The Dispatch Podcast - When Journalists Go Along with Hamas | Interview: Matti Friedman

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Author and journalist Matti Friedman was working for the Associated Press when he noticed a persistent bias in coverage: For the Western media, the story of the region was a simple narrative of good and evil, and Israel was cast as villain. Matti joins Jamie to discuss how this narrative formed and whether there's hope for serious journalism in such a conflict. Show Notes: -An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth -What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel -You're All Israel Now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Mati Friedman. He is an author and journalist, most recently of a celebrated book called Koo by Fire, Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. You can see his bylines in the New York Times and in Tablet Magazine, but he is perhaps best known for his 2014 piece in Tablet Magazine, called an insider's guide to the most important story on earth.

It is his tale of his time at the AP, where he was a reporter in Israel, reporting on the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And what he tells in that piece and what he tells on this podcast is what I would call the corruption that exists in the foreign press in Israel, where they push a narrative about what they believe the conflict should be about instead of reporting on what the conflict and what is happening on the ground. So we get into that and a lot more here.

So without further ado, I give you Madi Friedman. Mati Friedman, thank you for joining the dispatch podcast. Thank you so much for helping. Mati, let's begin with, for some of the listeners who may not be familiar with you, just where you came from, how you got to Israel, kind of your origin story. I was bitten by a radioactive spider when I was about four years old. I wish I could come up with a more dramatic origin story for you, Jamie, but I was born in a pretty boring part of Toronto and moved to Israel when I was 17, intending to be here for one year. and I spent that year working on a keyboard's milking cows, and then I just decided that I would stay. That was 1995, and I've been here ever since, so almost 30 years, and since that time, I served in the military for three years, and an infantry unit, went to university, studied Islamic Studies, became a journalist, spent most of my time as a daily journalist working for the AP, the Associated Press, the big U.S. News Agency, left the AP at the very end of 2011 and struck out on my own. And since then, I've been doing freelance writing for a bunch of different places, but I've mainly been writing books, nonfiction books, and I've written four, the last of which came out last year.

And I have four kids live in Jerusalem. That's the short version. How did you become a reporter? Did you report outside of Israel? Where else did you report? And just kind of, when did you know that you wanted to be a reporter? if you look at my eighth grade yearbook from Dublin Heights middle school in Toronto has a very nerdy picture of me and underneath it says what do you want to be when you grew up and it says

journalists and I don't think I knew what that was at the time but I did have this idea that that was a profession that I was interested in and when I moved to Israel after this period of time I spent working in agriculture I did an internship at a news magazine called the Jerusalem and that was my first taste of the profession. And I guess I did get bitten by a radioactive spider. And that's been more or less what I've been doing ever since. So it was a break of a few years while I was in the Army and in university. But it's more or less what I've done since I was 17, 18. We're going to get into the critiques from your famous 2014 piece in a second. But what was your time like as a reporter for the AP in Israel? You know, just generally, I mean, there must have been

some good times, some times that were fulfilling. What was that period before you decided that you could no longer work for the AP? I started working for the AP in the summer of 2006, and I was really happy to get that job. The AP is, you know, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. And And it was a great job. I got to report not only from Israel, but from elsewhere. I reported the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and I traveled to Washington, D.C. a few times. I went to Moscow. So I had a great time, and my initial expectation was that I wouldn't have any political problems.

I come from the left side of the Israeli political spectrum and didn't expect to have any kind of unexpected political challenges at a very mainstream American news agency. and was quite surprised to find that I did. And it took a few years before I really realized what was going on. And a few years after that, for me to get fed up enough to leave and just realize that I wasn't going to be able to do the kind of journalism that I wanted to do at the AP. There was very little connection between the story that I was writing and the reality that I could see out the window of the Bureau in Jerusalem.

And after a while, you know, after numerous arguments about how we were going to cover things, I just realized that I wasn't going to be able to change things from the inside, and I should probably just strike out on my own right reality as I see it. So I left at the very end of 2011. And I was there for about, I guess, five and a half years, almost six years. In 2014, you wrote a piece for Tablet Magazine called An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth. You wrote a second piece that year, which sometimes is not. Not as quoted, but I think just as poignant for the Atlantic called what the media gets wrong about Israel.

And one of the key elements of that, both those pieces, is the culture within the journalist community in Israel and how they cover Israel and how they see the world. Can you talk about the culture within the journalistic community within the, you know, who covered the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Irable conflict from Israel itself? So I found myself operating as a reporter in a social world that was quite uniform in its political outlook and was not made up entirely of people who are identical, but was certainly governed by certain political approaches that we were expected to obey. Most of the coverage was directed by people who weren't based here permanently, people who were kind of passing through. So Bureau Chief for most of my time at the AP was an American who was here for a couple years, but he didn't speak Hebrew or Arabic and had very little relevant knowledge. That was true across the board for the decision makers in the international press. I often find myself talking about the AP and feeling bad for picking on them. The AP is fairly representative of the international press scene and they were just unlucky enough to hire me.

So that's why they, you know, that's why I find myself using examples from the AP but there by no means the worst of the. of the bunch, what I found was that many of the journalists had replaced the idea of explanatory journalism with a kind of activism. And I think from 2023, it's quite clear what's going on. And it's clear that this is not just an Israel-specific problem, that something big changed in the press precisely in the years that I'm talking about. We're talking about 2007, 2008, 2009. Big years for media world and I guess for Western consciousness, right? Facebook comes online. At that time, Twitter, the whole economic model of the press collapses. The whole tenor of Western discourse starts to change and starts to get a lot crazier.

And this is all happening in the press. So I just found myself in a kind of activist world where there's this alliance of like-minded organizations. In the case of Israel, we're talking about big NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the UN, and the press. and they're all behaving kind of like a political lobby that's meant not to explain a complicated country to readers who are very far away from that country, but they're acting as if their job is to fight for justice. And justice is a very slippery idea, and it really changes what kind of stories you're selecting, it changes what you can and cannot report, it changes what you inflate and what

you erase if the object is not explaining a complicated situation, but rather lobbying for a particular political outcome. In the case of the world, I'm talking about, it was clear that the good guy and the bad guy had been decided upon, and the bad guy was Israel. So any story that helped the reader to understand that Israel was the bad guy was considered good journalism. And I just couldn't operate if those were the parameters. And that's why I had to leave. Let me quote from the Atlantic piece. You write, in these circles, in my experience, a taste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don't mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government

currently in charge of this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world's ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism, an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the progressive Western zeitgeis, spreading from the European left to American colleges can't campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. And my question is, if you didn't share that view, if you were a journalist who got assigned to a major bureau in Israel, would it be hard to be, I mean, do you almost feel like you have to write to those editors as opposed to explaining to, um,

you know, the world at large in order to get promotions to get awards, that this zeitgeist is almost, you know, so if you don't, if you don't accept this worldview, you're not going to see your career succeed in any meaningful way. Yes, that's absolutely true. I think it's true in a lot of workplaces. It's not only true in, you know, in more left-leaning media. I think it's true in the right-leaning media as well. And it's true of, you know, universities and it's true of a lot of other places, which is that these places are kind of social worlds. And social worlds have certain rules and certain norms. People dress in a certain way and they act in a certain way and they share certain conclusions and assumptions. And the press certainly worked like that. In the case of the

press, though, it's extremely dangerous to have that kind of ideological conformity because it means that you're going to get things wrong. And when you get things wrong, everyone will be wrong. because everyone thinks the same, it would be much better to have a very ideologically heterogeneous newsroom. Ideally, I think it would be better if journalists didn't even know each other. That's why I've always been made uncomfortable by the idea of the press core. The idea that the press is kind of like a military unit that marches in lockstep toward a shared goal, that's a complete misunderstanding of the press or what it should be, in my opinion. Journalists need to be independent.

They need to be knowledgeable and they need to be free to form their own conclusions based on their own expertise, and that was not the case in my experience. And it's quite striking to to see news coverage from Israel, not only from Israel, by the way, but we're talking about Israel. So if you look at news coverage from here from the big news organizations that cover this story on a given day, you're going to see a very similar story. And the story is often wrong, but it's wrong in the same way. And that's because of the tendency that you mentioned, which is to enforce a kind of ideological conformity, not explicitly, right? No one's going to stand up in front of the newsroom and say you must report like this. But if you don't, you're not going

to get promoted. You're not going to get the jobs inside the agency. You're going to be finding yourself on the outside and you're going to look for jobs elsewhere. So that's very much, that's very much part of it. Like-minded people hire like-minded people and they hire like-minded people. And you can see that happening in the university departments. You can see it happening in the press with the effect that things get increasingly extreme with every generation. of new hires and as dissenting voices are squeezed out. So there's a reason that press coverage looks as it does, and that's a big part of it. Do you remember the first time you noticed how this influenced coverage?

The first key example that I remember happened during the first serious round of violence between Israel and Hamas and Gaza, this sounds a bit like interesting. in history, but it's actually quite important for understanding the events that we're seeing right now. Israel pulls out of Gaza in 2005. The following year, there's a Palestinian election in which the Palestinians elected Hamas. The following year, 2007, Hamas takes over Gaza and eliminates what's left of the Palestinian authority in Gaza. And then in 2008, there's a war. And now we understand that this is the first round of many wars that are going to happen in Gaza once it's under Hamas control, but the end of 2008 was the very first one, and I was an editor

on the desk in Jerusalem. We're getting information coming in from Gaza, but the stories from Gaza are actually written from Jerusalem. So I'm in constant contact with a reporter in Gaza, Palestinian reporter, great reporter, up until that point, a really, really excellent journalist up until that point. And he told me that amid the fighting that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and that they were being counted as civilians in the death toll. That's a very important piece of information, particularly since we were making the civilian death toll in Gaza, the center of the story. Again, I think that would sound familiar to anyone following the news over the past couple weeks. So it's a very important detail. We need to understand that the

casualty statistics are being tallied by Hamas, and they are counting and are not counting certain things. So I put that in the story, and it winds out in an AP story. And then a few hours later, the same reporter called back and asked me to remove that detail. And it was quite clear that someone had spoken to him. And it was quite clear that there were now rules of coverage in Gaza and that he had kind of run afoul of these rules. And of course, I erased that detail. I was not going to endanger a reporter for any reason. And I think that was the right decision. But I suggested to the person in charge of the news desk that we write an editor's note at the bottom of the story to inform our readers that we were now conforming with Hamas censorship.

Anytime the Israeli military censor goes over an AP story, there's an editor's note that warns readers that the copy has been vetted by the Israeli military sensor, even though Israelis rarely will make a change to a story. It's mainly topics related to Israel's nuclear program. I thought it made sense to tell readers that AP coverage in Gaza was now being shaped by by Hamas, but I was overruled, and the story went out without very relevant information. We were now collaborating with Hamas, kind of collaboration that I think has only really deepened and become much, much more damaging and complicated in the years since.

But that's the date that I would place as the first real realization. I got that something was badly wrong with the way we were covering reality here. And in the Atlantic piece, you give several examples of this, I quote, the AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby, and the AP wouldn't report it, not even in articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. This happened to, you write. Hamas fighters would burst into the AP's Gaza Bureau and threaten the staff. The AP wouldn't report it. This also happened to you, right. cameraman waiting outside al-Shefa hospital in Gaza would film the arrival of civilians casualties

and then at a signal from an official turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. This two happened, you write. The information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents. My question, Maddie, is this seems almost like active. I mean, we just went through a whole news cycle about whether Hamas, uses al-Shifa hospital to hide, hide there, have a command center, whether Hamas hides below civilian buildings

and fires rockets next to the civilian buildings. What you wrote in 2014 was confirmation of everything that the journalists are debating and questioning now. Why is this fake debate happening when they seem to know this occurs regularly? It's possible that not enough people read my stories and had they only read the stories, you know, all these problems

would have been solved in 2014. But not only the commentators, but the journalists themselves seem to know this is happening. This is an essential part of the story of what is going on in Gaza right now is what you wrote in 2014 that Hamas has embedded itself

within civilian populations. I mean, I don't know how you could tell this story without the details that you knew in 2014, and yet it doesn't. does seem, you know, pretty absent for most of the reporting on what's going on. Sure. I mean, any honest reporter in the press court here understands that Hamas is shaping the coverage and the examples that I wrote in the Atlantic in 2014 are true and known to many people, not just to me. I mean, Hamas fighters burst into the AP Bureau during the war that summer, the summer of 2014

and threatened a photographer over a photograph, and the AP chose not to ever mention it. There was a rocket launch next to the Bureau. The entire staff saw it out of the window. And at the time, the AP was not saying that Hamas was launching rockets from civilian areas. They were presenting that as an Israeli claim. Of course, if you don't understand that Hamas is launching rockets from civilian areas, death toll makes no sense. The damage that you're seeing in civilian areas makes no sense.

So to not spell that out is real journalistic malpractice, and yet they weren't. And there are two things going on. One is intimidation. So if you have permanent staff in Gaza, that means the staff is at the mercy of Hamas. By the way, the staff that we're talking about, I think, contrary to what many people are imagining, is Palestinian. The heavy lifting of the foreign press in Gaza is done by people who live in Gaza, Palestinians from Gaza. And those people are quite understandably unwilling to cross Hamas. Some of them are Hamas supporters, but many of them are not, but will not be able to contravene Hamas.

coverage rules. So if people are imagining that there are masses of American and British and French reporters running around Gaza, that's not the case. Hamas very rarely has to threaten a Western reporter. The Palestinian staff does most of the work and they understand the rules without, often I think, without needing to be threatened. So all this happens. And if you protest in the Bureau, as of course I did, you'll be told that you're endangering the staff in Gaza. So I was told that we can't possibly, you know, publish that detail about Hamas fighters being disguised as civilians. And we can't possibly publish the fact that our coverage is being shaped by Hamas because that will endanger the staff in Gaza. So why does the AP or its sister

organizations, why does the Western Press have staff in Gaza? It has staff in Gaza mainly to get visual material that it needs, photographs and video. You need to be in Gaza to get that kind of material, and that means you're operating under Hamas, and that means you're making compromises to allow yourself to have access. And you tell yourself that you're making compromises in order to protect the staff and in order to gain access. But what has actually happened is that you've given Hamas access to your coverage. You know, since the event, since the incident that I mentioned, basically Hamas had access to our coverage and was shaping it. So there's a reason that you very rarely see images of Hamas fighters. There's a very, there's a reason that you very rarely see

images of rocket launches from civilian areas. There's a reason that you're seeing images of mass civilian death and not the deaths of fighters. There's a reason for that. And the reason is the coverage rules in Gaza. By the way, I'm not saying that there isn't mass civilian death in Gaza. I'm just saying that it's part of the story and that Hamas is quite expert at engineering what people are seeing. So that's one part of it, straight up intimidation.

The second part of it is that the part of the story that reporters are not being allowed to report is usually stuff that the reporters don't want to report anyway. Because for reporters, the story that they feel that they're supposed to report is a story about powerful Israelis abusing Palestinian civilians. So the existence of Hamas and Hamas military strategy and this incredible tunnel network that they've built and the way they use hospitals and they're very impressive military achievements, all of this is irrelevant to the story that they think is important. So they're being warned off parts of the story, but they tell themselves that it's not important anyway

because it's not the story. So that's also part of it. So part of it is intimidation and part of it is ideology, but the upshot of it is that Western audiences depending on mainstream media, I guess what used to call the mainstream media. I'm not sure if that makes sense anymore, but the large numbers of people in the West

who trust these organizations are being given a picture of reality that's false and are having a very hard time understanding reality. I think that if the Western press organizations, had done their job and reported what Hamas was doing in Gaza over the past 10, 15 years, which is basically wiring Gaza like a suicide bomber. They've created a military landscape that is indistinguishable from the civilian landscape, and that means necessarily that when war breaks out, it's going to be a civilian disaster.

The big Western press organizations have permanent operations in Gaza, and they've largely been happy to ignore it. So this attack on October 7th comes out of nowhere. when if you've been covering the story, as you should have been, Western audiences would have been much more capable of understanding that event and knowing where to put it. And you can see that millions of people in the West are quite baffled by what's going on and are reaching a series of completely incorrect conclusions.

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Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute this september lease a 2026 xe 90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the volvo fall experience event condition supply visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo dot com I mean it's sheer deceit in some ways to know these things and not cover them is a way of deceit in its own right. And I don't, again, as you write, I don't know how you cover the conflict without reporting on that. But even you write here, again, in 2014, the Atlantic Peace, Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas reported civilian death toll were laid through the

UN or through something called the Gaza Health Ministry, an office controlled by Hamas, but would make those numbers the center of the coverage. I mean, in this instance, there would be no threat to whatever reporters are in Gaza or the stringers that are in Gaza to not make numbers that they know they can't verify the center of the coverage. And yet, this debate still occurs. This seems to be the center of much of the coverage in mainstream press is the Gaza Ministry of Health and the numbers they report. Do we know at all whether these numbers turn out to be,

even close to the truth, when the war ends and people can get a more accurate count of the civilian versus Hamas death toll? What's happened in previous rounds is that the number of fighters killed becomes apparent after the war. So Hamas has an interest in creating the impression that only civilians are being killed, which they're doing quite successfully, by the way. And then after the war, because Hamas has to show the population of Gaza that it's meant, and heroically fought the Israelis, they started publishing their own casualty numbers.

And then you see that a lot of the dead are military. Exactly what's going to happen this time, it's hard to say. But certainly, Israel is targeting Hamas in Gaza. So there are a lot of civilians being killed, and it is tragic. There are clearly a lot of Hamas fighters being killed, and we don't know how many. So the number we're getting from the Gaza Health Ministry just can't. We have no idea if it's true or not. it is true that many, many civilians in the thousands are being killed and that it's absolutely

horrific and heartbreaking and it's a result of a war that Hamas started and it's a result of the battlefield that Hamas created on purpose. This is the way they fight and I think often the Western liberal mind kind of boggles. We don't want to believe that it's possible that an organization would sacrifice its own people on purpose and yet Hamas not only does it but it explicitly says that it is doing it. If you've heard interviews with Hamas leaders over the past couple weeks, that's part of the strategy. And by the way, I think it's quite effective. The strategy is to attack Israel, trigger an Israeli response and then, you know, get your friends abroad to shout genocide until Israel has its hands tied and can no longer pursue you. And then you live to fight another

day. And I think that was Hamas calculation when they embarked on the attack on October 7th. I'm not sure their calculation was right this time, but I'm also not completely sure that it's wrong and the images of armed civilians in Gaza, which again are real and heartbreaking, they act as a break on Israel's military response. And Hamas is counting on that pressure to save itself and allow it to continue its war next year and the following year. And it's one reason I think that Israel can't stop until this war's objectives have been achieved. That's in the interest not only of Israel, but I think it's in the long-term interests of the Palestinians and the region as a whole. Within the culture you mentioned of the foreign press in Israel, how do they view Hamas?

The general attitude toward Hamas, when I was in the press corps, was kind of what you might hear about, like, a rowdy fraternity at a college. Like, these are, they're good kids, you know, they go a bit too far sometimes. You know, we don't always love what they're shouting or, you know, we don't love the parties at 3 a.m. But, you know, these are basically good kids who have the right idea. Certainly, I think it's not an exaggeration to say that for many people in the press world, which is also the world, again, it's also the world of NGOs. It's also this kind of left-wing, academic, post-colonial world that we've seen take over a lot of important Western institutions and not just the press. In that world, there is a lot more sympathy for Hamas than for Israel.

And that's been true since my time in the press. It's certainly true now. Now it's much more visible. People are being much more open about their sympathy for Hamas. You know, people might say, yes, it's unfortunate. There was some, you know, unfortunate violence on the border on October 7th, and maybe they went a bit too far, but fundamentally, they're fighting for justice, and they're on the side of the good guys.

And, you know, we know who the bad guys are here. You know, that's unfortunately a big part of the brain of many of the people who are in charge of explaining events to Western audiences. And it's not true of everyone. It's not true of all press institutions. It's not true of all people inside, even the institutions that have malfunctioned. But I think that as a broad description of the zeitgeist, as we've seen, it is basically true. And it's a big part of the kind of breakdown in Western press coverage and in this incredible loss of credibility on the part of the very organizations that we desperately need to describe reality in a rational and helpful way.

One question I often oppose to people's stateside is, you know, do you believe Hamas, the IDF is as immoral as Hamas? It sounds like from what you're describing the, again, in broad strokes, the press foreign-based in Jerusalem or in Israel would view Hamas as the more moral actor than the IDF. I think in many cases they view them at least as equivalent. And a good example of that was the incident at the Al-Ahali Hospital early in this war, where often it's in the quick decisions that you see the deep psychology in play.

When people don't have time to make a calculated decision, you see what the instinct is. So the press had been reporting this terrible massacre in Israel, the October 7 massacre. And you could tell that the ideological forces in the press and the big NGOs in the U.N. really gritting their teeth because they can't bear the idea of Israelis being victims. They know who the real victims are. And then you had this explosion at a hospital in Gaza, the Hamas Health Ministry, which up to that point was called the Gaza Health Ministry and coverage, meaning that most readers can't understand where the information is coming from.

They came out and said, an Israeli air strike hit this hospital, and there are at least 500 people dead, and everyone reported it. Even at the time, it didn't make any sense that they would know how many people had been killed that quickly or that they knew the cause. Of course, there are a lot of Palestinian munitions in the air over Gaza and a lot of them crash in Gaza and everyone knows that. And yet we had this massive international story reported by all the big players. It managed to disrupt a visit by a president to the region. It disrupted some of these meetings with Arab leaders and it turned out to be completely false. It wasn't an Israeli airstrike and the death

toll was nowhere near 500 people. And you could really see that they do believe Hamas. I mean, Hamas had just fed them a story. Hamas obviously had to be an Israeli air strike. It was obviously has an interest in not just inflating the death toll in Gaza, but in diverting attention from what they did on October 7th. And they did it successfully. And that lie was too blatant to stand. It was just too obvious that that didn't happen. And then you saw the organizations kind of walk it back over the next couple of days. And people started referring to the Gaza Health Ministry as Hamas controlled. So there's some progress there, maybe taking the, you know, the statements from the health ministry with more of a grain of salt.

On the other hand, the center of the coverage is still the civilian death toll being provided by Hamas. So, you know, that says a lot. And I think we're not, you know, the problems that I described in 2014 based on my time as an insider, those problems, if anything, are worse now. I don't know if you were a reporter when the Janine incident happened in 2005, 2006, were there was three weeks coverage of very similar to the, you know, the numbers coming out of the hospital only to discover, you know, months later at a UN study that it was a fraction

of the massacre that the Palestinians claimed it was. And it wasn't a massacre. It was a, you know, a very risky operation that were Israel law soldiers itself. That was, yeah, that was that was 2002 Operation Defensive Shield. And actually at the time, I was a soldier. I was a reserve soldier. and that was a really good example of the way this works. The Palestinians came out with the story about a massacre. It was completely invented, but it got immense coverage because there's this real thirst for that story, even if it's false.

And there's that saying that I'm going to completely destroy when I try to remember it, but that a lie goes halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on or something like that. And that ended up being very true. So in the end, the story fell apart, but the damage had been done much, I think, in a similar way to what happened at the El Ahan hospital or what's happening now, big parts of world opinion are being convinced that Israel is indiscriminately bombing civilians on purpose. And the numbers will surface eventually and we're going to see a much more complicated picture. But by the time that happens, which will be maybe a month or two after the war ends, the damage will have been done. And all the players who completely messed up the coverage will have moved on. No one ever pays a price for bad coverage, as long as it's a mistake that goes in the right

political direction. And that's what we're going to see this time. The thing that has changed, I guess, is worth saying, is that the credibility of the press has decreased dramatically since I was a reporter, not because of my own departure, but because of these problems that I saw in the Israel story. Of course, these problems are not just in the Israel story. We've seen them, in the 2016 American election story, we've seen them permeate American politics. Now people understand much more than I did in 2014 that the press has turned to activism. And, you know, if you want left-wing activism, you know where to go. And if you want right-wing activism, you know where to go. But there are very few outlets that are just trying to explain what's going on.

And I think people get that much more. So, you know, the New York Times can write something or CNN can report something. It might be completely wrong, but it matters less in 2023 than it did in 2014 because so many people are skeptical of what they're getting. And there's no I don't have a drop of happiness in me about that. I'm not happy at the collapse of the credibility of the mainstream press because I don't think we have any other options. I don't think Facebook is going to replace what the New York Times once was, and I don't think we're going to get a rational and reasonable picture of the world from Twitter.

We need those organizations to do their job, to have knowledgeable people explaining to the best of their abilities what is going on in the world. And the fact that that job has been seated in favor of increasingly deranged activism, is a disaster for Western democracy. It's not just a disaster for Israel. It's not just a disaster for the newspapers themselves. It's a disaster for every citizen in the democracy who needs good information,

so that they can decide who to vote for and how to act as citizens. In your 2014 tablet piece, and I think you touched on it a little bit earlier, the scale of coverage in Israel versus the rest of the world, I think the number you used at the time, the AP had 40 editors and reporters, based in Israel, which was more than the combined total for Russia, India, China, and 50 countries

in sub-Saharan Africa. What do you think accounts for the overwhelming coverage of Israel versus, you know, not just the rest of the world, but important countries that we need to know and understand at the time like China? Right. So just to be exact about the claim, when I was at the AP, so this is between 2006 and the very end of 2011, we had more than 40 staffers. covering Israel and Palestinian territories.

So I'm including reporters, like me, print reporters, still photographers, TV crews, covering a story that includes about 14, 50 million people, Israelis and Palestinians on a piece of land that is one, 100 of 1% of the surface of the world. And that number was more staff than the AP had at the time in China, which has 1.3 billion people.

And it was more staff than we had in India, which is also about 1.3 billion people. And it was more staff than we had in all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. That's 50-something countries. So at the time, the AP's Jerusalem Bureau was its biggest international bureau. But given the size of the country is really, you know, striking. Even as a percentage of the Arab world, Israel is minuscule. Israel is one-fifth of one percent of the landmass of the era world.

We're talking about a very, very small country. There are a few things going on, and this could be a very long discussion. I'm not sure your listeners are really up for it. Part of what's going on is that this is a very easy story to cover. So you can be on the Gaza border wearing a black jacket and having yourself filmed with a plume of smoke in the background. And that's what all reporters want to do, right? They want to cover conflict. They want to cover serious events.

And then within about an hour, you're back in Tel Aviv and best bar you've ever been in. In a city that's much safer than the city you're from in the United States. You can write anything you want about the Israeli government and nothing will happen to you. Nothing that you write about the Israeli government will be worse than what Israeli. say about our own government every day. Everyone speaks English, everyone answers their phone. The story, the story basically writes itself. It's a very easy

story to report. Reporting from other parts of the Middle East can be very inconvenient and sometimes fatal. And that's not true. The Israel story most of the time. So that's part of what's going on. You can be a woman here. You can be gay. You can be Christian. All kinds of things that are not

Jewish. All kinds of things that are not really comfortable elsewhere in the Middle East. And that's part of why you see this incredible inflation of news staff. But that doesn't give us enough of an explanation for the scope of the coverage and for the incredibly emotional response to this story in the West. No other news story elicits the same response and no other story gets the kind of coverage that this story gets, even when nothing is going on.

A lot of the time in Israel, the death toll is lower than the homicide number for Indianapolis. That's been true most years over the past decade. And yet the story remains this kind of behemoth in the world of news. And part of it is that it's the Holy Land. So it's a country that's of great interest to the Christian world, which, of course, has much of its mythology set here. A big part of it is that it's a story about Jews. And Jews have a role in storytelling in Western societies. And the role is to serve as a blank screen onto which the ills of a given time are projected.

So, you know, you can get many examples, starting from the early years of Christianity when Jews were, presented as the opposite of what Christians believed. So we believe in charity and these people are greedy. We believe in the spirit and these people are too preoccupied with the body. We believe in Jesus Christ and these people killed him. That's a very simple way of explaining who we are. Who are we? We are not Jews. That's one of the most basic storytelling techniques in Western civilization. There's a really good book about it written by a professor from the University of Chicago and it's called anti-Judaism, and he traces this through many centuries of Western history. You can I mean, choose almost any century, and you'll get some kind of story about diabolical Jews

representing what's wrong at a given time. So, you know, jumping ahead to, there are many examples, but communism, you know, Karl Marx invents this incredibly influential ideological framework called communism and writes an essay in which he explains that the Jews are the enemies of communism, that the Jews, the religion of the Jews, he writes. is poxterism, and the god of the Jews is money, and mankind must be emancipated from Judaism. It's an essay called On the Jewish Question, which you can find online. I hesitate to recommend it, but if you haven't read it, I would recommend it. It's just a good example of how Western thought systems present their enemies as being Jewish.

At the same time, of course, people who hate communism think that the communists are Jews. So it's Jewish Bolsheviks and Jewish communists, but if you're a communist and the Jews are for bankers and capitalists. And this gets carried on, you know, of course, into Germany in the 20s when people become very preoccupied with racial purity. So who represents racial impurity? Today in the modern West and certainly in the United States, there are a few parallel and potent stories about Jews floating around. One of them is on the right, which is the story about globalists. The hard right is preoccupied with national borders and the movement of capital and kind of the erasure of national boundaries and the erasure of national

boundaries and the erasure of ethnic identity. And if you dive down the black Google hole of the ultra, you'll see that the word globalist is a stand-in for Jews. And Jews are said to be engineering the erasure of white America through various nefarious means, like movement of money and like the importing of immigrants. And that's a very, that's an idea with legs on the hard right. And if you look at the left, you'll see that there's a very powerful story on the left about a country called Israel, which happens to be the world's only Jewish state, which represents everything that liberal people are taught to hate, colonialism, militarism, nationalism, nationalism, racism. And this country is symbolic

of the deep ills of the world at this time. And thus, this country, and only this country, needs to be quarantined, boycotted, and if possible, made to disappear. And this is a very unique story. We don't see it about Russia. We don't see it about Turkey. We don't see it about the United States. We don't see it about China. see it about Israel. So I think that when we're analyzing the press story, we're asking that question that you ask, which is, why is this story covered in the way that it is? I think we need to exit the realm of journalism and delve into the realms of philosophy and history, because we're looking at a story that is not primarily a news story. It's a morality story,

and it's a morality story about the West. It's a way that the West is processing the ills of the West. Israel is almost irrelevant to the stories. So I think if we want to understand that we really have to look deep. Well, I mean, until the end, you know, I was going to ask you, it seems to me then this zeitgeist is, I think Larry Summers used this term many, many years ago about BDS, when he was a president of Harvard, it was anti-Semitic in effect, if not an intent.

But what you're saying almost is that the Jewishness of it is just, you know, an easy focus for the broader attack on the West. Or do you think that the underbelly of this, There is a anti-Semitism in the zeitgeist of this journalist culture that you were in for a little bit. I'm very careful with the word anti-Semitism, and I never use it unless it's absolutely unavoidable in part because anti-Semitism was a word invented by someone who hated Jews in order to make that hatred sound scientific. So I don't see any reason to really play ball with, you know, the lingo of people who hate me. Also, I think it often ends the discussion because no one really thinks they're anti-Semitic.

So if you say anti-Semitism, then everyone's ears kind of shut down and then you can't have a discussion about what's actually going on. Many of the reporters who were most guilty of, you know, journalistic malfeasance, in my opinion, when I was working with them, were themselves Jewish. And often Jewish people believe that they could not possibly be anti-Semitic. So I think it's more helpful to explain what's going on. What's going on is a deep Western tendency to use Jews as an illustration of what's wrong. And if you explain it like that, then I think you can actually have a discussion about what's going on

and how Israel fits into that format of Western storytelling, which is one of the most ancient Western storytelling formats. And you kind of have to understand and accept. I think that this is a story about Jews. And stories about Jews in the West are deep stories. They're very dangerous stories. They're not stories like the stories about Chinese people or Russians or Canadians or French people. It's a different category of story and it has very different effects.

And we can look back over many centuries of Western history and see the effects that these stories have had. These stories are almost never about actual Jewish people. But they often have disastrous effects on the lives of real Jewish people. And I think they need to be treated with extreme caution. So, you know, when I was in the press, I always kind of, surprised at the cavalier way in which these stories were promoted, you know, these ideas of of Israeli Jews killing children or the idea that the Jewish state was somehow this malevolent entity that was hiding its true nature. That's one of the tropes of the story that Israel seems

to be one thing, but actually it's another. And we have to unmask Israel for the evil that it is. But these are very deep ideas and they have nothing to do with journalism. So I think that we need to unpack the ideas rather than just say it's anti-Semitism, because there's something deep and interesting going on here, and I don't think we can sum it up with Word. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a

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through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellar lenses for myopia control. Learn more at slur.com and ask your family eye care professional for SLR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. Fair enough. One of the interesting aspects, though, of the overwhelming coverage that you mentioned in the statistics that you just gave was, you mentioned that there was 15 million people. but really the coverage was not for the 15 million people who was for just Israel. And I'm interested if you could just describe why there was such a lack of interest at all

in covering the ills or the problems or really anything to do with what was going on within Palestinian society. And maybe some examples of the types of coverage that the AP just was not interested. And a good example was after the election of Hamas in 2006, the AP released kind of a summation of the Hamas charter. Hamas has this wild charter.

That is very, you know, surprising if you're not expecting the kind of content that's in there and Hamas had just won this election against everyone's predictions. And the AP felt like it should write something about the charter. And they wrote a piece about the charter, which you can still find online as far as I know, where they kind of sum up the parts that made sense to the reporter writing the story and left out all the parts that he just could not handle, like the part where Hamas says that Jewish capital has taken over the world economy and the world media

and subverts, you know, the consciousness of the world, the part where it blames Jews for starting not just the French revolution and the Russian Revolution, but both World Wars. It's all on the charter, but they just couldn't handle it or they just didn't know what to do with it. So they left it out, and I think it's an important thing to understand about Hamas, which is this is not a rational organization that, you know, has fiery rhetoric.

This is a deeply, deeply irrational organization that is motivated by ideas that most, yes, most normal people in the West would find uphorrent. But there are many other, there are many other examples, not just negative examples. We made almost no attempt to actually understand what Palestinians were thinking or why they behaved the way that they did. And they were portrayed as victims of the party that mattered, which is Israel. And that's going on right now in the case of this war as well. there is no Hamas, there's no real attempt to analyze, you know, Hamas's connections to Iran,

Hamas has been busy, again, in a way that's quite impressive, turning Gaza into a fortress over the past 15 years, that hasn't been of great interest to people, where are they getting their weapons, how are they pulling off this set? It's incredible construction project. It's just not, it's not important because the story is about Jews, and the story is about the moral failings of Jews. And in that story, the role of the Palestinians is to be. be innocent victims, and that's it. So you have a story about these, you know, Israelis who've seen kind of like stormtroopers from Star Wars. And the Palestinians are generally presented as people who are just, you know, growing organic olives and, you know, hoping for a peaceful

future. And that's, I think, what a lot of people who've been, have grown up on Western press coverage think. And that makes the actual events in the country impossible to understand. And I'm not saying by any stretch of imagination that all of Israel's decisions have been good. I think we've made some decisions that have been really bad, like building civilian settlements in the West Bank. I think those are a pretty bad decision, and we've made many others. So I'm not making an argument here for, you know, the purity of Israel's record. And I'm also not saying that the Palestinians are evil. I think the Palestinians are people responding to events in ways that are more or less productive, like Israelis.

But I think we need to understand that this is a very complex situation in which there is no princess and no dragon. and it's not a, you know, it's not a fairy tale. It's not a children's story. And there's no, there's no, the villainy that people seem to attribute to Israel is coming from a deep place in the Western mind. It has very little to do with the actual state of Israel. You wrote in the tab of peace, coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

I think that's what you're describing here. What was stunning to me as an example you gave about the, I believe was 2008 Prime Minister Olmert's Peace Clan that I don't know if it was you or someone at the AP got a scoop on and they decided not to run with it because it didn't fit the narrative. I mean, this is the type of scoop that helps make careers. I mean, explain that one to me. I mean, how was the justification for not running a story on that? It fits into the same framework.

If the story is about Israelis who are increasingly extreme and unwilling to compromise and Palestinians who just want some kind of, you know, moderate arrangement to allow them to continue their lives, then the story of the Olmer offer makes no sense. What happened was that at the very end of 2008, Prime Minister Olmer made a very far-reaching offer to the Palestinians, which now everyone knows about, but at the time hadn't been reported. And the offer would have seen a Palestinian state in the West Bank in Gaza with swaps to make up for land that Israel was going to annex in the West Bank. And the Palestinians were going to get land from Israel proper in return and an international arrangement for the old city of Jerusalem. There's a very far-reaching plan. I'm not sure if it ever could have happened. And now it certainly can't. But at the time, it was quite a dramatic offer made by the Israeli prime minister.

So if you believe that the center of the coverage is the peace process, then of course, this is a huge story. this is one of the biggest stories of the year because you have the contours of what Israel is willing to offer and what the Palestinians are or are not willing to accept Palestinians, but by the way, didn't accept it. They rejected the offer. So we have the story, two reporters in the Bureau, have the story. One of them actually saw a map. One of the reporters was a veteran at a newsman named Mark Levy, and I'm giving his name because he himself came forward after I wrote the story and identified himself as one of the reporters. And they were told in no uncertain terms that they could not report the story.

And there's an official reason given for that. And then there's the real reason, which was clear to everyone. The official reason was that it wasn't a serious offer, it wasn't a real offer. There was a very kind of vague explanation given for why we weren't allowed to report this. The real reason was that it would have disrupted this princess dragon dynamic that we were very invested in. We needed our readers to know who the good guys and bad guys were. And this story would disrupt it. It would make it seem like Israel was pursuing.

some kind of rational compromise in that the Palestinians weren't interested. So that, you know, that would disrupt entire edifice of press coverage as we'd created it and it had to be made to go away. And it was, we didn't report it for about a year and a half. And the first AP reporters who ever spelled out what had been offered was me, but it was about a year and a half after it had happened, at which point it seemed like a, you know, like a historical curiosity and not like a significant news story that should have shaped our understanding of what was going on. Just to, and we'll get on to kind of a few closing questions, but does the editor, whoever spiked the story, does he view or he or she, do they view themselves as journalists or do they view themselves as active? I mean, what is, I mean, it does seem spiking that story to me is, I don't know how someone could think of themselves as a journalist and spike a story that is an exclusive like that.

If you think that journalism is supposed to explain complicated events to people who are far away, then, of course, it's not. The decision made just like that story was not a journalistic decision. Of course, it was an important story. Of course, it needed to be reported. But if you understand journalism as a tool in the fight for justice, and if you think that a grave injustice has been done to the Palestinians and that they deserve positive coverage because their cause is just, then that that decision. makes perfect sense. And I would say that the decision was an activist decision. There was nothing journalistic about it. And it really kind of encapsulates what's gone wrong. And it seems like ancient history now. I know we're talking about 2008 and it's 2023 and so much has happened. But I think

much of what we now see in the press, not just with Israel coverage, but in general, this swing toward activism, a lot of it can be dated to that time. And a lot of it can be dated to this or can be placed in the context of this story. I think that Israel in many ways was patient zero in this kind of activist journalism. The press corps and its affiliated organizations, the NGOs and the UN agencies, which, you know, where there's really a revolving door for journalists, they identified Israel as a party that needed to be libeled out of acceptable opinion. And anything that could be done to that end was just. And, could be, you know, passed off as the right journalistic decision if you understand journalism

as a tool in the fight for justice and not as a flawed profession where people try to make sense of the world and explain it to others. As we've discussed in this interview, we see a lot of echoes from your 2014 piece. Has anything, though, surprised you in the coverage of this latest conflict, either to the positive or the negative? Not really. I think that the coverage looks like a version of what I described, but maybe on steroids, this is a much bigger war than the previous rounds. I mean, we've never seen anything like the massacre of October 7th and the number of casualties in Gaza is higher than what we've seen in the past. We're talking about an event that's on a much bigger scale, but the fundamental problems are the ones that I described. And that

I think is why these essays, these two essays that I wrote that summer, one for tablet and one for the Atlantic, they keep resurfacing and they resurface because they explain something that people don't understand, which is, why am I reading this story? Why does the story look like it looks? Why does it not quite fit together? Why does it not seem to make sense? And I'm glad that I wrote them. They seem to have had no impact at all on the press corps itself, but I hope that they have enabled curious readers to make sense of the, you know, blizzard of information that we're all trying to navigate it. Is there anything that can be done with systematic problem with the coverage of Israel

and the conflict with the Palestinians and Arabs that can be reformed and how? How can this situation be fixed? Fixing it would require a much more introspective and self-critical press score than the one we have. The direction is clearly going in a different direction. It's moving toward more strident, active. And by the way, I'm saying that about the right media as well as the left media. I think everyone is kind of operating in a kind of political way and acting more like a political

lobby than than like old-time journalists who are trying to get the story right. And I would just urge everyone to get back to doing what journalists were supposed to do, and especially if we're meant to compete with social media. The only way to compete with social media, if you're a press organization, is to get the story right. I don't think we need more people screaming. I don't think we need more ideological silos where we can house as many people as possible. I think we need good sources of information, and people will come to those sources if they make themselves apparent.

One, I think good way of correcting much of what's wrong with the Israel's story is to place Israel in regional context. And I've been saying that for a while. This isn't really an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That's just the news framing of the story. That's the way that reporters have created a comprehensible news story out of very complicated events, a new story can basically make room for two actors. It doesn't have room for more, so you need two players, if possible, a good guy and a bad guy, and that's how you got the

Israel-Palestine story. But most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel fought wars, unfortunately, against Egyptians and Jordanians and Iraqis and Syrians and Lebanese. And Israel's most potent enemy at the moment is Iran. So none of those actors are Palestinian. So clearly there's a broader conflict going on that isn't Israeli-Palestinian. And I think that if you place Israel in the context of the Middle East, and if you look across the Middle East, you'll notice that there's violence more or less everywhere, including in many places where there are no Jews. So clearly the Jews are not the drivers of violence in the Middle East. They're part of a very violent region and dealing with it in ways that might be good or

bad, but they certainly can't be presented as the cause when there are six million Jews in one corner of the Arab world, which is 300 million people, and in one corner of the Islamic world, which is about a billion and a half people, maybe two billion. It depends on who you ask If you view this in regional context, then I think a lot of the problems with the story are solved by themselves. I don't think people need to be nice to Israel. I don't think people need to accept Israeli claims without question. I certainly don't think people need to demonize Palestinians or draw them as evil or incomprehensible. But I do think that if we place this in the context of the region and have knowledgeable people who are genuinely interested in making sense of very common.

complicated series of events. That will solve a lot of the problems with the Israel story, which has really, again, exited the realm of news and become a completely different kind of story that presses very deep western buttons and has very little to do with actual events in a very small corner of the world. Let me close on this question. In a 2020 piece for Tablet Magazine which is called We Are All Israel Now, you said, I think as you mentioned a few questions back, that Israel was patient zero of cancer culture. And I don't know if you used this term, I don't remember, but basically for some of the kind of the ideologies, the rest of ideologies that have become part of our zeitgeist all around the world.

Do you think it's possible that it could also be patient zero for the reaction back from those ideologies after October 7th where we're seeing, I think, at least in the United States, some people on the left pretty shocked about how someone they, what they thought there, there were allies justifying what occurred there. through using some of the ideologies that you mentioned, do you think it's possible that this could be the turning court where there's a fight back against some of these ideologies? I'd love to think that the answer is yes,

and maybe it is. I definitely have seen a shift in, I guess you call it the center left. People are generally liberal in their orientation, but certainly don't support terrorism and massacre and raping women and beheading babies. and things like that. And they've had to come to terms with the fact that their ideological universe is actually quite sympathetic to those things. Or people who assume that we were still talking about a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and woke up on the morning of October 7th and realized that actually the people who they generally find common cause with are talking about the obliteration of the state of the state of the state of the state, maybe some kind of Hamas rule of state in the cause of social justice, which somehow has become mixed up with American ideas of race and inequality. I think there is movement. There is movement. The institutional world of the press, and again, it's affiliated organizations, the Academy, the NGOs,

they've gone so far off the ideological depend that I'm not sure that they can be repaired, but there are attempts to create new organizations and to think about different ways of telling stories. And there definitely are a lot of smart people out there. A lot of smart journalists have been kind of vomited out of the system and are wandering around homeless on the internet and I'm cohering in certain corners like the free press like Barry Weiss's outfit which is doing some really good stuff

and there are other corners where interesting things are happening and there are parts of you know of the right which are you know quite sane and doing a good job of kind of holding the craziness at bay and I think you know if I'm being wildly optimistic I'd love to see an alliance of the same where the division is no longer left and right. It's a division that I don't really understand anymore. I think these are old terms that aren't particularly helpful.

I think that there are people who are reasonable and would like our society to move forward to the extent possible. And I hope that they find common ground with each other and realize that they have much more in common with each other than they do with some of the nutcases in their own ideological camp. And maybe this will be a moment of clarity. Unfortunately, great global events often tend to coagulate around Jews. That's just something cosmic that keeps happening. And we might be witnessing one right now with a moment of understanding, a moment of tragedy, a moment of catastrophe, a moment of conflict around this tiny Jewish state in the Middle East that somehow crystallizes an understanding that the West needs. You know, let's end on an optimistic note and decide that that is definitely. definitely what is going to happen. Maddie Freeman, thank you for joining the Dispatch

Podcast. Thank you again for having you, Jimmy. You know,