Israeli anti-Occupation activist, Ezra Nawi, builds shelter for Palestinian villagers (Rina Castelnuovo/NYT)
I don’t know what it is with Ethan Bronner, the NY Times’ Israel correspondent. He’s clearly intelligent. He knows the issues fairly well. But his problem is he’s conflict about the politics of the Middle East. With a child in the IDF and married to an Israeli it’s almost as if he has to pull his punches [correction: Ethan Bronner denies he has a son in the IDF and I can’t for the life of me remember where I read this. So I stand corrected on this particular matter and apologize to Bronner and Phil Weiss, who picked this up from here. But Bronner’s wife IS Israeli.]
It’s not that he’s a horrible journalist. After all, as I said he’s articulate and intelligent and knows the issues. But rather than come right out and say something definitive, he beats around the bush and tempers his judgments. He wants everyone to like him and is shocked when many don’t.
The thing that irks me most about his reporting is that he ALWAYS manages to include a real howler in almost every major report that he writes. It usually something so condescending toward the Israeli peace movement or the Palestinians or something so twisted or distorted that it leaves you scratching your head how an otherwise intelligent human being can say something so out there, so…dumb.
In today’s report, he chose a worthy subject in Israeli peace activist Ezra Nawi, who has “adopted” the Palestinian villages of the south Hebron Hills, defending them from the marauding neighboring settlers. In addition, Ezra does come up for sentencing on Wednesday so the scrutiny on Israeli justice from a major U.S. media outlet is quite welcome. Please sign this Jewish Voice for Peace petition to pressure Israeli authorities to end this sham judicial process. For more on Nawi’s case, see this report by Neve Gordon.
But it’s as if he somehow has to mollify his right-wing readers in choosing such a progressive topic that he adds the following howler:
Since the Israeli left lost so much popular appeal after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 and the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza three years ago, its activists tend to be a rarefied bunch — professors of Latin or Sanskrit, and translators of medieval poetry. Mr. Nawi, however, is a plumber.
A note before I go on: later in this story he DOES quote an Israeli peace activist, David Shulman, who IS a professor of Sanskrit at the Hebrew University. But it’s as if this single source has somehow become emblematic of the entire Israeli peace movement. Not just emblematic, but in Bronner’s eyes the entire Israeli left has been reduced to David Shulman. While Prof. Shulman, a leader of Ta’ayush, IS an extraordinary scholar and human being, it is s deep disservice to him and the Israeli left to imply there aren’t many tens of thousands of others doing work equally valuable.
Bronner: have you forgotten about B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh G’vul, Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence, Rabbis for Human Rights, Hadash, Peace Now, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, Courage to Refuse, Parent’s Circle, Anarchists Against the Wall (just to mention organizations)? And individuals like Uri Avnery, Rabbi Menachem Froman, the Sheministim, Michael Sfard, Jeff Halper, Shulamit Aloni, Robbi Damelin, Yitzchak Frankenthal, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Dov Kheinin. Are these all nothing but effete European professors of obscure humanist subjects? The very notion is absurd and offensive.
Now, as always with Bronner’s howlers–there is a kernel of truth there. The organized Israeli left has shriveled and failed in a massive way since the first Intifada and especially during the Lebanon and Gaza wars. Note I said the “organized” left. I say this deliberately because Israeli NGOs and individual peace activists are doing work as vital as any done by the Israeli left when it was a more powerful political force. So for Bronner to dismiss the constituency of the Israeli left as he has done is deeply insulting and false.
He owes these courageous groups and individuals an apology. But will they get one? Don’t hold your breath.
David Shulman provides this bit of sad news from the anti-Occupation forces:
Yesterday was a tough day in the Territories…The whole group of some 30 Taayush activists, including 2 Palestinian drivers and some of our Palestinian colleagues, was arrested on arrival at al-Safa to accompany the farmers to their lands. The arrests were carried out [by the IDF] very brutally, there was one broken leg and one apparently broken arm.
As far as the IDF and the Occupation goes, plus ca change plus la meme chose. Oh I forgot, that’s going to mark me as yet another effete western intellectual do-gooder.
a child in the IDF and married to an Israeli Oh im sure if Bronner was to do a honest report abt the peace movement Im sure his son would get some flack from the higher ups in the Idf! Bronner how do you sleep at night
Well, if he has a kid in the IDF – why would he be critical?
I don’t know for a fact what impact it has. But if my child was fighting in Israel’s army and I reported from Israel for a U.S. newspaper my reporting about the IDF and its various wars and operations might be colored in some way. I might be tempted to pull my punches rather than really take it to the IDF if that was required.
Richard
I enjoy your excellent comments, but I am slighly offended about being left out of the list of progressives in this column. I have bene fighting for years against the silly notion that Jews require their own homeland. San Francisco is my Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem of myth is just another dusty Middle Eastern city. I am a brave fighter of the occupation, and will only rest when Jews are scattered among the nations, freed from atavistic tribal rights that cause worldwide scorn and hostility
My friend, if you’re slightly offended because I never mentioned yr name & have never heard of you before, then you take offense far too easily. And the notion of a Jewish homeland, whether you agree with it or not is not “silly.” Anyone who could say that doesn’t have a serious grasp of Jewish history.
I’m with you on fighting the Occupation. But not much else.
Richard, I am afraid you are off the deep end about Bronner. He wrote a perfectly good piece in today’s New York Times calling attention to this matter.
I’m a little confused, Suzanne. I thought today’s piece is what Richard is writing about.
The article is good in some ways, but as Richard says, it also trivializes the Israeli peace movement. I don’t think it’s an accident. The NYT is “balanced” on the I/P conflict in a way that doesn’t show in their coverage of repression elsewhere (like Iran). To steal a point made by a letter writer to the NYT public editor today, the NYT often seems to think “balanced journalism” means throwing a bone (or entire skeletons) to their rightwing critics, rather than simply reporting the facts as accurately as possible.
And notice that phrase “since the Israeli left lost so much popular appeal after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 and the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza three years ago”, followed by the reference to the peace movement being composed largely of professors of medieval poetry. The underlying message here is that common-sensical Israelis quite rationally lost hope because of the violence and terrorist-supporting proclivities of the Palestinians and the only Israelis who were different were the ivory tower dreamers and now this idealistic gay plumber–in other words, people either too impractical or too good for this world. Bronner is channeling the viewpoint of those Israelis who stopped supporting the peace movement, making this attitude seem reasonable. The “violent Palestinian uprising” in its first several months had ten Palestinians dying for every Israeli death–the ratio dropped later once the terrible suicide bombings against Israeli civilians began, and even then it was still three or four Palestinians dead for every Israeli. If people knew this it might put a different perspective on Israelis who say they stopped supporting the peace movement because of Palestinian violence. But it’s the way people tend to talk in the US and in the NYT–the Palestinian uprising is violent, and if any Israeli violence is mentioned it always has to be balanced by mention of Palestinian violence. The rule doesn’t apply the other way.
This is how you slant the news if you’re clever–you don’t have to lie, you just phrase things in certain ways, talk about “violent uprisings” and not about “war crimes” and make all the dissidents look like impractical saints, even while you praise them. We read this article and admire the man Bronner writes about (and we’re right to do so), while the article itself does little to challenge the assumptions of people who might say that Ezra Nawi means well, but that Israelis favored peace and it was Palestinian violence that got in the way.
BTW, the equivalent bias on Iran would be what you find in some misguided lefty commentary (though less and less)–the idea that the opposition to the government comes mainly from pro-Western secularists totally out of touch with their own society. You’d also have to throw in the subtle implication that support for governmental repression was understandable under the circumstances.
The analogy doesn’t entirely work, because the opposition in Iran might well be the majority of the people, whereas it’s really true that in Israel, the majority favored barbaric actions like the bombing of Gaza last January.
Sorry Mr. Bronner, but the opinion of a journalist at an elitist paper is worth almost as little as that of a “translator of mediaeval poetry” (that would be me). Your high regard for the proletariat has been noted however, and will undoubtedly stand you in good stead at the manual labourers’ collective to which you will be assigned.
Richard, one correction – roughly speaking there are two groupings of Israeli left, the so called “Zionist left” and the so called “Radical left”.
It is the first group which has lost its political power and popular support, the second group never had either (and if anything, their number is growing.)
As for the “Zionist left” – a brief look at their platform will show that they were never all that far off from the political right wing in Israel.
Besides this – keep up the good work.
Yes, you’re right. Meretz is commonly called the “Zionist left” & it is pretty much dead or on its deathbed. Labor used to be called such as well. But I don’t think they are “left.” If anything they are “liberal.” And liberalism in an Israeli context has been killed off.
But yes, the true Israeli left composed of activists NGOs, political parties like Hadash, & brave individuals are a strong group because they live by their principles & don’t compromise them. They don’t have many Knesset seats. But they wield moral power of a sort since no one else stands up for these principles.
Richard,
I took the phrase about the left in Israel having lost its popular appeal as referring to the Zionist left. That is certainly correct. They have long outlived their usefulness to the State and they have never, except at the very margins, been part of the activist, anti-occupation left.
Mapam, which took over Meretz, has a long history of subservience to the Israeli state, from establishing kibbutzim on confiscated Arab land to opposing giving support to refuseniks and Yesh Gvul. This type of militarist Zionist ‘left’ served no real purpose.
The activists left never had any great popular appeal so you may be correct in saying that its numbers haven’t significantly declined.
the so called “far left” Jews will just be seen as enlightened jews
http://ibnezra.wordpress.com/ Mondoweiss not a good partner? WTF If not for these,and so many others enlightened jews It would have been even harder to get my family to see the light.
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Richard,
I’m not sure if you mentioned this, but Prof. Shulman whom Bronner ridiculed, is a winner of the 1987 MacArthur Genius Award.
He’s one of the best exports the US has ever made to Israel.
I had no idea of Shulman’s award. That’s wonderful.