How Israel’s Press Prophets Would Have Profited the U.S.

Here’s a link to a powerful article (in the Harvard/MIT journal International Security) on the tremendous damage done to the U.S. by faulty press coverage of Israel/Palestine, by Jerome Slater, a scholar at SUNY Buffalo. Apropos of my posts on the Camera conference, Slater says that the Israeli press has provided a true picture to its readers of the moral crisis that Israel is in due to the occupation while the American press has provided a "mythology." This mythology has had dangerous consequences: it has deeply affected our politics, made Americans think that Israel is the good guy and Palestinians are the bad guy, cast an unfair offer at Camp David (a "water-starved" state without the Muslim holy sites) as generous, and so sharply narrowed American policy choices, resulting in disaster for the U.S. in the Arab world.

Titled "Muting the Alarm Over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," the article’s deeper point is that the many prophetic voices in the Israeli press–generally leftwingers who have cried out against the horrors of the occupation–have served a vital political function there of ringing alarm bells. But they have been completely redlined out of the American discourse, so that we have little idea how desperate matters are. Slater specifically compares Haaretz and the New York Times, and notes that while editorial writers and Thomas Friedman routinely scored the settlements, they looked away from the larger rot: 

Until recently…the Times was largely silent about the overall Israeli occupation—of which the settlements are but one manifestation—and it repeatedly downplayed the devastating consequences of the occupation on the Palestinians. The most important consequence, of course, has been the killing and wounding of thousands of innocent Palestinians. Beyond that are the political costs to the Palestinian people of being ruled by others, the psychological costs of the daily humiliation and harassment associated with the occupation, and, of course, the economic costs. 

Slater’s article is further evidence of the Walt and Mearsheimer effect. Though no newcomer to this field, he owes some of his thinking re the Israel lobby to Walt and Mearsheimer, whose huge impact he acknowledges. Yet he also thinks that W&M went too far in the powers they ascribe to the lobby. I think Slater is unpersuasive here; and that for all the achievements of his moral/journalistic investigation, he is blind to the sociological/religious component of the lobby’s presence in American elite life. (Do you notice all the coverage of the Christian right on TV lately? What about the Jewish right? Zilch). Yet there is nothing defensive or obstructionist in Slater’s response to Walt and Mearsheimer. He has worked hard to expand our field of knowledge on a crucial issue. There is something breathtaking about an independent intellectual…   

      
       
      

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