Philadelphia — Recently I was listening to the news on National Public Radio and heard the announcer inadvertently sum up the contradictions and misperceptions inherent in the conventional wisdom about the Middle East.
Listeners were told that a Palestinian suicide-bomber had managed to murder two Israeli soldiers with a roadside bomb — and then that “both sides exchanged complaints about cease-fire violations.”
The brief summary of this terrible story of how two Israelis were lured to their deaths by a Palestinian Arab pretending to need roadside assistance was bad enough. But it was not enough to shatter the frame of reference of the news writers or the editors at NPR.
No matter what the Palestinians do, the best the Israelis can hope for in the information war is an “evenhanded” account that will see the two sides as morally equivalent.
Events in the last year have shown that this mind-set has proven to be virtually invincible. If the Palestinians’ rejection last summer of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s ridiculous offer of more than 90 percent of the territories and half of Jerusalem could not convince news media leaders that the Palestinians don’t want peace, then would anything?
The Palestinian decision to follow this move with a decision to launch a low-level war against Israel didn’t change it either.
The complaints of friends of Israel about this situation have generally fallen on deaf ears in the media. That is bad news for those of us who care about the integrity of journalism. But how much damage is it really doing to Israel?
Critics of the media have pointed out, with some justification, that the Jewish state’s hold on American public opinion has remained relatively strong. Polls show that most Americans support Israel.
Despite the affectionate coverage their cause receives from foreign journalists, the Arabs are handicapped by Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat’s well-earned reputation as a bloodthirsty terrorist.
But what worries me most about this is not the effect bad press has on that ordinary, fair-minded American. I’ve come to believe the real danger anti-Israel media bias poses is to American Jewish opinion of Israel. Many Jews are still insecure enough to care what media elites think of them.
And they care desperately about what is written about Israel since, by extension, that affects their own image. So if Israel is falsely portrayed as Goliath menacing the little Palestinian David, many American Jews feel like bad guys themselves. And that they do not like.
But rather than get mad about these misperceptions, many of us have internalized them. The universalistic element of Judaism that calls on us to care about the downtrodden and grieve even at our enemies’ deaths has led too many Jews — Israelis and Americans — to see the world from the point of view of Palestinians’ demands, not Israel’s security or Jewish rights.
How else explain how every time Israel is pushed to the wall by egregious Palestinian terrorism — like the lynching of two Israeli soldiers or the bombing of a Tel Aviv disco, which killed 21 Israeli kids — Jews can be found to demonstrate against Israel?
Groups like “Jews United for Social Justice,” which held a “vigil” earlier this month outside the Israeli consulate in Philadelphia, blasted Israel while not even mentioning the Tel Aviv bombing. A rival leftist group attempted a more balanced critique of the Jewish state and did note the misdeeds of the Palestinians.
The left and the media may want to change the subject to whether or not Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria are illegal or obstacles to peace. They are neither illegal nor an obstacle, but this debate is irrelevant to the reality of the Palestinian war.
Costly attitude
Of course, the demonstrators and others like them throughout the country don’t represent anything more than a marginal element.
But when you think about the feeble number of Jews turning out for solidarity rallies for Israel — not to mention how few American Jews are traveling to Israel these days — you realize that a substantial portion of American Jewry is largely indifferent to what’s going on in Israel.
And when you consider that our politicians look to American Jews — and not to the more fervently pro-Israel evangelical Christians — for guidance about Israel, you see that a media-inspired distancing from Israel by American Jews could be very costly to Israel.
For the last decade, American Jews have been told via the media and mainstream Jewish groups that peace is upon us, and that the Palestinians have accepted Israel’s existence. The drumbeat of media assaults on Israel has bred an impatience about the Jewish nation’s inability to conclude peace in even those American Jews who are not the sort to preen about their supposed moral rectitude and exhibit it in front of an Israeli consulate.
The point here isn’t to say that Jews shouldn’t criticize Israel. Israel’s governments and its politicians are no more worthy of adoration than their American counterparts.
But the crisis Israel currently faces has created a situation that makes the traditional left-right debate about what Israel should do with the territories irrelevant. Yet so long as American Jews are still stuck on these media-fed myths, mobilizing them is going to be very difficult.
A strong American Jewry community united in support of a beleaguered Israel could have a massive impact on the Bush administration and Congress as they ponder whether to pursue a strategy that will mean pressure for more Israeli concessions.
Unfortunately, unless we can shake off the current media-fed miasma of Jewish complacency, American Jews will not play that crucial role.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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