A Brave Voice in Israel
By Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
Monday, April 15, 2002; Page A21
Israel's "military operation is nearing exhaustion, and in any case its results are already evident," one careful observer said last week. "It has succeeded in landing a considerable blow on the Palestinian terrorist framework, but it cannot uproot terror or eliminate the ground on which it grows. On the contrary, the deeper and longer the operation, the more its inherent contradictions are exposed. The destruction of the Palestinian governing authority and security services . . . also smashes those elements on the Palestinian side that Israel will demand impose control on the residents after the military operation is over."
This clear-eyed analysis came not from Colin Powell or Kofi Annan or one of the Middle East pundits who strike bellicose poses from the safety of Washington, but from Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. It's published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, not far from the sites of some of the most terrible suicide bombings, and in English on the Internet (www.haaretzdaily.com). It's pages are black and ugly and dense with tiny type, and its circulation is equally tiny, even by Israeli standards. But it's still, by far, Israel's best and most prestigious newspaper, and at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks more tragic and hopeless than it has in a generation, it offers something to admire: tough wartime reporting, and even more courageous commentary.
Media everywhere have a hard time maintaining a healthy independence from government during times of crisis and war -- the United States was no exception in the weeks after Sept. 11 -- but in Israel the pressure is crushing. After all, hundreds of innocent people in a small and almost claustrophobically close society have been slaughtered at random in the past few months by suicide bombers who seem bent on obliterating the nation. Israelis are terrified, besieged, fighting for their lives -- and most of them, seeing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unleash a military offensive against the West Bank two weeks ago, reacted like the mainstream newspaper Maariv, which banner-headlined a Biblical quotation evoking God's Passover smiting of the Egyptians.
Israel's politicians and even many of its intellectuals haven't been much different. The left-wing Labor Party, which for a decade sponsored the Oslo peace process, can't bring itself to leave the government, even though the military campaign is dedicated to destroying Oslo's achievements. Former "peace camp" spokesmen offer accounts of how they have come to believe in brute force. A Jerusalem rabbi who was once lionized by Western journalists for his progressive views recently offered this suggestion about the Palestinians: "Very simply, wipe them out. Level them."
In the teeth of that climate, Haaretz published an editorial just four days after the beginning of Sharon's offensive entitled simply "The Day After." It began by acknowledging that hardly anyone in Israel could oppose a military response to the suicide bombing of a Passover Seder. But it then added that "the efficacy of the [army's] operations in the territories is debatable." The siege of Yasser Arafat, it correctly predicted, would only strengthen his position, divert attention from his responsibility for the terrorism and bring a cascade of international condemnation of Israel. "Experience -- particularly of Sharon's past behavior -- shows that such actions can deteriorate, go on longer than planned and even spin out of control," it added. This was one week before the battle of Jenin killed scores in a Palestinian refugee camp.
But Haaretz's most fundamental point, insistently repeated in a series of follow-up commentaries, is this: "Military operations cannot exist on their own without being backed, indeed being based, on a political horizon." Sharon's government, it keeps pointing out, has no political plan, other than to destroy the Palestinian Authority. The prime minister's vague talk about "a long term interim agreement," the paper observed last week, does not allow for a viable Palestinian state, nor does it "give any indication of how this interim arrangement would be defined -- neither its framework, nor its principles, nor its timetable." "This melange of outdated ideas," Haaretz concluded, "cannot serve as any practical prescription for advancing out of the current crisis and toward any kind of agreement."
Such arguments are accompanied by tough reporting. During the past two weeks Haaretz has offered vivid accounts of the disorder in the West Bank as well as in Sharon's cabinet. Its reporters have risked their lives to slip into occupied Ramallah, and when they couldn't get in, they called Palestinian sources on the telephone and relayed their accounts. The paper has even been hard on itself and the rest of the press. "In general the Israeli media is showing no interest in what the Palestinian people are experiencing," wrote media critic Aviv Lavie last week. "The day will come when we will all regret this blindness."
It's not easy to publish such stuff when Palestinian bombs are killing children down the street. Haaretz and its writers have been deluged with abuse and threats. Even some who admire its reporting think the paper's editorials are hopelessly softheaded. And yet, right or wrong, Haaretz offers a sign of how and why Israel will get out of this crisis: It is a democracy, and in a vigorous democracy with a real free press, bad policies sooner or later yield to reason. Sharon -- who detests journalists -- recently told one of the few he speaks to that "the media's job is to give the nation pride and hope." In a time of despair, Haaretz is doing just that.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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