One of the electrifying journalistic events of the "war on terror" came in 2004 when Farnaz Fassihi, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Baghdad,
wrote an email to a colleague, describing how awful life was there. The email was sensational because Fassihi's best reporting on the disaster wasn't showing up in the Journal; it got out as a form of
samizdat. And it changed the climate of reporting.
Well, Taghreed El-Khodary is a stringer in Gaza for the New York Times, i.e., she is a journalist under contract to the Times. El-Khodary is not a member of the Times staff, which consists of two reporters in the Times' bureau in Jerusalem, who have barely set foot in Gaza. El-Khodary has contributed reporting to the Times, but her best, most vivid accounts of the most important international story of the day are not appearing in the Times.
Here's El-Khodary speaking to Al-Jazeera from Gaza (as reported by electronic intifada):
The fear resonated in her voice while she was on the phone to Al-Jazeera. Taghreed lives on a street near my parents.
"Where to? Where can I go seek refuge to?" she continued. "I live next
to the parliament which was destroyed; next to the police station,
which was destroyed; next to the hospitals, which were bombed; and the
Israeli navy is shelling from the sea, the F-16s from the sky, the
tanks from the ground … where to?" she repeated again and again.
"First your house shakes, and the windows break, and the fear … the
fear. And when you see all these children around you in the hospital.
Some can draw, and what they drawing is unbelievable. A six-year-old
boy in my house drew a picture of boy who was alive, and another who
was dead. He said the dead boy was his friend, whom the Israelis
killed. And the father is unable to protect his child. And the mothers
are trying to hide their fear from their kids."
Here she is telling us what it's like to be in Gaza on NPR's show "The Takeaway":
"People are in a state of fear and horror. They don't know what's coming… I walked around the streets and the streets are deserted, shops are closed… Bakeries are still functioning, but they are fearing that there will be no fuel and no flour… They don't know, what are the targets?… They [Hamas] have built a lot. You don't know who is wanted around you. If your neighbor is wanted… you don't know where it's coming. You don't know what Israel is going to hit…
"[Opening the border] crossings is a demand for the people. People are screaming for freedom of movement!… They [Israel] are saying no to Hamas… They are considering Hamas an enemy. But with such psychological warfare, with such warfare, I think more extreme is coming, and I am predicting the worst to come to Gaza.
"I met many people who are injured.. [I ask] 'Who do you blame?'… They do not blame Hamas… All these injured people they were naming Egypt, Israel, the U.S., the international community… A mother who lost her loved one, her son…was cursing.. the U.S. for its silence."
My question is simple. Why isn't this eloquent Arab woman's voice in the New York Times in all that searing honesty? Is she not to be trusted? If not, why not? Why isn't her personal account on the front page or the Week in Review?
Indeed, El-Khodary's voice when it appears in the Times is so different from her comments to Al-Jazeera and the Takeaway it's a wonder she isn't having an integrative psychological disorder. Here she is in the Times dutifully quoting an American Jewish Congress report on Hamas's civilian infrastructure. As'ad AbuKhalil has repeatedly criticized the coverage the Times offers from El-Khodary and has reported that El-Khodary is complaining privately about edits.
Three years ago, Dan Okrent (my editor back in the day), then the public editor of the New York Times, defended the Times's coverage of Israel/Palestine but offered one suggestion: [emphases mine]
can be objective about our own claimed objectivity.
It 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… The Times ought to give it a try.
Good advice, Dan.
There was a time when the Times had only gentile reporters in Israel out of concern that it would be accused, as a Jewish-owned newspaper, of putting its thumb on the scales of the truth. That day is long past. Both Times reporters in Israel/Palestine are married to Israelis. I believe both are Jewish too. Ethan Bronner is married to Naomi Kehati, a clinical psychologist, who is said to be a Mizrahi Jew from Yemen who grew up in Tel Aviv. Isabel Kershner is married to Hirsch Goodman. She used to work at the Jerusalem Report. Is the 'Times' also married to Israel? You have to wonder. As Roger Cohen wrote in the Times the other day, echoing one of my central themes in the age of Obama, Isn't it time we got more non-Jews into the mix on the Middle East?
This is the home of the brave. Americans are brave enough to read Taghreed El-Khodary's words.
