Mainstream Media Coverage of Israel and Palestine
Philip Weiss
“Mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine.”
Delinda
Hanley: Well, next, Philip Weiss is an American journalist who is
the founder and co-editor with Adam Horowitz of Mondoweiss, the
widely read news website devoted to covering American foreign policy
in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
Phil began his career in mainstream journalism, writing for The
New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire
and the New York Observer. In 2006, while at the
Observer, he began writing a daily blog called Mondoweiss.
As he began to explore more deeply the relationship between American
Jews and Israel, however, the Observer became increasingly
uncomfortable. So in 2007 Phil established Mondoweiss as an
independent blog, and today it is a valuable source of news and
opinion from a variety of authors. We are so very glad to have Phil
here with us today to share his observations on The New York
Times in the coverage of Israel over the years. Please join me
in welcoming Philip Weiss.
Philip Weiss: Thank you very much. Thanks, Delinda. I just have to
say that Rula’s invocation of the Vietnam War and what journalists
did around the Vietnam War was very important to me, too, as a young
journalist. I remember that I was at the Philadelphia Daily News
30 years, 35 years ago, and the guy at the next desk had read
Harrison Salisbury’s book about the Pentagon Papers, and that was
when The New York Times took on the government. The
government tried to shut down The New York Times’ publication of
this vital document that explained the history of the Vietnam War,
and The Times stood up to the government and it helped to
bring—it took a while, but it was very important in bringing an end
to the American participation in that disaster.
My friend at the next desk said, let’s write to Harrison Salisbury,
you know, we’re never going to get a story like that. So we wrote
this letter and we said, “Dear Mr. Salisbury: How do you plan your
career”—we were just young ambitious journalists—“how do you plan
your career so that you can get ready to take on the government and
have a big story like that?” And what I remember about his letter is
that he said—just hang in there, learn to be a good journalist, work
hard and someday you will get your big story.
The thing I find really moving about that now is that, in fact, we
did get that big story. We got it in the shape of the Iraq war and
just what American foreign policy has been in the last 10 years, and
The New York Times has been AWOL on that one. I think I may
have said this the last time—that gives tremendous power to our
community, if you think about how much information the people in
this community are developing in the way that journalists are
supposed to develop, traditionally have developed, information
that’s vital.
Even this fact that both Rula and Colonel Wilkerson said earlier,
about the extent to which the aid package to Egypt is essentially a
bribe to keep them or to hold them—this is a central fact of our
foreign policy that just you won’t find stated, and that is on par
with anything that was in the Pentagon Papers in terms of a vital
understanding.
So I’m here to talk about The New York Times chiefly
because The Times sort of sets the parameters and the tone
for the mainstream discussion. I did once do some work at The
Times, I worked as a staffer at The Times Magazine,
and I thought I would just anatomize The Times a little and
then move on to the whys of it—why is The Times sort of in
the tank for Israel?
So the newspaper’s been a reliable Israel supporter for a long time
now, and we keep looking for signs of a thaw. I’m going to be
hopeful, but let me first describe the character of that support. As
I go through my remarks, I’ll be using the term Zionism. I think
that Zionism is embedded; it’s a very important force at The New
York Times. What I mean by that is some degree of commitment to
the idea of the need for a Jewish state and the need to preserve a
Jewish state in Israel.
So The Times has at least three columnists who are openly Zionist.
Those are David Brooks, who has said that he gets gooey eyed about
Israel when he thinks about Israel, and he has been there a dozen
times. That was a couple of years ago, I think he’s been there more
since. Roger Cohen, who says that Israel is justified by the
Holocaust, but he can also be somewhat critical of the occupation.
He is openly a Zionist, which I think is a very good thing, in as
much as he’s frank about his adherence to the ideology. And then
there’s Paul Krugman, who is a liberal Zionist who says he’s
critical of Israel but never expresses it. He says it as little as
possible. You would think that winning a Nobel Prize and having a
Times column would give you freedom, but Krugman surely demonstrates
Tolstoy’s principle that the higher you get, the less freedom you
have.
I’m leaving that other stratosphere of columnist, Tom Friedman, out
of this list because, while Friedman began his career as an Israel
supporter back in the suburbs of Minneapolis doing chalk-talks on
the Six-Day War at his high school, I think that one of the
principles of this conference is that people can change. I sense
that Friedman has fallen away from the ideology in as much as he has
said, for instance, that Congress is bought and paid for by the
Israel lobby—which is a statement that, if a non-Jew made it, would
brand them as an anti-Semite. I think the standard is not being nice
enough about Israel.
He has also said recently that the two-state solution is a failure
and that that failure was produced by, among others, Netanyahu and
Sheldon Adelson and the right-wing Jewish influence, openly speaking
of right-wing Jewish influence. That was a very important column and
I will return to it, because I think it’s the heart of what I always
understood journalism to be. Not quite the heart, because I always
understood journalism to be what’s new, true and important. And it’s
true and it’s important, it’s just not new what Friedman was telling
us.
So I think you may know that David Brooks’ son served in the Israeli
military and he’s one of four Times reporters who have had children
who served in the Israeli military. The most celebrated example of
this was Ethan Bronner, who was the previous Jerusalem bureau chief.
His son entered while he was writing for The Times and it was
shortly after Cast Lead, when Israel slaughtered 1,400 Palestinians
in Gaza. It caused Palestinian activists in a truly masterful act of
branding to paint The New York Times logo on the apartheid
wall. I don’t know if you saw images of this, but it was just kind
of wonderful.
Bronner introduced a guessing game into journalism about unspoken
ideological agendas. This was, is he or is he not a Zionist? I think
that I participated in this guessing game. A lot of journalists in
the blogosphere did. When he left the newspaper ultimately in the
last year or so, he left less and less doubt about this question,
and resolved it entirely when he hosted right-wing Israeli military
figures at the 92nd Street Y in New York on a program that was about
the “incredible courage of Israeli soldiers.”
So we started the same guessing game when Ethan Bronner’s successor,
Jodi Rudoren, took over after him in Jerusalem. I remember that I
was a little bit more credulous than others—I’m not proud of
this—and I sort of thought, oh, she’s going to be fair. But what we
found was that she wrote totally out of the Israeli Jewish
experience. That was really the community that she’s openly admitted
that she related to more, but she made little effort to get outside
that comfort zone. So there were long pieces about young Israelis
getting tattoos when their grandparents had had Auschwitz tattoos.
There was an episode where she went to Gaza in 2012 and on Facebook
said that Palestinians were ho-hum about the death of family
members. She went to a funeral in Gaza and observed that
Palestinians were, quote, ho-hum about the death of family members.
It was a shocking incident and it was something she had to apologize
for, but it wasn’t a prejudice that she seemed to want to shed or to
get out of. Recently she gave some podcasts where she said that she
spoke one word of Arabic. Actually, I’m sure she speaks more Arabic,
in that there are a lot of Arabic words in our language—alcohol and
algebra to begin with [laughter]—but it’s a reflection of her
deepening incuriosity about the Palestinian experience. It’s kind of
White Citizens Council journalism that you see in The Times
a lot, and that she exhibited.
So I remember, because she was more adept at this guessing game
about her commitment to Israel as a Jewish state, she said, the only
ist I am is a journalist, when she was asked about this question.
I’m not a Zionist. The only ist I am is a journalist. I remember
that I once wrote that she comes out of a Zionist background. She
was upset about even that, being identified even in that fashion,
and said, well, why would you say that? I said, well, you’ve said to
Jewish groups when you’ve spoken to them that you are familiar with
the American Jewish experience, and the American Jewish concern for
Israel, and you came to Israel when you were in high school with
United Synagogue Youth. You know, that’s a Zionist background. And
she said, you know, I went to Lake Winnipesaukee too. [Laughter]
So it was one of the most disingenuous deflections I’ve ever
experienced, because those trips by United Synagogue Youth and other
Jewish organizations were highly ideological in character. They
weren’t like vacations in the White Mountains. It was a measure of
how obtuse she could be that she would make that kind of statement.
In my one meeting with Rudoren, I told her that her great challenge
was to tell Americans that—this was four years ago—that the
two-state solution is over. And that if you just go to the West
Bank, you’d see that it’s over. They won’t be able to make a viable
Palestinian state there. Those people don’t want to leave.
Just a little bit of an ad, some of the journalism I’ve done myself
lately about the West Bank, which we have out in the adjoining room.
I said that she had to explain this in a lead [to an article]. This
was a vital function of a journalist, to bring this news, and she
never did that. It’s not just that I made this challenge. You’ll
notice recently that John Kerry and Dan Shapiro from the State
Department, they both said we’re approaching this one-state reality.
Well, they’ve gotten no support from the leading American newspaper
to explain what that one-state reality is.
So The Times has sort of abandoned this kind of vital
journalistic function of telling people what’s going on in this kind
of most important American relationship that exists. I think that
that, again, is one of the great things about this Tom Friedman
column, was he said the Israelis don’t want to leave. They’ve been
supported in the West Bank. They’ve been supported by right-wing
American Jews. It’s going to be an unending civil war, with greater
and greater isolation of Israel on the world stage. All true—and
this has been true for the last five, eight years, I think, at
least, and yet now a Times columnist and secretary of state
are the people who are bringing this information.
So in the time I have left—and, by the way, I think that there’s
something very cruel about maintaining the illusion about the
two-state solution, because it’s saying that, oh, these horrible
conditions, they’re just temporary. These people, five million
people under some form of apartheid or ghettoization in Gaza, in a
prison, we’re going to take care of that soon. So it’s prevaricating
about tremendous human rights atrocities all the time. It’s White
Citizens Council journalism.
If you think about the great Jewish seer Rabbi Hillel, who said if
not now, when—this is a situation which demands if not now, when?
And the position of The Times is kind of, whenever. The
position of these people who preserve the illusion of the two-state
solution is kind of whenever with respect to a tremendous amount of
suffering, as Susie so beautifully showed us.
So I brought in the Jewish piece, the parochial Jewish piece. I’m
one of the American Jews who is in the conference today, and in my
parochial capacity I would just have to acknowledge that Zionism
comes out of the Jewish community. It was an answer to Jewish
persecution in Europe and was embraced by the world—or the Western
world, the colonial world—as a solution of the Jewish question of
Europe. It won Jews to its side through the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. And
now, what we’re seeing because of the unending 50-year occupation,
we’re seeing even inside the Jewish communities some questioning of
this ideology.
I think that if Bernie Sanders says there is a war for the soul of
Islam and America has to help Islam in that respect, there’s also a
war for the soul of Judaism right now. Whether this is a religious
conflict or not, I’m not getting into that. But to the degree that
the American Jewish community, including large parts of The New
York Times itself, where Jews of my generation are working in
great number—to the extent that the American Jewish community
embraced this ideology and married this ideology and saw it as a
deliverance ideology, that’s something that is now beginning to come
undone among younger Jews.
So I would remind you, if you don’t know it, that there was a time
when The New York Times was anti-Zionist, when it did not
see Zionism as the answer. It said, our homeland is here, we don’t
want our patriotism undermined by the creation of a Jewish state,
and we’re going to oppose it. We’re not going to send Jewish
reporters over to Jerusalem because of their loyalty. We don’t want
to place them in a position where there’s any question about where
our loyalty lies.
So that era passed in the 1960s. The Times ultimately
became an organization where many Zionist Jews work. I think that
there are no anti-Zionists openly at The Times, but that
will come. It’s bound to because of the changes, not just in the
Jewish community, but throughout the American community, which is I
think what we’ve witnessed at this conference. I think the great
thing about this conference is that it has brought together so many
diverse perspectives—American interest, Israelis, left-wing,
Palestinian solidarity people, and anti-Zionist Jews as well. I
think that, again, just to return to what I said at the beginning,
this gives our community tremendous power from the storytelling
journalistic perspective. We are the ones who are developing this
information, who are working through these extremely difficult
questions of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, separating those. We’re
developing experience about talking about these things and that will
also make us information leaders. Thank you very much.
Delinda Hanley: Thank you. I really recommend everyone starting off
their day with reading all the columns on Mondoweiss. Thank you very
much for your work.
