January 1, 2009
The biggest problem in writing for a weekly newspaper is that by the time you get to your readers, anything you’re going to say has probably already been said by somebody else. That wasn’t a problem, oh, 20 years ago. But the Web can provide instant access to the opinions of just about everyone with a keyboard, from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists to bored office workers to the poor guy hunkered in his bomb shelter or safe room.
When it comes to the Middle East, meanwhile, anything you’re going to say not only has been said by somebody else — but has been said before the event in question has even taken place. Mideast punditry has become the foreign affairs version of “Mad Libs” — the basic story lines stay the same; you just have to plug in new proper names, dates, and locations.
Still, there are plenty of folks writing about the Middle East whose opinions and reportage remain fresh and even surprising. And in a week like this one, with events moving quickly and chaotically, I rely on them to make sense of the maelstrom. The following list of such pundits and reporters is not exhaustive, and I’ll make room for readers’ suggestions in future columns.
Jeffrey Goldberg (jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com) cut his teeth at the Forward and was the gutsy Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker. He cares enough about Israel to have served in the IDF (the subject of his book Prisoners) and to critique its mistakes. He’s one of the few “Jewish journalists” who can write off-handedly about his “friends” in Fatah, who told him this week that they are “rooting for the Israelis to decimate Hamas” and that “Fatah has actually been assisting the Israelis with targeting information.” Goldberg offered a strong defense of Israel’s assault on Hamas, saying no other country would be expected to ignore attacks from just over its borders. And he offered this depressing but succinct summation of Israel’s dilemma: “It is Hamas’ indifference to Palestinian life, not Jewish life, that makes it a formidable foe, in the manner of Hezbollah.” But Goldberg is a realist. Can Israel force the overthrow of Hamas? Goldberg explains why he doesn’t think so — and why Israel may not want to.
Shmuel Rosner (cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/category/General) may be the most widely read Mideast correspondent among American Jewry’s leadership class. After a stint covering Washington for Ha’aretz, he’s now back in Israel at The Jerusalem Post, talking to everybody and writing just about everywhere. On Monday he wrote about how Israel learned the lessons of its 2006 war in Lebanon, especially in lowering expectations of what it can and wants to achieve. While eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza is a desirable and “justifiable” long-term goal, the “2008 Gaza war is the war of the possible. When Hamas is ready to strike a deal that will end both the operation and [Olmert’s words] ‘improve the security reality of’ Israel’s ‘southern residents,’ the war will be over.” (Rosner is also able to pivot away from the Mideast crisis, as he does in interviewing an American rabbi about his call for Bernie Madoff’s “excommunication.”)
JTA, the venerable Jewish news service (jta.org), has been doing great work recently under the editorship of my old colleague Ami Eden. It has a great stable of Washington and Israel correspondents, whose work appears frequently in these pages. But I’ve also come to rely on its various blogs, whose contributors are compulsive in finding and linking the Web’s latest writing and thinking about Jews and the Middle East. This week the “Telegraph” blog aggregated the full range of reporting and analysis out there, from Yediot Ahronot’s Nahum Barnea (“The thing that will put an end to the fire is a renewed understanding between Israel and Hamas via Egyptian mediation”), to The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (Hamas “believes that Israel wants to avoid a public relations debacle [so Hamas will do everything it can to engineer or fabricate one]”), to Lebanese writer Hassan Haidar (“Hamas was surprised by the magnitude of the response, as it did not take the Israeli threats seriously”). It’s also here that I first learned that the IDF launched a YouTube channel featuring videos of Israeli air strikes.
Bitterlemons.org is neither a news site nor a blog, but a weekly posting of articles by Israeli and Palestinian experts, usually on the hottest story of the week. It’s a joint production of Yossi Alpher, the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and Ghassan Khatib, a dean at Birzeit University and a former Palestinian Authority minister. This week Alpher writes that Israel had no alternative but to respond to Hamas rocket attacks, but worries that Israel has no long-term strategy for dealing with an enemy that “refuses to behave like a sovereign power and, ultimately, glories in the victimhood or martyrdom of its people.” Alpher offers two alternatives: direct talks with Hamas and lifting the blockade on Gaza, or “the option we fear the most: reoccupying all or part of the Strip with the goal of militarily eliminating Hamas.” Khatib and Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at al-Azhar University in Gaza, offer uncomfortable rebuttals, but you can’t gain an understanding of the conflict if you listen only to the Israeli side, no matter how factious that side can be.
