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Tips for Reading about Israel

(Sapir Journal) Matti Friedman - Some Western observers have formed a picture of Israel only tenuously linked to reality. The shared narrative in Western Europe and North America is largely a negative one that grows increasingly negative as the ideological landscape of the West becomes more polarized and inflamed. Too many mainstream journalists have abandoned old ideals such as objectivity for the idea that journalism is a tool to effect social change. Similar trends are afoot in the world of elite universities, where the goal of educating knowledgeable people is losing ground to the goal of training activists, and where Israel is presented as a potent symbol of what a right-thinking person is meant to be active against. Journalists who have become activists see their job not as helping you understand events, but as pushing you toward their conclusions. As soon as the press becomes activist, it becomes impossible to understand what's going on. Israel must be compared with other countries in similar situations and not to abstract ideals like "democracy." If someone is claiming that casualties in an Israeli operation in Gaza are "high," that needs to be compared with similar operations, like the U.S. Marines in Fallujah, or the British in Northern Ireland. If you're critical of open-fire orders on the Gaza fence, you should know how that works on the perimeters of U.S. military bases in Afghanistan. Most criticism of Israel doesn't compare it with anything. The stories told about Israel often suggest that bringing peace is a problem Israel could solve if it wanted to, which sets up the Jews as villains, rather than as people caught up in a complex situation where no one really knows what to do. The writer was an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011.
2021-06-24 00:00:00
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