It may very well be that these settler teens were picked up with insufficient evidence. But, under similar circumstances would we see Arab youths freed from custody until investigations were complete? Hardly! Arab youths could just as easily be held in administrative detention with no charges against them.

Related posts:

1. Tell the US Consulate in Jerusalem about Mohammad Othman
2. Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? In Israeli prison, of course!
3. Othman’s human rights activities may be circumscribed

MJ Rosenberg lands on the Bronner story and says that the son’s decision reflects the family’s devotion to Israel, and puts a huge question under Bronner’s objectivity. He draws the most important lesson from the drama, a lesson that is very heartening indeed:

Suddenly the New York Times feels the need to deal with its critics who argue that an intense attachment to Israel obscures objective judgement on the Middle East.

This is new. Until very recently the assumption was that the Israeli position was, by definition, the neutral, disinterested position.

Read any Tom Friedman column on the Middle East. The underlying assumption of any Friedman column is that if it’s good for Israel, it’s good for America. It’s right.

This is truly a door-opener, and a new world. We’re coming in. I repeat that this drama will not end without Bronner’s reassignment (but executive editor Bill Keller is dug in) or the addition of an Arab-American or Palestinian reporter to the Times’ (West) Jerusalem bureau. Or this idea from public editor Dan Okrent writing on the issue–"The Hottest Button"–four years ago, and making a reasonable suggestion. Four years have passed; and the Times has not done the right thing.

It [claimed objectivity] is limited by geography. The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this "structural geographic bias."

If the reporters lived in Gaza or Ramallah, this argument goes, they would feel exposed to the daily struggles and dangers of life behind Palestinian lines and would presumably become more empathetic toward the Palestinians.

I don’t know about empathy, but I do know that the angle of vision determines what you see. A reporter based in secular, Europeanized Tel Aviv would experience an Israel vastly different from one living in Jerusalem; a reporter with a home in Ramallah would most likely find an entirely different world. The Times ought to give it a try.

Related posts:

1. The Public Editor Leaves Something Out
2. And lo, after 500 years, AIPAC called settlers
3. Bold or just old– Netanyahu called for ‘limited Palestinian state’ 6 years ago

The arguments by Keller, Goldberg, Avishai, etc. in defense of retaining Ethan Bronner at his post in spite of the conspicuous conflict of interest, show how hard it is for us to judge Israel by the standard we apply to other countries.The sympathy/kinship/affinity runs too deep. Imagine a Times reporter on the Zapatista rebellion of the 1990s whose son enlisted in the Mexican army that fought to crush the rebellion. Would Keller write a personal defense of the decision to keep that reporter as his leading source of information on Mexico?

Closer to home. Say the Times reporter in Helmand province is married to an Afghan woman (from one of the families of the Northern Alliance). Their son enlists in a special-ops unit operating in Helmand and the Times asks itself: "How compromising is this? The marriage was already awkward, but it also gave our reporter access to sources denied to other Americans. Yet the son will now be going on controversial missions which the father is assigned to cover." Is there really much question what conclusion would be reached?

The defense of Ethan Bronner’s personal probity and freedom from bias finally proves too much. If these arguments suffice to overturn the usual standard of conflict-of-interest, it should be possible for Bronner himself to enlist in the IDF and continue as the leading Times correspondent on Israel’s politics and its treatment of Palestine.

Related posts:

1. I passed along a false report re Ethan Bronner
2. Bronner: ‘My son joined the IDF five weeks ago’
3. The ‘Times’ now owes it to its readers to assign an Arab-American reporter to Jerusalem

The controversy about Ethan Bronner and his son goes deeper than the New York Times’ coverage of the Middle East.

I accept the argument that Bronner’s reporting is likely to be affected by those he lives and works with on a daily basis and by his son’s  enlistment in the IDF.

But isn’t this the problem at the root of all journalism when it comes to covering conflict? The idea of "objective" journalism, after all, has always been a bit of a pipe dream, given that humans are involved. Isn’t the answer here not necessarily an Arab journalist to provide balance, but instead perhaps…an Eskimo? That is, someone at a remove, whose outlook isn’t already imprinted with a narrative?

For the most part Americans or Brits are reporting on the action in Afghanistan and Iraq (or, if not Americans, they are reporting to American editors). C.J. Chivers, a very able journalist for the TImes, is a former marine. He’s a guy you’d want in your foxhole. His pieces on the action in Afghanistan are gripping and heartbreaking. But he’s only telling one side of the story.

This is the fallacy of the "embedded journalist" practice — you’re going to identify with the guys who speak your language and who are saving your skin.

The only journalist I can think of who actually made an attempt to cross enemy lines and tell their side was the Australian Wilfred Burchett.

Burchett was the first western journalist to venture into Hiroshima after the bomb. He was the first to file copy describing the horrors of radiation sickness. He was summarily thrown out of Japan by the U.S. authorities, and William Laurence of the New York Times went on to refute the notion of radiation sickness — and won a Pulitzer. (From Common Dreams: the coverup that won a Timesman a Pulitzer).

Burchett later traveled to North Korea and North Vietnam and described the wars from their vantage points.

He was decried as a traitor.

Maybe he was; depends on what side you’re on.

Voskamp is editor of the Block Island Times.

Related posts:

1. Profile in courage: Gideon Levy makes ‘In These Times,’ not ‘the Times’
2. ‘Times’ stringer El-Khodary’s searing reports from Gaza appear on ‘Al-Jazeera,’ not in the ‘Times’
3. Forget about the 2-state solution — get ready for the ’side by side’ solution

Steve Walt has a great post following the news from Tony Blair that when he was planning the Iraq war disaster with George Bush they consulted the Israelis, and that Israeli security was a consideration. Walt feels vindicated on the most controversial claim of his book, that the Israel lobby pushed the Iraq war. Here’s an excerpt from Walt, then I will provide my two cents.

Consider the following passage from an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Forward, published in 2004:

As President Bush attempted to sell the war .. in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense.  In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that that the removal of the Iraqi leaders would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America’s war on terrorism" 

The editorial also noted that "concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."

The Forward, it is worth noting, is well-connected and has a well-deserved reputation for probity in its reporting on the American Jewish community.  It is hard to see how its editors could be mistaken about such an important issue or why they would lie about it.  And they never issued a retraction. We can therefore assume that the writers of this editorial knew what they were talking about: key groups in the lobby supported the war.  Reasonable people can disagree about how important their influence was, of course, but at a minimum these groups reinforced the Bush administration’s resolve and made it less likely that other politicians or commentators would conduct a serious debate about the wisdom of the invasion.

Finally, it bears reiterating that I am talking about key groups and individuals in the Israel lobby, and not about the American Jewish community in toto.  Indeed, my co-author and I have repeatedly pointed to surveys showing that American Jews were less supportive of the decision to invade Iraq than the American population as a whole, and we have emphasized that it would be a cardinal error (as well as dangerous) to try to "blame the Jews" for the war.  Rather, blame should be reserved for Bush and Cheney (who made the ultimate decision for war), for the neoconservatives who dreamed up this foolish idea, and for the various groups and individuals — including those in the lobby — who helped sell it.

What’s always intrigued me about the argument that American Zionists/the lobby/American Jewish leadership had no responsibility for the war is that I grew up being told that Jews were the smartest people in the world and our ideas had changed history– Einstein, Freud, and Marx were the triumvirate my parents cited– and then the Iraq war happens, and basically it’s our ideas, or Zionist neocon ideas, and when the thing is a disaster everyone says that Bush and Cheney came up with it. And the Forward, fearing pogroms, says, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." It just doesn’t track. Ideas are important; that’s a modern conception, and a Jewish conception; and god knows that ideas that arose in the Jewish community were very important indeed here. The evidence is endless. There are all the books by Wurmser, Berman, Kaplan, Kristol, Perle and Frum on my bookshelves arguing for the Iraq war in part because of suicide bombers in Israel. There’s Tom Friedman making that argument; and later telling Ari Shavit that if you had abducted 25 intellectuals within a mile of his office in D.C., most of them Jewish, the war would never have happened. There’s the collapse of the liberal Jewish establishment, from the Union for Reform Judaism to the New Yorker magazine to 9 of 11 Jewish congressmen from NY and California (praise Bob Filner and Jerrold Nadler for their Tonkin Gulf-awareness). Yes and why did they collapse? There’s Philip Zelikow, the head of the 9/11 Commission saying that Israeli security was the motive for the war that dare not speak its name; there’s Colin Powell saying that the idea for the war came out of the Zionist thinktank the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; there’s Condi Rice saying the war was to "help Israel," per her biographer. And now there’s Blair.

Vietnam helped bring down the WASP Establishment, and Iraq is going to do a number on the Jewish presence in this Establishment. That’s why there’s such anger at Mearsheimer and Walt; there’s a lot of social status in play, let alone national security issues. And Jewish life won’t be healed until we recognize the degree to which macho Israeli militarist ideas inside our Diaspora thinktank-journo-privileged-pencil-neck community have wagged the dog. We’re empowered people. Yes we have been victimized in history, as other people have been too. But that has given rise to a myth of Jewish non-agency in world affairs.

Related posts:

1. Steve Walt becomes a blogger at… ‘Foreign Policy’!
2. John & Steve (Mearsheimer & Walt): Let the Good Times Roll!
3. Democratic Party Arm Calls Walt & Mearsheimer’s Ideas ‘Downright Dangerous’

I have been of course following all the absurd defenses and excuse-making from Jeffrey Goldberg, Ron Kampeas, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, etc for Ethan Bronner and the New York Times, as well as your recent comments. They insist that there is no bias in Bronner’s reporting and that his son’s service in the occupation army presents no conflict of interest. Here are the issues they seem to avoid:

-The New York Times has a long history of appointing reporters who are Jewish and/or Israeli to the Jerusalem bureau – Friedman, Sontag, Erlanger, Bronner, Kershner (etc. correct me if I am wrong on any of these). Whether Jewish or not they tend to live as middle class Israelis do, in West Jerusalem (like Bronner in an ethnically cleansed Palestinian neighborhood) or perhaps Tel Aviv, but never in Ramallah, Nazareth, Gaza or Hebron. So they have a structural identification with Israeli Jews — the privileged segment of the population living between the Med and the Jordan River.

Now let me be clear that I do NOT assume that being Jewish, or even having family ties to Israel, or being Israeli, automatically results in bias. Amira Hass of Haaretz is an excellent reporter. She’s an Israeli Jew whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Deborah Sontag of the New York Times was one of the best reporters on the conflict ever -  she was there during the second Intifada. So was Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian. So anyone who says that being Jewish automatically leads to pro-Israel bias is wrong. So on this point those criticizing and defending Bronner and the NYT should find a lot of common ground.

But here’s the issue that sticks. Is the NYT really defending some sort of universal principle? Can anyone seriously imagine that if it had been revealed that Bronner’s son had joined the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas), we would be hearing these sorts of defenses? Of course one reason is it’s so hard to imagine is because the New York Times has never had a Palestinian, Palestinian-American or Arab-American reporter of stature report on the conflict.

Yes, recently they have had Taghreed El-Khodary in Gaza  — who some like (Weiss for instance), but others (such as As’ad AbuKhalil) have strongly criticized. But here is a crucial point: El-Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be — I assume — because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week. Seriously?

To what can we attribute this double-standard? I am afraid it smacks of racism.

I also have a long memory — Back in 1995, NPR fired Maureen Meehan because it was claimed she had not adequately disclosed that her husband had worked as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority. Of course we did not have blogs in those days, but I still do not remember an outpouring in her defense from the mainstream media. Hmmm. I wonder why?

Related posts:

1. ‘Times’ says there are equal #s of Jews and Palestinians between river and sea; Mearsheimer says, more Palestinians
2. I passed along a false report re Ethan Bronner
3. Why Jews Are Not Leading an Antiwar Movement This Time Round

The other day I did a post on "Status, Radicalism & Happiness" that argued that many lefties who left the bourgeois track during the Vietnam era have had rich lives. I mentioned "my neighbor growing up in Baltimore. He got into the SDS at Harvard, and ended up dropping out and picking sugar cane for years in Cuba. Now he writes mysteries." Henry Norr in Berkeley knew who I meant. He sent the post along to Dick Cluster; and Dicky as I know him wrote to me that my facts were wobbly but my lesson isn’t.

I agree what you and your wife say, and feel free to use me as example. But actually, just to not-give-myself-airs: I was in SDS at Harvard, definitely, but alas graduated from the place (best I can claim is that I was on probation for a Dow Chemical sit-in — you can imagine my father Ray telling me on phone that he understood what we’d done but to try not to get kicked out in my last year because of the $$$ he’d invested), and spent only 2 months cutting cane in Cuba, in between stints working on "underground" newspaper Old Mole. Mysteries yes, though more recently Spanish-English translation, history, and also a couple of non-mystery novels without publishers. And teaching and advising half-time at UMass Boston, the commuter branch of UMass.

Who knows what it was I was on track to be if the movement hadn’t intervened????  My sense is like yours, though: that most of us from elite colleges, Jews and non-Jews, who got off that track ended up being able to rejoin it, though more often on some slow-freight line rather than fast-track, and with better social/service/political goals. I did stay in touch with Cuba and in the early-mid ’90s stumbled on a chance to go back there and work for (off-and-on) four years ‘92-’96, with Cuban teachers of English, and my kid to go to high school there 2 semesters, and my partner Nancy live and work there much of that time too; so now we have Cuban more-or-less extended family we go back and visit (and by a long and curious and very Cuban chain of events, one of those old mystery novels got published in Cuban translation a couple years ago).

Here’s a link to a social history of Havana written w/ Cuban writer/editor friend. And here is link to something short that  I wrote recently about the Venceremos Brigade etc (for the mag of the "David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies" at Harvard of all things — which is edited by someone who was also on the VB). [Weiss excerpts:]

Related posts:

1. How it feels to be inside an insurgent political movement
2. What If the Northern Press Hadn’t Covered the Civil Rights Struggle, Cont’d
3. Mark Cuban Shows You How to Win

The Harvard Crimson reports on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s DNA genealogy project that will be featured on a PBS series:

While working on the program, Gates learned that television personality and cardiothoracic surgeon Mehmet C. Oz ’82, who is Muslim, and Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony-award winning director Michael I. Nichols, who is Jewish, have a common ancestor.

“It’s sort of like the biblical story of Abraham,” said Gates, referencing the father of the monotheistic faiths and his two sons—Isaac, the founder of Judaism, and Ishmael, the founder of Islam.

Gates described this discovery as emblematic of the purpose of the project.

Writes my Muslim tipster: The vast differences posited between Muslims and Jews always annoyed me. My parents did almost keep a kosher kitchen. We loved books. In a strange rite derived I believe from Indian Muslim tradition, we were not allowed to step on a piece of paper or a book. It was considered blasphemous. It was described as stepping on the back of our mother. Today many Muslims and Jews argue for vast differences between the two on religio-political ideological grounds. Maybe one day Moshe and Mohammad can argue over who has the best hummus or how the semitic cousins have so much in common.

Related posts:

1. Slumdog’s Muslim protagonist
2. Jewish body in Germany decries hate-slaying of Muslim woman
3. ‘Youtube is lessening anti-Jewish feeling in the Muslim world’

A chorus of statements from human rights organizations has determined that both Israel and Palestinian authorities have failed to conduct independent, impartial investigations into alleged war crimes committed during last year’s Israeli assault on Gaza.

The United Nations’ Goldstone report called on both sides to conduct independent investigations in accordance with international standards over the war crimes allegations. A U.N. resolution that was adopted in November implored Israel and Hamas to undertake these investigations within three months—and that time frame is up now.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian reports were given to the United Nations in late January, and they both denied wrongdoing. Much of the Israeli report focuses on the capacity of the military to investigate itself.

Below are excerpts from some of the human rights organizations’ statements concerning Israel’s and the Palestinians’ investigations.

From Human Rights Watch:

Israel has failed to demonstrate that it will conduct thorough and impartial investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations by its forces during last year’s Gaza conflict. An independent investigation is needed if perpetrators of abuse, including senior military and political officials who set policies that violated the laws of war, are to be held accountable.

From B’Tselem:

No system can investigate itself. The [Israeli] report emphasizes the independence of the military justice system in interpreting the law. However in all other matters, it is an integral part of the military… B’Tselem again urges Israel to immediately establish an independent investigative apparatus composed of persons from outside the military. The investigation must examine not only the conduct of the soldiers in the field but also the orders given them and the policy that was set by the senior military echelon and the political echelon.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in addition to criticizing the Israeli undertakings, has said that the investigations carried out by Hamas and by officials in Ramallah are not credible, as has Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch called the Hamas claim that their rocket attacks into Israel are not war crimes “factually and legally wrong.”

In addition, a coalition of Israeli human rights groups sent an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 4 days before the Israeli response was released to the U.N., calling on Israel to "establish, without delay, an independent and impartial investigation mechanism to thoroughly examine the allegations raised regarding violations of international law during Operation Cast Lead."

Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon’s only statement on the responses has been to say that, “no determination can be made on the implementation of the (UN) resolution by the parties concerned.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said they were “shocked and appalled by this lack of responsibility,” by Ban, saying that Israel has not conducted credible investigations and that the United Nations has a responsibility to ensure accountability for war crimes.

Related posts:

1. It’s OK for Americans to fund settlements, but aid human-rights groups? No way
2. Human rights investigations for Africa not Gaza, says France’s Kouchner
3. When will ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’ speak out for human rights in Gaza?

Story itself is a rehash. But the headline is choice, and echoes the EI item that broke the kerfuffle.

Related posts:

1. In Political Coverage, ‘The Times’ Fails to Identify the Jewish Right
2. The National Interest, and the Israeli interest
3. 2 days and counting: ‘NY Times’ fails to correct Israeli gov’t misrepresentations about the killing of a demonstrator