Reporting Liberties

June 9, 2004

By BARBARA SOFER

Let's set politics aside. Whether you think Israel should expand, maintain, or abandon Jewish presence in downtown Hebron or Kissufim isn't the point.

The question is why a highly regarded journalist from one of the world's most respected magazines allows himself liberties reporting on Israel that he would never allow himself reporting elsewhere.
New Yorker magazine staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg's provocative article "Among the Settlers. Will They Destroy Israel?" appeared in the May 31 issue. It's 17,000 words long. Goldberg used to live in Israel, and he speaks Hebrew. He is a winner of an award by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity. The New Yorker isn't just another cable station that sends in a rookie correspondent for two days of the conflict, nor is Goldberg a clueless reporter who doesn't know Joshua from Jesus.

Remember that it was the recent New Yorker article "Torture at Abu Ghraib" by Seymour M. Hersch that so stirred world opinion. Besides the high quality of its writing, the weekly magazine has famed legions of fact-checkers reputedly checking every fact and assertion.

Goldberg arranged many interviews with the assistance of a US public relations firm that works with the settler movement. He came away with a very unflattering portrait of the men and women who live beyond the Green Line, and ultimately of the State of Israel that holds onto this territory.

Playing on the statement by Ze'ev Jabotinsky that "when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation," Goldberg concludes that "today, the Jews have a national home, a potent Air Force to protect it, and the patronage of the most powerful country on Earth. Today, the Jewish claim to the West Bank and Gaza is one of appetite, not of starvation."

That Goldberg implied that he would be writing positively about people in order to secure interviews with them is within the parameters of "fair" in the world of investigative reporting, if perhaps below the standards of a public integrity prize-winner.

A more important problem is the writer's obvious dislike of his subjects. This from a reporter who interviewed Ahmed Yassin and Hizbullah leaders in Lebanon without expressing antipathy. Let it suffice to say that I doubt he would have remarked on the unkempt fingernails of a working mother with 10 children had she lived in Beirut, Bombay, or Belfast.

But in Hebron, the rules are different. The same mother of 10, claims Goldberg, suffers from a "Moriah complex." The traditional site of the binding of Isaac, says Goldberg, "symbolizes a Jew's absolute devotion to even the most inexplicable and cruel demands of God. The Moriah complex is characterized by a desire to match Abraham's devotion to God, even at the price of a child's life."

The suggestion that she � or, by extension, all of us who live here � values her children less than he does and would welcome the sacrifice of a child is an obscenity, not to mention his misuse of a seminal story of Jewish tradition.

What about plain old accuracy? The compelling list of errors � some due to Goldberg's faulty Hebrew � noted in a letter to the editor by Hebron spokesperson David Wilder can't be dismissed as a publicist's disappointment. A few examples from a very long list:

Goldberg has one of the interviewees speaking of "Hellenizers" (mityavnim in Hebrew) when she probably spoke of secular Jews (hilonim).

Goldberg writes that "a framed photograph of Meir Kahane, "the zealot rabbi from Brooklyn, who advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel," hangs in one of the homes he visited, and Wilder says there is no such photo. Also it should be noted that Kahane was murdered by an Arab terrorist.

One of the most repellent scenes in the article describes "yeshiva students" harassing Arab schoolgirls with lurid sexual curses in Arabic. Wilder questions the identity of the reputed harassers as yeshiva students.

Small points, perhaps, but there are lots of them, and they call into question the reliability of Goldberg's observations and conclusions.
Goldberg is obviously peeved by the out-of-proportion impact that right-wing, pro-settlement Jews have on Israeli politics � an annoyance shared by many Israelis. A vexing aspect of living in a democracy is that those who are well organized, who are effective lobbyists, who turn up for demonstrations and, even more important, show up at the polls, really do have significant impact. The message for those who disagree is, of course, to get organized and to get out the vote.

One of the perks of giving birth to, toilet-training, doing homework with, feeding, and clothing 10 children is that you get 10 additional family votes, whether or not you've had time for a manicure.

So when a reporter � one who cares and who sees himself as having earned certain insider's rights � arrives in Israel and wants to even the playing field, coverage becomes an extended opinion piece. That would be fine debated here on the op-ed pages of The Jerusalem Post; but disguised as investigative reporting, it does us � and, in light of the reign of world terror, all persons � a disservice.