 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
October/November 2007
Opinion
Gershom Gorenberg
Uncandid CAMERA
Let’s be fair: Some criticism of media coverage of Israel is justified—-and some of the media’s unflattering coverage is accurate and necessary. It is not the press’s job to provide PR for any government.
I got hit by CAMERA a couple of years ago, to my great relief. Recently, I nearly got swiped again, but not quite. Alas.
CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, is a Boston-based watchdog group that says it aims at “improving coverage of Israel and the Middle East” by monitoring the media and responding to what it regards as biased reporting. It’s the organizational embodiment of some American Jews’ discomfort with any media coverage that fails to portray Israel with a halo. As a responsible member of Israel’s fourth estate, I’ve often been critical of my country’s policies. Yet CAMERA ignored me—while attacking colleagues whom I respect for solid, careful writing on the Mideast. I wondered what I was doing wrong.
Finally, CAMERA demanded a correction of a 2006 op-ed article I wrote for the Los Angeles Times about U.S. policy on the legality of Israeli settlements. More recently, it bashed CNN for its reporting on the same subject in a three-part documentary, God’s Warriors. CAMERA left me out of the latter tiff, though CNN was citing my research and interviewed me for the documentary. Both incidents show that in pursuit of “accuracy,” CAMERA can be cavalier with facts.
The facts are that, from the Johnson to the Carter administrations, Washington regarded settlements as violating international law. So did the Israeli government’s own legal expert, Theodor Meron, at the time it approved the first settlements. Meron, now recognized as one of the world’s top authorities on international law, stands by his original opinion.
In my L.A. Times op-ed, “West Bank Buildup,” I noted that in 1968 the State Department instructed the U.S. embassy in Israel to remind Israeli officials that America considered the settlements illegal. CAMERA shot off a letter to the editor insisting that I was mistaken: “only Carter's administration… held that the settlements violated international law.” When contacted by my editor, I explained that I was quoting a cable dated April 8, 1968, signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It said that settling Israeli civilians in the West Bank was “contrary to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states ‘The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’” In 1976, I added, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. William Scranton said the same thing in the Security Council.
Case closed. Sort of. On its website—for instance, in a screed against CNN’s God’s Warriors—CAMERA continues to attribute the position that settlements are illegal to the Carter administration alone. For PR purposes, this is convenient. Many Jews regarded Jimmy Carter as unfriendly to Israel long before his recent book. But if CAMERA were really interested in accuracy, it would revise its story.
It’s true, as CAMERA says, that Ronald Reagan said in 1981 that settlements were “not illegal,” even if he did call them “ill-advised” and “unnecessarily provocative.” Reagan, no legal scholar, blindsided the State Department’s legal office with a view that could politely be termed unusual. Since then, though, U.S. administrations have phrased their opposition to the settlements in political, rather than legal, terms.
Internationally, this is the minority view. William Quandt, author of Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, says that other than Israel and the U.S., “no other governments that I know of” accept it. Quandt suggests that after Reagan deemed settlement legal, “anyone who said it wasn’t…would be viewed as anti-Israeli” in the U.S. Aaron David Miller—the ex-diplomat who advised six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, and author of the forthcoming The Much Too Promised Land—suggests another kind of pressure. Once a Mideast peace process was underway, American presidents and secretaries of state “knew they had to maintain the trust” of Israeli leaders and so avoided the legal issue.
One scholar who clearly labeled settlements illegal was Meron, who in 1967 was the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser. Before the first settlement was approved, he wrote a top-secret memo stating that settling Israeli civilians in the territories “contravenes the explicit provisions of the Geneva Convention,” though temporary military bases, he said, were acceptable. I found this now-declassified document in the Israel State Archives and published it last year in my book, The Accidental Empire.
CNN quoted Meron’s memo in God’s Warriors. But CAMERA, in attack mode, faulted the network for failing to mention “more senior Israeli experts.” This is silly several times over. As the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, Meron—the government’s in-house authority on international law at the time—was the senior expert. And before Meron wrote his opinion, then-Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira had told Prime Minister Levi Eshkol the same thing.
Meron later left Israel to teach at New York University, where he gained stature as one of the world’s leading scholars on the laws of war. As an American citizen, he was appointed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where he is a member of the Appeals Chamber. In an interview with CNN, he affirmed his original position on settlement. CAMERA skips this context in its effort to misrepresent the legal issues.
Let’s be fair: Some criticism of media coverage of Israel is justified—and some of the media’s unflattering coverage is accurate and necessary. It is not the press’s job to provide PR for any government. Until CAMERA gets this straight, self-respecting journalists will regard an occasional snarl from the watchdog as proof that they’re doing their job.
Gershom Gorenberg is a Jerusalem-based journalist and the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.
Digg this!
Save on del.icio.us
Share on Facebook