Jonathan Cook, writing at Mondoweiss, provides some fascinating insights into the reasons for the entrenched bias in Western reporting on Israel-Palestine conflict. He explains why the case of Eitan (“Ethan”) Bronner — the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief whose son’s enrollment in the Israeli army recently provoked a brief debate inside the newspaper about conflicts of interest — is far from unusual. Cook spoke to a Jerusalem-based bureau chief who anonymously shared these observations:
He calls Bronner’s situation “the rule, not the exception”, adding: “I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”
He added that it is very common to hear Western reporters boasting to one another about their “Zionist” credentials, their service in the Israeli army or the loyal service of their children. “Comments like that are very common at Foreign Press Association gatherings [in Israel] among the senior, agenda-setting, elite journalists.”
My informant is highly critical of what is going on among the Jerusalem press corps, even though he admits the same charges could be levelled against him. “I’m Jewish, married to an Israeli and like almost all Western journalists live in Jewish West Jerusalem. In my free time I hang out in cafes and bars with Jewish Israelis chatting in Hebrew. For the Jewish sabbath and Jewish holidays I often get together with a bunch of Western journalists. While it would be convenient to think otherwise, there is no question that this deep personal integration into Israeli society informs our overall understanding and coverage of the place in a way quite different from a journalist who lived in Ramallah or Gaza and whose personal life was more embedded in Palestinian society.”
And now he gets to the crunch: “The degree to which Bronner’s personal life, like that of most lead journalists here, is integrated into Israeli society, makes him an excellent candidate to cover Israeli political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life. The problem is that Bronner is also expected to be his paper’s lead voice on Palestinian political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life, all in a society he has almost no connection to, deep knowledge of or even the ability to directly communicate with … The presumption that this is possible is neither fair to Bronner nor to his readers, and it’s really a shame that Western media executives don’t see the value in an Arabic-speaking bureau chief living in Ramallah and setting the agenda for the news coming out of the Palestinian territories.”
All true. But I think there is a deeper lesson from the Bronner affair. Editors who prefer to appoint Jews and Israelis to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are probably making a rational choice in news terms — even if they would never dare admit their reasoning. The media assign someone to the Jerusalem bureau because they want as much access as possible to the inner sanctums of power in a self-declared Jewish state. They believe – and they are right – that doors open if their reporter is a Jew, or better still an Israeli Jew, who has proved his or her commitment to Israel by marrying an Israeli, by serving in the army or having a child in the army, and by speaking fluent Hebrew, a language all but useless outside this small state.
Yes, Ethan Bronner is “the rule”, as my informant notes, because any other kind of journalist — the goyim, as many Israelis dismiss non-Jews — will only ever be able to scratch at the surface of Israel’s military-political-industrial edifice. The Bronners have access to power, they can talk to the officials who matter, because those same officials trust that high-powered Jewish and Israeli reporters belong in the Israeli consensus. They may be critical of the occupation, but they can be trusted to pull their punches. If they ever failed to do so, they would be ejected from the inner sanctum and a paper like the NYT would be forced to replace them with someone more cooperative.
Read the whole piece.
Enlightening data, Paul. So obvious, now that someone’s spotted it and said something about it. Thanks.
In a speech a few years ago in Europe the then editor of Haaretz hinted at how any Israeli newspaper has to serve as the state’s hasbara outlet and admitted that the English and the Hebrew versions are often quite different for raisons d’etat. If you circulate amongst Jews for much of your life– unnoticed to be a goy– it becomes clear that a racist derision towards “dumb goyim” is often expressed making us the butt of much hateful slander in order to feel a sense of superiority. As the seemingly deranged Abe Foxman wrote: the Holocaust happened because Christians are jealous that Jews are God’s chosen people. Admittedly, history makes it scary to be a Jew, so even the obsessive “mensch-hood” complex is understandable. This insistence that you must “dupe these dumb goyim” is not new to NYTimes and other leading Jewish controlled media outlets. Nevertheless, mass majority of Jews feel themselves as totally integrated parts of goy society, feeling neither inferior nor superior…so much so that Foxman had to betray that his Anti-Defamation League’s main function is to “fight assimilation” of Diaspora Jews into our “dumb goyim” society.