Today in the New York Times, Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren covered Israelis’ views of Ariel Sharon. Her story is summarized by the subhead:
Some Israelis recall a determined leader, while others revile him as the man who removed Jewish settlements in Gaza
Israelis? The story is 18 paragraphs long. Nowhere in there is it mentioned that 20 percent of Israelis are Palestinians. Nowhere are they asked for their views.
You have to get to the 11th paragraph to hear any Palestinian voices at all–
The Palestinian news media reported that people in Gaza burned pictures of Mr. Sharon and distributed sweets in the streets to celebrate the death of a man they called “the butcher.”
And that’s all. Rudoren’s Palestinian voices are in Gaza, outside Israel.
Then she goes back to the praise. And there are two points of view according to her, the rightist and the far-rightist. To her Israelis are Jews. She completely erases 20 percent of the population. Do they not have a word of criticism? Some of the people killed in the second intifada were Palestinian Israelis.
Imagine during Jim Crow that a white supremacist senator in the south died, and the New York Times reporter didn’t ask the black people in the state what they thought about him.
Now let’s go to the last paragraphs of the story. Rudoren closes with food. And this was characteristic of Time magazine under Henry Luce: to humanize a person you discussed what they liked to eat. Luce pioneered that–
Asian strongman Ferdinand Marcos sits down to a breakfast of fish and scrambled eggs.
Rudoren’s anecdote takes one of Sharon’s most disagreeable habits to make him human:
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, remembered preparing Mr. Sharon for his first meeting with President George W. Bush in 2001. True to his well-known appetites, Mr. Sharon had buckets of steak, lamb chops and hot dogs delivered to his Washington hotel room.
“He gets down to the last two hot dogs, and he says, ‘Are you sure you don’t want them?’ Mr. Hoenlein said with a laugh. “He loved everything, but he loved hot dogs in particular.”
Hoenlein’s not an Israeli either. But he’s Jewish, so he counts.
Rudoren have become more and more of a zionist fundamentalist the past year.
People like her are the same that supported the apartheid government in South Africa.
Imagine going back in time to Alabama 1962 and telling the young Jews protesting Jim Crow there that the spirit of Bull Connor would drive the Jewish State 50 years later. You’d be laughed at.
NYT is Israel’s Pravda here in the US.
What a world we live in.
Your criticism is spot on James, but Rudoren doesn’t even deliver the goods when it comes to Israeli Jews.
Sabra and Shatila? That’s the only thing anyone remembers from the nearly 20 bloody years Israel spent in the “Lebanese quagmire”? Over 1,000 Israeli dead and one of the most controversial issues in Israel for nearly two decades – for which Sharon bore huge responsibility (full of lies, deceit, illegality and lunacy), and which probably drove Menahem Begin to an early grave — and Rudoren forgot to mention it?
And settlements. All that matters is his removal of the settlements from Gaza (and the terse description “builder of Jewish settlements”)? Settlements have been the focus of bitter public debate in Israel for decades, and Sharon was instrumental in the post-’77 policy shift that created the current settlement reality. Rudoren didn’t think that was relevant?
It’s not even about “rightist and far-rightest”. It’s about crappy, lazy reporting.
The “distribution of sweets” in Gaza bit is simply dehumanising garbage.
jnorth, hoenlein got it wrong: I happen to know from an insider that *sotto voce* the hot dogs were, more accurately, ‘ball park franks’. yes, Sharon loved hot dogs, and baseball and apple pie. why he was as American as . . . well, American things. (here is luce’s lack of vision on display. nobody – no American – wants to hear about some Asian eating fish for breakfast. sounds too foreign.)
in regard to shmuel’s comment, i think that the critical year in settler policy was ’73, the near disaster of the yom kippur war. at the risk of exposing my mild OCD, eyal Weitzman gives a neat hour-long summary of the history on youtube, i believe at the Baker Institute of Rice University, for those who don’t want to invest the time or money in his book on the subject.