#865 – 7/30/17 – This Week: A Book Report (all right, a little belated)

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Books that Western news reporters who’ve reported from Israel write about reporting from Israel give us maybe the clearest insights into the impressions these professional fact-probing visitors form of respective Jewish and Arab homeland equities in the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict.  Two very professional such reporters shared a speaking event with me one night at a JCC just north of New York, where we both spoke on our books.  Their book tells us a lot about the impression we’ve made.

This Week:  A Book Report (all right, a little belated)

A month or so ago, a reader of this media watch named Ken (not the Ken of Ken and Jan of recent weeks’ media watches) emailed me a request.  He was interested (he didn’t say why) in how the Palestinian Arab claim that up to five hundred Arabs had been killed in fighting with Israeli troops in Jenin back in 2002 had been debunked.  Did I know of a book on the subject?  Know of one?  I had one.  And not just a book, but THE book, authored by the AP reporter who, at personal risk, had been first journalist on the scene, and found that the Palestinian Arabs’ claim of hundreds dead was “not holding up.”  “Is it a good book?” he asked.  “I don’t know,” I shrugged, “I haven’t read it.”  [Ok, I’d glanced through a few randomly selected pages.]  “Then how do you know what it says?”  “Well, I’ll tell you.”

For many years it had seemed to me there were two books about the Jewish homeland of Israel crying out to be written – how the media skews the news to skrew the Jews, and on the Jewish people’s continuous post-biblical presence in Palestine.  When I met a businessman at a Jewish group meeting one night who as a side venture published books on every subject from Jane Austen to “Judaica,” I put these two book ideas to him, and he said, “You write these books and I’ll publish them.”

First to come out was Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.  We took it to The Jewish Book Council in New York, where, along with, it seemed to me, hundreds of other authors spread over three days, I got to give a (JBC expert-helped) two minute pitch to a roomful of representatives of JBC member groups from all over the country.  The objective was to get yourself invited to present your book at their authors’ events.  I garnered one such invitation, to a Jewish Community Center just north of New York.  This was some five years ago.

There were two authors’ presentations on that evening’s program, mine, followed by This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by the husband-and-wife journalist team of the (then) AP’s Greg Myre and Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, who’d lived in Jerusalem from 1999 to 2007, giving birth to and raising two daughters.  Euge, who drove up there with me, and I spent an hour alone with our fellow presenters in a side room before we went on.  It was there, during our discussion of (what else?) mainstream Western media coverage of Israel, that they told us of how Greg had been first on the scene in Jenin and what he and his team had discovered.  Following an appreciated amount of book signings after our talks, we authors posed for a photo (still on my bookshelf) holding each others’ great works, and exchanged copies endorsed with kind sentiments.  My Greg-and-Jennifer-signed copy of This Burning Land says “To Jerry, It was great to share the stage with you.  Keep writing!”

This week, reader Ken brought back my book.  The time’s come, I decided, to read it.  It wasn’t easy, not because This Burning Land isn’t well written (it is), but because the book, to my less than disinterestedly-objective eyes, dwells far more on Palestinian Arabs’ claims and grievances than on Israelis’.

In the very interesting chapter “Versions of the Truth,” the authors accurately state (p. 77): “Both Israelis and Palestinians scrutinize language obsessively, and accepting or rejecting their lexicons is a litmus test that quickly classifies you as friend or foe.”  But the book uses terms like Israel’s 1948 “founding,” Israel’s “1967 borders,” contrasts “Israeli settlements” with “Palestinian villages” in the same sentence (p. 195), etc., from the other side’s lexicon.  The key “disputed” versus “occupied” territories” point centers on a discussion between the AP bureau chief and a Palestinian Authority minister who, after the AP man says the Jews have security, religious and historical claims, “so without judging the merits of either claim, it is, technically, a dispute,” replies that he claims the AP man’s apartment, so that too is in dispute.  The AP man said “We both laughed long and hard,” and that “I could never use ‘disputed’ with the same assurance again.”  (p. 78).

That the AP’s Jerusalem bureau chief could treat what he acknowledged as Jewish security, religious and historical claims so dismissively reflects not so much on the parties to that discussion on pages 77-78 of that book as on our failure to make those claims convincingly.  We ourselves use “East Jerusalem, West Bank [even though the UN said “Samaria and Judea” in 1947], settlers and settlements,” etc.  We call Palestinian Arabs – our opponents in the conflict over “Palestine” –  “The Palestinians,” even though the UN in 1947 called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”

One line in the book This Burning Land, though, sticks with me.  Early on, Jennifer recounts that her young daughter returned home one day from her first year in school happy and excited that her class had been practicing for Shabbat and she’d been made “Shabbat mommy.”  “I didn’t have the heart to tell her,” Jennifer writes, “that she’s not Jewish.”  Christianity has been around for two thousand years, Mrs. Myre, and no other Christian mother of a young daughter has said that.