Listen to Jeffrey Goldberg on the Ethan Bronner flap, saying his friend should of course stay in Jerusalem:
this is a somewhat obvious point except to propagandists, reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage. I’ve worked with Palestinian reporters in Gaza and the West Bank, many of whom have had family ties to Fatah and, in one case, even to Hamas, but without fail they’ve functioned as professional news-gatherers interested only in getting the story before the competition. I don’t think the Times should stop using Palestinian reporters in the West Bank and Gaza, because if it did so, its coverage would suffer.
How typically parochial. Goldberg seems to want Palestinians covering Palestine, Jews covering Israel. Once again, Zionism drags the Jewish discourse backwards, demanding that the smartest writers rationalize Jim Crow. The whole point of the Bronner case is that Bronner’s coverage is blindered. We need diversity. It’s time to have people from other societies engage with Israel and Palestine. It’s the only way.
P.S. Here is As’ad AbuKhalil responding to Goldberg’s jab at him. A friend asked me this weekend, What does Angry Arab care about? I tried to summarize. Below AbuKhalil gives his creed.
Goldberg: "Did it strike [NYT public editor Clark] Hoyt that perhaps a web site called "The Angry Arab News Service" might be engaged in the dissemination of, you know, propaganda? "
Abu Khalil: There is an Arabic saying by `Ali Bin Abi Talib which says: I never argued with a reasonable man and did not beat him, but I never argued with an ignorant man and was not beaten by him. So I would in no way argue with somebody whose Middle East training amounts to training in the Israeli occupation army. As for the charge of zealotry: I stand guilty. I am a zealot when it comes to secularism, women’s right, reason, the belief in sciences and not quackery, the belief in the abolishment of capitalism and the end of poverty, the principled opposition to Zionism in all its deadly forms (paper forms or land forms), the belief in the goal of liberating all of Palestine and the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes, the belief in socialism and in anarchist critiques of the state–the state in itself. On all those principles I am a zealot–proudly. With somebody who volunteered in an occupation army and who served as a jailer for the natives of the land, there should be no arguments. Trials would be in order, not arguments.
