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.

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?

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.

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.