Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian leader who died at the start of this decade, used to tell a story about his first visit to Israel. The 1967 war had just ended, borders were suddenly opened and he took a drive to Tel Aviv, where at some point he found himself detained by an Israeli policeman. Questions and answers ensued. At one point the policeman said to him, “As a proud Zionist, I must tell you ....” At which Mr. Husseini burst out laughing.
What’s so funny? the policeman asked. “I have never in my life,” Mr. Husseini replied, “heard anyone refer to Zionism with anything but contempt. I had no idea you could be a proud Zionist.”
I have written about the Arab-Israeli conflict on and off for more than a quarter-century and have spent the past four weeks covering Israel’s war in Gaza. For me, Mr. Husseini’s story sums up how the two sides speak in two distinct tongues, how the very words they use mean opposite things to each other, and how the war of language can confound a reporter’s attempts to narrate — or a new president’s attempts to mediate — this conflict in a way both sides can accept as fair.
Among Israel’s Jews, there is almost no higher value than Zionism. The word is bathed in a celestial glow, suggesting selflessness and nobility. But go anywhere else in the Middle East and Zionism stands for theft, oppression, racist exclusionism.
No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language. The barrier snaking across and inside the West Bank is a wall to Palestinians, a fence to Israelis. The holiest site in Jerusalem is the Temple Mount to Jews, the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims. The 1948 conflict that created Israel is one side’s War of Independence, the Catastrophe for the other.
After Israel’s three-week air, sea and land assault in Gaza, aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire, it is worth pausing to note how difficult it has been to narrate this war in a fashion others view as neutral, and to contemplate what that means for any attempt by the new Obama administration to try to end it.
It turns out that both narration and mediation require common ground. But trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus. It feels like I am only fanning the flames, adding to the misunderstandings and mutual antagonism with every word I write because the fervent inner voice of each side is so loud that it drowns everything else out.
George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader who is Mr. Obama’s new special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, could find something similar when he arrives here.
Even though an understanding crystallized a decade ago over the outline of an eventual solution here — Israel returning essentially to its 1967 borders and a Palestinian state forming in the West Bank and Gaza — the two sides’ narratives have actually hardened since attempts to reach a peace foundered.
So Mr. Mitchell, who once led a commission tasked with finding a solution to the conflict, will begin this latest effort grappling with two separate wars fought here, based on two very different sets of assumptions.
Opponents of Israel feel the Gaza fighting has demonstrated (again) everything they have always believed — that Israel is a kind of Sparta that dehumanizes the Palestinians and will do anything to prevent their dignified self-determination. The ways in which Israel attacked — the overwhelming force, the racist graffiti left on walls — are what one has come to expect of that state, they say; those Hamas rockets were no challenge to the Israeli military behemoth, and, after all, who could blame the resistance fighters for launching them to protest the blockade and everything else about Israel’s longstanding occupation?
Those for whom Israel is the victim and never the aggressor likewise saw in this war a reaffirmation of their beliefs — that Hamas, an Islamist terror group, hides its fighters behind women and children; that Israel’s army was an exemplar of restraint and respect, holding its fire when civilians were in sight, allowing tons of humanitarian aid in even while at war (what other army would be so decent?).
Abroad, people care deeply about this conflict. That should make it easier for a reporter to cover, because the actors and place names and history are familiar. But it turns out that like the actors themselves, the audiences have utterly distinct and contrasting sets of assumptions. Every time I fail to tell the story each side tells itself, I have failed in its eyes to do my job. That adds up to a lot of failure.
What’s more, the competing war narratives are part of a larger narrative disconnect.
One side says that after thousands of years of oppression, the Jewish nation has returned to its rightful home. It came in peace and offered its hand to its neighbors numerous times only to be met with a sword. Opposition to Israel, this side argues, stems from Muslim intolerance, nationalist fervor and rank anti-Semitism, all fed by envy at the young state’s success. Every time I write an article about the conflict that does not mirror this story line — if, for example, I focus on Palestinian suffering or alleged Israeli misdeeds or quote a human rights group like Amnesty International — I have proven myself to be a secret sharer with the views of the enemy.
As one recent complainer wrote, “To read your paper, all the questions and criticism are directed at Israel, and it is all based on a collection of anti-Semitic organizations masquerading as humanitarians.”
The other side tells a different story: There is no Jewish nation, only followers of a religion. A group of European colonialists came here, stole and pillaged, throwing hundreds of thousands off their land and destroying their villages and homes. A country born in sin, Israel has built up an aggressive military with help from Washington in the grips of a powerful Jewish lobby.
Every time I fail to allude to that story — when, for example, I examine Israel’s goals in its Gaza war without implicitly condemning it as a massacre, or write about Israel in ways that do not call into question its legitimacy — I have revealed my affiliation and can no longer be trusted as a reporter.
Since the war started on Dec. 27, I have received hundreds of messages about my coverage. They are generally not offering congratulations on a job well done.
“Thanks to you and other scum like yourself,” said one, “Israel can now kill hundreds and you can report the whole thing like it was some random train wreck.”
“Bronner ,” said another, “you’re back to your usual drivel about only the poor filthy Arabs — who voted for the Hamas people who got them into this predicament — with incessant indiscriminate rocket fire on innocent Israelis.”
There are also blogs and chat sites on both sides that spend time accusing all the journalists here of having agendas because our articles mention facts or trends that they consider a diversion from the real story.
Because Israel barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza until the war ended, The New York Times relied on my Palestinian colleague here, Taghreed el-Khodary, for on-the-ground coverage of the fighting.
We would speak several times a day as she cautiously went out. Her first stop was usually Shifa Hospital to get a sense of civilian casualties. Early in the war, at the hospital, she witnessed the murder of an alleged Israeli collaborator by Hamas gunmen. They shot him in the skull more or less in front of her. One of the gunmen told Taghreed that she should never mention what she saw to anyone. She told him there was not a chance she would stay silent, then made some calls to find out about other such events and sent me the information, which we published the next day.
A couple of Arab bloggers went after Taghreed with the worst insult they could come up with — Zionist. She was a Palestinian Uncle Tom doing the bidding of her white-man bosses at a newspaper that, as one reader said in an e-mail message, “is fully complicit in the atrocities that Israel commits against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. You make it sound guiltless and reasonable. That’s your assignment.”
At the same time, Israeli officials and their backers declared that keeping reporters out of Gaza was the right move because no independent journalism could possibly occur in an area run by Hamas, which controls every utterance here. Have any of these people ever read Taghreed’s work? Or any of our work out of here?
Many have but it doesn’t matter because their belief in their own view is so overpowering that anything that contradicts it becomes a minor detail. As another reader put it, “Basically, you are aiding terrorists and causing the increase in bloodshed while telling one-sided stories, totally ignoring the whole picture.”
He did say one thing I agree with: “You should not be a reporter if you are not telling the whole story, not just the parts that sell.”
I would offer a mediator the same advice.
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