After I attacked Washington Post correspondent Joel Greenberg for giving too much airtime to the Israeli version of events re Jawaher Abu Rahma– and yes I stand by that criticism, I don’t think that American publications should be doing On-the-one-hand/On-the-other-hand finger exercises when they’re dealing with thugs– people pointed out that even if Greenberg once served in the Israeli army, he is a good guy, so I did a post showing that he’d gone to jail rather than serve in Lebanon. Then even more people praised him– and today his coverage of the killing of the 65-year-old Palestinian in his bed had the right emphasis in the lead– so in fairness I wanted to pass along the praise of him.
I have a lot to say about the larger question here: Should American publications be employing former Israeli soldiers as their correspondents? Even sober Dan Luban seems to regard this question as a matter for debate. (And here’s what I want to debate: Elliott Abrams helping to plan the Iraq War in the White House after he’d said that Jews must stand apart from every society they live in except Israel, and Dennis Ross getting to plan Iran policy for Obama after he ran the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute out of Jerusalem.) But I’ll get to my dual-loyalty issue some other time. Just wanted to pass on more about Greenberg. First Idrees Ahmad:
In Greenberg’s defense let me point out that he was the only [then-] NYT journalist covering the I-P beat who frequently incorporated human rights report in his coverage. In their excellent book Israel-Palestine on Record, Richard Falk and Howard Friel refer to a series of 6 reports by Greenberg as exceptions to the NYT’s otherwise consistent record of ignoring human rights organizations and international law. In these reports Greenberg cited Amnesty, B’Tselem, as well as HRW. They quote at length from the 6 articles, and also speculate if this anomalous behavior played a part in his abrut departure to the Chicago Tribune in November 2002. (pp.38-43)
“From memory, Greenberg played an heroic journalistic role during the First Intifada when he broke the first story to nail Israel not just shooting at purportedly rioting Palestinian (mostly) youths, but bore vivid witness to Israeli soldiers beating to a pulp a bound Palestinian whom they’d taken away from sight (they believed) behind a tree. It was one of the major exposes of the early intifada period, published in Jerusalem Post, for which he then worked (which then tilted dovish under the ownership of the Histadrut).“Parenthetically, his father, Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, who died last year, was a renowned scholar from the Conservative Judaism movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary who carved out as one of his major areas of study the problem of racism within Jewish religious law and tradition.”
