Tuesday, September 10, 2024
From Ian:
Matti Friedman: When We Started to Lie
Matti Friedman: When We Started to Lie
Exactly ten years ago, during an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now, I published two essays describing my time reporting on Israel for the Associated Press. “Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else,” I wrote at the time. “Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.” It wasn’t the volume of coverage that unsettled me in the summer of 2014. I was writing about something that had gone unreported, and which has done much to shape reality in the decade since—a change not in the news but in the newsroom.From academic guardians to political operatives
The essays—the first for Tablet, and the second for The Atlantic—described my experience as a reporter watching from the inside as a major news organization lost its way in one of the world’s most heavily covered stories. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has been quoted back at me more often. The essays go back into circulation every time there’s an explosion of violence here, and it happened again after the Hamas attack of October 7. I reread them recently, as the new tragedy in Gaza balloons into a moment that feels like a civilization shift, as rallies against “Zionism” become a staple of life in cities across the liberal West, and as a war launched by Muslim fundamentalists is recast with global success as a story of Jewish brutality, influence, and mendacity.
The most important thing I saw during my time as a correspondent in the American press, it seemed to me, was happening among my colleagues. The practice of journalism—that is, knowledgeable analysis of messy events on Planet Earth—was being replaced by a kind of aggressive activism that left little room for dissent. The new goal was not to describe reality, but to usher readers to the correct political conclusion, and if this sounds familiar now, it was both new and surprising to the younger version of myself who was lucky to get a job with the AP’s Jerusalem bureau in 2006.
The story I found myself part of proposed, in effect, that the ills of Western civilization—racism, militarism, colonialism, nationalism—were embodied by Israel, which was covered more heavily than any other foreign country. (Israel takes up one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world, and one fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world.)
By selectively emphasizing some facts and not others, by erasing historical and regional context, and by reversing cause and effect, the story portrayed Israel as a country whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies. The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information. All of this had the effect of presenting a mass audience with a supposedly factual story that had a powerful emotional punch and a familiar villain.
“The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself,” I wrote as the fighting petered out in 2014. “It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” It’s possible that I understated the problem.
It’s hard to deny the once-storied AAUP, esteemed for its commitment to academic integrity, has been captured by activists who are more concerned with advancing their political goal of dismantling the Jewish state than with advancing the group’s scholarly mission.Yisrael Medad: The Jewish 'status quo' violated? Jewish historical narratives are too often ignored
This shift from scholarship to anti-Israel politics, as expressed by the AAUP’s approval of academic boycotts, not only corrupts AAUP’s mission and degrades its reputation, it can cause real harm to higher education in America and beyond.
What few people realize is that although an academic boycott of Israel ostensibly targets Israeli universities and scholars, there is simply no way it can be implemented without directly suppressing the educational opportunities and academic freedom of students and faculty on U.S. campuses, as well as inciting antisemitic animus and harm towards Israel’s on-campus supporters.
Specifically, implementing academic BDS means boycotting the educational programs in or about Israel on one’s own campus, and seeking to cancel or shut down Israel-related events and activities; encouraging academic programming and campus events that portray Israel in a wholly negative light, as a pariah state unworthy of normalization; shunning collaborations with Hillel and other Jewish organizations and the students and faculty who affiliate with them; and denigrating, protesting and harassing members of the campus community who express positive views about Israel.
The AAUP’s reversal of its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts marks a significant blow not only to Jewish students and faculty but to the future of higher education and the society that vitally depends upon it. By condoning an academic boycott that replaces genuine scholarship with political activism aimed explicitly at dismantling the Jewish state and purging Zionism and Zionists from the academy, the AAUP has made a mockery of the professional standards it has, for more than 100 years, been relied upon to uphold. It has shown itself to be a deeply corrupt organization, antithetical to the core principles of American higher education, and wholly unworthy of the public’s trust.
Until 1911, that is
On Monday, April 13, during Passover, the Parker Expedition Affair, the search for “Solomon’s treasures,” exploded. The guardian of the Haram al-Sharif was bribed to let the British adventurers in to the Dome of the Rock. Their digging was discovered. Riots broke out in Jerusalem. At the Wall, the Sephardi custodian was set upon and beaten. Benches were broken.
It is unclear whether there is a direct connection, but in early November that year the status quo came to an end. Jews were informed that no benches or stools would be permitted at the Western Wall. The complaint of the locals was that Jews bringing chairs would allow them in the future to assert ownership. Chairs, tables, and separation screens now were deemed “innovations.” Appeals went out to the sultan in Turkey.
A British official was to later testify that if chairs were allowed, next would come benches, then permanent seating, “and before long, the Jews would have established a legal claim to the site.”
The July 26, 1912, issue of the Chicago Sentinel, a Jewish weekly, reported, a bit garbled, that an order from Constantinople “announces that the recent interdict prohibiting the Jews from worshiping on Friday evenings at the Western Wall in Jerusalem has been removed.” What the editor couldn’t have known as he went to press was that on July 22, the night of Tisha B’Av, the Western Wall had been smeared with feces. And not for the first or last time.
It was from this period that the struggle over the rights of Jews at the Western Wall became a central political element in the relations between Jews and Muslims in the early years of the Mandate. Chaim Weizmann tried solving the matter by purchasing the neighborhood, as did others before him.
In May 1920, a month after the riots, the Wakf unilaterally attempted to fix the upper layers of the Wall. Benches were removed by the Wakf in early 1922 and Yom Kippur 1925. In 1923, the approach to the Wall was closed to Jewish worshipers on the first day of Passover, as the British feared disturbances.
Following the violent incident of the removal of a partition on Yom Kippur, September 29, 1928, Mufti Amin al-Husseini organized actions that would highlight the Muslims’ exclusive claims to the Temple Mount and its environs. He ordered new construction in proximity to the Western Wall.
Eventually, on November 19, 1928, a white paper was issued. Quoting the 1911 prohibition, Leopold Amery, secretary of state for the colonies, pronounced there had been an infraction of the status quo, which the government was unable to permit.
As a result of the ensuing 1929 riots, an international commission was appointed. On December 1, 1930, it declared a prohibition on bringing “benches, carpets, mattings, chairs, curtains, and screens” to the Wall and “to blow the ram’s horn” at the Wall, all in force until 1948.
That situation continued throughout the Jordanian occupation.
No full Jewish rights. No Jewish privileges. No more previous status quo. That is, until 1967, when full Jewish sovereignty was renewed.
