When I saw the July 3 New York Times headline "Setting Sail on Gaza’s Sea of Spin," I expected the worst.

Times reporter Ethan Bronner's analysis piece on the Gaza humanitarian flotilla starts off predictably enough, saying there's blame to spread all around:

Almost everything about the flotilla stuck in Greece and waiting to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza seems to be a parable for something else, part of an unstated effort to recast the Israeli-Palestinian narrative in extreme terms. Instead of helping to clarify what Gaza needs and how it might build a future, the saga has merely brought out the public relations demons on all sides.

PR demons?!

The first problem, according to Bronner, concerns the very purpose of the flotilla. As he sees it, there would seem to be no need for much relief in Gaza, thanks to Israel's generosity following the killings of activists on last year's  flotilla:

The international outrage that followed helped force an easing of the siege. One result, largely unacknowledged by the flotilla leaders: far more goods have gone into Gaza over the past year, and while the 1.6 million people there still need many things, basic supplies are not among them.

This is something that Bronner seems to fixate on in his reporting-- he had a June 25 report that touted the building boom in Gaza:

Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall — with escalators imported from Israel — will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off.

As pro-Palestinian activists prepare to set sail aboard a flotilla aimed at maintaining an international spotlight on Gaza and pressure on Israel, this isolated Palestinian coastal enclave is experiencing its first real period of economic growth since the siege they are protesting began in 2007.

He went on to note that things were not progressing evenly, but his point seemed to be that things were much improved since the last flotilla, thus making the current efforts unnecessary ("For the past year, Israel has allowed most everything into Gaza but cement, steel and other construction material.")

But the evidence available from human rights observers tells a very different story.  From the Oxfam report, "Dashed Hopes" (12/1/10):

Many in the international community, including Quartet Representative Tony Blair, expressed hopes that this would lead to a major change and alleviate the plight of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza. However, five months later, there are few signs of real improvement on the ground as the ‘ease’ has left foundations of the illegal blockade policy intact.

While the Government of Israel committed to expand and accelerate the inflow of construction materials for international projects, it has so far only approved 7 per cent of the building plan for UNRWA’s projects in Gaza, and of that 7 per cent only a small fraction of the necessary construction material has been allowed to enter for projects including schools and health centres.  In fact, the UN reports that Gaza requires 670,000 truckloads of construction material, while only an average of 715 of these truckloads have been received per month since the ‘easing’ was announced.

Although there has been a significant increase in the amount of food stuffs entering Gaza, many humanitarian items, including vital water equipment, that are not on the Israeli restricted list continue to receive no permits. Two thirds of Gaza’s factories report they have received none or only some of the raw materials they need to recommence operations. As a result, 39% of Gaza residents remain unemployed and unable to afford the new goods in the shops. Without raw materials and the chance to export, Gaza's businesses are unable to compete with the cheaper newly imported goods. This economic development leaves 80% of the population dependent upon international aid.

And a March 2011 United Nations report found that

the easing of the blockade on the Gaza Strip since June 2010 did not result in a significant improvement in people’s livelihoods, which were largely depleted during three years of strict blockade. Because of the ongoing restrictions on the import of building materials, only a small minority of the 40,000 housing units, needed to meet natural population growth and the loss of homes during the ‘Cast Lead’ offensive, could be actually constructed.

Bronner argues that the improvement in Gaza goes "largely unacknowledged" by the flotilla activists. Actually, what they're saying is that the blockade has hardly been eased-- which is almost the opposite of what Ethan Bronner is reporting.

What's the Israeli government's new "plan" for peace? Reading the New York Times doesn't help your understand where they stand. Earlier this week, the Times' Ethan Bronner (5/17/11) praised a speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for exhibiting "greater flexibility on territory." Bronner wrote that he showed "more willingness to yield territory than he had before, strongly implying that he would give up the vast majority of the West Bank." As Matthew Taylor wrote at Mondoweiss (5/17/11), there was little actual evidence that there was much going on here--just some "implying" and "suggesting."

A Times article today (5/19/11) from Bronner and Helene Cooper makes things more confusing. The piece describes Netanyahu as wanting three things: Israeli military along the Jordan River, control of Jerusalem and holding on to West Bank settlements. His other "condition" is that the Palestinian government cannot include Hamas; the Times notes that "Netanyahu knows that the Palestinians will find this condition unacceptable.... But since the United States labels Hamas as terrorists, Mr. Netanyahu is betting that he will appear more forthcoming than ever."

Well, he's already appeared that way in the pages of the New York Times. Though the piece today also says this:

Whether Mr. Netanyahu's offer, first outlined in a speech to Parliament on Monday, is a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, or to make it appear that the Palestinians are the ones blocking progress, is not yet clear.

This is hard to square with Bronner's earlier report praising Netanyahu's supposed flexibility. Now it sounds like the Times isn't so sure that it's a sign of much of anything. But to help clarify things, the paper granted anonymity to an Israeli official in order to get the truth:

"On the one hand, the Palestinians are moving toward Hamas while on the other, the prime minister is showing a real willingness to make far-reaching territorial compromise," a top Netanyahu aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

What would be the condition for this? The official needed anonymity in order to more effusively praise his or her boss?

At Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah challenges the skewed history coming from Ethan Bronner in the New York Times (5/15/11). In trying to explain the context for the recent Palestinian protests, Bronner wrote:

After Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Abunimah replied:

This is standard Zionist propaganda that bears little resemblance to the facts. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces began in late 1947, so that by 15 May, 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled from their villages and cities before a single soldier from any Arab army had intervened. The exodus from, for example, Jaffa began in early 1948 after Zionist terrorists belonging to the Stern Gang set off a massive car bomb destroying the Jaffa municipality building on 4 January. (This is all well-documented in books by right-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris, among others.) Many villages in the north of Palestine were also depopulated around that time.

Abunimah adds that the Deir Yassin massacre happened in April 1948--before Israel declared its independence.

This skewed history seems to be fairly common. NBC's Richard Engel presented it this way on the Today show on Monday (5/17/01):

What sparked this is Palestinians were commemorating what they call the Nakba, it's the Arabic word for "catastrophe," which is how many Palestinians describe the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The "catastrophe" is not the establishment of the state of Israel, it's the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that accompanied that establishment. It's an important distinction.

Anonymous Israeli officials are weighing in at the New York Times today. Let's remember the Times has some rules regarding the use of anonymous sources:

The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy. When we use such sources, we accept an obligation not only to convince a reader of their reliability but also to convey what we can learn of their motivation--as much as we can supply to let a reader know whether the sources have a clear point of view on the issue under discussion.

The rules also stipulate:

• "We will not use anonymous sourcing when sources we can name are readily available."
• "We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack."
• "Anonymity should not be invoked for a trivial comment, or to make an unremarkable comment appear portentous."

With that, example No. 1 comes from a piece about the effect of the leaked Palestine papers on future negotiations:

Another top Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the big question for him was whether the revelations would make the Palestinians more timid in future negotiations because of public indignation. He said they seemed to be walking away from their concessions since they were revealed.

Alternatively, the official said, the opposite could be true--the Palestinian public could get used to the kind of concessions needed for a deal now that they were in the open, and that would ease future talks.

So things could turn out one way, or the other way. What a revelation.

In another piece on the political upheaval in Lebanon, we get this:

"We are concerned about Iranian domination of Lebanon through its proxy, Hezbollah," said an Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the situation in Beirut was not yet clear.

Presumably said official will speak on the record once things in Lebanon are "clear."

Of greater concern, though, is the charge that Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. This is often treated as a fact in U.S. media discussions, though a few months ago (10/17/10) an expert on such matters wrote this letter to the Times (see bold):

To the Editor:

Joe Klein, in his review of A Privilege to Die, by Thanassis Cambanis ("The Hezbollah Project," October 3), says Mr. Cambanis fails "to put Lebanese Hezbollah in the context of Iran's larger terrorist network." However, Mr. Cambanis is correct in his presentation; the idea that Hezbollah today has a place in Iran's "larger terrorist network" is ill-informed. Hezbollah has not been under Iranian political or military control for nearly a decade. It is now an organization operating on its own recognizance, although it continues to receive a fraction of its operating funds from Iran--much of it in the form of religious charitable contributions from its Shia brethren.

WILLIAM O. BEEMAN
Minneapolis
The writer is a professor and the chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota.

The big news in the U.S.-guided Israel/Palestine talks is that a renewal of a so-called "settlement freeze" in the West Bank is basically dead. Ethan Bronner has a post-mortem of sorts in the New York Times (12/9/10), where he describes the backdrop for the previous round of negotiations:

The Israelis had insisted that the only way forward was through direct talks. Yet when those talks began in September, the Israelis engaged in little substance. The Palestinians had insisted that there could be no direct talks without a settlement freeze, yet they waited nine months into the last such freeze before agreeing to negotiate.

Bronner added that a "second settlement freeze was viewed as unnecessary and politically painful to achieve."

But the first "freeze" wasn't a freeze at all--though it was often portrayed that way.  I have an article in the new issue of Extra! that lays out the case. (Subscribe today and you can read the piece.)

What's especially interesting is the fact that Bronner once wrote one of the few pieces explaining that the freeze was mostly fiction. As he explained back in July:

an examination of the freeze after more than seven months suggests that it amounts to something less significant, at least on the ground. In many West Bank settlements, building is proceeding apace. Dozens of construction sites with scores of Palestinian workers are active.

To be able to write these facts once, and then somehow forget them, takes a special kind of talent.

There's a lot to say about Ethan Bronner's Week in Review piece in the New York Times (11/21/10). The headline says a lot on its own: "Why America Chases an Israeli-Palestinian Peace." This is ironic, at the very least, given the role the U.S. has historically played in making peace quite difficult. And the current "peace" talks include the a U.S. deal to give, as Bronner explains, Israel a 2-for-1 deal on new fighter jets.

What's really galling about the article, though, is this:

It is worth noting that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years.

The "past few years" would conceivably include late 2008 and early 2009, when Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip. About 1,300 Palestinians were killed (most of them civilians).

Since deaths in Gaza can be forgotten, what violence really matters? Bronner gives an indication when he refers to the threat of "future violence" as a rationale for the Obama White House's increased focus on Israel-Palestine negotations:

Ten years ago, when peace talks led by President Bill Clinton at Camp David fell apart, the second Palestinian uprising broke out, leading to exploding buses, suicide bombings and harsh Israeli countermeasures. Thousands — most of them Palestinians — were killed.

It's clear, then, that Palestinian violence is the real worry. And Bronner is mangling this history; as Seth Ackerman wrote in Extra! (7-8/02), the breakdown in the Camp David talks in July 2000 did not precipitate the second Intifada, which did not break out for another two months: "The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding over 200."

Of course this isn't a new thing for the Times. Jim Naureckas wrote here recently about a Times op-ed by Martin Indyk which argued that "violence is down considerably in the region." As Naureckas pointed out:

According to the Israeli human rights group [B'tselem], there have been 100 Palestinians killed by Israelis in the time period following Israel's December 2008 assault on Gaza; the assault itself killed 1,397 Palestinians, a large majority of whom were either minors or non-combatants.

In much of the coverage of Gaza, there is a media shorthand that is used to recall some of the most important recent history. Like in today's New York Times (6/11/10):

Israel imposed the embargo, allowing in charitable goods and letting out people with medical emergencies. It invaded in late 2008 to stop a flow of rockets and destroyed thousands of buildings.

Israel invaded Gaza in order to stop rockets, destroying buildings in the process--a shorthand that makes the invasion seem more defensible. But if reporters summarized this history accurately, they would be telling a far different story. It would go something like this:

A mid-2008 cease-fire between Hamas and Israel severely curtailed rocket fire from Gaza.  That was broken when Israel attacked and killed four Palestinians in early November. That breach of the cease-fire led to increased fighting and an escalation in rocket fire, culminating in a full-scale Israel invasion that killed over 1,000 Gaza civilians.

It would not be very difficult to report the story this way. (This graph would help make things relatively clear.) As FAIR noted (1/6/09), the New York Times has in the past reported these facts (12/19/08); in fact, the very same reporter, Ethan Bronner, who today wrote that Israel invaded "to stop a flow of rockets" had earlier acknowledged that Hamas had been "largely successful" in seriously curtailing rocket fire from Gaza. He noted then:

Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

As Noam Chomsky wrote recently (In These Times, 6/8/10), the cease-fire rockets that were launched were not the work of Hamas, and that attempts to renew the ceasefire were rebuffed. That forgotten Times account also noted that an Israeli easing of the Gaza blockade--which was promised in return for reducing rocket fire--fell short of expectations.

Time magazine, meanwhile, floats the idea (under the headline, "Can Israel Learn How to Make Its Case?"), that many Israelis see a weakness in their PR strategy:

The way Israelis see it, the failure of the commando mission was compounded by a failure to communicate the danger in which Israel finds itself. The Gaza Strip, besides being home to 1.5 million overwhelmingly poor Palestinians, serves as a launching pad for missiles usually fired by Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic group that does not shy away from terrorist attacks. The Qassam rockets that reach nearby Israeli towns are cobbled together inside Gaza. The fear is that Hamas will one day be able to stockpile larger rockets that could reach Tel Aviv. These would likely be supplied by Iran and arrive by ship. Hence the blockade.

This is absurd. There is constant stream of reporting and commentary that stresses the threats to Israel posed by Hamas rockets--in fact, as described above, the coverage actually distorts that history to Israel's benefit.

New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner has a piece today (4/7/10) headlined "Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance," which attempts to show that there is a new move away from armed resistance to Israeli occupation. You get that message pretty clearly from Bronner's language: He calls it a "new approach" and argues, "Nonviolence has never caught on here."

That's not so; if anything, Palestinian nonviolence just hasn't caught on at the New York Times. As Patrick O'Connor wrote in 2005:

Over the last three years the New York Times has published only three feature articles on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. This despite the fact that Palestinians have conducted hundreds of nonviolent protests over the last three years throughout the West Bank against Israel's construction of the Wall on Palestinian land, and despite the fact that the Israeli army killed nine Palestinian protesters, wounded several thousand protesters, harassed and collectively punished villages that protested, and arrested hundreds of protesters, including nonviolent protest leaders.

More recently (1/28/10),  Edith Garwood at Amnesty International criticized Barack Obama, musician Bono and Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for saying that Palestinians need to find their MLK/Gandhi--ignoring the fact that Palestinians nonviolently resist every single day, and such actions have roots that go back to the 1900s:

Complicit too is the media's noncoverage of nonviolent direct actions and damaging comments by someone of Bono's stature that completely ignores the vital nonviolent struggle and committed activists.

Palestinian leaders like Ghassan Andoni, Mustapha Barghouti,  Jamal Juma’, Abdallah Abu Rahme, Mohammed Othman and Jean Zaru , among others, continue to speak publicly and organize direct actions to nonviolently protest injustices.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/21/10) returns to the issue of Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner having a child fighting on one side of the conflict he's covering (FAIR Activism Update, 2/12/10):

Some Times journalists have taken issue with my position in this case, believing it suggests that no Jewish reporter could fairly cover the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (or, for that matter, a corollary: that a Muslim of Arab descent could not cover Iraq). Until Thomas L. Friedman was sent to Jerusalem in 1984, the Times would not assign a Jew to that post, a sorry history that nobody should want to repeat.

But there is a huge difference between being a Jewish reporter covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and being a reporter whose son has enlisted in the Israeli military. For one thing, as the letter from Ira Glunts illustrates, there is no unanimity among Jews about Israel. To suggest otherwise is to buy into stereotypes. Good reporters bring their life stories to their work and learn both to mine them for material and to correct for bias. But having a son take up arms in a foreign fight you are covering--any fight--creates intolerable pressures and appearances, in my view. I would have said the same thing if the Times had had a reporter in Northern Ireland with a son in the British military there--or fighting with the Provisional Irish Republican Army....

If it isn't acceptable for a Jerusalem correspondent's son to volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces, would it be OK for him to be in the United States Army? My answer is yes, though the reporter's assignment might be affected by what his son was assigned to do--and where. Though some journalists concerned with objectivity may not always be comfortable with it, readers expect American reporters and their family to be part of this society and to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But they don’t expect a correspondent sent to cover an intense overseas conflict to wind up heavily invested in one side--or to be perceived as such--even if it is through the action of a close family member over whom the reporter has no control.

Hoyt is right to reject the odious equation of concern over Bronner's situation with the idea that Jews (or Muslims) should be barred from reporting on the Middle East. The assumption that reporters will naturally side with their own ethnic group is bigotry, and the Times shouldn't try to appease any readers who make that leap. If there is any personal tie to a story that a journalist should not be expected to be able to set aside, however, surely it's having a child whose life or death is at stake.

FAIR has a new Action Alert out, "Does NYT's Top Israel Reporter Have a Son in the IDF?" (1/27/10), about the New York Times' failure to respond to questions about whether Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner's son is enlisted in Israel's military, and, if so, whether this poses a conflict of interest. If you send a message to the Times about the alert--or otherwise have thoughts you'd like to share about the alert--please make use of the comments thread for this post.

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner (5/9/09) wrote about the Israeli government's development plan in Jerusalem--a "$100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital."

According to the Times report, this will involve tearing down some Palestinian homes around the city, while at the same time cleaning up other areas and putting up "new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history."

Bronner and Kershner explain the different reactions to these moves:

The parts of the city that are being developed were captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but their annexation by Israel was never recognized abroad.

At the same time, there is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of the effort, archaeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here. Yet Palestinian officials and institutions tend to dismiss the finds as part of an effort to build a Zionist history here.

In other words, while the Israeli narrative that guides the government plan focuses largely-- although not exclusively--on Jewish history and links to the land, the Palestinian narrative heightens tensions, pushing the Israelis into a greater confrontational stance.

Well, those Palestinians are always angry about something.

Apparently tearing down buildings is focusing on "history," while downplaying archeology is "heightening tensions." Good to know.

(h/t Angry Arab)

New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to "balance" these facts with criticisms of Palestinians.

For a piece that is attempting to get a better sense of who's "version" of events is more accurate, the Times reveals its bias from the start, rendering a white phosphorous attack on a house as a "phosphorus smoke bomb," the qualifier "smoke" helpfully suggesting that the bomb, which accidentally incinerated most of a family in their home, was being used legally as a smoke screen.

The Times underlines this point in the second graph by noting that the bomb was "intended to mask troop movements outside." According to whom? That claim is stated is as a fact, with no attribution.

The Times' reporters continue by writing:

The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.

In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.

OK--neither side's tale is completely accurate.  But after reading the Times' own account, it certainly seems that the Palestinian "version" is much closer to reality. Nonetheless, the reporters chalk up the differences as part of  "a desire to shape public opinion."

The Times goes on to review--and in some cases debunk--some of the Israeli justifications, including an attack on a school and the destruction of homes. The impact of that investigative work is, yet again, diluted by the framing of the big picture:

Both sides engage in their own denials.

Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.

Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war--about 1,275.

For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.

Let's compare those two forms of "denial." Israelis somehow have convinced themselves that their military has been exercising unusual restraint--while killing over 1,000 people before this latest round of attacks. Palestinians, meanwhile, deny the existence of Hamas fighters in their area-- though, by the Times' own reporting, in the very same article, Israeli claims about the numbers of Hamas fighters in this given area appear to be (in some cases) unfounded.

This equivalence comes amid stories of heart-wrenching suffering--an injured baby left to die on a tractor because Israeli soldiers were firing on family members trying to get to a hospital. Why dress up that kind of reporting with this sort of "he said, she said" balance? Perhaps the sense that the truth is too one-sided.