“We are facing a political tsunami,” warned Defense Minister Barak. He and Netanyahu viewed UDI as a Palestinian plan to sue Israel in international courts for illegally occupying a UN member state. The penalty could be sanctions on Israel, with devastating economic results. “2011 is going to be like…1973,” wrote Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, evoking the specter of the Yom Kippur War. “A diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.”
Fortunately for Israel, the administration was determined to avoid revisiting the previous year’s trauma of vetoing its own policy in the Security Council. American diplomats labored to prevent UDI from ever coming to a vote. Israel fully supported this position and, working in tandem with the State Department, I lobbied the ambassadors of rotating member states such as Gabon and Colombia. But while united in the fight against UDI, Israel and the administration were deeply split over how to react if it succeeded.
Even if the Security Council rejected the Palestinians’ bid, other UN bodies might not. In that case, long-standing congressional legislation mandated the immediate closure of the PLO’s Washington office, the cessation of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, and the defunding of any UN agency that recognized Palestine. Israel strongly endorsed all three repercussions, which the White House just as vehemently opposed.
“You don’t want the fucking UN to collapse because of your fucking conflict with the Palestinians, and you don’t want the fucking Palestinian Authority to fall apart either,” Deputy Secretary Tom Nides warned me at the State Department.
Exactingly civil in public, American officials, behind the scenes, often revel in four-letter words. Israelis, by contrast, usually avoid expletives, perhaps because biblical Hebrew supplied them with none. When in Washington, though, I spoke like a Washingtonian. “No, Israel does not want the fucking UN to collapse,” I replied to Nides. “But there are plenty of Tea Party types who would, and no shortage of Congress members who are wondering why they have to keep paying Palestinians who spit in the president’s eye. You don’t want to cut off aid, you don’t want to defund the UN or close the PLO office, so what will you do?”
Nides slumped into his Louis XVth chair and looked beat. The answer to my question was apparently “nothing.”
I reported that to Netanyahu by paraphrasing an old movie we both remembered. “Being Palestinian,” I said, “means never having to say you’re sorry.” The administration’s response, less lyrical, appeared in a Jeffrey Goldberg article in which unnamed government sources said the White House would “oppose [UDI] in spite of Netanyahu, not to help him.” The president’s dislike of the prime minister, Jeff wrote, “has deepened in a way that could ultimately be dangerous for Israel.”
On September 20, then, while rushing to New York to receive Netanyahu, I had every reason to expect another showdown. As anticipated, Abbas’s speech to the General Assembly cited the Muslim and Christian connection to Palestine and ignored the Jews’, quoted Obama’s “promise” of the previous year, and called on the Security Council to recognize Palestine. Netanyahu, true to form, highlighted the Holocaust and the Iranian nuclear threat. More untypically, the prime minister concluded on a movingly musical note: “President Abbas, I extend my hand—the hand of Israel—in peace….We are both sons of Abraham. We share the same patriarch. We dwell in the same land. Our destinies are intertwined. Let us realize the vision of Isaiah, ‘The people who walk in darkness will see a great light.’ ”
But the starkest surprise came in Obama’s remarks. After extolling the democratic victories of the Arab Spring and reaffirming the need for a negotiated two-state solution, the president launched into his most pro-Israel oration ever:
Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring….[A]ny lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day….Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile and persecution, and fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are….The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland….And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth….
I was nonplussed, albeit in a positive way, as were other Israelis. Even Foreign Minister Liberman, not wont to compliment the president, praised his address as “the speech of an ally.” And indeed an ally Obama seemed to be, conferring for an hour alone with Netanyahu at UN headquarters. I peeked into the room several times to glimpse the two leaders chatting shoulder-to-shoulder like pals. Part of me longed to believe it was true—that Obama had finally realized that Abbas would never negotiate and that Netanyahu, when embraced rather than dissed by the White House, would make an amenable partner. So, too, I wanted to believe that Netanyahu could build trust with Obama. Unfortunately, previous experience had taught me that such moments of fraternity proved to be just that, momentary, and that the core differences between the two leaders would resurface.
And they did, almost immediately. Checked by the Americans in the Security Council, Abbas turned to achieving his goal of unilaterally declared independence incrementally, by joining associated UN agencies. Of these he chose the most prestigious: the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, UNESCO. Congress promptly responded by defunding the agency, enraging the administration. Instead of rebuking Abbas, the White House took Israel to task for supporting the cut-off.
“UNESCO teaches Holocaust studies, for chrissakes,” Tom Nides berated me. “You want to cut off fucking Holocaust studies?”
Israel did not, but the president thought he had already done enough by opposing the Palestinians’ bid and did not need to punish them further. Instead, using his waiver powers, Obama prevented the shutdown of the PLO’s Washington office and preserved most of America’s aid to the Palestinian Authority. A furious Netanyahu announced the acceleration of Israeli building in East Jerusalem, which in turn triggered the usual State Department condemnations.
Finally, on November 8—one week after the Palestinians’ acceptance into UNESCO—Obama met with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Cannes. Sarkozy, whose early ardor for Israel had shriveled into an almost constant critique, called Netanyahu a liar. “You are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, unaware that he was speaking into a live microphone.
The incident again brought to mind the words of Job: “I’ve barely learned of this latest catastrophe, and already there’s news of the next.” And the back-to-back crises continued. The Egyptians arrested an Israeli-American, Ilan Grapel, charged him with spying, and began bargaining for the release of Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails. Radical Israeli settlers vandalized a West Bank mosque and Ultra-Orthodox men spat at female Israelis outside of Jerusalem. Referring to these reports at the annual Saban Forum on U.S.-Israel relations, a senior administration official warned that Israel was en route to becoming another Iran. Though off the record, the remark so incensed Netanyahu that he instructed me to phone congressional leaders and remind them that women have served as the chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, the Speaker of the Knesset, and the prime minister. The calls further annoyed the administration. But I had no time to deal with this fallout. With Job 1:16 in mind, I rushed back to the embassy to grapple with a potentially devastating assault from the press.
Hatchet Jobs
That same November, I received an email from a well-placed source within the production staff at 60 Minutes. The famed CBS TV newsmagazine would soon air an item accusing Israel of forcing Christians to flee “the Holy Land,” the source r
evealed.
This intelligence dispirited me. Since my adolescence, when it first debuted, I admired 60 Minutes for its hard-nosed but entertaining format. But during my time in Washington, the show began displaying an increasingly anti-Israel slant. There were segments critical not only of the settlements but also of archeological digs in Jerusalem and even Israel’s alleged cyber-operations against Iran. According to 60 Minutes, the Iranians discovered the computer viruses that Israel planted in their nuclear facilities and then turned those “worms” against the West.
Disappointed by these segments, I went to see Jeffrey Fager, the program’s executive producer and chairman of CBS News. Fager rebuffed any charges of bias, pointing out the program had positively profiled the Israeli Air Force and Hadassah Hospital. “Fair enough,” I replied. But then that email from the 60 Minutes source arrived informing me of a threat not only to Israel’s image, but to its national defense.
Paradoxical though it may sound, the security of the Jewish State significantly depends on Christians. The United States is the most religiously observant of the world’s industrialized nations. A significant percentage of Americans attend church each week, and though some churches are critical of Israel, the most crowded ones are not. On the contrary, the colonial-era notion that I first explored in my book Power, Faith, and Fantasy, that the “new Israel” of America and the “old Israel” of the Jews were indivisibly linked, continued to impact U.S. policy. By 2011, close to three-quarters of all Americans defined themselves as pro-Israel—more than twice as many as the evangelical and American Jewish communities combined. It never surprised me to encounter a congressman whose district contained few if any Jews but who nevertheless pointed at the Bible on his desk and told me, “God says I will bless those who bless you. Now how much do you need for Iron Dome?”
Israel’s enemies were keenly aware of the importance of Christian support for Israel and labored to undermine it. They promoted the 2009 Kairos Document—issued by a group of West Bank Christians—that denied the right of self-determination to the Jews, designated Israel as a sin against God, and justified suicide bombing. In spite of these smears, Kairos remained a potent tool for driving Israeli-Christian wedges. These were widened by periodic reports—all proven groundless—of Christian suffering at Israeli hands. One spring morning, I awoke to an online article, “Dark Easter for Palestinian Christians,” claiming that Israel had prevented West Bank Christians from attending church in Jerusalem. I quickly called the head of Israel’s Internal Security Services, who assured me that tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians had entered Israel that Sunday. The story, planted by Palestinian propagandists, was a sham. Some of the websites retracted the story, yet still it went viral.
But none of these canards had ever been promulgated by a platform as broadly viewed as 60 Minutes. Far exceeding any PR problem, such a slur posed a strategic danger to Israel by eroding its vital Christian support. What could be done? I could try to persuade the producers to cancel the project or at least present an accurate view. All else failing, I could attempt to delay the broadcast until after the football season, during which 60 Minutes airs directly after the Sunday game and attracts a much wider audience. I could push it past the Christmas and Easter holidays, which would surely amplify any anti-Christian message. Or I could do nothing.
—
In baiting Israel, 60 Minutes was merely mimicking the popular trend in much of the American media. Rarely did my day not begin with several critical press reports about Israel on issues ranging from the peace process and Iran to trends in Israeli society. I had to choose which items required a letter to the editor or merely a complaint to the ombudsman. In Foreign Policy magazine, now published by my college roommate, David Rothkopf, I refuted the charge that Israel was no longer a strategic asset to the United States (“Ultimate Ally”) and no longer liberal (“Resilient Democracy”). Responding to all the allegations could have been a full-time job.
Most malicious was the op-ed page of The New York Times, once revered as an interface of ideas, now sadly reduced to a sounding board for only one, which often excluded Israel’s legitimacy. The page’s contributors accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, brutal militarism, racism of several stripes, and even “pinkwashing”—exploiting its liberal policy toward lesbians and gays to cover up its oppression of Palestinians. After a while, I simply gave up trying to debunk such lunacy. Only once, when an op-ed by Mahmoud Abbas suggested that the Arabs had not rejected the UN’s UN’s Partition Plan in 1947, did I feel compelled to phone the page’s editor, Andy Rosenthal.
“When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backward?”
“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.
“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”
“In your view.”
“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach?”
Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize–winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”
I urged him to publish a response by President Shimon Peres, who was present at Israel’s creation. Rosenthal said that he already had an article by Knesset member Danny Danon. A rightist who opposed the two-state solution, Danon would only make Israel look more extreme, I knew, which is perhaps what Rosenthal wanted. “Hold off on Danon,” I urged the editor. “I’ll get you the Peres piece in time to go to press tomorrow.”
That day, Sally and I attended our son Yoav’s graduation from Columbia. Seated in the VIP section next to the famous Alma Mater statue, I could have enjoyed the pageantry and relished the view of my old dorm room in John Jay Hall. Instead, I text-messaged Peres. The result was his moving memoir of Israel’s struggle for independence and its insuppressible yearning for peace. Just before deadline, I pressed the SEND button and sighed with relief.
The next day, the Times published Danon’s article.
How to explain such chicanery? Israel was certainly not lacking for policies, such as settlement building, that were difficult if not impossible to portray positively to the press. Our frequent need to resort to force and the growth of religiously observant communities tended to paint us in less liberal colors. But displayed in my embassy office was a 1973 edition of Life magazine celebrating Israel’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Back then, the Jewish State was far more militaristic and less democratic and tolerant. Yet Life praised it as a paragon of righteousness and creativity. Such adoration typified the media’s depiction of Israel back then. Something obviously changed.
—
That something, according to former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman, is the grossly disproportionate number of journalists assigned to covering Israel—more, Friedman writes, than “AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.” Beyond the unbalanced numbers of correspondents, Friedman posits, is the biased story line they are forced to adopt. Investigations into Palestinian Authority corruption or Abbas’s rejection of peace offers are simply quashed, while exposés of Israeli intransigence merit headlines. Friedman believes the reason is anti-Semitism, the willingness to associate Jews with the worst traits in today’s world, namely, militarism, colonialism, and racism. Charges of Israeli trafficking in human organs, highlighted by Time and The New York Times, indeed evoke classic anti-Semitic tropes. And more than a few journalists are ill-disposed toward Israel. But there is also a more mundane reason for Israel’s bad press: ratings.
Israel sells. Arabs massacring Arabs in, say, Syria, is a footnote, while a Palestinian child shot by Israeli soldiers is a scoop. The racist undertones are clear but the reality, irrefutable. And no one understands it better than the terrorists, Hamas and Hezbollah. If they fire at Israeli civilians, Israel will retaliate and unintentionally k
ill the Palestinian and Lebanese civilians behind whom the terrorists hide. The pictures will be gruesome, and if insufficiently so, the terrorists will manufacture them, exhuming bodies from morgues and graveyards. The staged images, picked up by editorless blogs, proliferate on the Internet. Many will be reproduced, uncritically, by the mainstream press.
Even The Washington Post, an august paper, can fall for the ruse. Once, after a round of Hamas-Israel fighting in Gaza, the Post ran a four-column-wide front-page photograph of a crying man surrounded by mourners and clutching a small shrouded body. The caption said that a Palestinian father grieves for his son “after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.” I called the editor, a good friend, and asked about the photo’s provenance. “I’m no expert,” I said, “but the figures’ positions are too symmetrical—a neat semicircle—and their expressions identical. Are you sure it’s real?” The editor insisted that the photograph had been authenticated by its source, the Associated Press.
Some months later, an investigation by the UN (the UN!) determined that the infant was most likely not killed by the IDF but by a Hamas rocket. The Post apologized yet the harm to Israel’s reputation was, once again, irreversible.
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