considered by the Labour elite at the time as a marginal factor that would not become mainstream. It has meant that what was at one time argued to be a moral and political right for the Jewish people that they would willingly share with non-Jews (cf the works of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes that I cited in the Palestine thread), has been replaced by an emphasis on the Holocaust as if Israel was now in a comparable situation. It also means you have a bigot like Avigdor Lieberman becoming Foreign Secretary when his stated views about Arabs are so offensive that in Europe or North America he would not even be selected to run for office never mind being elected -where was the outrage over the inclusion of this man in the Israeli government?

Just as serious is that this anti-politics has infected the liberals so that they are now caught up in both their own mixed record and their inability to detach themselves from the dominant rhetoric of nationalism, as if to do so would be un-patriotic, and true to form, those Israeli historians who do criticise past governments are derided as un-patriotic traitors, the most recent being Ahron Bregman because of his book Cursed Victory (see one of the reviews on Amazon to get a flavour of the flak).

There is a clue to this problem in a remark that Friedman makes, in parenthesis, as if it were not a fundamental factor: (I am a believer in the importance of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.)
Does this mean he is exempt from responsibility because he is not a political sympathiser of Likud or its coalition partners? Is there some magic wand that he can wave to exempt himself from the latest round of bloodletting, as if his liberal politicians in Israel over the last 60 years had nothing to do with the illegal occupation(s) of the West Bank and Gaza District, no involvement in illegal settlement building, no responsibility for the expulsion of Arabs from their land, no responsibility for demolishing homes as collective punishment if one member of the family was designated a 'terrorist', no responsibility for the detention of Arabs without trial, torture and murder?

Taking sides for or against Israel or the Palestinians is an option that I reject because the values that are important to me are not in display in this Israeli government, or Hamas, or any other government in the region. Freedom is too important to be left to jackasses like Netanyahu or Abbas.

1967 was the key moment that has led to the current crisis. Before 1967 a secular Arab nationalism was dominant in the region, after it a widespread loss of faith in secular politics encouraged the growth of the political Islam which had been dormant since the 19th century -or suppressed in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria. I take the view shared by Olivier Roy that the Islamic movement has lapsed but that there is no coherent alternative, either religious or secular around which the Arabs can unite while the actual experience of the state endowed by Anglo-French imperialism is now in a crisis, though we still don't know if it is terminal.
IS has stepped into a vacuum, but its behaviour merely promises more of the same dictatorship that has cursed the Arabs since kings and dictators were installed by the British and the French in 1920-21. Thus:
-Dictators ruled without consent, IS rules without consent.
-Dictators controlled the media, IS controls the media.
-Dictatorships privileged the military and embedded it in the economy, IS privileges the military and seeks to embed it in local economies.
-Dictatorships were notorious for their savage violence, IS is notorious for its savage violence.
-Dictatorships vilified their enemy while trading with them, IS vilifies its enemies while trading with them.
-Arab dictators have claimed descent from Muhammad (the Hashemites, the Kings of Morocco, Saddam Hussein), thus 'Caliph Ibrahim' now wants to be called Ibrahim al-Baghdadi al-Qurayshi because he too is a descendant of the Prophet, which makes you wonder why they are at war with the Partisans of Ali (Shi'at Ali) who think the Caliph should be a relative of the Prophet....

The extremes have taken over the centre ground, in Israel and the Arab states, and we are living with the consequences, and will be for some time to come.

(Note -I am in the middle of a major project at the moment and cannot post on a regular basis).

Good arguments Stavros (though I think the deep seated anti-semitism of the Hamas document is unmatched in official terms in Israel). Certainly Lieberman represents an abhorrent racism.The rise of the Sephardic domination of Israeli politics is also a key element.

As regards the tendency to absolutism that surely predates modern times and the crude imperialistic division of the region under Sykes-Picot - and is deeply embedded in some dominant strands of islam (in particular the Wahhabist/Salafist tradition which is intolerant of all but the very purest interpretation of the Qur'an and underpins the ideology of all the major islamist movements around the globe)

We are wrestling with an apparently intractable problem: has dictatorship in the Middle East been a reflection of age-old enmities, or does it create them? You could ask of Scotland, is the desire for independence a reflection of their feelings for 'the auld enemy' or is this latest wave of separatist feeling something that has been created in more recent times, and is related to the collapse of the vote for the Conservative Party in Scotland, a disenchantment with Westminster, a belief that the financial crisis of 2008 showed that Scotland cannot rely on London for its security, and so on?

What is striking about modern Israel is that the developmental years from 1948 to 1977 enabled Israelis to create a civil society in which they had space to move and create independent of government, and must be one reason why Israel has achieved so much in science and engineering, in the arts and entertainment, and may also explain why so many Israelis are actually disenchanted with their own politicians, in the sense that the criticism Odelay has made of politicians in the US also applies to Israel -but note too that this experience was different from the Mandate when the British dominated politics and were reluctant to open politics for all out of a fear of sectarian conflict, which happened anyway, and possibly because the more the British tried to suppress political expression, the more aggressive was the response, though the vexing problem of immigration was undoubtedly a toxic factor.

But if you then look at the Arab states, the British stifled political expression in TransJordan, while struggling to contain it in Iraq; the French faced numerous rebellions in Syria throughout their rule, and even after the independence of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, the 'west' continued to intervene in a way that they never did in Israel so that whereas Israel had that space in which to breathe and live free from intervention, no such luxury was afforded the Arabs who also, like it or not, resented the degree to which the imperial powers had lumbered them with states that served a minority interest, and fought against it.

In the case of oil, what could be more stark than the failure of Iranian nationalisation in 1951? Far from being an intervention to prevent extremists taking power, Musadeq was Prime Minister in a democratically elected Majlis, and while he blundered over the nationalisation because he did not anticipate the success of the world-wide boycott and thus could not sell anyone Iranian oil, the British view was that the oil belonged to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company just as it would later insist that the Suez Canal belonged to the shareholders of the Suez Canal company and not the Egyptians. Iranian oil was a crucial source of foreign exchange for the UK in the straitened circumstances of the post-war, so this really was an 'oil war' except that what happened was the coup you know about rather than an actual war.
The USA, the British and the French were involved in interventions in Iraq in 1958, in Lebanon in 1958, in the Yemen and Oman in the 1960s and so on -but no such interventions ever took place against Israel even when it was in illegal occupation of the Sinai peninsula, bombing targets in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, not to mention the mysterious case of the USS Liberty during the 1967 War. The Arabs are aware of all these incursions, but again, one wonders if the culture of dictatorship and violence in the Middle East is a reflection of its failed politics or contributes to it. I suspect it is a mixture of both.

As for IS, the link to an interview with Roy from a year or so ago offers a different perspective from what is being debated in most of our media.
https://cup.columbia.edu/static/Inte...ier-globalized

Joe Klein has reviewed Lawrence Wright's study of the Camp David peace talks, looks like a book worth reading: review is here:

Elusive Peace

‘Thirteen Days in September,’ by Lawrence Wright

On March 11, 1978, 11 Palestinian militants came ashore in Zodiac boats north of Tel Aviv and set about murdering as many Israelis as they could with guns and grenades. They hijacked a taxi and two buses; 38 were killed, including 13 children. The massacre was intended as a provocation; a disproportionate Israeli response was assumed. And three days later, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, which was then controlled by the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat. “Those who killed Jews in our times cannot enjoy impunity,” the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin said. More than a thousand Palestinian civilians were killed; more than 100,000 were left homeless. The world, including President Jimmy Carter, was horrified. Following another invasion in 1982, Israel would occupy parts of southern Lebanon until May 2000. The similarity to recent events in Gaza is striking, of course. The Middle East never changes.
Except, very occasionally, when it does. A mere six months after the Lebanon incursion, Begin and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, would negotiate peace between their countries, having been hounded into a very tentative comity by Carter during 13 days spent in isolation at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park. It was not a happy two weeks for the participants; Begin and Sadat could barely look at each other; no one sang “Kumbaya.” A great deal of what Carter and Sadat wanted to accomplish — a comprehensive plan to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands — had to be set aside. But a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, the region’s principal adversaries, was beaten into shape during marathon sessions of what can only be called bare-knuckle diplomacy. The final peace treaty was signed at the White House on March 26, 1979, after even more haggling. Thirty-five years later, the peace between Israel and Egypt stands, sometimes unsteadily, as the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Lawrence Wright’s “Thirteen Days in September” is a magnificent book with an unusual provenance. It began as a play called “Camp David,” which Wright wrote at the behest of Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s old media meister. The negotiations were a natural piece of theater, filled with strange and colorful characters, constant plot twists and deathbed-dark humor; the play was mounted successfully at Washington’s Arena Stage in the spring of 2014. But Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of our finest nonfiction writers, wasn’t satisfied. The Camp David process was more than just stirring drama; it was a hinge in the history of the region, and a tutorial in negotiating strategy. Yet, aside from the memoirs of the participants, it has received relatively skimpy consideration by historians.
Perhaps the greatest service rendered by “Thirteen Days in September” is the gift of context. In his minute-by-minute account of the talks Wright intersperses a concise history of Egyptian-Israeli relations dating from the story of Exodus. Even more important is Wright’s understanding that Sadat, Begin and Carter were not just political leaders, but exemplars of the Holy Land’s three internecine religious traditions. Carter, the born-again Christian, “had come to believe that God wanted him to bring peace.” Sadat, a devout Muslim, brought along his deputy prime minister and astrologer, Hassan al-Tohamy, a Sufi mystic, because “he has something godly in him and he can see the unknown.” Tohamy reported “prophetic dreams or conversations he had just had with angels.” The rest of the Egyptian delegation thought he was mad.
Menachem Begin was the most secular of the three. His Judaism was litigious, drawn from the Talmudic tradition of worrying the law to distraction, fighting over every codicil. But even Begin had his mystical moments. When Carter proposed that Israel allow a Jordanian flag to fly over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Begin responded, “Never. . . . What will happen when the Messiah comes?” He agreed to participate in the negotiations because “President Carter knows the Bible by heart, so he knows to whom this land by right belongs.”
In most thumbnail accounts of Camp David, Sadat emerges the hero, with good reason. He’s the visionary who started the reconciliation process by going to Jerusalem in 1977; he pays for the treaty with his life when he is assassinated in 1981. He is a more sympathetic character than Begin, a sourpuss extremist. But Sadat also has a clear, tough-minded sense of what was about to happen: He would offer a comprehensive peace plan for the region, Begin would reject it, Carter would pressure the Israelis to accept it. If Begin didn’t cave, he would be held responsible for the failure of the summit. Begin didn’t cave on anything except giving up the Sinai Peninsula, but Sadat did the unthinkable — he recognized Israel — and emerged from the haggling an almost saintly presence (in the West, at least), and Egypt gained crucial economic and military aid from the United States.
It is a measure of Wright’s fairness and subtlety that Begin comes across as an almost-sympathetic character. He isn’t dashing; he isn’t eloquent; he doesn’t smile. But there is integrity and brilliance to his stubbornness. He is a former terrorist who believes that not just Gaza and the West Bank, but also the Sinai Peninsula, are integral to Israel. He knows he’s going to have to give up Sinai, but he refuses to relinquish the Jewish settlements there. This is a central issue in the talks, resolved in a bolt of cleverness by Israel’s Moshe Dayan, who suggests that Begin pass the decision along to his parliament, the Knesset. Carter allows the gambit, with a private vow from Begin that he won’t campaign against the proposition.
In the end, Camp David is Jimmy Carter’s triumph, although it is not a transcendent one. Somehow, Carter, the unlovable Sunday school teacher, always eludes the credit he deserves. He conducts the discussions thoughtfully, at one point asking Begin and Sadat to talk about their days as political prisoners, which they do. But this doesn’t create a bond. He asks them to dress casually for the talks — Begin refuses — as if informality can induce intimacy. He brings no eloquence to the table, and little charm. He is a brilliant, dogged negotiator, but a self-righteous and curiously joyless one. He has staked his presidency on the talks and somehow manages to hold them together for 13 days, despite regular attempts by Begin and Sadat to walk away. He gets into shouting matches with both men, and at critical moments threatens them — effectively — with the loss of American aid and friendship.
But he is also able to rise above the clutter of the moment and change tactics. He arrives at Camp David expecting to be a facilitator, but by Day 5 he realizes that he has to take the lead. He proposes a detailed American peace plan, which becomes the template for the final agreement. (Barack Obama has been far more cautious — unwilling to present a detailed American plan, unwilling to call the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the mountaintop.)
Wright reminds us that Carter’s Camp David was an act of surpassing political courage. At a time of double-digit inflation, sluggish economic growth, soaring gas prices and a real-time revolution in Iran, he dropped everything for two weeks and took a long shot at creating peace. He won his treaty, but lost his presidency because most Americans blamed him for not doing more to address the things they really cared about. There is a stubborn myopia to Carter’s quest, but also integrity and real honor — and now, a 35-year track record of a grudging but effective peace. Lawrence Wright makes a masterly case that it is time we gave Jimmy Carter full credit for all the lives his inspired diplomacy saved.

THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
By Lawrence Wright
Illustrated. 345 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/bo...ttom-well&_r=0