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Israeli Major General Amram Mitzna had been in many battles before, but none stranger than this one.
Mitzna, the commander of Israel’s central front, which includes the occupied West Bank, was driving up the highway from Jerusalem to Ramallah in January 1988. As his sand-colored Land Rover command car approached the Arab village of al-Ram, about five miles north of Jerusalem, Mitzna beheld through his front windshield a confrontation taking shape between some of his soldiers and a crowd of about fifty Palestinian teenagers. The Palestinian youths, their heads wrapped in checkered kaffiyehs, had erected a barricade of burning tires, broken car fenders, and boulders in the middle of the highway and were lobbing rocks and insults at ten Israeli soldiers standing in the road some 75 yards away.
But the combatants were not alone.
“When I arrived on the scene,” Mitzna recalled, “I discovered that there were more journalists there than soldiers. I had something like fifteen soldiers in all, including those who came with me, and there must have been at least twenty-five reporters, photographers, and video cameramen. At first, I ignored the journalists and told my soldiers to run with me to break up the demonstrators. So I started running. As soon as I took one step, though, I found myself surrounded by photographers on my right and video cameramen on my left. They were running right along with me! I could barely move. They were between me and my men, and around us and inside us—cameras, still photographers, everything. They were everywhere. So I stopped and I told the journalists, ‘Look, let me first make the news and I promise to come back and talk to you about it after it’s over. But for now, please go back and stand on the other side of the road.’ So one of the journalists—he was an American—says to me, ‘Show me an official [military court order] declaring this a closed military zone, otherwise I am not moving.’ Can you imagine the chutzpah! I said to him, ‘You know me! You know who I am. Now move away.’ It was crazy. I am the supreme commander in the West Bank and I had to argue my way past journalists to get to a battle.”
This was hardly the first time journalists had outnumbered Israeli soldiers at a confrontation with Palestinians in the West Bank, and it would not be the last. Consider just a few pieces of data. Israel, in quiet times, plays host to one of the largest foreign press contingents in the world, with some 350 permanently accredited news organizations stationed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. According to the Israel Government Press Office, an additional 700 journalists flocked to the country at the height of the 1987— 88 Palestinian uprisings. That influx amounted to 1 foreign correspondent for every 6,100 Israelis. That is the equivalent of roughly 36,000 foreign correspondents suddenly descending on Washington, D.C. A New York—based media analysis firm, A.D.T. Research, compiles a monthly second-by-second record of how much time the three major American networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, devote to individual news and feature stories during their regular Monday through Friday thirty-minute evening news broadcasts. According to A.D.T.’s tabulations, from December 1987, when the intifada erupted, through February 1988, when it peaked, the story of the Palestinian demonstrations and the Israeli responses occupied a total of 347 minutes of evening news time on the three major American networks combined. That, according to A.D.T., was almost 100 minutes more than the second most popular story during the same time period, the December 1987 Washington superpower summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which merited only 249 minutes, and it was almost 200 minutes more than the third most popular story, the 1988 New Hampshire presidential primary (139 minutes). Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s entire campaign for August, September, and October 1988 totaled only 268 minutes on the three major American networks.
No wonder Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, once remarked, “There is a hole in the floor of the nave of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. In ancient times, it was believed that Jerusalem was the center of the world and that this hole was the center of the center—the very navel of the universe. Sometimes I have the impression that the foreign correspondents who reside here, and the hundreds more who visit every year, still believe that. Why else would they so often focus the attention of millions of people upon this small city and this small country?”
Kollek is right. The Western media in general, and the American media in particular, clearly have a fascination with the story of Israel that is out of all proportion to the country’s physical dimensions. It was obvious by the amount of coverage devoted to Israel’s handling of the intifada, but it was apparent even before.
How can a tiny country with the population of greater Chicago and the size of the state of Delaware occupy as much news space as the Soviet Union, if not more?
There is no single or simple answer to this question. Israel’s high profile in the Western news media is the result of a combination of factors—some of them historical, others cultural, others psychological, and still others political. Some have to do with the way Western man looks at the world, while others have to do with how Israel projects itself abroad.
Men have never taken the world just as it comes; our minds are not just blank pages upon which reality paints itself. Whether that reality is Israel or anything else, it is always filtered through certain cultural and historical lenses before being painted on our minds. Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi calls these lenses “super stories.” A super story, says Ezrahi, consists of a collection of myths, or ideological constructs, tied together by an overall narrative. This super story helps us to explain the world to ourselves, to determine what information we will treat as significant, and, most important, to record our experiences and shape our values. Like any colored lens, it lets certain rays of light in and blocks out others. Religions are the most popular super stories, but so, too, are universalist ideologies such as Marxism. As it happens, the oldest, most widely known super story of Western civilization is the Bible: its stories, its characters, and its values constitute the main lens through which Western man looks at himself and at the world. The Jews—the ancient Israelites—are the main characters in this biblical super story.
This fact alone accounts for a good deal of Israel’s high visibility in the Western media. Put simply: news from modern Israel is more appealing and digestible for people in the West than from elsewhere, because the characters, the geography, and the themes involved are so familiar, so much a part of our cultural lenses. We are naturally predisposed to read about people and places we know, and these people, the Jews, and this holy land, Israel, we know, because we hear about them every weekend in churches and synagogues all across the Western world. We also read about them in general literature and contemplate them in art. Their Bible stories can be found from Milton to Rembrandt. As Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister when the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland was issued, once told the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, the names Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem “are more familiar to me than the names of Welsh villages of my own childhood.” Indeed, every American is familiar with a place like the Sea of Galilee—even though many states in the United States have lakes which are much bigger. But physical size is irrelevant in trying to understand why one country or people gets reported in the Western media and another doesn’t. What matters is the size that country or people occupies in the super story, and when looked at that way, Israel becomes one of the largest of countries in the eyes of the West, while big countries such as China or Sudan become very small.
This process works in reverse as well. News about Israel in the Far East, where the biblical super story does not have wide currency, is generally treated as insignificant. American Jewish author Chaim Potok once told me that when the 1956 Sinai war broke out, he happened to be in Japan. “I was dying to find out what was happening,” said Potok, an ordained rabbi, “but there was virtually no news about the war in the Japanese English-language newspapers. The Jews aren’t part of their world view. Most Japanese don’t really know what a Jew is, and Israel has no special significance for them. The only way I was able to really get caught up on what was happening in the Sinai war was by getting hold of Stars & Stripes [the American armed forces newspaper].”
News from modern Israel is not only intuitively familiar to the Western ear, it is also intuitively relevant. Modern Israel is not viewed by most Christians as a new country or a new story, but rather as the modern extension of a very old country and a very old drama involving God and man. Itzik Yaacoby, who heads the East Jerusalem Development Corporation, which is responsible for maintaining the Old City of Jerusalem and all its Christian, Muslim, and Jewish holy places, noticed that most Christian tourists he showed around the city felt as though they were walking through the pages of the Bible. The notion that Israel was just another twentieth-century nation-state created by the United Nations after World War II was totally alien to them.
When American astronaut Neil Armstrong, a devout Christian, visited Israel after his trip to the moon, he was taken on a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov. When they got to the Hulda Gate, which is at the top of the stairs leading to the Temple Mount, Armstrong asked Ben-Dov whether Jesus had stepped anywhere around there.
“I told him, ‘Look, Jesus was a Jew,’” recalled Ben-Dov. “These are the steps that lead to the Temple, so he must have walked here many times.”
Armstrong then asked if these were the original steps, and Ben-Dov confirmed that they were.
“So Jesus stepped right here?” asked Armstrong again.
“That’s right,” answered Ben-Dov.
“I have to tell you,” Armstrong said to the Israeli archaeologist, “I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the moon.”
Because of this perception that modern Israel is really an extension of biblical Israel, the way the Jews living in modern Israel behave themselves is theologically relevant to the Christian world, and this is the second reason why news from Israel is treated with such extraordinary prominence in the West. The basic claim of Christianity was that revelation began with the Jews—that God originally revealed himself through them—but because they strayed from God’s commandments, their Scriptures were ultimately superseded by the teachings of Jesus Christ. The destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in A.D. 70, and the subsequent dispersion of the Jews for two thousand years, were often interpreted by Christianity as God’s punishment of the Jews for their not having accepted Christ as the Messiah.
Therefore, the fact that the Jews have ended their dispersion, returned to their biblical homeland, and built there a modern, vital Jewish state—a Third Jewish Commonwealth—is extremely relevant to Christianity. While some evangelical Christians celebrate the Jews’ return to Israel as the necessary first stage in the coming of the Messiah, others, particularly the Vatican, see it as a theological dilemma with implications for their own interpretation of Scripture. Because if for all these years it was thought that the Jews were wandering as their punishment for rejecting Jesus, if for all these years it was believed that the Jews were just a prelude to Christianity and then supposed to be reduced to a footnote, what in the world were they doing back in Israel flying F-15 fighter jets over the skies of Jerusalem? It is no accident that the Vatican has never recognized the state of Israel, and it was also no accident that when the Archbishop of New York, John Cardinal O’Connor, visited Israel in January 1987 the Vatican refused to allow him to meet Israeli President Chaim Herzog in his office. If Herzog is really at home in Jerusalem, then the Pope has a problem in Rome.
As the Christian theologian Paul van Buren once put it, “Modern Israel is both unsettling and exciting for the Christian world. It is unsettling because it was not supposed to happen this way—as we read the story. The very existence of Israel as a modern state is slightly mind-blowing. This was not in the script. You thought you had some understanding of the Jews and where they were, and now they are not there. If you reflect on it all, it becomes even more unsettling, because maybe you have to go back and rethink your own story a little bit. At the same time, it is exciting, because with Israel back on the scene again, the whole story suddenly becomes modern. For anyone with a biblical faith, the existence of this state, with Jerusalem as its capital, reawakens the whole possibility that this is not all in the past. Something about this is happening now. It is a problem we have to think about now. Maybe God is not as dead as we thought. I think this rings a note in the subconscious of even the most secular Christian.”
The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is 2 plus 2 and he tells you 5, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is 2 plus 2 and he tells you 97, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking with is operating with a wholly different logic from your own.
Whenever I observed how Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians during the intifada was handled by the Western news media, I was reminded of this story, because the extensive focus on Israeli soldiers beating, arresting, or shooting Palestinians was so obviously out of proportion to other similar and contemporaneous news stories—such as the Iraqi army’s poison-gas attack on the Kurds, or the Algerian army’s shooting to death of more than 200 student rioters in one week—that it could not be explained by Israel’s familiarity and relevance alone.
That thought first occurred to me on the morning of March 22, 1988. I was eating breakfast in a London hotel and devouring the International Herald Tribune along with my eggs and toast. But there was something in the newspaper I could not quite digest. On the top of the front page—next to a story about Iran and Iraq attacking each other’s cities with long-range missiles, killing scores of innocent civilians—was a four-column picture of an Israeli soldier grabbing a Palestinian youth. The caption read: “An Israeli soldier grabbed a Palestinian as he prepared to show his papers in Ramallah, on the West Bank, during a security check. The man was arrested and driven away. See World Briefs. Page 2.”
In other words, the actual news story was so insignificant it merited only a two-paragraph brief inside the paper. Yet the lead picture in the Herald Tribune that day, at the very top of its front page, was of an Israeli soldier not beating, not killing, but grabbing a Palestinian. I couldn’t help but say to myself, “Let’s see, there are 155 countries in the world today. Say five people grabbed other people in each country; that makes 775 similar incidents worldwide. Why was it that this grab was the only one to be photographed and treated as front-page news?”
A similar lack of proportion could be found in some of the editorials which were written about Israel’s handling of the Palestinian uprising. Take, for example, an editorial published February 18, 1988, by the Boston Globe, a serious newspaper, about an incident in which four Palestinian youths in the West Bank were buried alive under piles of sand by several Israeli reserve soldiers. (The four were quickly dug out by friends before suffering any serious injuries, although the Israelis who buried them apparently did so with the intent to kill; they received prison terms as a result.)
The Globe, in its editorial, declared that these four Palestinian “victims will be identified with an entire people. The dispossession of the Palestinians, their dispersal, the massacres they suffered, not only in their native land but also in Jordan and Lebanon, at the hands of Phalangists, Syrians and the Shi’ite Amal militia—all these horrors are evoked in the image of being buried alive. It is an image that calls up collective memories from the history of the Jewish people as well: the czarist pogroms, the centuries of homelessness and persecution, the mass grave at Babi Yar, the piled bodies found at Nazi death camps in 1945.”
To be sure, Israel’s handling of the Palestinian uprising was at times both brutal and stupid. But to compare it to the genocide at Babi Yar, where 33,000 Jews were massacred solely for being Jews? To the mass graves of 6 million Jews systematically liquidated by the Nazis? That is too much. Some other logic must be driving Israel onto the front pages.
I believe this logic has to do with the fact that because the Christian West views modern Israel as the continuation of a 3,000-year-old biblical drama, it also views modern Israel as the sovereign inheritor of the 3,000-year-old roles which the Jews played in Western civilization. What the West expected from the Jews of the past, it expects from Israel today.
That means two things in particular. First, the Jews historically were the ones to introduce the concept of a divine universal moral code of justice through the Ten Commandments. These divine laws, delivered at Mount Sinai, formed the very basis of what became known as Judeo-Christian morality and ethics. Modern Israel, therefore, is expected to reflect a certain level of justice and morality in its actions. But the Jews also played another role, which modern Israel is expected to live up to: as a symbol of optimism and hope. It was the Jews who proclaimed that history is not, as the Greeks taught, a cyclical process in which men get no better and no worse. No, said the Jews, history is a linear process of moral advancement, in which men can, if they follow the divine laws, steadily improve themselves in this world and one day bring about a messianic reign of absolute peace and harmony. Human history and politics, declared the Jews, can lead to something better: Slaves can be free; the Exodus from Egypt is possible; there is a Promised Land at the end of the desert.
Because Israel has inherited these two roles of the Jew in Western eyes—the yardstick of morality and the symbol of hope—the way Israel behaves has an impact on how men see themselves.
For instance, news from Israel can be psychologically liberating, unlike news from any other country. For the past two thousand years, the Jews were victims of other people’s power, and as victims they could always stand up and preach about justice and ethics from a position of moral invincibility. After all these centuries of being lectured to by Jews, the West finally wants to see whether these same Jews, now that they have a state and power of their own, will live up to the standards they set for themselves and others.
As David Hartman put it, “Historically speaking, if the Jews behaved well, they made those around them feel deficient. If they misbehaved, those around them felt relieved of the moral demands the Jews represented in history. If Israel turns out to be the light unto the nations, which it initially proclaimed itself to be, then it will be a judgment, a moral critique, on the incompleteness and shortcomings of all other nations. Just as if Marxism had actually created a workers’ paradise, it would have been a devastating living critique on capitalism. We feel guilty about ourselves if there really is an alternative option for building a more just social and political reality. On some level, I believe, the Western press wants to crush the messianic notion Jews gave to the West that human history and politics can lead to something better. The media take a perverse pleasure in labeling Israel South Africa. It is the same pleasure you get when you catch your Sunday-school teacher misbehaving. If my Sunday-school teacher is misbehaving, then so can I. What the media are really telling the Jews through their saturation coverage of Israeli beatings and shootings in the West Bank is: ‘Don’t lecture me anymore that there is a Promised Land, that I could be better than I am, that there is a higher standard I could strive for. Look at yourself. If you are not, then I don’t have to be. If Israel is just like South Africa, then we can all go play tennis.’”
I am sure very few reporters or editors are overtly conscious of these feelings. They are more subliminal; but they are very real. It was no accident that NBC subtitled its controversial 1987 documentary on twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank “A Dream Is Dying.” It was a perfect title, because at times the news reporting of Israeli behavior in the occupied territories was not just a story, it was a funeral wake—men toasting the end of the Jewish dream next to an open coffin. The television correspondents all might as well have been standing on hillsides with Israeli soldiers beating Palestinians in the background and announcing to their viewers, “It began here and it ended here. Here lies the Sunday sermon.”
Can one imagine a documentary called Hafez Assad’s Syria: “A Dream Is Dying”? No, because there has to be a dream which we all can relate to before its death is worth an hour on network television. When the Syrians kill thousands of their own people in Hama, it is not liberating or devastating for the West, because the West has no higher expectations of the Syrians and does not see any of its values emanating from Damascus.
“When the Syrians kill people it is a story about Syria,” observed Yaron Ezrahi. “When the Jews kill, it somehow becomes a story about mankind. If Damascus is sinful, it is bad for the Syrians or the Arab world, but if Jerusalem is sinful, it means we are condemned to live in an unredeemable world.”
The liberating quality of news from Israel has a particular appeal for Europeans who carry guilt over the Holocaust. Before 1967, if there was any unifying trend to European coverage of the Middle East, it was the tendency to overromanticize and oversentimentalize Israel in general and to highlight its military prowess in particular. This was particularly obvious in European documentaries about Israel during this period. It was as if by emphasizing Israel’s strength the Europeans were telling themselves that the Jewish people had been resurrected and therefore the weight of what the Germans did to them during the Second World War could be lightened.
After Israel went from underdog to overdog, however, the mood of the European media shifted. There was a pronounced tendency in the German, French, and Italian media to focus on Israel as a triumphant and ruthless occupier, a new Prussia, in what seemed to be a not-so-subtle attempt by these countries to absolve themselves of some of their own guilt for how their own Jews were brutalized during World War II. Highlighting the Israeli involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre was a convenient way of saying, “Look, the Nazis were not unique; nations massacre other nations all the time. Moreover, we Europeans weren’t so guilty when we said we didn’t know what was going on inside the concentration camps. It happens to everybody—even the Jews.”
Something of this European attitude seemed to be behind the remarks by the Norwegian ambassador to Israel, Torleiv Anda, who told Israeli reporters in February 1988 that the Nazi occupation was actually more enlightened than the Israeli one in the West Bank and Gaza. “What the Germans did,” said Anda, “including beating and torturing prisoners and suspects, was very bad. But we do not remember [the Nazis] going out into the streets to break people’s arms and legs or pulling children out of their homes at night. Norwegians did not expect such things from Israelis, and it has left a deep impression. One doesn’t like people who behave like that.”
Ambassador Anda later apologized for his selective memory of Nazi behavior. The point is that when Israel is the story, nobody comes empty-handed; everyone comes with an ax, some kind of an ax, to grind.
Yet, on another level, I think some of the very same reporters and readers who seem to relish news of Israel’s misdeeds also hope that Israel will succeed—that it will one day fulfill its promise. Why? Because the identification with the dreams of biblical Israel and mythic Jerusalem runs so deep, particularly in American culture, that when Israel succeeds and lives up to its prophetic expectations many Americans feel part of it. Israel’s success is their success. After all, the Puritans and other early American settlers actually saw themselves as inheritors of the Israelite dream and as fighters against the tyranny of the modern pharaoh in Great Britain. They spoke of building a “New Jerusalem” when they came to America. The Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, even suggested to the Continental Congress that the seal of the United States picture the Israelites and Moses standing on the shore, while Pharaoh and his army drown in the Red Sea, surrounded by the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.” They settled instead for a bald eagle. Later, the black civil-rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., adopted the story of Exodus from bondage as the underlying theme of its struggle for equality.
Former Israeli ambassador to Washington Simcha Dinitz once told me of a lecture he delivered in a black church in Washington, D.C., in the early sixties. “After my talk,” said Dinitz, “a young girl came up to me and said, ‘Where do you live?’ I said, ‘Jerusalem.’ She thought about that for a minute and said, ‘Jerusalem, is that a place on earth? I thought it was in heaven.’ That’s when I really understood that Jerusalem symbolizes every wish, every hope, every dream, every ideal. Everyone sees it how they want to see it. It may be the capital of Israel, but in every American’s heart is a little bit of Jerusalem.”
This is why I believe that people, and particularly Americans, can get an emotional high from news about Israel that they can’t get from reading about Singapore. This helps to explain why Israel is overreported in America, not only when it behaves negatively, but when it performs positively as well—whether it is Israel “turning the desert green” (which many other countries have done without similar publicity) or rescuing hostages in Entebbe or vanquishing three Arab armies at once in the 1967 war.
On June 9, 1967, at the moment Americans first realized that Israel was not going to be destroyed in the Six-Day War, columnist Mary McGrory wrote in The Washington Star about a rally for Israel in Lafayette Park across from the White House: “Some of us never knew what a simcha [Hebrew for a real joy] was. We know now. It’s what happens when the Arabs admit they’ve had it—again—and there are 30,000 Jews in Lafayette Park to celebrate. That’s what a simcha is. We were all Jews in the park yesterday. Instant Israelization was occurring all over … . Our signs, many of them written in haste on the buses coming down, showed a lot of chutzpah. ‘God is not neutral,’ ‘Support Israel, God’s Little Acre’ and ‘Lyndon Johnson, Let’s Be Jewish.’ … [When the cease-fire with Egypt was announced] we went wild with joy. Then we wept, we embraced each other. We sang the Israeli national anthem, ‘Hatikva.’ We observed a moment of silence for all who had fallen, heard the melancholy summons of the shofar.”
Finally, news from Israel is not only uniquely liberating and uplifting, it is also uniquely compelling compared to news made by other countries its size, because of all the historical and religious movements to which Israel is connected in Western eyes. So many cultural and historical strands come together in Israel that almost every story from there is two-dimensional; it is about itself and something else.
In 1986, for instance, Spain established diplomatic relations with Israel. On the one hand, it was a straightforward diplomatic story. On the other, some people saw it as the final chapter in a great historical saga that began in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The story of the Israeli Supreme Court accepting as an Israeli citizen an American Gentile who was converted to Judaism by a Reform rabbi is both an immigration story and a fundamental statement about who is a Jew. Even a travel story about kayaking down the Jordan River in Israel touches a certain religious chord in some readers that kayaking down the Thames does not. Since editors often find that in stories from Israel they are getting two news items for the space of one, they are more disposed to use them over those from other foreign countries which don’t pack as much punch per paragraph.
Whenever I think of this unique double dimension of news from Israel, I am reminded of a story that Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai told me about his daughter and Herod’s tomb. Amichai lives in the Yemin Moshe quarter of Jerusalem. Between his home and the King David Hotel is a small garden, in the middle of which is what looks like a stone well. In fact, it is the tomb of Herod the Great, who ruled Judea from 37 to 4 B.C. and erected some of Jerusalem’s greatest buildings. One day, Amichai was sitting in his Jerusalem home when his four-year-old daughter rushed in and shouted, “Daddy, Daddy, my ball fell into Herod’s Tomb.” For Amichai’s daughter, that little pile of stones next to their house was just another playground with a name—Herod’s Tomb—but it also happened to be Herod’s tomb!—a landmark of historical significance.
Had the early Zionists taken up the British offer to establish their state in Uganda instead of in the holy land, news from Israel might have been a little less interesting. But the Jews chose to build a “normal” state in the one land that was totally abnormal, in the land that more than any other on earth was soaked with religious meaning and history and intimately tied to all the hopes and neuroses of Western civilization. Because the Jewish return to this particular land unleashes so many passions, touches so many memories, and is relevant for so many people in the West, Israel simply cannot avoid being extraordinarily newsworthy—not in Jerusalem, not now and not tomorrow.
But Israel’s fascination for the West is only half the story, because Israel’s high profile in the media is not only the result of the West looking in but also the result of Israel reaching out—sometimes frantically—to grab the world by the throat. From the day Israel was born as a nation, its leaders have invited, and even at times demanded, that the world take heed of its uniqueness and judge it with a different yardstick from other nation-states.
No one is more aware of this than Israeli statesman Abba Eban, who, in 1947, had the difficult task of presenting the Jewish people’s claim for statehood before the United Nations, which was then considering the idea of partitioning Palestine.
“It was not easy to make our case,” recalled Eban. “The entire region rejected us. We were forming a state for people who were not yet here. And we were not a majority in our country. We had to seize the ears of the world. We could not just rely on pure juridical arguments. We could not argue like Ghana. We had to make ourselves exceptional. So we based our claim on the exceptionality of Israel, in terms of the affliction suffered by its people, and in terms of our historical and spiritual lineage. We knew we were basically appealing to a Christian world for whom the biblical story was familiar and attractive, and we played it to the hilt. We are still the victims of our own rhapsodic rhetoric, and our own rhapsodic defense. [But] we chose the line. We chose to emphasize at the beginning of our statehood that Israel would represent the ancient Jewish morality. Some Israelis now complain about being judged by a different standard [from other countries in the Middle East]. But the world is only comparing us to the standard we set for ourselves. You can’t go out and declare that we are the descendants of kings and prophets and then come and say, ‘Why does the world demand that we behave differently from Syria?’”
Israel’s quest for world attention was also related to its own insecurity. The trauma of two thousand years of Jews being rejected by the outside world and living on the margins of whatever society they happened to find themselves in lies deep in Israel’s historical consciousness. This explains why Israelis have always felt a certain urgency about what the outside world thought of them. Israelis have a deep need to be visible, to be loved, to be admired, to be ushered out of their sense of loneliness and have the world take them by the elbow and say, “Yes, we see you. We recognize you are there and part of us.” Israeli Foreign Ministry employees always like to tell the story about the time when an Italian Foreign Minister made his first visit to Israel. He stepped off his Alitalia flight onto the tarmac at Ben-Gurion Airport, walked directly into an airport press conference, and was immediately asked by an overeager Israeli reporter, “Sir, how do you like our country?”
When I was leaving Jerusalem after completing my reporting assignment last year, every person I dealt with, from the semiliterate moving men to the woman at the rental car agency, asked me, not in passing but with real concern, whether I had enjoyed my stay. When I answered yes, they would always look at me sideways and say in Hebrew, “B’emet?”—Really?
I found that nothing rankled Israelis more than to hear that a man of international prominence, such as John Cardinal O’Connor, had come to Israel and refused to meet “officially” with the Israeli President. After all, the very meaning of having a Jewish state was so that the Jews could project themselves into the larger drama of world politics and no longer be a marginal people. And nothing used to please Israelis more than to have world-renowned figures, particularly Gentiles like Jane Fonda or Frank Sinatra, visit their country and give it their stamp of approval. At tennis tournaments in Jerusalem, Israelis always got a special charge out of watching their home-grown tennis champion Amos Mansdorf being chummy with the likes of Jimmy Connors. You could almost hear people in the stands saying, “Look, we’re one of the fellas!”
Take this congenital insecurity and couple it with Israel’s near-total economic dependence on the United States and it becomes easy to understand why Israel is obsessed with how it is portrayed in the Western media in general and the American media in particular. In talking to Israelis, I have always felt that when they thought about news in America they imagined that every American had a television set with a voting box next to it, and after each broadcast of the evening news, Americans would vote on whether or not they still liked Israel. Or, as one senior Israeli official put it, “Israelis are certain that America is a country that spends all its time being either for or against Israel.”
Being the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, I was both the beneficiary and the victim of this Israeli obsession with the American media. On the benefit side, it meant that every Israeli official returned my phone calls and that I could see everyone from the Prime Minister on down within forty-eight hours of a request. The negative side was that people read everything I wrote with the scrutiny of copy readers examining Torah scrolls for mistakes. My hate mail from readers who did not appreciate my reporting was often written in a tone reserved only for child molesters and convicted Nazi war criminals. In fact, one particularly obnoxious reader used to address all his letters to me “Dear Kapo”—the term used to describe those who manned the ovens in the Nazi death camps.
The speed with which Israelis would move to correct mistakes I made in The New York Times was measured not in days but in hours and minutes. After the Israeli government was formed following the July 1984 elections, my soft-spoken assistant, Moshe Brilliant, dictated by telephone to New York the list of new Cabinet ministers, which was released late at night and close to deadline. Moshe began with the Prime Minister and then read the names of the other new ministers over the telephone. When he got to the Minister of Religious Affairs, he said, “veteran National Religious Party leader Yosef Burg …” Well, the person taking dictation in New York heard “Bedouin” instead of “veteran.” Sure enough, the Cabinet list was published and it read “Bedouin National Religious Party leader Yosef Burg.” Considering that Burg was an Orthodox Jew, a bigger mistake would be difficult to make. The first edition of The New York Times hits the streets about 11:00 p.m. At 11:01 p.m. someone called Burg in Israel, and at 11:02 p.m. he or one of his staff called the Times. By 11:03 p.m. the Cabinet list had been corrected for later editions.
Not surprisingly, Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to project and protect its image abroad. The Israeli Foreign Ministry commissions roughly one hundred freelance articles a year about different aspects of Israeli life, technology, and medicine and distributes them to roughly two thousand publications in the United States—from journals for dairy farmers to metropolitan newspapers. The Israel Broadcasting Service, a corporation set up by the Foreign Ministry, produces radio shows on various Israeli topics, sometimes tailor-made to interest specific Hispanic, black, or geographic audiences in America, and then issues them regularly to 550 radio stations around the United States, and to another 300 stations in Latin America, Europe, and the Far East. The Israeli government, working through a private distributor, also regularly sends local television stations across America special 90-second news videos about different developments in science or agriculture in Israel. These spots often get aired as straight news on local stations, without attribution as to the source. In addition, each year the Israeli Foreign Ministry brings to Israel at its own expense roughly 400—500 key opinion makers—journalists, priests, union leaders, student leaders, mayors, local politicians, and academics from communities all over the United States—to see the country and then return to their homes to talk or write about it. Israel’s embassy and nine consulates in the United States closely monitor all the newspapers and television news shows in their regions, large and small, and when “hostile” articles or editorials appear, their staffs will meet with the editors of those news organizations and encourage local Jewish community activists to write letters to the editor or rebuttals, sometimes by the sackful.
In Jerusalem, the Government Press Office makes sure that foreign correspondents are kept abreast of all the news, both pro-and anti-government, by providing daily English translations of the main articles and editorials in all the Israeli newspapers. It even distributes them by computer directly to each correspondent’s terminal. Moreover, the major foreign and local reporters in Israel are connected to a telephone system, nicknamed the “golem.” (In Jewish folklore, the golem was an artificially created human being.) The golem allows the Government Press Office to call the entire foreign press corps simultaneously and inform them, at any hour, of everything from the Prime Minister’s schedule to announcements by the army spokesman that someone has just hijacked a bus.
As an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman remarked one day after briefing foreign correspondents practically from dawn until dusk, “Let’s face it, we are doing a striptease for the world every morning.”
The intensity of the spotlight which has been focused on Israel has profoundly affected the way Israelis and Palestinians think of themselves and the way television viewers and readers in the West think of their conflict.
For the readers and television viewers, the spotlight on Israel has been so glaring at times that it has totally distorted people’s ability to make sense of the Palestinian—Israeli conflict. Virtually every action, reaction, and declaration involving Israelis and Palestinians seems to get magnified out of all proportion to its actual impact on the ground. Because of this, the viewers in the West, who see the conflict only through the distorting lenses of television or the print media, expect all these actions and declarations to have a much bigger impact than they ever do.
This was obvious in the coverage of the intifada. The fact that news stories involving Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza throwing stones and being beaten by Israeli soldiers were virtually all that many Westerners viewed from Israel and the occupied territories for several months left many people with the impression that this was all there was to life in this land. I am sure many viewers said to themselves, “My God, this is a war. How can the Israelis tolerate this uprising for another day?”
What the cameras usually did not show was that while Israeli troops were clashing with stone-throwers in one village, Palestinians in most other villages in the West Bank were going to work in Israel. What the cameras also did not show was that in the spring of 1988, while the intifada was raging on American television, thousands of Israelis were going to the Tel Aviv fairgrounds every evening to ride Ferris wheels, eat cotton candy, and visit all the booths at the exposition marking Israel’s fortieth anniversary of independence. In the West, the intifada was viewed as an uprising that had left Israel ablaze, because that was virtually all that was shown. But Israelis and Palestinians always viewed the uprising in its real proportions: as a slice of life, not life itself. It involved sporadic “clashes,” sometimes lethal, that disrupted the lives of some people and didn’t even touch the lives of many others.
Whenever West Bank expert Meron Benvenisti comes to America and watches the way the American media overcover every twist and turn in the Palestinian—Israeli conflict, he always tells me after a few days that he must go back home. “What I am seeing on your television just doesn’t correspond to the reality that I know,” complains Benvenisti. “I feel as if I’m watching a tennis game being played on a vertical court.”
For Palestinians, this spotlight has been both a blessing and a curse. The blessing for the Palestinians is that because their enemy happens to be the Jew, and their battlefield the holy land, both of which loom so large in Western eyes, the Palestinians have received more attention and visibility than any other refugee community or national liberation movement in the world. The Palestinians have had the great fortune to be cast as supporting actors in a large and long-running historical drama starring the Jew, who one season is playing a tortured Hamlet, the next season King Lear, and the next Goliath. This means that the Palestinians have always gotten a hearing, year after year, while other defeated nations, who didn’t have the Jews for enemies, were ignored. Had the Palestinians had the bad luck of the Armenians, who got stuck with the Turks as their enemy, or of the Kurds (who were promised a state by the Allies after World War I), who ended up with the Iraqis, their cause would be as unknown in the West as Kurdish and Armenian nationalism.
Western news cameras do not flock to Israel to film Palestinian stones; they come to film Jewish billy clubs. Israel Television’s Arab affairs reporter, Ehud Ya’ari, once witnessed an incident in the al-Amari refugee camp in the West Bank in which television cameramen literally stood around for hours outside the camp waiting, not to talk to Palestinians, but for that inevitable moment when Israeli soldiers would begin to beat some of them up.
“Israeli soldiers were standing off at a distance,” said Ya‘ari, “facing a big violent crowd of Palestinian demonstrators who were throwing rocks, bottles, Molotov cocktails. The following conversation took place between the [American] cameramen and the Israeli officer in charge. The officer said, ‘We are not going to go in. We are not going to do it for you.’ And the cameramen said, ‘You will have to go in, so you might as well do it now.’ Everyone understood his role very well. Eventually the soldiers went in, and as soon as they started breaking into homes to capture rioters who had fled, the cameras all started to roll.”
When the Palestinians are not victims of the Jews, but of other Arabs, or when they themselves are victimizers, the West in general is simply not interested in their fate. That becomes clear from even the most cursory reading of newspapers during the past few years. When Israelis were indirectly involved in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, the story was front-page news for weeks. When Lebanese Shiites were directly involved in killing Palestinians in the very same camps from 1985 to 1988, it was almost always back-page news—if it was reported at all. This despite the fact that some 3,000 Palestinians were killed during the three years of fighting over the camps, including women who were shot by snipers while going out to buy bread and others who died of hunger after having run out of dogs to eat.
The abundance of reporters in Israel also clearly curtailed the amount of force Israel could use against Palestinians. An Israeli colonel in the West Bank was quite explicit when I asked him about the deterrent effect television has had on his treatment of West Bankers and Gazans.
“I used to be stationed in south Lebanon,” said the colonel, “and in south Lebanon there is nothing between you and God Almighty. The only question you ask yourself when you are going to blow up someone’s house is whether to use 50 kilos of dynamite or 25 kilos. Here in the West Bank you have to explain every little move you make to ten different people.”
A senior Israeli commander in the West Bank said that he told his men specifically, “Do not beat anyone if you see a television camera. If you are already beating someone and you see a camera, stop. If you see someone else beating someone and you see a camera, stop him.” The same officer told me, “Look, when my soldiers are involved in something not so kosher with Palestinians in a village, and television is not around, I can live with it. I may not like what they did, but I can live with it. But if television is there, I cannot live with it. Not at all.”
But the attention the Palestinians received because their enemy was the Jew has also been a source of enormous frustration and confusion, because although the West seems to be talking about them, it doesn’t seem to be really feeling for them. Instead, it only seems to truly feel for the Jew—sometimes it is feeling anger and other times compassion, but these emotions seem to be reserved largely for the Jew. It can be extremely frustrating to think that the world is talking about you but not feeling for you.
I once visited the Remal Health Center in the Gaza Strip, which is run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), to talk to Palestinian women about their views on childbirth and fertility. As I was being shown around the maternity ward by Dr. Zuhni Yusef al-Wahidi, I stopped at several bedsides to interview Palestinian mothers who had just given birth. While I was in the middle of a conversation with one new mother, a middle-aged Palestinian nurse standing off to the side suddenly exploded with a question directed at me in a burst of staccato Arabic.
“Where are you from?” the nurse asked, with an arched eyebrow.
“I’m from America,” I answered.
“Well, then can you tell me something?” she continued. “Why is it that when the Germans were killing the Jews everyone screamed, but when we are being killed by Israelis, the world calls us killers?”
The nurse’s question was clearly spoken out of a deep psychic wound, a grievance that she herself had been nursing for a long time. Who could blame her? As I stood there, one hand on the new mother’s bed railing and the other gripping my clipboard, I wanted to explain to her that the difference in treatment had nothing to do with the Israeli cause being somehow morally superior to that of the Palestinians and that it also had nothing to do with any conspiracy in the media. It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians simply are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose don’t, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathies of the West the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews, no matter how hard they try and no matter how much they suffer.
Examples of this can be found in the newspaper every day. At the November 1988 meeting in Algiers of the Palestine National Council, Muhammad Abbas, the Palestinian guerrilla leader who planned the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, was being pressed by Western reporters as to whether he regretted the fact that his men murdered a wheelchair-bound passenger on the ship, Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old New York Jew. Abbas eventually grew so exasperated with the reporters’ questions, he blurted out at them, “I wish that the names of our victims and martyrs were as well known as the name of Klinghoffer. Can you name ten Palestinians who died from Israeli gas, or ten pregnant Palestinian women who were crushed and killed?”
Indeed, shortly after the Israeli army trapped the PLO in Beirut during the summer of ’82, and the Palestinian issue became headline news around the globe, my colleague Bill Barrett, then the correspondent of the Dallas Times Herald, received a telex at the Commodore Hotel from his foreign editor back in Texas. The telex read: “Why can’t the Palestinians go back to Palestine? Is there a problem with their papers or something?”
Bill’s one-sentence reply was: “Because their mothers are not Jewish.”
Bill remarked to me later that his answer seemed to confuse his editor even more. “I was a bit surprised,” said Bill, “that a foreign editor would not know any of this, although I suppose his ignorance simply mirrored that of the American public. A few months later my editor quit the paper, left journalism, and became a real-estate agent.”
In this same vein, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, once told me a story about being on Ted Koppel’s Nightline, debating an Arab ambassador. A handsome, Western-looking figure with perfect English and an M.I.T. education, Netanyahu was in the same Washington studio with the Arab ambassador, but they were divided on air by a split screen. They had the usual debate about the Palestine question and each said the usual things. “After it was over,” recalled Netanyahu, “I got up from my seat to leave the studio and one of the cameramen came up to me and said, ‘You won.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘You won even before you started.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Look, you both have funny last names, but your first name is Benjamin and his is Abdullah. He didn’t have a chance.’”
(The group of Americans who seemed to be most consistently and deeply disturbed about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians were American Jews, but that had little to do with concern for the Palestinians per se and more to do with concern for what Israel as a Jewish state was becoming.)
The spotlight on Israel has been a curse for Palestinians in another way as well. It has given them a grossly exaggerated sense of their real strength and convinced their leaders that time is somehow on their side. After all, if you are Yasir Arafat and senior editors of Time magazine are chasing after you for weeks to interview you on your private jet, how can you not feel important, how can you not feel powerful, how can you not feel that if you just tell your story enough times to the audience in the West it will force Israel to give you a state and spare you having to make either a real war or the real concessions for a settlement? To be a story is easy, and sometimes fun; to change reality is difficult, painful, and dangerous—especially in this theater called the Middle East, where no one uses fake ammunition and there are no stuntmen around to perform the difficult leaps.
Israeli policymakers have been no less affected by the spotlight focused on them than the Palestinians. On the one hand, the presence of the foreign media really forced Israelis to look at the true brutality of their occupation. Many times during the early months of the intifada Israel Television showed American television footage of Israelis clubbing or shooting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because the four American networks had more crews—at least a dozen more—in the occupied territories than did Israel Television. Were it not for the presence of the American media, more than a few of the most disturbing scenes of the intifada, most notably the incident recorded by CBS News on February 26, 1988, in which four Israeli soldiers in Nablus were involved in beating two Palestinian demonstrators with a stone for forty minutes, would have gone unrecorded.
On the other hand, because Israelis constantly felt that they were under a spotlight and were being judged by the whole world, their spokesmen and leaders spent more time and energy thinking up ways to explain why they were treating the Palestinians as they were than dealing with the underlying political causes of the uprising. The Israeli leadership were often more obsessed with the spotlight than with the reality upon which it was focused. There is a real danger in this: an actor who is always onstage reciting his lines can never really look at himself in a relaxed and critical manner and address his shortcomings in an honest and meaningful way.
Sometimes Israeli officials became so involved in reciting their lines that they no longer heard how phony they sounded. On February 28, 1988, at the height of the intifada, I was listening to the Voice of Israel Radio’s 1:00 p.m. English news broadcast. The announcer read the following item—with no hint of irony in his voice:
“In the village of Burin, south of Nablus, a riot broke out today. An army patrol was sent into the village and came under a hail of stones. After firing in the air and rubber bullets failed to disperse the crowd, the army spokesman said the commander of the unit fired at the legs of the demonstrators. The result was that one demonstrator was shot in the neck and died” (emphasis mine).
When Israel was the darling of the West after the 1967 war, Israeli leaders and American Jews could not read enough stories in the newspapers about this “heroic little state”; no one in Israel then complained about the spotlight on their country. Twenty years later, though, after Israel’s behavior in Lebanon and the West Bank has often cast it in a negative light, Israelis have become some of the loudest critics of the foreign press. Why us? they ask. Why all the excessive press attention? There are endless panel discussions and conferences held in Israel on why the foreign press is so biased against the Jewish state, as if it were all just a question of the foreign press and not anything Israel itself was doing.
Today, an increasing number of Israeli leaders find themselves unable to handle the intense judgmental spotlight any longer, but they are also unwilling to address the ugly reality of their occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. So they look for a curtain that will shield them from the piercing gaze of the West and allow them to maintain the status quo in the occupied territories. That curtain is called the Holocaust. From behind the curtain of the Holocaust, Israelis can scream out at the world, “You have no right to judge us. We are victims of Auschwitz! Go away! Go away!”
This was clearly the sentiment that motivated a statement by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shortly after the intifada erupted and the networks began focusing on Israeli beatings. Shamir, who, like the Palestinians, also knows how to play only one role, King Lear, practically screamed at inquiring reporters one day when they asked about Israeli treatment of Palestinians: “We are not allowed to kill; we are not allowed to expel; we are not allowed to beat. You ask yourself, What are we allowed to do? Only to be killed, only to be wounded, only to be defeated.” Shamir later added, “We have plenty of ‘friends’ in the world who would like to see us dead, wounded, trampled, and suppressed—and then it is possible to pity the wretched Jew. When Jews are killed in this country, does the United Nations discuss it? It has never yet happened. But we do not want to be deserving of pity, we want to fight for our lives.”
When the Israelis join the Palestinians in wrapping themselves in the loincloth of the victim, all prospects of dealing with the underlying causes of their conflict get lost. In its place what you have is a theater in which Israelis and Palestinians are clubbing each other onstage, but instead of talking to each other straight, they are each looking out at the audience and declaring, “Did you see what he did to me? What did I tell you? I am the real victim. Don’t judge me, judge him.”
In recent years many Israelis could be heard wishing for the day when their country might be reported on like Norway, or even Syria. They cite the famous saying by the French philosopher Montesquieu: “Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.” A year after the intifada began, there were signs that their dreams were beginning to come true—that stories of Israeli troops shooting a three-year-old Palestinian boy, while dispersing a demonstration of ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children, were becoming boring to the West and worth only a small mention in the newspaper. The audience in the West seemed to be starting to lose interest in the misbehavior of Israeli Jews. If I were Israeli I would think twice before celebrating this newfound anonymity. When Israeli repression is no longer viewed as news, it means that the West no longer expects anything exceptional of Israel and Israel no longer expects anything exceptional of itself. That can only be a sign that something very essential in Israel’s character and the character of the Jewish people has died.
The day when going from Beirut to Jerusalem means not going anywhere at all is a day Israel will rue forever.