I did it this morning, I do it often: slag the New York Times for doing biased coverage of Israel/Palestine. Do I single the Times out? Absolutely. It is still the hymnal of the Establishment, notwithstanding Arianna Huffington. But let me be constructive: What should the Times be doing?
The Times should forget about the angry letters it gets from Zionists and undertake to educate its readers about the largest truth of the Israel/Palestine situation: Israel faces a grave crisis.
The Times should do so by turning to the realists and leftists who understand this. A new conventional wisdom is developing on the realist-left: that Israel's crisis has little to do with Iran but is of its own making. Many of the writers who describe this process are Jews, including Ian Lustick, Jerry Haber, M.J. Rosenberg, Bernard Avishai, Richard Silverstein, and Jerry Slater, most of them scholars, all struggling to reimagine Israel.
The News here–and let's not forget, the Times is a newspaper with the duty to inform its readers–is expressed best in this piece by Steve Walt, saying that Netanyahu is nuts to be dragging feet on a Palestinian state because if Israel doesn't get a two-state solution, in a hurry, it faces the choice of: apartheid (basically the existing situation); ethnic cleansing of the West Bank (even the U.S. might have a problem); or a binational state (goodbye to Zionism). Last week in a fine speech at AIPAC, Aaron David Miller, a good liberal, essentially made the same point when he said that Israeli leaders "are prisoners of their politics, not masters
of their constituencies." It is "arguable whether they have the moral
authority" to establish borders of the state. Very grim prognosis.
Miller and Walt both look at the internal politics of Israel, which are scary, prey to feverish settlers. In his essay Walt points out that Arabs probably outnumber Jews right now in Israel/Palestine, and says:
the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are
reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living
abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According
to Ian Lustick and John Mueller,
only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country,
and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are
considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As
Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making
this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus
most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized…
Right now even the Zionists are doing a better job of informing their
constituencies about Israel's crisis than the New York Times is. Howard Kohr gave that amazing speech at
AIPAC on Israel's global delegitimization that I believe has gone unreported in the Times. Commentary does a package
this month called "Israel at Risk" that includes Ambassador Michael Oren's lament that Jews have abandoned Jerusalem and the Zionist ideal.
A few years ago the Times made the regrettable ideological choice to elevate Judy Miller and later Bill Kristol– and worse, to listen to them. Today the Times should make an ideological choice of a far more neutral character: it should begin to listen to progressives and realists.
The challenge to the Times is to show some journalistic leadership, as
it has done on countless times in the past (for instance, in it superb
series on head injuries in football, or in the Pentagon Papers case) and bring these exciting new voices to its core readership, Obama Jews, the largely-secularized, liberal Jews who still have a fantasy about what Israel is, and educate them about the Netanyahu-era realities. It should wake Jews up to the crisis. It should inform them about the creative thinking that is being done about Israel's militarist society by thinkers such as John Mearsheimer and Dorothy Naor (of New Profile, right). 
It should undeceive American Jews about Israel's internal crisis and the crisis of the occupation. It would thus provide intellectual leadership–telling the Establishment how to think about this stuff– and give Obama more political cover to make the necessary changes in foreign policy.
There's another thing, and I think Chomsky mentioned it somewhere: the NYTimes as agenda setter for other newspapers.I'm sure that other people are having the same thought.
most of them scholars Just because a man plays a guitar doesn't necessarily mean he is making music.
Hasn't the Times always been the great flagship paper, commanded by a zionist captain? I read the comments against Kristol and Friedman when they write on Israel. The comments against their positions, are by by a large majority opposed to their ideas.
The NYT couldn't survive an advertising boycott, and that is what would happen if it broke ranks.
"What should the Times be doing? " shutting its doors. hanging editors and columnists. dying. but before going tell your advertisers, basically your kin-in-crime, to screw off then to burn with you. a fellowship to hell.
"its core readership, Obama Jews" What am I, chopped liver?
ha, I like that, Jacqueline. It makes me think to myself, just because a man moves around a lot in bed, it doesn't mean he's making love.
Phil presupposes that the Times is run by rational people. I think since the Rosenthal wing of the family gained control, they are pushing the extreme zionist agenda. Yes, there are risks, but they have the West Bank to gain. Yes, there are risks, but the US can be manipulated into fighting wars for Israel. Of course, they continue to issue liberal sounding platitudes, but there is a bottom line — objectively they support the Likud-Aipac view.
Last week in a fine speech at AIPAC, Aaron David Miller, a good liberal, I lately noticed, that Patrick Lang esteems Aaron David Miller as highly as Phil does. Which strictly makes me wonder why Norman Finkelstein begs to differ so vigorously. Hmmm?
What made Judith Miller super-pundit? In 1990 to publish a Holcaust book named One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust. It missed the whole context. In a sane world such obliviousness would have been something negative for her career as a reporter, but in modern America she was elevated as a consequence.
ROFL I thought the same when Phil, in conclusion said, "It should undeceive American Jews about Israel's internal crisis and the crisis of the occupation." I guess goy Americans are insignificant–who needs them to be informed to take the nation on the best path? Their 97% demographic doesn't even matter. I can't argue with that.
RE: Commentary does a package this month called "Israel at Risk" …. MY COMMENT: “Commentary” magazine reminds me of the Heaven’s Gate cult. It invariably defies logic. I gave up on it decades ago!
It would be nice if the Times were to educate its readers that "Israel faces a grave crisis," but that's "the largest truth of the Israel/Palestine situation" only for those who see the world strictly through the prism of "what's good for the Jews." For the rest of us, the "largest truth" of the situation is that the Zionists have stolen most of Palestine from its indigenous inhabitants and they're doing their best to steal the rest of it. Since we're in the realm of fantasy anyway, why not imagine them educating their readers about THAT?
I think that if American Jews are truly seeking to see the reality of the present state of Zionist Israel, they would find it whether or not the New York Times leads the way. Jews need to first and foremost stop looking at the Middle East and U.S. Middle East policy as though it should be evolving around Israel, and look at Israel through the Arab people's eyes….
I looked through your eyes. Too much hatred there.
Perhaps jacobwolf has never been in a position where terrorists blow up a building just across the street, in front of you on a pleasant summer morning (killing a couple of ancient scholars), or when the then head of Sayeret Matkal dressed up as a woman to assassinate a Palestinian poet (Ehud Barak, Ghassan Kanafani). Perhaps he never looked up to see US-made Israeli jets swooping over, at low level, to bomb refugee camps. Perhaps he never met the woman whom I paid to clean my Beirut apartment, who didn't turn up for a few days, because her son was murdered by those Israeli jets. I have seen these things, albeit 30 years ago, and they changed my opinions.
I think that you may not be able to see properly through my eyes due to your own hatred jacob….
Yes, anecdotal information tends to drive reality out of your intellect. Happens to the best.
It is called the NIMBY effect. All well and good until it's personal. How many antisemites created over a pair of socks?
But you are not thinking, you are merely displaying ignorant hatred.
First of all what ignorant hatred am I displaying Jacob? Maybe you can be more specific? I, like Richardo1 have had my own personal experiences which have very much effected my opinion of Israel….
Richard, Can you give us more details about your experience in Lebanon? Were you there in the early eighties when Israel attacked and invaded Lebanon going all the way up to Beirut? Were you there during the Sabra and Shatila Massacre?
I related those 'anecdotes' because I saw them with my own eyes. They never made it into the western press at the time. I tell you; if you've seen Israeli jets swooping over your apartment and releasing rockets to somewhere behind you., from half a mile in front, then you get fairly scared. If you've seen a building in another country blown up by Israeli terrorists, right in front of your eyes, you begin to see their long–term aggression against every single one of their neighbours (except Cyprus)
No, Marion, I wasn't there when Sabra and Chatila were 'cleansed'. But my old housemaid was. She survived, but the whole of the rest of her family was killed. I note that Elie Hobeika, who led the attack, under the benevolent gaze of Ariel Sharon and the IDF,later became a minister in the Lebanese government In 1983, an Israel state inquiry named Hobeika as the man who personally (under the benevolent gaze of Ariel Sharon) directed the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. In June 2001, Just before his death, Elie Hobeika publicly declared his intention to testify against Ariel Sharon about his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in a Belgian court's trial for crimes against humanity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Hobeika He was assassinated by a massive car bomb in Beirut on January 24, 2002 (That was a definitive shut-up!) Ariel Sharon is,,thankfully, under the influence of a massive stroke which renders him harmless.