This is funny in an elephant-in-the-room sort of way. The New York Times posted a video to its Facebook page on Tuesday of the next Jerusalem bureau chief, Peter Baker, getting a primer about his new assignment from former bureau chiefs Jodi Rudoren and James Bennet, both of whom are now big editors at the paper, and Rudoren and Bennet repeatedly describe the fishbowl pressures on a New York Times reporter in Jerusalem and the closeness between Israel and the United States– but never actually use the word Jewish in doing so. During 25 minutes of palaver, the word “Jewish” occurs just once, when Rudoren refers to the Jewish National Fund.
The omission is entertaining because gee, everyone knows that a lot of the pressure on the Times is from Jewish groups, and the Times is owned by Jews; but Rudoren, now a deputy international editor, and Bennet, the paper’s editorial page editor, can only talk about all the “Americans” who are invested in Israel. Watch the contortions:
Rudoren: I mean it’s very interesting how America and Washington are perceived there. I mean it’s such an important part of life there, whether it’s because there’s a huge amount of Americans there, there’s also so much American philanthropy. There’s American names on so many buildings.
Bennet: Americans on both sides.
Rudoren: Correct. I mean a huge amount of Palestinian-American money yeah, also involved in things. And the foreign policy relationship and aid relationship is the defining thing in a lot of ways… Because Israel is so connected with America culturally, policy wise, alliance-wise, it’s not a distant sense of how they perceive America.
It’s not as if everyone in the room isn’t thinking, Jewish. I’ve been in Israel and the settlements: the names on buildings are Jewish ones. Blooomberg, Adelson, and so on.
The story-behind-the-story is that Baker is not Jewish and his appointment breaks a string of Jewish bureau chiefs for the Jewish-owned newspaper, including Rudoren and Bennet (who is of Polish-Jewish descent, according to Wikipedia). Rudoren has exhibited frank ethnocentrism: she has repeatedly given speeches to Jewish-American groups, seemed to pitch a lot of her coverage to American Jewish readers, and once told Hadassah of her assignment: “I come knowledgeable about the Jewish American or Jewish Israeli side of this beat.”
But then Peter Baker asks about the America-Israel relationship, and Rudoren and Bennet tuck into euphemisms.
Can we expect these editors to address questions of the U.S. Jewish community’s influence over foreign policy honestly? Forget about it. This issue is just too loaded for them personally and institutionally to say one plain word about it in public. And yes, in fairness, a component of their inhibition is that Jew-baiting/anti-semitism charges have been swirling throughout the election campaign and the Times has been in the crosshairs.
But the result is that readers are turning elsewhere to learn about something they have a right to know. Why, just yesterday +972 wrote directly of a “Jewish American billionaire” pouring huge amounts of money into Israeli politics, and Jewish Insider reported that Jewish conservatives are boycotting the Republican convention because as one of them says, Trump “has gone out of his way to offend Republican donors, especially the Jewish ones at the RJC [Republican Jewish Coalition]. Why attend a party that celebrates the defeat of the donor class?” Jews are important.
Another omission: throughout the Facebook session, Rudoren uses the word “Israeli” instead of Jewish Israeli, which is unfair to the 20 percent of that society that is not Jewish. It is like speaking of “southerners'” attitudes in the Jim Crow era when you are only talking about the white ones. And she rationalizes Israeli racism. When Bennet says that people in Israel and Palestine are more “raw and candid” than folks here, Rudoren says:
And also blunt and racist in a way that’s just different from America… It’s blunter there, but it is also more rooted in experience. It’s not based on some stereotype. It’s based on, “Every Israeli I know has acted in this way.” Or, “My cousin was killed by a suicide bomber.” It’s not based on kind of an idea, it’s based on experience.
Thanks to Adam Horowitz.
Most fascinatingly repulsive to me were Rudoren’s comments re: “zero sum empathy.” that is in having empathy for one, it requires (or to her readers it was perceived as) one to reduce empathy for the other.
But I find this position itself to be consistent with supporting zionism, that is an exclusive, colonial, ethnosupremacist position, not with single-state, who support equality across-the-board, and are thus genuinely empathetic to both parties.
She therefore taints the political movement towards Palestinian equal rights, or Israeli anti-apartheidism, with zionism. A perversely false equivalence.
Classic apology for racism.
I was also intrigued by Rudoren’s “huge amount of Palestinian-American money” (somehow comparable to “[Jewish-]American money” in Israel, as “such an important part of life there”), with an assist from Bennet. Fake balance is par for the course, but this is a real whopper.
The NYT exists in a bubble. They have no incentive to change, so they won’t.
Always interesting and revealing , if you can hold your nose long enough to avoid the stench, to delve into the mainstream JSILi Press to get a flavour of JSILi and in particular JSILi West Bank settlers thinking. In today`s Jerusalem Post eg
http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/The-IDF-has-lost-control-over-Hebron-area-460403
The story covers the feelings of local settlers in the wave of recent”terrorist” attacks in the Hebron area and features taped comments from the daughter of one of those killed.
There are the usual carefully crafted ” we have to learn to live together in peace” inserts just to reinforce the idea that the JSiILi settlers are ordinary peaceful folks who just want to get on with their everyday lives. But the main theme is that of victimised and wide eyed innocence. Why has this been done to us ? Why is this being done to us ?
Even the reference to the Palestinians who went to the aid of one of the victims is somehow twisted into the narrative to imply that most Palestinians in the West bank have no issues with the Ziothieves living in their midst and don`t really want them to leave.
Totally brain dead and totally brainwashed.They have zero perception of the simple fact that it is being done to them because they are foreign invaders who have stolen,raped and pillaged another peoples land. It never felt like this back in good old Brooklyn.
And somewhere in all of this you have a sense that individually and collectively these Zio Freaks are desperately resisting the urge to scream round them all up , concentrate them in camps and well you know the rest.
The modern state of “Israel” has successfully indoctrinated many Jewish Americans to believe that the political ideas of Zionism have become either the equal to, or supplant, the historic Jewish religion.
By effectively substituting “State” for one’s Jewish social and religious identity the self-proclaimed “Jewish State of Israel” practices a unique, de facto form of supremacy by applying ethnicity and religious identification to determine the degree of ones political enfranchisement and entitlement to receive basic human rights.
This is why there can be “A Nation of Jews” in Israel, but there can never be “A Nation of Israelis” in Israel, composed of multiple ethnicities and religions, yet all receiving the same degree of equal rights and enfranchisement.
I find it dangerous to embrace the doctrines of a State that claims to officially speak in the name of my family’s Jewish ethnicity and faith, while depriving human rights to those Jews and non-Jews who either can not, or will not, embrace the official, received identity.
The brittle intolerance shown by those opposing any dissenting opinion to Israel’s official narrative mirrors Israel’s sad and steady march towards a Jewish fascism that recognizes only one interpretation of Judaism and Jewish identity, and ironically deprives Jews of a religious freedom officially recognized by every secular democracy on earth.
The moral blindness of Zionism to critically judge its own behavior towards “The Goyim,” or “Other” is Israel’s moral and pragmatic Achille’s heal, because a self-proclaimed Jewish state that ironically cannot officially tolerate Jewish religious pluralism is also a self-proclaimed Jewish State that can justify a military occupation of non-Jews for nearly 50 years, conduct illegal land seizures, engage in illegal settlement building, and determine human rights based upon ones religious and ethnic identity.