Other
From the Editor
Blind Man's Bluff
“Auge um Auge: Der biblische Krieg,” proclaims the cover of the April 8 Der Spiegel. Surrounding the German newsmagazine’s overheated cover line, a lurid montage juxtaposes images of Jesus’ crucifixion and Crusaders battling Saracens with photos of Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Israeli soldiers, and Palestinian gunmen.
“Eye for an Eye: The Biblical War”: The combination of text and pictures pushes a whole keyboard’s worth of buttons, as it was designed to do. It undoubtedly sold magazines. Yet I doubt that the cover story—a review of Middle East tensions since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden—did much to advance readers’ understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian war that rages on at this writing.
Is the press running out of angles on Israel and the Palestinians? Can anyone trace the paths by which one side or the other veered away from the course toward mutual acceptance? Like scar tissue, the layers of past injustices, of mythology born of real or imagined grievances not only blind the antagonists to the potential for peace. They impede the press’ ability to see and therefore tell the story in a way that enlightens rather than befuddles.
The best reporters have equal amounts of zeal for and skill in analysis, delivering the reconstructed narrative readers need to grasp complex phenomena. There is something immensely intellectually satisfying in dissecting a snarl of apparently chaotic, confusing events and creating an intelligible web of cause and effect that reveals: That’s how it happened. Tracing the causal links within an inchoate jumble of information is one of the most rewarding aspects of reporting—equivalent to wiping away cobwebs to find an intricately patterned design beneath.
The Palestinian-Israeli struggle presents a challenge to even the most incisive reporter. Almost every causal connection in the 54-year narrative since Israel’s founding—not to mention the 50 years before—is qualified by so many caveats and competing interpretations that it is impossible to write an uncontested narrative of what led to the current shooting war. Wherever you plot a turning point on this conflict’s tangled timeline, you encounter a raft of counterclaims.
It’s not that we suffer from a lack of coverage of the Middle East. We do suffer from a lack of clarity, a failure to unpack the stock phrases and formulaic labels proffered by the spokespeople for each side. Part of the problem rests on journalists’ shoulders. We all carry an awful lot of baggage when it comes to the antagonists. Nary a soul is dispassionate about what’s at stake in this narrow sliver of land between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea. The military campaign is mirrored by a fierce media battle between the partisans of the Israelis and those of the Palestinians. It is extraordinarily difficult to winnow out the spin and strip away accretions of bias to tell this story with open eyes.
How much harder, then, when reporters are blocked from events on the ground. It is to the enduring shame of the Israeli government that it has kept the press from doing its work by barring journalists from the West Bank towns it invaded in April.
And it has proved to be terribly shortsighted, playing into the hands of those with a stake in promulgating tales of Israeli atrocities. Because independent observers were excluded from Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Jenin, we may never know what really happened there; but almost immedi-ately, reports of a massacre in Jenin added fuel to Palestinian hatred for Israel and whetted hunger for revenge. Contempt for truth only engenders more of the same.
