Last week we posted on Max Blumenthal’s important investigative piece on the New York Times Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner’s connection to Lone Star Communications, an Israeli PR firm run by the West Bank settler Charley Levine. You can see Lone Star’s promotional material for Bronner here (PDF), where he was promoted through its speakers bureau. One topic Bronner speaks on is “When the Bible Belongs on Page One: Archeological Breakthroughs in Israel,” which caught my eye in light of a story Blumenthal tells in his piece:
In 2008, in an excavation in the Israeli town of Khirbet Qeiyafa, near what was said to be the valley where David battled Goliath, an archaeology professor from Hebrew University named Yosef Garfinkel found a shard of pottery that contained what appeared to have been the oldest Hebrew text ever discovered. Garfinkel believed the artifact offered evidence of a kingdom ruled by King David more than 3,000 years ago. Such a find could be used to boost claims that an ancient empire established the historical precedent for the present day Jewish state, though archeologists differ on their interpretations of what Garfinkel found.
Garfinkel asked two of Israel’s most avid archaeology enthusiasts, David Willner and Barnea Selavan, to start a fundraising operation that would allow the completion of the dig. Willner is a settler from the West Bank who hosts a popular archaeology radio show and Barnea Selavan had previously worked as a public relations hand for the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, an organization dedicated to settling religious nationalist Jews in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Willner and Selavan turned to Lone Star, a Jerusalem-based Israeli public relations firm founded and directed by Charley Levine, a well-connected Israeli media adviser.
Lone Star in turn arranged an exclusive tour for Bronner. “The feeling was the Times was the most serious periodical who could run the story who could generate serious publicity and generate fundraising from the get-go,” Willner said. “And so the feeling was that if it was a New York Times story, it was worth its weight in gold.” Bronner published an October 30, 2008 feature in the Times that examined the historical and political controversies surrounding the dig.
Blumenthal uses the story to demonstrate how Bronner reported on stories about Lone Star clients without disclosing his own business relationship to the firm, which violates the Times ethics policy. It ends up the article in question wasn’t the only place Bronner pushed Lone Star’s Khirbet Qeiyafa story. In April, 2009 Bronner spoke at a Duke University Center for Jewish Studies conference called “Archeology, Politics and the Media” where he discussed Khirbet Qeiyafa, but also displayed a deep bias which should raise additional questions for the New York Times.
Here is how Bronner described the Khirbet Qeiyafa story to the Duke audience (Audio recordings of the conference are archived here and on iTunes. The following appears at 12:28 on the recording):
I got a call about this story from a guy, who is a sort of, who’s a PR guy, who specializes in right-of-center stuff, shall we say. And the reason he called me is because the people who were ending up funding this dig are not Elad [for more on Elad see here], but Elad light. And so anyway he called me and he said we thinking of (unclear) and so we worked it out and the truth is is that it did seem like a quite a serious thing and Yossi Garfinkel seemed like a great and serious person to me and I spent a long time on it and I’ll just tell you that story very quickly.
Bronner doesn’t mention that he is represented by the same “PR guy,” and it’s clear he understands that his role is to help fund raise for their project:
Why does Yossi, why do they want me to put this in the New York Times? Foundation Stone, Elad light, an organization whose website you can go to, is helping to fund it. They don’t have a Moskowitz in their back pocket, that Elad has, they go out and raise the money. These are modern orthodox, Zionists, Americans, who live in Israel. A guy called David Willner who is from LA, and he lives in Efrat, which is a West Bank settlement by most of our standards, although it’s in Gush Etzion, you know one of the less “setterly” settlements if you like, but nonetheless. And he was the trip, my first visit to the site, and the point of the group is to strengthen the tie of the Jewish people to the land. The website says it is, Foundation Stone is redrawing the map in Jewish education and that it’s activities are anchoring traditional texts to the artifacts, maps and locations that form the context for Jewish identity.”
Dr. Eric Meyers, the organizer of the conference, says that Lone Star did not arrange for Bronner to speak at the conference (Meyers reached out to him himself), but confirmed that Bronner’s speaking fee was paid to Lone Star.
It seems one point of Bronner’s story at the Duke conference was to demonstrate how archeology is used as political tool in Israel, and to show how some archeologists become implicated in efforts to confirm nationalist narratives of history. Bronner sees a possible conflict of interest in this and ironically warned the archeologists in attendance about taking money from people with an agenda. He says, “that is certainly something for you guys to think about.”
It would be convenient to see Bronner’s relationship to Lone Star in a similar light, an unwilling dupe to Charley Levine’s right-wing agenda, but the rest of his remarks at Duke reveal a deep antipathy to the Palestinian people and apparent bias in how he explains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While he tries to soft step the Israeli settlers’ project above (“less ‘setterly’ settlements”), he comes down hard on the Palestinians, questioning their claims and basically blaming them for Israeli intransigence.
He takes the Palestinians to task for attempting to use archeology to further their own nationalist agenda, and says that he believes that Palestinian rejection of Israeli archeological claims is what is driving the Israeli focus on Jerusalem. He says, “As one-sided and single-focused as the Israeli and Jewish approach to archeology is, the truth is that the Palestinian approach to archeology is really problematic. Really problematic. And I believe it has really made the problem much worse on the Israeli side.”
Moving on from archeology, Bronner goes on attack and belittle Palestinian political demands. He recounts a story with Saeb Erakat and finds it amazing that Erakat would demand that Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem be treated like Israeli settlers in the rest of the West Bank as part of an effort the make the city the capital of a future Palestinian state. He doesn’t understand why Israeli settlers would have to be uprooted from Jerusalem given that “these neighborhoods have been annexed to Jerusalem for so long.” He then implies that it is important for Israel to retain control over Jerusalem, because if it were left to the Palestinians no Jewish history would be “dug up or highlighted.”
In the end, he sees the conflict as a fight between two sides, which Israel is winning in part to combat Palestinian rejectionism:
“It’s not just the story of an occupying power enforcing its will on a population, that would otherwise be sharing about it all, it’s a story about which side is dominant, and therefore in a position to impose its view on the history of the place. And one problem with all the criticism of Israel’s position from archeologists and from the European Union is that if fails to acknowledge how the Palestinians have acted over the decades and how that has effected the Israeli authorities. You know, to be told you have no roots there, for Jews to be told that, obviously Arafat used to say that all the time, is galling and it makes these Israelis dig their heels in as well as their shovels.”
To finish it off he goes on to say that most of the Palestinian building in Silwan is illegal, and questions that truth behind Palestinian claims that building permits are difficult to get.
While it does seem that Bronner is attempting to play devil’s advocate to a crowd that was critical of Israel’s attempts to steal Palestinian land under the guise of archeology (imagine that!), this speech does give more context to Bronner’s relationship to Charley Levine and Lone Star Communications. Blumenthal writes, “Bronner says he does not share what he described as ‘Charley Levine’s rightist politics,'” but this speech would seem to indicate they may agree on quite a bit. As so Bronner’s relationship to Lone Star does not only reflect a deep conflict of interest for the Times, but yet another case of his pro-Israel bias.
