Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo
At a rally in solidarity with the Palestinian people, in Madrid’s Plaza de las Provincias, May 15, 2022
It hasn’t been a banner week for the Israeli government. Following four separate, relatively detailed investigations by news organizations, including one that carried five bylines in The New York Times that concluded that an Israeli soldier shot and killed the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh back in May, Palestinian officials handed the bullet in question to the U.S. State Department so that it might be tested. State officials then, without the permission of Abu Akleh’s family or the agreement of the Palestinian Authority, turned it over to the Israelis. The department then issued a statement that the condition of the bullet precludes a “clear conclusion” as to its origins, though it added that Israeli forces were “likely responsible” for firing the shot. Even so, it “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances during an IDF-led military operation against factions of Palestinian Islamic Jihad … which followed a series of terrorist attacks in Israel.” This contradicted accounts of Palestinians who witnessed the killing as a deliberate attack on journalists, as well as the conclusions of a CNN investigation that concurred with this judgment, to say nothing of the fact that it would be impossible to discern such a thing from the bullet itself.
Recall that the Israelis initially denied that the bullet could have been fired by one of their soldiers and attacked the Palestinians for refusing their offer of a joint investigation. Defense Minister Benny Gantz put most of the blame on “the terrorists who fired from within a civilian population.” (The Times’ own monthlong investigation found no evidence of any armed Palestinians near Ms. Abu Akleh when she was shot.) The Israelis announced there would be no investigation on their part, which led to protests from dozens of Democratic senators and representatives.
Recall, also, that for reasons I will never understand, Israeli police also attacked the pallbearers of this “Palestinian icon” as they carried her coffin by clubbing them at their knees, providing their enemies with priceless propaganda seen around the world. As Jack Khoury wrote in Haaretz: “The photo tells the Palestinian story in its painful essence. A casket containing the remains of a woman who struggled in her own way to present the Palestinian national narrative beyond the conflict and its divisiveness and power struggles. A coffin raised above the discord, carried on the backs of young Palestinians who are facing down an armed and particularly brutal police force. A scene of death, pain and oppression, that despite everything, proves to the world that the Palestinian people are still alive and kicking, striving for their freedom.”
The Israelis next made matters even worse. Following the above debacle, Noa Tishby, the ditzy soap opera actress whom the Israelis rather crazily appointed as their first-ever “Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization of Israel,” insisted that “journalist [sic] are killed around the world every week, without the same global reaction. This is the antisemitic double standard.” (Even were this statement true, someone should have told Tishby that this does not happen “every week” when journalists are covering nations that call themselves democracies in territories in which they enjoy complete control, nor does it happen very often when the victim is an American citizen.)
In betraying the Palestinian Authority’s wishes by turning the bullet over to the Israelis, U.S. officials not only demonstrated once again who and what their priorities are in the conflict—recall this was an American citizen who was killed—but also needlessly undermined what little legitimacy the Authority has left, at a time when it has been actively looking for ways to bolster it.
That’s all background for why I am asking you to look at how the Times decided to headline their story on the State Department’s report. It reads: “Bullet Too Damaged to Prove Who Killed Palestinian American Journalist, U.S. Says.” I pay a lot of attention to headlines because in the vast majority of cases, that is all most people ever see. They read the headline but never click on the story. And if all you saw was this headline, you would never know who was responsible and assume that such knowledge was impossible. Now look at how virtually every other news organization covered the State Department statement:
“Israeli Bullet Likely Killed Al Jazeera Reporter, Says U.S. Dept. of State” (New York Daily News)
“U.S. Concludes Unintentional Israeli Fire Likely Killed American Journalist” (The Washington Post)
“Al Jazeera Reporter Likely Killed by Unintentional Gunfire From Israeli Positions, U.S. Says” (Reuters)
“Al Jazeera Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh Likely Killed by Israeli Gunfire” (Newsweek)
“Israeli Gunshot ‘Likely’ Killed Shireen Abu Akleh, US Concludes After Analyzing Bullet” (The [Jewish] Forward and the Jewish Telegraph Agency)
The sad fact is that none of these publications, even added together with all the other publications in the world, will match the influence of the Times in the way this story is perceived both in the world at large and among American Jews. And so, as with so many stories in which the Palestinians are treated as mere objects rather than subjects—so often dying in passive tense from bombs and bullets that, according to the typical Times headline, have no apparent origin—it has the effect of whitewashing the consequences of Israel’s occupation. This is not to say that Times reporters do not do great reporting from Israel. They do. But just as Times headline writers were, for years, unwilling to attach the word “lie” to Donald Trump’s statements for fear of offending his fans, so, too, are they especially sensitive about how they represent the content of the stories about Israel that these reporters publish. (This Slate story gets at the overall problem reporters tend to have with this issue, though of course much has changed in recent times.)
The reason the Times is so important, as I explain in my forthcoming book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel:
Ironically, while The New York Times is often the first example cited by pro-Israel media critics for alleged pro-Palestinian bias, it is also the first example cited by pro-Palestinian media critics for its alleged pro-Israel bias. This is due in part to the fact of its being by far the most influential and important foreign-news source in the US—indeed, in the English-speaking world. Former Begin spokesman Zev Chafets explained that within the Israeli government attention was paid to the Times correspondent first, with whoever was US Ambassador at the time following closely behind. The paper had primacy because “if it was in the Times it was automatically going to be everywhere else.” When former Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren took the job as editor of the Jewish Forward in 2019, she told a former colleague, Ben Smith, that she hoped to make it the “Jewish New York Times.” His reply: “But the New York Times is already the Jewish New York Times.”
As it happens, the following day, the Times published this quite good article, which might be fairly interpreted as a kind of an apology article for the previous one.
Relatedly, I try to avoid moralistic appeals in politics, but from a strictly self-interested perspective on the part of the both the Israelis and the U.S., how can it benefit anyone to instruct Palestinians of goodwill to learn that:
- Israel reserves the right to shoot a journalist who happens to be a Palestinian who is covering a protest.
- After such a shooting, Israel feels no obligation to even investigate the circumstances under which it takes place, much less punish the person responsible.
- Israeli troops will attack the mourners of such a victim, again, without even bothering to offer any reasonable explanation.
- Israel will leverage its connections with the United States not only to betray their word to the Palestinians and turn over critical evidence in a shooting of an American citizen, but also to let the entire matter go, despite the protests of virtually half the members of the Senate from the president’s own party.
The Committee to Protect Journalists also has a statement here.
Chris Wallace has apparently written a terrible book about the nuclear bombing of Japan, and few, if any, of its reviewers have so far recognized this. That’s what my long-ago dissertation adviser, Barton J. Bernstein, says here and I’m sure he’s right. (You’ll need an institutional log-in or to pay up, alas.)
One of my favorite species of news article is the personality profile where the person being profiled thinks themselves wonderful but (pretty much) everyone else, save perhaps their parents, who reads it thinks, “Why in the world did this person think this might be good idea?” Here is a prime example of that genre, and here, as Irin Carmon puts it, is “a lot more about what that Princeton guy who married his student was actually accused of from this thorough investigation” before he was fired, despite having tenure and despite having been previously punished before the article appeared.
P.S.: I wrote this listening to the bonus live disc that came with the reissue of Led Zeppelin’s first album on my stereo, not my computer, and then I checked Twitter before sending it in and it informed me that Zep was trending, but for no reason. Can we trust Elon Musk with this frightening power?
Meanwhile, here they are doing the trivial Eddie Cochran hit “Somethin’ Else,” just to show you how great they were. And here they are at their best. Here, finally, are Little Roger and the Goosebumps improving on one of the most annoying songs of all time.
