Ali Abunimah responded to Phil’s post on how the The New Yorker is failing in its Israel/Palestine coverage:
This is when I wrote the New Yorker off – when Henrik Hertzberg attacked me for daring to equate the lives of Palestinians with Israelis and daring to suggest that the systematic killing of unarmed civilians might not just be an unfortunate accident. Hertzberg wrote:
This is where the second intifada, which began soon after the failure of the Camp David talks at the close of the Clinton Presidency, has led; and this is where (one way or another, whether what follows is better or worse) it is ending. The violence has taken nearly a thousand lives—the equivalent, in proportion to the population of Israel and the Palestinian territories, of eight times the carnage of September 11th. Although the violence has taken the form of a cycle, as the journalistic cliché goes, it has not quite been symmetrical. Palestinians have instigated more of it, and they have suffered more from it. And, morally speaking, there has been a qualitative difference—something that even the most moderate Palestinian spokesmen refuse, on the whole, to admit. On the Op-Ed page of the Times, Ali Abunimah, of the Arab American Action Network, condemns “the targeting and killing of innocent civilians regardless of whether they are Israelis or Palestinians.” It’s a tired formula, and a dishonest one. Innocent Palestinian civilians, including children, have indeed been killed, often carelessly, and that is bad enough. But they have not been “targeted.” For Hamas and Islamic Jihad, however, the killing of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, is deliberate, premeditated, and desired—a matter of pride, a religious duty, an occasion for celebration, even (given that the proclaimed goal of these organizations is the liquidation of the Jewish state) an end in itself.
Horowitz comment: This was written in the New Yorker in 2001. I wonder if Hertzberg still feels this way after Jenin, Lebanon and Gaza. You should check out this clip from Democracy Now! where Amy Goodman had both Abunimah and Hertzberg on to discuss this. Hertzberg doesn’t come out looking very good.
