Truly An Excellent Piece Of Work By Zvi Barel .
Even from my limited knowledge of Arab thought ,this writer really does appear to make an awful lot of sense.
He is mentioned in this article by another good writer , Aviv Lavie ,regarding the Saudi initiative awhile back, and the failure of the press to encourage open debate.
Maybe the media in Israel could take some lessons from your fave publication : The New York Times. <g>
This site states as it's purpose :
An effort to confront the Israeli-Palestinian conflict honestly and constructively, towards the goal of replacing conflict with coexistence.
Sounds good from here.
occupationalhazard.org
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So what if the Arabs want to make peace?
Aviv Lavie - Ha'aretz
A foreign correspondent based here for many years couldn't hide his amazement this week. "We were all anticipating the reaction in Israel to the Saudi initiative, as soon as it became the official position of the Arab League," he said of himself and his colleagues. "Some believed the Sharon government would reject it and then have to deal with a wave of protest from the left. Others thought the broader public would not be enthusiastic, and there was one unrepentant optimist who believed Sharon would surprise everyone and deal with it seriously.
"There's only one thing we didn't take into account: that the decision would be greeted with nearly total silence, that the media wouldn't conduct a serious discussion of the dramatic step taken by the Arab world. History is happening in front of your eyes, but you're behaving as if it has nothing to do with you."
The source of the rivers of blood now being spilled are said to be found in the failure of the Camp David summit of July 2000. The Israeli media - as we've noted in the past - adopted Ehud Barak's version of events hook, line and sinker. Barak claimed that he offered the Palestinians nearly total withdrawal (with territorial exchanges) to the 1967 borders, a division of Jerusalem, and a creative solution to the refugee problem. According to Barak, Arafat said no. That was proof that we want peace, he said then, and that the chairman of the Palestinian Authority wants bloodshed. But over time, it turned out that there was a lot more to what happened at Camp David.
But let's let bygones be bygones. This past week, 22 Arab states put an historic proposal on the international table, and it is surprisingly similar to what Barak claims to have proposed two years ago. Peace based on the `67 borders, open negotiations on an agreed solution to the refugee problem, and a division of Jerusalem. As expected, the Sharon government rejected the proposal with contempt. Amazingly, the Israeli press, except for a few weak voices - helped bury the proposal way underground. Apparently we have more important things to deal with.
Journalists are not supposed to tell the public which position to take on the proposal's details. Their job is to emphasize and reiterate that the Arab League proposal is part of an historic process, and requires a serious public debate before it is rejected or adopted. The media's role is to put the proposal on the Israeli table, give it the appropriately important emphasis, and ask questions. If two years ago, we were all echoing Barak that "the real face of the Palestinians has been exposed," what can be learned about Israel's real face if it is now the one to refuse the proposal?
Instead of doing its job, the Israeli press responded in two ways. Some belittled the summit and its outcome, shoving into the inside pages as if it were some distant diplomatic event attended by a few heads of state. That marginalization, conscious or not, obviously is connected to the grave events that take place daily, and sometimes twice a day. But the media's job is to rise above the daily flow, identifying processes and defining priorities on the public agenda. The media has failed.
There were those who sought out any flaw to prove that it was another Arab plot to destroy Israel. "Israeli assessments: Without Mubarak, the summit will become an anti-Israel rally," said Yedioth Aharonoth, preparing its readers for the worst on the day the summit opened.On the day it ended, it ran a headline, "A threatening message."
Threatening? Who was threatened? Apparently it threatened the Israeli government and the newspaper itself, which in recent days has gone back to the jingoistic warmth of the political establishment. Only a few weeks ago it seemed, at least for a few days, to finally have taken on the proper job of journalism: to question, criticize, be skeptical.
A public opinion poll conducted by Mina Tzemach for Yedioth on Friday showed that 41 percent supports accepting the Saudi initiative, and 10 percent are undecided. That was before there was any debate at all about it. That same day, Ben Caspit wrote in Ma'ariv that "this decision will serve as the basis for every public debate of the political process. It will be the focus of the next elections in Israel. It will became the main axis of political debate in Israel and the region. It will be the watershed for any political debate, or the basis for a draft peace treaty. It embodies the great dream of Zionism from the days before the Six-Day War: Let us live in this little land."
At the moment, it looks like Caspit was somewhat naive. For the Arab League decision to become the main subject of the debate, first there has to be a debate.
In an excellent article in Ha'aretz, commentator Zvi Barel analyzed the proposal and quoted Hosni Mubarak as saying, "I don't believe Sharon really wants to reach any negotiations."
There is hope that the Israeli public will adopt it and make its leaders understand there is no other choice of action. But for the public to examine the proposal seriously, it needs a mediator, and currently, this mediator - the press - is not doing its job. Those are the same journalists who love to write about those "who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Usually, they refer to the Palestinians.
More Arafats to come
From the moment Sharon took office, government spokesmen have focused on Yasser Arafat as the fuel that is firing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The campaign demonizing him accelerated as the conflict escalated. One after another, ministers stepped up to the microphones to lay down the doctrine: It's impossible to do business with Arafat; we have to wait until the right moment and then get rid of him, and talk to the younger generation that follows, which will certainly be more "pragmatic" and "moderate."
But on the eve of the invasion of Ramallah, when the government decided to "isolate" Arafat and take him off the playing field ("at this stage"), the slogans suddenly went through a quick rewrite. When the moment of truth arrived, it turned out that the articulate government spokesmen understood that the promises they had handed out over the past year were not going to be kept. Overnight, a new line was formulated, its main message being that even without Arafat, there won't be anyone to talk with because the next generation - Surprise!- is "not ready" or "not capable" of reaching peace with Israel (in other words, peace on Limor Livnat's terms).
An interview to that effect was broadcast right after the seder with Minister Danny Naveh. He prepared the public for a big disappointment after the great moment - when Arafat is neutralized - explaining that he doesn't see any Palestinian leadership with whom a compromise is possible. The interviewers didn't bother to confront Naveh with the false predictions he and his pals had been handing out freely until then. A whole theory, on which a policy was based, collapses in a minute, and in the passion of events, nobody stops to ask any questions.
Arafat's isolation, as was expected, has made things complicated for the government of Israel's public relations efforts. After every terrorist attack in recent months, the government issued a statement blaming it directly on Arafat. After the attack on Saturday night in Tel Aviv, no such statement was published. They have nobody left to blame.
The no-name war
After 18 months of fighting, there is still no name for what's happening in Tel Aviv's cafes and on Ramallah's streets. Up until recently, the media was ambivalent about what to call the events: war, conflict, fighting, intifada, or maybe something else. Now there's general agreement that it is war, but nobody has any idea what to call it. The left calls it Operation Peace for the Settlements, parodying the right's name for the Lebanon War, while the right calls it "the Oslo war," or the "war for home." But obviously those aren't names that will be used by everyone.
Lacking a name, every incident gets its own quick slogan invented by a copywriter at this or that newspaper. For a while, the logo "The Terror War" was popular and after the seder, everyone was calling it "The Pesach Massacre." At the beginning of the week, new logos came up for the invasion of Ramallah - for Yedioth it was "The war against Arafat" but once he was locked up in one room with a candle, it looked like that name was no longer relevant. In Ma'ariv they made do with "Days of War." But that only pointed to the question, days of what war?
Meanwhile, the Saudi TV station MBC reported several times on Friday that the IDF gave the name "Defense Wall" to the Ramallah operation. But on the Israeli channels the military correspondents kept the secret to themselves, saying that "it is still not permitted to reveal the name of the operation." |
