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May, I escorted the editor of London's Guardian newspaper,
Alan Rusbridger, and his features editor, Ian Katz, around West
Jerusalem and into Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem. It was Rusbridger's
first trip to Israel. His paper had been singled out by critics
of press coverage of Israel as one of the most unfair.
Unlike many
other journalists, who have climbed aboard the anti-Israeli bandwagon
over the last months without having ever even been to Israel, Rusbridger
— to his credit — took five days off work to see the situation
for himself. He is, after all, heir to the great C. P. Scott, editor
of the Guardian for 57 years, who (in Rusbridger's words)
"fought tirelessly alongside Chaim Weizmann for the creation
of the state of Israel." (Indeed it was Scott who introduced
Weizmann to Arthur Balfour).
A few days
before our meeting, the Guardian's chief Jerusalem correspondent,
Suzanne Goldenberg, had been presented with Britain's prestigious
Edgar Wallace Trophy by Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a front-page
announcement, the Guardian said that the London Press Club
had decided to award her the prize for her "courageous and
objective journalism." Even though the prize is meant to cover
reporting in general, and has no particular connection with the
Middle East, the runner-up was another media crusader against Israel,
Robert Fisk of the Independent. Goldenberg's news report
in the Guardian, on the morning the prize was announced,
was titled "Mutilated Children of a Crippled Palestine"
— which gives a flavor of the kind of writing which had so
impressed her fellow journalists.
Rusbridger,
Katz, and I crossed by car into Bethlehem. It wasn't clear whether
it was safe to go there that morning. The mutilated bodies of two
13-year-old Israeli boys had been found in a nearby cave just hours
earlier, and tension was high. My car had Israeli, not Palestinian,
license plates, and in the previous weeks several motorists had
been shot dead for just such an offense.
The
Journey
Two Israeli
soldiers, aged about 18, were standing guard on the Israeli side
of the border. When we showed our press cards and asked if we could
cross, one of them said in English, "But of course, if you
are journalists, you must come in." Then he added with a wry
smile, "You are the bodyguard of democracy, after all."
Rusbridger jotted down the soldier's observation in his notebook.
"Is it
safe to go in this morning?" I asked the soldier. "Yes,
the Palestinians don't start shooting until lunchtime these days,"
he replied. Katz was worried: "You mean they have shooting
here!"
We were pressed
for time, so our foray into Bethlehem was a short one. But it was
long enough for Rusbridger and Katz — a contemporary of mine
at Oxford, who told me he hadn't been to Israel "since his
bar mitzvah" — to see with their own eyes that the Israeli
soldiers were courteous and polite to Palestinians. They saw that
Palestinians were allowed to cross the checkpoint, both by car and
on foot, in a matter of seconds. And they saw by contrast how the
same soldiers were refusing religious Jews — who wished to
go and pray at the nearby holy site of Rachel's Tomb — entry
to Bethlehem.
On our drive
down one of Bethlehem's main streets, we passed Palestinian-owned
cars of a similar standard to those we had just seen being driven
by Israelis in Jerusalem. Rusbridger and Katz also had a chance
to observe that the local Arab shops were well stocked. And when
we drove back out from Bethlehem into Israel, they could see that
Palestinians were allowed to pass quickly — in about the same
time it takes an average Israeli to enter a Tel Aviv shopping mall
or movie theatre, as his bags are searched for explosive devices.
The religious Jews we had seen before were on the other side of
the road, still pleading with the soldiers to be allowed entry to
Bethlehem.
Odd
— But Not Rare — Fruits
Two weeks later,
Rusbridger wrote about his trip in a cover story for The Spectator
in London. The Spectator was an unexpected choice. It is
owned by Conrad Black, one of the few prominent non-Jews in the
West to have openly denounced media coverage of Israel. "The
BBC, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard,
and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly anti-Israel,"
Black had written in The Spectator a few weeks earlier, "and
wittingly or not, are stoking the inferno of anti-Semitism."
Rusbridger
began his Spectator article as follows:
In the last,
dying days of apartheid I visited South Africa… A couple
of weeks ago I made my first trip to another much written about
country, Israel. As with my earlier journey I found a lot that
was shocking, but this time I was genuinely surprised. Nothing
had prepared me for finding quite so many echoes of the worst
days of South Africa in modern Israel.
He went on
to give some examples — taken out of context — of shooting
incidents, and of Palestinian poverty he had witnessed in what he
called the "large prison" of Gaza. He wrote of the "endless
humiliating queues waiting to pass through Israeli army checkpoints."
There was no mention of our very different experience crossing into
the "occupied West Bank."
Not content
with drawing analogies with South Africa, Rusbridger also made a
comparison with Northern Ireland, implying that the situation is
worse in Israel because Israelis don't know what's going on. He
wrote (mistakenly) that "The difference in Israel is that almost
no Jewish-Israeli journalists ever report firsthand on life and
death on the West Bank or Gaza today… The exceptions —
I think there are three — are brave and, by and large, despised
by Jewish Israelis."
He seemed to
have forgotten our conversation about the workings of Israeli democracy,
in which I had pointed out that every Israeli newspaper — without
exception — has regular and comprehensive reporting about life
in Gaza, some of it highly critical of Israel; that both national
Israeli TV channels have correspondents in Gaza; that senior advisers
to Yasser Arafat, and even spokespersons for Hamas, are regularly
interviewed on Israeli television and radio; and that Israeli Arabs
play a significant role in the Israeli media. Indeed, as I had told
Rusbridger, probably the single most influential journalist in Israel
— Rafik Halaby, the director of news at Israel's state-run
Channel One TV — is an Arab.
In his article
Rusbridger also made no reference to the many progressive elements
of Israeli Jewish society which we had discussed in some detail.
I had asked him why, if Israel is "an affront to civilization"
— the headline given to a comment piece written by a former
British defense secretary in the Guardian's sister paper,
the Observer, a few days before Rusbridger's visit —
the Jewish state should, for example, have some of the most liberal
laws in the world for homosexuals, far more liberal than those in
the U.S. and Britain.
As for his
claim that "nothing had prepared me for finding quite so many
echoes of the worst days of South Africa in modern Israel,"
it made me wonder, for a moment, how carefully he reads his own
paper, given that comparisons between present-day Israel and South
Africa in the Apartheid era have become part of the Guardian's
stock-in-trade.
Take, for example,
Goldenberg's report of Saturday, June 3, 2000. It was headlined,
"Palestinians feel the heat as police enforce beach apartheid:
With peace looming, Israel is keen to establish areas for Jews only."
The article itself began:
In these
early days of a sweltering summer, the long palm-dotted beaches
of Tel Aviv are a natural escape. But if you are a Palestinian,
a family day out can mean a night in jail. As Israeli Jews lolled
on the sand yesterday, the Tel Aviv police were out in force in
a zealous enforcement of beach apartheid… [an] operation
to create Jewish-only beaches. Palestinians were arrested near
the dolphinarium before they could even set foot on the sand...
As someone
who lives in Tel Aviv, and goes to the beach most days, I have never
seen anything of the kind. Jews and Arabs mix freely on the beach,
and did so when the article was written in June 2000, as any resident
of Tel Aviv will confirm. This includes the area around the dolphinarium,
site of a deadly Palestinian suicide bomb at a beachfront teenage
disco exactly a year after Goldenberg wrote her piece.
More
Falsehoods
About the same
time as Rusbridger published his Spectator article, he wrote
a massive editorial in the Guardian, running to well over
2,000 words, entitled, "Between Heaven and Hell." A pull-quote
was reproduced in large type in a box on the Guardian's front
page. It read:
We are forced
to confront some uncomfortable truths about how the dream of a
sanctuary for the Jewish people in the very land in which their
spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped has come
to be poisoned. The establishment of this sanctuary has been bought
at a very high cost in human rights and human lives. It must be
apparent that the international community cannot support this
cost indefinitely.
In spite of
all this, Rusbridger seems to me to be a divided man. From what
I know of him, and from what I have heard from others, he remains
friendlier to the Jewish state in private than do many in the British
media. When it comes to public pronouncements, however, he usually
seems unable to resist the prevailing tide of "enlightened"
opinion in Europe — a tide which can only encourage attempts
to destroy Israel.
Next:
In
Vogue
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