It won't surprise anyone, I'm sure, that I think New York Times
coverage of Arab--Israeli and particularly Palestinian--Israeli
issues--taking into account all types of coverage, from straight
news reporting, to analysis, to editorial/op--ed coverage--tilts
distinctly toward Israel. This is noticeable to a limited extent
with straight news coverage, much more obvious with analysis, and
very evident with editorial and op--ed coverage. Often this is a
matter simply of reporting or analyzing from an Israeli perspective,
without taking the Palestinian perspective into account--as if all
reporting from Israel and about Israelis is essentially reporting on
"us" and on concerns in which we the readers are vitally
interested, whereas reporting on Palestinians is about a different,
foreign people and therefore of much less interest.
This occurs, for instance, when we're treated to frequent
features on the personal and psychological impact of suicide
bombings on Israelis but seldom see stories about the impact on
Palestinians of the occupation and all its aspects--the civilian
deaths, the roadblocks, the land confiscation, the curfews, the
depredations by settlers, the shootings by soldiers, the destruction
of olive groves, etc., etc. Times reporters seem to spend little
time in the West Bank and Gaza--less and less as Israel tightens its
control over these territories--and as a result there is relatively
little reporting on the situation there. Even the stories about
Israel's July 22 missile attack in Gaza that killed 14 innocent
civilians were filed from Jerusalem, not from Gaza.
Imbalance in news coverage is chiefly a matter of omission rather
than commission, as the examples above show. Since the beginning of
the intifada almost two years ago, the Times has only rarely given
casualty totals for Palestinians and Israelis--one suspects because
Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths by about three to one,
which makes it difficult to portray Israel as the party under siege.
Times editorialists never saw fit to comment on the July 22 Israeli
missile attack on Gaza, although they generally do run editorials
decrying large Palestinian terrorist attacks.
The Times also seldom uses the word "occupation" to
describe Israel's 35--year--old rule over the West Bank and Gaza,
seldom describes East Jerusalem as occupied territory, seldom
informs readers that the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem
are settlers who reside not in "neighborhoods" or in
"suburbs" of Jerusalem but in settlements built on land
confiscated from Palestinians, seldom reports on the steady
expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, and
seldom indicates that the intifada is an uprising against Israel's
occupation.
A comparison of Times news reporting with Washington Post
reporting shows the Post to be far superior in its on--the--ground
coverage. Whereas Times reporters seem usually to file their West
Bank and Gaza stories from Jerusalem, Post reporters generally write
them directly from the West Bank or Gaza. Post stories are for the
most part broader in scope, more in--depth, more probing, and more
balanced than Times articles. Post reporters tend to get "down
and dirty," more often reporting the grim realities of
Palestinian life under occupation, more often following Israeli
soldiers as they blow in doorways and walls in house--to--house
searches in refugee camps, more often catching the uncomfortable
realities of Israel's occupation practices, such as sniper shootings
of rock--throwing Palestinian teenagers.
Whereas the Times only rarely reports casualty figures, the Post
did so with some regularity until Israel's reoccupation of the West
Bank in April. It is unclear whether Post reporting on deaths has
dropped off because numbers became much harder to track during that
month--long siege, or because the Post, and all other papers, have
begun to receive much heavier criticism from Israeli supporters in
recent months, and all print and electronic media are on the
defensive. The Post's employment of an ombudsman--veteran reporter
Michael Getler--although not a key to perfection, helps keep the
paper more nearly honest. Getler writes a weekly column, which he
frequently devotes to a thorough analysis and questioning of Post
reporting from the Middle East.
Analytical reporting in both the Post and the Times is spotty. In
the Times, analysis, which is usually done by the paper's best
diplomatic correspondents, often indicates at least a mild bias,
usually in the form of an inability to fathom where the Palestinians
are coming from and what the Palestinian perspective is. One gets
the impression that few if any Times correspondents understand what
drives the intifada or accept that there is any legitimacy to
Palestinian resistance to the occupation. For instance, in October
2000, during the first few days of the intifada, Palestinian
citizens of Israel demonstrated in solidarity with West Bank--Gaza
Palestinians, who at that point were being killed in very large
numbers by Israeli soldiers, and during the demonstrations Israeli
police shot to death 13 Israeli Palestinians.
In an analysis of the nationalistic reaction to the intifada
throughout the Arab world written two weeks into the intifada,
Judith Miller wrote that the "rift between Israeli Jews and the
Arab citizens of Israel" was another "profound emotional
scar" left by the violence. Her evidence of the "emotional
scar" was that Israeli Jews "were horrified by the
ferocity of this uprising, which closed off large sections of their
country, and by the 'Death to the Jews' slogans chanted by the Arab
protesters." She made no mention of an emotional scar for
Israeli Palestinians, no mention at all of the fact that 13 unarmed
Israeli--Palestinian demonstrators had recently been shot to death,
no mention that Israeli police had never in Israel's history opened
fire on demonstrators when they were Israeli Jews, and no mention of
the fact that Israeli Jewish demonstrators had chanted "Death
to Arabs" during demonstrations at the same time.
More recently, on July 14, 2002, Serge Schmemann wrote a brief
essay accompanying pictures of several West Bank Palestinians who
described their frustration with US policy. (A 12--year--old boy,
for instance, says that he likes Americans when they support
Palestinians, but then he notes that Colin Powell came to visit
Yasir Arafat and "said something about" a Palestinian
state but then did nothing. A taxi driver who had been waiting for
hours for Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint to return his ID papers,
said he blames everybody for the situation, including the
Palestinian Authority, and feels that the US gave the green light to
Israel to continue the occupation.) Under a headline that does
sympathetically acknowledge the Palestinians' "deep
despair," Schmemann seems to give them the back of his hand by
concluding his essay this way: "It is easy to argue with these
voices, to recite the litany of Mr. Arafat's failings and lost
opportunities. Perhaps it is useful, though, to simply hear
them" [my emphasis]. If Schmemann didn't actually mean to be
patronizing, as this sounds, then he must have felt it necessary to
apologize for letting Palestinians speak their minds.
One other example of the failure of Times correspondents to
understand--even to fathom -- the Arab and Palestinian perspective:
on March 3, 2002, diplomatic correspondent Elaine Sciolino ran a
long article on the mood in Saudi Arabia and appeared on C--SPAN
that morning to talk about it. On C--SPAN, she said she had been
quite surprised during a three--week trip to Saudi Arabia to
discover how much all levels of Saudi society focused on the
Palestinian situation. It amazed her, she said, how very much the
Palestinian crisis dominated Saudi conversation, and how the crisis
informed their thinking about the US because the US armed Israel. It
also surprised her, she said, that television pictures of Israelis
attacking Palestinians appear all the time in Saudi Arabia [her
emphasis]. She repeatedly emphasized her amazement at this
discovery, and the tenor of the article was similar, although a
little less obviously surprised. The article spoke of seeing
television footage of "the Palestinian interpretation of the
intifada," by which Sciolino meant that the pictures were
one--sided, showing Israeli soldiers firing into crowds and dead
Palestinian babies but no Palestinian suicide bombers or Israeli
bombing victims.
What's most amazing about Sciolino's discoveries was not that the
Saudis were concerned about the Palestinian plight, but that
Sciolino was surprised to discover that they were. No media person
and no one as well informed and savvy as Sciolino should ever have
been surprised that the Arab man in the street sees frequent
television pictures of Palestinians being beaten and shot by
Israelis and that this arouses genuine anger on behalf of the
Palestinians. This is an appalling level of obliviousness and
denial. The Times understands historic Jewish fears and the impact
these have on American Jews when they see Israelis under attack, but
it generally isn't able to apply this same level of understanding to
Arabs and their sense of solidarity with fellow Arabs under attack.
Times editorials, columns, and the selection of op--ed articles
are far more blatant in their tilt toward Israel. In an article in
Roane Carey's The New Intifada, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
described the tilt of editorials and op--eds run during the first
four months of the intifada. Of 15 editorials on the conflict, they
labeled 14 as pro--Israeli and one as neutral because it focused on
internal Israeli politics and made no mention of Palestinians. Of 33
op--eds, 25 were pro--Israeli, six were pro--Palestinian, and two
were sensitive to both sides. (The Post doesn't come off any better
in its editorial coverage. Abunimah and Ibish found that of 13 Post
editorials in the same period, 12 were strongly pro--Israeli, the
remaining one neutral. Of 27 op--ed articles, 20 were pro--Israeli,
five were sympathetic to the Palestinians, and two were sensitive to
both sides.) Times editorial writers have criticized Israel for
settlement construction and harsh practices in the West Bank and
Gaza, but in the two years since the Camp David summit
collapsed--years that have seen the outbreak of the intifada, a
steady escalation in Palestinian violence, an increase in suicide
bombings, Israel's complete termination of the negotiating process
six months after Camp David, the election of hardliner Sharon, the
collapse of various cease--fire and negotiating plans such as
Mitchell and Tenet, a campaign of Israeli assassinations of
Palestinians, the reoccupation and siege of the civilian population
of the West Bank, the destruction of the Palestinian civil
infrastructure--Times editorials have concentrated the burden of
blame for all turmoil almost entirely on Yasir Arafat and the
Palestinians.
Arafat alone was blamed for the collapse of Camp David, Arafat
has been blamed for provoking Israel into taking harsh measures
during the intifada, Arafat and the Palestinians are blamed for
escalating violence. In an August 2001 editorial, the Times declared
that both sides needed to work to contain the violence and that
their mutual goal should be "to create a calm enough atmosphere
to take the first steps toward resumed negotiations." Getting
to that point would, in the Times's view, require two things: that
Arafat show "more responsible behavior" and that Israel be
willing to recognize that "for now he [Arafat] is the only
realistic Palestinian negotiating partner." In other words,
Israel need do nothing except grin and bear Arafat; all real
concessions and good behavior had to come from Arafat. The usual
presuppositions were at work here: Israelis always show responsible
behavior and don't need the admonition given Arafat, and, unlike
Palestinians, Israelis obviously always desire "a calm enough
atmosphere to take the first steps toward resumed
negotiations."
The Times demonstrated its unbalanced approach most noticeably in
July 2001 in its commentary on a major one--year--later
retrospective on the Camp David summit published by Jerusalem bureau
chief Deborah Sontag. In a striking--and, one must assume,
deliberate--effort to maintain its own blame--Arafat position on
Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag story undermined Sontag
by contradicting her principal conclusion. Having done extensive
interviews with Israeli, Palestinian, and American participants in
the summit and in--depth analysis of what went wrong, Sontag
concluded that Arafat was by no means solely to blame for the
summit's collapse and that all three parties were responsible, more
or less equally, for mistakes made over the entire seven years of
the peace process. A "potent, simplistic narrative has taken
hold" in Israel and the United States, Sontag wrote. "It
says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last
summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then 'pushed the button' and
chose the path of violence." But officials to whom she spoke
had concluded that the dynamic was actually far more complex than
this, that Arafat did not bear sole or even a disproportionate share
of the responsibility. In fact, Sontag concluded, Barak did not
offer Arafat the moon at Camp David but rather proposed a solution
that might have been generous and even politically courageous in
Israeli terms, but that would not have given the Palestinians what
they regarded as a viable state.
Rather than accept Sontag's considered assessment of where
responsibility lay, a Times editorial two days later persisted in
praising Barak and blaming Arafat. Barak had come to Camp David, the
editorial proclaimed, "with a daring offer, a peace plan that
essentially vaulted over the interim steps outlined under the Oslo
accords.Mr. Barak gambled that Mr. Arafat would accept his
approach." But, the editorial contended, Arafat was not up to
the task, acted too hesitantly, did not offer any proposals of his
own, and condoned and, it's implied, stirred up "the violent
uprising" that erupted two months later. Words and phrases like
"daring," "vaulted," and "condoned the
violent uprising" set the tone here. The editorial is saying
that, despite what Sontag wrote, Barak did offer Arafat the moon,
and Arafat was solely responsible for letting it all fall apart.
(Interestingly, Sontag left Jerusalem after this article was
published. She's still with the Times and occasionally writes for
the Magazine, but I can't help wondering if she got kicked upstairs,
or aside, or something. Maybe she intended to leave anyway; this
article would have been a great swan song. But maybe it turned into
a swan song after the Times editors decided they didn't like it, or
after they received complaints from pro--Israeli, anti--Arafat
readers?)
The story of what actually transpired at Camp David, unearthed by
Sontag a year after the fact, is also an indictment of the US media,
including particularly the Times. By unquestioningly accepting the
US--Israeli version of Camp David, which from the moment it ended
placed the entire responsibility for failure on Arafat, the media
made a very serious political and diplomatic miscalculation that has
had far--reaching consequences. As Rob Malley, an American diplomat
who participated in the summit and has written extensively on it
since, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, "The
one--sided account that was set in motion in the wake of Camp David
has had devastating effects--on Israeli public opinion as well as on
US foreign policy," setting in train a string of misperceptions
that add up to a mythology about the Palestinians' supposed
inability to make peace.
Malley puts it this way: "Barak's assessment that the talks
failed because Yasser Arafat cannot make peace with Israel and that
his answer to Israel's unprecedented offer was to resort to
terrorist violence has become central to the argument that Israel is
in a fight for its survival against those who deny its very right to
exist. So much of what is said and done today derives from and is
justified by that crude appraisal. First, Arafat and the rest of the
Palestinian leaders must be supplanted before a meaningful peace
process can resume, since they are the ones who rejected the offer.
Second, the Palestinians' use of violence has nothing to do with
ending the occupation since they walked away from the possibility of
reaching that goal at the negotiating table.And, finally, Israel
must crush the Palestiniansif an agreement is ever to be
reached."
Although Israel and the US, and most especially President Bill
Clinton and his Middle East advisers, are responsible for starting
up this body of myths by stridently playing the blame game and
loudly trumpeting Arafat's "sole responsibility" for Camp
David's failure, the media--and the Times as the leading US
newspaper--bear an equal or nearly equal share of the responsibility
for buying into this line without questioning, without
investigating, without ever wondering if there might be something
self--serving in the US and Israeli versions of the story.
Deborah Sontag did a good job of research and in--depth analysis
in publishing her story, but it should not have taken a year to get
the real story. It was there to be ferreted out much earlier from
the Palestinian press, the Israeli press, various Internet websites,
and the numerous officials on all sides who were at Camp David, but
no US media organ was interested. It should have been obvious from
day one that there was something not quite straight in the tales of
Barak's great readiness to compromise versus Arafat's total
stone--walling. No negotiation is ever that black and white. But the
mindset and the body of assumptions from which the media and US
policymakers have always approached this issue blinded
correspondents and commentators to what was actually going on.
Thomas Friedman's commentaries, perhaps more even than the Times
editorial line, determine the impressions gained by Times readers of
what's involved in the conflict, who's responsible for its
continuation, and where it's headed. I won't go into a detailed
analysis of Friedman's writings since Camp David, but suffice it to
say that he has in repeated columns over two years obsessively
heaped blame on Arafat and the Palestinians (taking the line that
the intifada proves that Palestinians cannot make peace and want to
destroy Israel) and seriously distorted what Israel offered at Camp
David (repeating the fiction that Barak offered "95% of the
West Bank and half of Jerusalem, with all the settlements
gone," never mentioning that the resulting so--called
"state" would have been broken up into several
non--contiguous parts).
Friedman likes to blame Arafat for "provoking the Israelis
into brutalizing Palestinians" and for provoking the
"ritual sacrifice" of Palestinian children: "The
Palestinians seem to have no qualms about putting up their youths to
be shot at." He adds that Israelis seem to have no qualms about
shooting at Palestinians, but it's clear that in his book the basic
fault lies with the Palestinians. This is the way Middle East policy
is often made in Washington--through the commentary of leading
opinion--molders like Friedman and Times editorialists who spout
distortions like these all the time and whose critical position at
the center of public discourse enables them both to influence public
thinking and at the same time to reflect that thinking upward to
policymakers.
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst
with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in
1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer,
dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book,
"Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on US Middle East
Policy," was published by the University of California Press
and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second
book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian
Story," was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband
Bill, also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the
CounterPunch website.