Anyone Listening in America?

George S. Hishmeh

The Jordan Times (used w/permission).

According to this Op-Ed piece by George S. Hishmeh from the Jordan Times, U.S. reporting on the Middle East is steadily improving, but it is still a challenge for many reporters to bring the full story to light in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation of Iraq.

WASHINGTON - Slowly, but surely, there has been a noteworthy turnaround - certainly more realism - in the reporting and writing on the Middle East, particularly on Iraq, and Palestine and Israel. This is not to say it is widespread, but the first signs are that American journalists have become a little more observant, sometimes critical, of what they have been fed officially, probably because of the continued killing of American soldiers in Iraq and Israel's resumption of its "targeted assassination" of Palestinian militants.

This has also been matched by some soul-searching by a few prominent Israelis and American Jews, like Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, and Arthur Hertzberg, a visiting professor at New York University and author of the forthcoming book `The Fate of Zionism'. Both decried the bankrupt policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who does not appear to be keen on implementing the Quartet-sponsored roadmap which promises, in the words of US President George W. Bush, a "viable" Palestinian state alongside Israel by 2005.

Howard Kurtz, the media critic of The Washington Post and host of the CNN talk show "Reliable Sources," noted last Sunday that the American media are reluctant to declare "the situation in postwar Iraq a failure". And he said: "Numbers, journalists understand numbers, and the casualty (among US troops) behind these numbers all but ensures that, while the Iraq story may ebb and flow, it will not go away." He observed that "the prevailing media picture in Iraq is that things are just falling apart".

Nevertheless, Kurtz, who was interviewing Tom Friedman, award-winning columnist of The New York Times, wondered why American journalists are "afraid" to make judgements like "look, it appears there are not enough American troops to keep the peace there". Friedman answered: "One of the problems (is that) not a lot of journalists writing about this war have been to postwar Iraq ... and because of that, I think that maybe more people have been willing to rely on what they've been told in Washington."

But, he maintained, "that's changing now".

The two did not dwell on the Middle East coverage, which is often mediocre. However, Friedman voiced some "fundamental" concerns about the turn of events there. He wondered whether the situation at present is beyond the two-state solution "and we're now in a one-state solution" saying that "either this is going to become a bi-national state, in some way, or there's going to be, you know, some kind of ethnic cleansing".

Israel's recent killing of Hamas leaders - 10 have been killed in the last two weeks - has raised many questions here. James Bennet, The New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, asked in an article this week: "There is something of a mystery to Israel's new campaign to kill members and leaders of Hamas, a mystery that goes to the heart of the stand-off with the Palestinians: Why didn't Israel do this a year ago, or two years ago? And if it was a bad idea then, why is it a good idea now?" He complained that he did not find "very good answers".

Hertzberg, in turn, saw the renewed cycle of violence in the Middle East as "another setback in (the US) role as a regional peace broker" and argued that there can be no resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "unless the United States pressures the two parties to make concessions that they have refused for decades to make". He proposed that the US apply "punitive economic measures" against the Palestinians to curtail the "war makers" in this midst, and the Israelis "to force the end of settlement activity" - a step that "would find far greater support among Jews both in Israel and in the United States than many people in Washington imagine".

He attributed this support to the "pressing matter of demographics", explaining that the total population at present between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is more than 40 per cent Arab. Considering the Arab birthrate, he wrote in an op-ed article last weekend, "there will be an Arab majority in, at most, 20 years" in this region.

But the harshest criticism voiced against Israeli policies came from the former Israeli parliamentary speaker in an article published in "Forward", a New York-based Jewish weekly. Burg, now a member of the Knesset, warned: "The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice."

He urged the diaspora Jews to "pay heed and speak out (because) it is not possible to keep the whole (of Palestine) without paying a price". Or else, he warned, "the countdown to end of Israeli society has begun". The choices for the Israelis, in his opinion, are: "Jewish racialism or democracy. Settlements or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognised international order between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem."

Burg, who was speaker from 1999 to 2003, added: "But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head."

Anyone listening in America?

Note: This article was originally posted on the Jordan Times website on Friday-Saturday, September 5-6, 2003. It is republished here with the permission of the Jordan Times Editorial staff.