Daniel Lubetzky

Last night I listened to Anderson Cooper on CNN as he analyzed the Netanyahu speech at the UN.  He asked if Netanyahu had naively bitten Ahmadinejad’s bait, and he introduces an excerpt where Netanyahu appears to angrily overreach by attacking every member of the UN for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, saying:

I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame?  Have you no decency?

My immediate reaction as I listened to this edited piece was, man, this is dumb.  Netanyahu should not attack all members of the UN.  After all, the body at the UN is designed for ALL nations – even those ruled by oppressive regimes – to have a forum to speak (as David Gergen explained, pointing to Netanyahu’s moral clarity but criticizing him for not recognizing this).  And how dare Netanyahu say he represents all the Jewish people? I don’t think he represents me – certainly not on how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But something felt wrong.  I may disagree with him on many policy issues but Netanyahu is a smart man with strong diplomatic and public speaking skills.  Was this the real story?

So today I read the entire transcript of Netanyahu’s speech.  And I was shocked at how bad CNN/Anderson Cooper had framed the issue! I’ve written about how FOX over-does the spin in the right-wing direction.  But CNN and Cooper should be embarrassed about how they handled this.  And one of my favorite commentators and real statesmen – David Gergen (perhaps the only excellent one left among dozens of mini-opinionators) probably did not even listen to the speech in full, and certainly did not frame things clearly.  The other commentator (Reza Ezlan?) was way way off.

Here is a quote within context from Netanyahu’s speech:

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium.  To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you.  You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.
But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame?  Have you no decency?  A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace!  What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Now, of course that in the age of twitter, you need to keep things brief.  But Cooper/CNN could have easily introduced the segment of Netanyahu by explaining that he criticized not the entire UN audience, but those who stayed to listen to Ahmadinejad.  Denying even monsters like Ahmadinejad the podium is not an option at the UN.  But every nation has a right to get up and walk out – to exercise its right not to be subjected to his vitriolic hate-mongering, and this was a valid position for Netanyahu to take.

With this post I do not mean to endorse all of Netanyahu’s foreign policy positions – quite the opposite, in some areas I feel he harms Israeli and Palestinian interests alike. But as a student of the media, following on my prior post about editorial spin, I am yet again alarmed at how dangerous unchecked news sources can be.  Indeed, a big part of why the Middle East and the world are in the shape they are is because partisan media feeds each audience what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear, and they don’t constructively engage audiences to better understand each other.

For students of oratory and for students of history, Netanyahu’s speech is actually constructed extremely well, and will probably become a historical piece that others will study for decades.  The transcript is provided below in full for those who want to examine it for themselves:

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To get a sense of how radically an editor of a newsletter can spin a story, take a look at the two different ways that an identical story is summarized by two different newsletters:

From OpinionSource, which is pretty mainstream, maybe slightly progressive but reliable reporting:

Israel’s Gaza Indication
By Jackson Diehl
Washington Post, 9/21/2009
Most of Washington’s predictions regarding the adverse outcome of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip (locally known as Operation Cast Lead) were correct. Yet Israeli leaders consider the attack a success. Why they do so bears consideration as Israel prepares to weigh Washington’s opinion regarding an attack on Iran. Israel points to Operation Cast Lead as bringing a respite from Gaza’s attacks on Israel, which had been nearly continuous since April 2001. Yet this view of victory does not take into account the loss of life, Palestinian suffering, and the subsequent offense to UN leaders. Nor does Israel recognize that Hamas is stronger since Operation Cast Lead. As Israeli leaders debate whether to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, they may well decide, as with Gaza, that temporary respite trumps long-term repercussions.
Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs.
Link to full text in primary source.

 

And now look at the way it’s redacted in the "Daily Alert" which is put out "for" the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization BY the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a right-wing outfit managed by Dore Gold:

Israel’s Gaza Vindication – Jackson Diehl (Washington Post)

• When it was launched last December, Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. But today, the three-week operation is generally regarded by the country’s military and political elite as a success.
• Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal.
• Hamas remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.
• However, Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. "They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel," a senior government official told me last week. "But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war."
• As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized UN Human Rights Council.

You can draw a conclusion from the above:

• briefs and summaries are useful time-savers, but always view them with even more skepticism than their original sources, which you should also be wary of, as everything regrettably seems to have some spin and pure fair objectivity is hard to come by, or non-existent;

The above is not the most extreme example of spin.  I have noticed over time that the Daily Alert is  a partisan effort to scare people off with paranoia. It is very professionally written and redacted – far better than most newsletters put out by mainstream, center, center-left and far-left newsletters I get or review; but regrettably it is full of spin and not objective.  Too bad because it loses much of its legitimacy that way.

Btw, here is the original story the two sources above aimed to summarize:

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Also been meaning to upload this picture of the YGL delegation that came with us on a visit of Jerusalem this last spring…

I don’t agree with everythign Aluf Benn writes, and I feel Israelis overall are unusually suspicious of President Obama, but I believe Benn hit the nail on the head with his article in the New York Times advising Obama to speak to the Israeli people directly.  I voted for Obama believing he would push for concrete progress towards a two-state-solution, and I don’t believe pressing Israel to be realistic is bad but good and needed.  But Obama’s failure to speak directly to Israelis is a huge missed opportunity and is harming chances for peace.

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Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, Crown Prince of Bahrain, wrote a refreshing column in the Washington Post, telling Israelis and Arabs some truths they need to hear about the imperative of moving towards conflict resolution.  Unfortunately earnest non-partisan nuanced talk doesn’t get as much coverage as biased one-sided positions.  But it is worth reading.

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Our amazing friend Jason Alexander, whose George Costanza character in Seinfeld is the furthest thing different from the real Jason, spoke to OneVoice youth earlier today about the Imagine 2018 essay and film project and caught a ton of media attention.

It cracks me up how amazing stuff happens every day by ordinary Israelis and Palestinians but never gets media coverage.  It takes a celebrity to get attention for moderates.

Below is a good article from Ha’aretz and a video from Jerusalem Online that covers the meeting.

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The New York Times reports about (OneVoice/PeaceWorks Foundation Board member) Dennis Ross’s move from the State Department to the White House.  It offers a lot of theories for the move, many of them probably on target. But it fails to mention one of the most important likely factors: the interplay between all these Mideast conflicts, and the need for an integrated broad approach and appreciation when tackling them. 

It does not mean that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will fix the Middle East! (Ross would plainly disagree with that, as the article points out).  But it does mean that Iran’s arming of Hezbollah and Hamas deeply handicaps efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peace, and that lack of Israeli-Palestinian progress hampers US national interests – as well as Israeli and Palestinian and Arab progress itself.

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Here is an interview about OneVoice, PeaceWorks, and "my life" (the title and theme of the show, Hayati) that aired on the Arabic TV Network Al Hurra.

It is painfully funny to watch how chubby I was…

A year ago we conceived a project to help young Palestinians and Israelis visualize what their lives would be like ten years from now if peace were to come.  To dare them to believe, hoping this will then prompt them to invest into turning this vision into a reality.  The project, Imagine 2018, received thousands of essay submissions from students, and captivated the imagination of millions.

Now its next phase – turning children’s winning essays into short films by award-winning directors – is also becoming a reality, as described in this email from Gil from OneVoice Israel. The next step is to make peace a reality.

Soldier and Boy                 Tel Aviv Damascus

Dear all,

We would like to update you that OVI had filmed the 2 short movies of the "imagine 2018" project.

There were two days of shooting : 24-25 of may.

Overall the outcomes  were beyond our expectations, since the producers and directors were very professional and organized, and they were able to recruit some of the best actors in the local market, that made this project very prestigious .we had:  Yona Elian – A very famous and respectable theater and movie  actor. an Israeli icon, Aki Avni, a very talented and well known actor. worked in LA in the past few years, Clara khoury, who played the "Syrian bride", Oshri Cohen, played a leading role in "beau for" Ali Nassaer (an Arab Israeli  actor and director) and the amazing kid , Abdallah Akkal.

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Dan Bar-On was an extraordinary man who, together with Sami Adwan, conceived a powerful shared narrative project, where Israelis and Palestinians read about their and their counterparts’ historical narrative – helping them understand they don’t need to give up their patriotism to better understand the other side.  Bar-On, who gave his life to peace efforts and who was an inspiration to OneVoice, lost his battle to cancer last fall.  He once wrote:

"[Hope for achieving co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians may in the end depend on] giving up the romantic, monolithic desires of the idealized past in favor of a less perfect but more complex understanding of the world and ourselves, an understanding that can create new possibilities for dialogue within our selves, among ourselves within a collective, and with the Other."

From "Tell Your Life Story" by Dan Bar-On, as related by Dr. Saliba Sarsar

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