Didi Remez reports at 972:
According to Oren Persico of the The 7th Eye, a respected online media magazine published by the Israel Democracy Institute, Ethan Bronner, The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, appeared on Sunday at the Eilat Journalism Conference and said this [full translation of section at the bottom of this post]:
“There aren’t many other places in the world where white people with guns tell brown people what to do,” said Ethan Bronner, The New York Times correspondent in Israel, today as he tried to explain Israel’s image problem in the international press.
[Here’s the transcript:
[Bronner: You’re starting way back in trouble because most don’t really understand why you’re trying to stop stuff from getting into Gaza. We know why you’re trying to stop arms from getting into Gaza, but most people don’t understand why you’re trying to stop other stuff from getting into Gaza. And then when you try to stop them 9 people are killed. זה לא טוב. It doesn’t look good. You’ve got a lot of to catch up on to convince people that well some of those people really were nasty people.
[There aren’t that many places left in the world where white guys with guns are telling brown people what to do.
[[Lilach] Sigan: We’re not perfect. The problem is that the focus is only on Israel’s mistakes and not on Hamas’ mistakes and how much suffering they are causing their own people.
[Bronner: 9 people are dead. Who shot the 9 people? Not Turkey. That’s the story. If nobody died on the flotilla, nobody would have given a damn about what happened on that flotilla. Nine people were killed. It’s the main thing, it’s the first fifteen paragraphs.”]
Bronner is coming under heavy flak today from the left
for writing over the weekend that “the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years,” forgetting, among other things, that the ‘09 Gaza War was rather deadly and pretty recent. Now he’s going to get it from the right. I don’t think he’s consciously triangulating, and he’s not known for being particularly courageous, so what cause him to make the white/brown analogy in public?
Exasperation, most likely. He’s invited to speak at a journalism conference and it feels like an AIPAC rally:
Lilach Sigan, editor of Globes’s daily magazine, asked Bronner why the international media only dealt with Israel’s actions around the Turkish flotilla and did not devote sufficient coverage to the Turkish and IHH connection. “We’re not perfect,” she pointed out, “the problem is that the focus is only on Israel’s mistakes and not on the mistakes of Hamas and the suffering the they inflict on the Palestinians.”
After Sigan’s statement elicited applause from the audience, Bronner replied: “Nine people died. Who shot the nine? Not Turkey. That’s the story. If no one had been killed on the flotilla, nobody would have cared about it. Nine died. That’s the main thing. Those are the first fifteen paragraphs.”
Sigan, ostensibly a journalistic peer, actually went on to sputter:
“One of our biggest problems is that we’re a democracy,” she said. “We have freedom of information and freedom of expression and everyone can say whatever he wants, and these things are quoted elsewhere.”
