Are other readers of the New York Times as enraged as I am by the latest piece from the paper’s new Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren? It’s a glowing profile of settler/colonist leader Dani Dayan, suitable for framing on the Dayan family wall. A couple of weeks after Dayan was given ample space on the Times op-ed page to say the settlers are here to stay, Rudoren tours “Samaria” with Dayan and describes him as “worldly and pragmatic.”
In his mind, he and his family, just by living here in the West Bank rather than yielding it to become a Palestinian state, are a “shield” protecting those theaters and museums, and the survival of Israel itself…
Passionately ideological yet profoundly secular, he defies the caricature of settlers as gun-toting radicals who attribute their politics to God and the Torah — he travels the world collecting art and wine
There is not even the standard evasive Times boilerplate in the article making passing reference to the fact that the settlements are illegal under international law. No, they are “disputed.” And Rudoren does not ask Dayan’s unwilling Palestinian neighbors for a token sentence of rebuttal, let alone describe the fractional amounts of water from their own land that they can draw compared to Dayan and his ilk. Who cares if he likes art and nice wine? What are he and his fellows and the Israeli army doing to make Palestinian lives miserable?
It was OK that Rudoren profiled Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard a month back, but lately she did a glowing profile of American Jews emigrating to Israel to join the army– “Enlisting from afar for the love of Israel”–a valentine to the Israel lobby group Nefesh b’Nefesh. Evidently this is her role: to pit leftist Israelis against rightist Israelis without giving Palestinians any voice. It’s the old internal Israeli argument all over again.
Yeah, I saw it and had the same gag reaction. But perhaps she was subtly trying to advance the one state solution. (kidding)
The perfect complement to Geller’s “savage” ad. Meet Dani Dayan, civilised man!
Well, Jodi Rudoren has removed all doubts: she is a “liberal Zionist.” What else would one expect from the New York Times?
Joseph Goebbels was also a charming fellow with an appreciation of culture, the fine arts and high cuisine. (I just read Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts.”)
Definition of “liberal Zionist” — someone who runs interference for Likud Zionist and neoconservative policies behind an obfuscating cloud of vague feel-good liberal rhetoric. That describes most Democrats.
Extremist Jewish settlers in Israel, with the help of the Israel lobby, are dragging the entire American political system behind them over the cliff and into the abyss.
And Hitler loved his dog and had impeccable table manners.
Not good reasons for not pointing out he was also a mad man.
Rudoren is on ziocaine.
Things look pretty bad, but maybe she’ll eventually redeem herself by writing an equally glowing profile of various Palestinians, including Hamas leaders and without citing a single Israeli. It’s the only way she could be fair at this point.
Of course I don’t expect that. It is possible she might write a sympathetic story about a nonviolent Palestinian activist, but that’s closest thing to balance you could hope for at the NYT. And it will surely contain some Israeli views.
” But as The Atlantic noted, he faces an internal battle among the settlers over tactics; many prefer a more principled, confrontational stand to his pragmatic, businesslike approach.”
That’s the fetish of the moderate centrist “pragmatic” type that has deformed our own politics in America. The Overton Window keeps shifting rightwards over the past few decades because you have some screaming maniacs on the far far right and then some polite soft-spoken merely far right person can be portrayed as “pragmatic”. So we have center-right Democrats labeled as liberal socialists and of course Obama himself helped anoint Paul Ryan as a serious thinker a couple of years ago.
I just looked at the Atlantic piece linked in the NYT article. It’s better.
The author states that underneath the moderate facade Dayan is an extremist.
link