Mideast Media Sampler 06/03/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Absolute Truth

In a statement popularized after being named as the future executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson said

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she told Jeremy Peters. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Her remarks have been mocked for their religious or pagan content.


But her boast about the "absolute truth" made me go back to last week's coverage of the diplomatic spat between President Obama and PM Netanyahu. There were a number instances where the Times was clearly not telling the truth.

On May 22, Helene Cooper reported in Obama presses Israel to make 'hard choices:'

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, in fact, made such a proposal to the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2008, as the two sides rushed to complete a peace deal before Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert left office. 

It may be that PM Olmert was rushing to make a deal, but Mahmoud Abbas had no interest in a deal. This is a point confirmed by the "Palestine Papers." Abbas never responded to Olmert.

More importantly, Cooper leaves out an important point that she herself had reported: the decision to mention the Israeli Palestinians conflict in his State Department speech, was a last minute decision. It was calculated to upstage Netanyahu. But on May 22, she was writing that there was little new in President Obama's speech and created the impression that Netanyahu was making a big deal out of nothing.

On May 25, Thomas Friedman wrote a column Lessons from Tahrir Square, which included this rant:

As for Bibi, his Tahrir lesson is obvious: Sir, you are well on your way to becoming the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process. The time to make big decisions in life is when you have all the leverage on your side. For 30 years, Mubarak had all the leverage on his side to gradually move Egypt toward democracy — and he never used it. Then, when Mubarak’s people rose up, he tried to do it all in six days. But it was too late. No one believed him. So his tenure ended in ruin. 

Israel today still has enormous leverage. It is vastly superior militarily and economically to the Palestinians, and it has the U.S. on its side. If Netanyahu actually put a credible, specific two-state peace map on the table — not just the same old vague promises about “painful compromises” — he could get the Americans and Europeans to toss in anything Israel wanted, including the newest weapons, NATO membership, maybe even European Union membership. It could be a security windfall for Israel. Does Bibi have any surprise in him or do the Palestinians have him right: a big faker, hiding a nationalist-religious agenda under a cloak of security? 

First of all, Fatah had just agreed to a unity deal with Hamas and Friedman attacks Netanyahu for failing to seize the initiative. The Palestinians had just shown that they rejected the basic requirement for making peace with Israel and somehow it was Netanyahu's fault? Worse, Friedman demands a "credible, specific" plan from Netanyahu when Arafat rejected such a plan in 2000 and Abbas (as mentioned above) rejected one in 2008. Netanyhau, early on in this term as PM, Israel removed "dozens of roadblocks." Has Abbas or even Fayyad done anything remotely comparable to facilitate peace with Israel?

That same day Ethan Bronner reported Israelis See Netanyahu Trip as Diplomatic Failure

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned from Washington on Wednesday to a nearly unanimous assessment among Israelis that despite his forceful defense of Israel’s security interests, hopes were dashed that his visit might advance peace negotiations with the Palestinians. 

Bronner makes his case mostly by quoting Netanyahu's critics. Though he did observe:

A poll commissioned by Maariv, and conducted in one day, found that Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity rose slightly after his Washington visit. 

Ha'aretz though, reported that Netanyahu's popularity "soared."

It's doubtful that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his wildest, most optimistic dreams, would have dared to imagine when he set off for the United States last week that Israelis would respond to his six-day trip so enthusiastically: According to a new Haaretz poll, they are giving the visit high marks, considering it an overwhelming success. 

The poll, conducted by the Dialog organization, under the supervision of Prof. Camil Fuchs of the Tel Aviv University Statistics Department, showed that 47 percent of the Israeli public believes the U.S. trip was a success, while only 10 percent viewed it as a failure. 

This suggests that Israelis didn't see the trip the same way Bronner did; but that Netanyahu's goal was to defend Israel's interests. That didn't stop the editors of the Times for relying on Bronner's report (though the Ha'aretz poll was available) to lament:

And while he basked in Congress’s standing ovations, Ethan Bronner reported in The Times that in Israel the trip was judged a diplomatic failure. 

In these four instances writers for the Times took adversarial (if not hostile) stances toward Netanyahu. In each case it required a significant misstatement or omission to make the case.

But it wasn't just last week's reporting.

Today, I saw a story from last week, Hearsay: IDF Releases Findings of Investigation Regarding Remarks Made at Rabin Center (h/t DolpheenaIDF ):

The investigation concluded, based on evidence from the soldiers that participated in the conference, that the stories told were purposely exaggerated and hyperbolic in order to reinforce a point amongst the conference participants. For example, one story made the claim that a soldier was allegedly given orders to fire at an elderly woman. However, upon investigation, it was found that the soldier witnessed no such thing, and was only repeating a rumor that he had heard from an unknown source.

This investigation, concluded that charges made and publicized two years ago were unfounded. Two years ago, the New York Times, eagerly following Ha'aretz published these allegations on its front page. Unless the Times wants to claim that it was reporting accurately that soldiers made the allegations (but not that the allegations were true) how is this absolute truth? And doesn't absolute truth dictate that the Times has an obligation to report the results of the IDF investigation?

But of course the New York Times isn't about "absolute truth," rather it's about slant as Barry Rubin observed recently:

The fact that Israel’s public opinion and expert opinion can be totally misrepresented by the mass media from being anti-Obama, pro-Bibi to being pro-Obama, anti-Bibi is frightening. We are beyond the “slant” and into the total reversal of reality.

2) Rahm defends his old boss

Rahm Emanuel has written a defense of his former boss, Obama’s commitment to Israel, in the Washington Post.

President Obama, like every student of the Middle East, understands that the shifting sands of demography in that volatile region are working against the two-state solution needed to end generations of bloodshed. The fragile stasis that exists today cannot hold.

Israel’s survival as a Jewish, democratic state is at stake because of many factors, including uncertainty brought by the Arab Spring, growth in the Palestinian population, unilateral efforts to create a recognized state of Palestine and technological advances in weaponry.

That is why, from his first days in office, the president has invested so much in encouraging meaningful negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His goal has been one shared by a succession of Israeli and American leaders: two nations, the Jewish state of Israel and Palestine for the Palestinian people, living side by side, in peace and security.

I never knew that the President was a "student" of the Middle East. But as Alan Dershowitz demonstrates, he has gone about encouraging negotiations all wrong:

The President has asked the Israelis to agree to negotiate new borders based on the 1967 lines, with land swaps. But he did so without asking the Palestinians to agree to drop their demand that millions of so-called "refugees" – those who fled or left Israel during the 1947-49 Arab attacks against the Jewish state, and their descendents – be allowed to "return" to Israel. New borders would be meaningless if this demographic bomb were to be dropped on Israel, turning it into yet another Arab state with a Palestinian majority. Everyone knows, as a matter of reality, that this is not going to happen, just as everyone knows that Israel will eventually give up most of the West Bank as it did the Gaza Strip. But it is critical to any successful negotiation that these two issues – borders and "the right to return" – be negotiated together. The Israelis will never agree to generous borders for the Palestinians unless they are assured that their identity as the nation-state of the Jewish people will not be demographically undercut by "the right of return." And the Palestinians will never give up their emotionally charged right of return unless that is an unambiguous prerequisite to achieving statehood with generous borders. The Obama strategy – to demand generous borders from Israel first and leave the right of return to subsequent negotiations – is a prescription for stalemate.

But there's something else that's troubling about the President's approach to the Middle East. Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported two weeks ago:

President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal. 

In the two years he's been Prime Minister, Netanyahu has seen most checkpoints get taken down and he enforced a building freeze for six months at the President's behest. None of these bought him any goodwill (from either the Palestinians or the President.) Mahmoud Abbas reluctantly agreed to talks with Israel for a couple of weeks and then walked out. He has now joined with Hamas and Fatah has made it clear that it will not recognize a Jewish state.

Asked whether Fatah had spoken with Hamas about recognizing Israel, the senior Fatah official said, “Fatah has not recognized Israel. I challenge anyone who says that the case is otherwise, whether it’s Hamas or others. Neither Fatah nor Hamas is required to recognize Israel. Only governments and states extend recognition. It was the Palestinian government that recognized Israel, just as the Israeli government recognized us.”

Does President Obama really think that if Tzippi Livni were the Prime Minister, there's be a final Arab-Israeli peace treaty? If so he's no student of the Middle East. 

Technorati Tag: Middle East.