Today The New York Times publishes a valentine to Artists4Israel, a group that paints pretty pictures in the occupation. Jodi Rudoren’s report from the occupied Golan Heights is yet another example of the Times’s deep fascination with the Israeli mindset even as the newspaper of record is incurious about Palestinian culture. As several recent posts show (here, here and here, at 1:17), the Times has a negative reputation among Palestinians and doesn’t seem to care.
Anyone who’s interested in this issue should watch this speech on the conflict last month by Times deputy national editor Ethan Bronner at Purchase College. It is very revealing.
Bronner is famous of course for being Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times three years ago when his son entered the Israeli Defense Forces, causing a great deal of embarrassment for the newspaper. Bronner addresses that in a somewhat pained tone, saying that it was his second son’s choice and “wasn’t the easiest thing that happened to me while I was there,” and his son was entering a force that had killed the fathers of two journalists who worked for the Times: Fares Akram and Khaled Abu Aker, whom he calls “my closest Palestinian collaborators.” But:
It didn’t drive us apart. We were joined by a lot of common beliefs. .. We were joined by a belief in truthseeking, in journalism, and in personal trust, all of which are increasingly lacking in this conflict.
(Bronner does not mention that his son’s decision was a factor in the decision by a third Palestinian who worked for the Times, Taghreed El-Khodary, to leave the newspaper.)
Fares Akram and Khaled Abu Aker were also, Bronner says, the only two Palestinians who came to his going-away party in Jerusalem a year-and-a-half ago.
There were actually three going-away parties. Bronner tells a story about them at the beginning of the speech. One was at PASSIA in Jerusalem, a Palestinian thinktank, and the party fizzled when six young “radical” Palestinians stood up and asked him about his son and then walked out. The second party was in Ramallah, hosted by a Palestinian, and Bronner says that because of traffic at Qalandiya crossing, he and three others from the Times (Isabel Kershner, Jodi Rudoren and photographer Rina Castelnuovo) got there an hour late, by which time almost everyone had left and the hummus had a brown crust. “It was really depressing.” So that was a bust too.
But the third party was a big success. It was in Jerusalem– a “classic contemporary Israeli event, there’s great food in Israel today, spectacular wine.” Some Likud government ministers came, and Israeli officials hovered about Fares Akram as if he were an “exotic bird” because they never got to see people from Gaza. Bronner doesn’t seem to understand how sad it is that the only two Palestinians at this party with great food and spectacular wine were both his employees.
As for the political wisdom of Bronner’s speech, it’s astute. He says that the two state solution is cooked (but the only solution in his view), that the Israeli government won’t give up settlements or Jerusalem, and that the sides are more polarized from one another than ever. They demonize one another, and it’s impossible to imagine their coexisting happily. As someone who just visited the place, I agree with him entirely.
But the image of Palestinians in this speech is tragic, when you consider that this was the Times’s top man in Israel for many years. Bronner makes several statements that help explain why Palestinians just don’t like the New York Times.
He says that the young radical Palestinians who came to his first going-away party believe in boycotting “anything having to do with America or Israel.” This is surely wrong; they likely believe in boycotting Israel and groups that seek to normalize the occupation. He says that Palestinians in refugee camps “have keys in some cases, deeds in other cases, to homes that no longer exist, from the 1940s.” Anyone who is sensitive to Palestinians would note that one house that does exist is the one the New York Times owns in West Jerusalem. He says that it’s a great shame that the Israelis can’t give up the settlements and the Palestinians can’t give up the right of return– thereby equating a crime that the world says should be stopped (the settlements) with the Palestinian insistence on their right to property taken from them in a crime (the Nakba). And Bronner repeatedly praises Israeli food and art and wine (spending a bit too much energy for my taste on the fact that Sigalit Landau makes pictures of herself naked).
The speech left me with a couple of questions. Has the Times covered BDS? The most important movement in Palestinian civil society, endorsed by countless Palestinian organizations and Josh Ruebner and Max Blumenthal who are on book tours right now—has the Times covered the boycott movement, and if not why not? Bronner’s ignorance about whether those young radicals are boycotting Israel or the U.S. is telling. (Update: A friend points out that Times coverage of BDS has been very thin.)
Also, why didn’t the Times team leave enough time to get through Qalandiya crossing? If someone were throwing a party for me in Ramallah, I would damn sure leave early and give myself a lot of time, especially if all four representatives of my organization were traveling together. And I’d probably take Hizma crossing. Being that late to a party in your honor seems to represent a kind of contempt.
“my closest Palestinian collaborators”?
Isn’t the word “colleague”?
PS Thanks to Krauss for hopping on settlements/right-of-return equation in a comment yesterday.
Yesterday, The Irish Times ME reporter ,Mark Weiss reported the Settlement expansion plans by Israel.He mentioned ” Settlements on 4 occasions but not once referred to them as Illegal or that they are considered Illegal under International Law.
He also reported the incident involving the death of a uniformed member of the Occupation Forces, (my description)who was killed by a 16 year old Palestinian who was , note “Illegally in Israel.”
Get the double standard.
Just an addition in relation to my comment yesterday.
I noted that he spent a great deal of time to slam his critics as biased. He took a fatalistic viewpoint on the current state conflict, because he refuses to see it as a logical end goal of Zionism, which it is. This is what it had to lead to.
But he cannot accept this, and still pretend he is a liberal, so he then bends over backwards to paint it as an accident – both sides to blame, of course. He does this by blaming the victims of ethnic cleansing, which is pretty fucking shocking, if you’ll excuse my language.
Finally, I noted that his de facto position was a “liberal” Zionist, which he defines as being “neutral”.
I could also add that if it wasn’t for the notoriously high threshold of racism you can get away with against Palestinians in the American discourse, he’d be fired for his blatant racism of blaming the victims of ethnic cleansing. (Then again, considering that Richard Cohen just keeps getting new lifelines, maybe not).
For me, Bronner’s speech is an encapsulation of the corrupted nature of ‘liberal’ Zionism. He’s not as delusional as some(read: Jeremy Ben-Ami) to keep deluding himself the conflict will get “solved” with the 2SS. Instead he’s content with trying to blame both sides, throw up his hands and de facto support the status quo.
Why do I say he supports the status quo? Because he’s smart enough to get that the 2SS is over, but at the very same time, he tries very hard to slam the door shut on any true democratic solution(one person, one vote, no matter what race). This is where his “liberalism” falls apart, as it usually does, with the “liberal” Zionists.
Bronner’s dilemma is that while he pretends to oppose the settlers, what he actually opposes is a democratic solution to the conflict now that the 2SS is closed as he himself admits, and he – shockingly – blames the victims of ethnic cleansing for the conflict’s dead impasse.
And again, this is the “liberal” side of Zionism. And it’s completely mainstream to maintain this level of shocking racism at the highest levels of the NYT.
His speech and his revealing racism is a very good reason to study the American media landscape, which inevitably gets into the sociology of Jewish power(for a lack of a better term) in the media. I know this make people uncomfortable, but Bronner’s speech makes it brutually clear there’s no other choice. The only way to bring real pressure from the outside is to expose bigots like Bronner. And we also have to get at why this level of racism is so accepted in Jewish/Zionist context.
Otherwise, you can never have real pressure on Israel through the American media.
P.S. There is a correlation here related to Max Blumenthal, note the increasingly desperate attacks on him from Buzzfeed. The two leading the charge has been Rosie Gray and Ben Smith. Smith has been notorious in his close relations with neocons on matters Israel. He grew up in a liberal Zionist family on the Upper West Side. Does it matter that he is BuzzFeed’s political editor? I think it does. People like him act as the gatekeepers on Israeli/Palestinian discourse, which is why he set out to destroy Max. As some readers may recall, Ben Smith was also instrumental in the smearing of the Think Progress blog which got Ziad Jilani among others fired, by carrying water for Josh Block.
People sometimes criticize the sociology of power, especially how it relates to the Jewish ascent in the last 50 years and Zionism, and understandably so for historical reasons. But to ignore it is to do a disservice to the Palestinians. There is racism, a lot of it, on this issue in the Jewish community.
Krauss– thank you for these very powerful posts. I think you hit the nail squarely on the head, and flattened it.