Late last August, Matti Friedman, a former Associated Press (AP) reporter currently living in Jerusalem published an essay in the online Tablet magazine titled "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth."
The big story he referred to was not the conflict in the Middle East but really only one side of that conflict – the Israel story. And the “insider’s guide” was Friedman’s attempt to explain why AP had more staffers in Israel than it did in China, Russia, India or in all of the 50 countries in sub- Saharan Africa combined; why every flaw in Israeli society – the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation – is covered to death even as the number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas are summarily ignored and why most reports about the conflict end up in print only when Israel gets into the picture. For example, Friedman claimed that for a very long time the story of Gaza’s tunnels interested no one. They became headlines only when the IDF sought to destroy them.
Soon after it was published "The Insider’s Guide" went viral with over 75,000 Facebook shares. It also prompted a response from Friedman’s former AP boss Steven Gutkin, who called the Insider’s Guide “little more than well- written hogwash”. (Later, Friedman responded to Gutkin, who followed up with a second post.)
Friedman accused mainstream media editors of “groupthink”, that they were all marching to the same drum which beat out the charge that Israel was the bad guy again and again. And while Friedman did not name names he did imply that Gutkin, who is also Jewish, was guilty of the same.
One story that Gutkin buried had to do with a generous land offer presented to Palestinians by Israelis. Friedman claimed that two of his colleagues obtained information that then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinians who had deemed it insufficient. One of his colleagues had actually seen the map outlining territories from which Israelis were prepared to withdraw. Friedman thinks that the censorship had all to do with the monolithic narrative. But Gutkin does not agree. “Matti stated that a female reporter in our bureau had access to maps showing contours of a generous Israel offer, but that the bureau’s leadership refused to run the story. The map he’s talking about was indeed shown by a Palestinian official to one of our reporters. It affirmed a longstanding Palestinian proposal for a land swap that had been part of the Geneva Initiative, and was old news.”
Gutkin and Friedman agree that the quilt with which journalists cover Israel has many more patches than other quilts. They agree that the coverage of Israel is disproportional to the size of the conflict, to the actual casualties, to the difference this or that round makes to the fight as a whole.
Friedman thinks that the reason why Israel is forced into the limelight has everything to do with anti-Semitism. He writes: “For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition, the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place. Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned – and I’m not alone these days – is that I was foolish to have done so.
Gutkin takes a very different perspective. To him it seems that the world is focussed on Israel for one reason only – because Israel is a great story. “The story of Israel is that of a nation rising from the ashes of the worst genocide in human history, being attacked from all sides upon its inception. Depending on your point of view it’s also a story about the persecuted becoming the persecutors. All of this is of course happening to the people of the Bible, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves who were led out of Egypt by Moses and from whose ranks emerged Jesus Christ. It’s as if a new chapter of the Bible is being written in our times.”
Now listen to Friedman again: “Israel,” he writes “is not an idea. It is not a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map – sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge”.
How are we to understand the difference between these two exceptional journalists? Why is it that Gutkin seems ineluctably attracted to Israel as archetype, to the story of Israel as myth, as cosmic, as the story of morality – even as Friedman seems to care less about such things?
How to account for such divergence in taste and orientation? Could it perhaps have to do with the fact that Friedman is a Canadian which means, among other things, that myth and the moral struggle does not pull at his gut the way it does with Americans?
After all Canada was not born of Promethean fires, is in fact far more of an evolving political state than the morality play going on south of our border. Could it not be that Gutkin’s attraction to that aspect of Israel is as Narcissus’ love of his own reflection? Could not the same thing be said of Friedman?
David Berlin is the founding editor of The Walrus.