(no subject)
May. 1st, 2012 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretOh, by the way, since I haven't been pissed enough at anti-semites lately...
60 Minutes did a story Sunday before last on Christians in Israel.
And it was in some places a reasonably fair-minded piece on a difficult issue. Israel is not persecuting Christians- even the left-wing Israeli interviewed in the story who opposes the Wall and the Settlements admits that- but the Wall and the Settlements and the whole Situation have made life difficult for Arab Christians living in Israel. This is a fair criticism of Israeli policy. The frustrating thing about gotcha politics is that it can make it harder to say things like "Yes, this happened because someone made a decision about acceptable collateral damage. You can disagree with the line drawn and have a valid point. Even we as defenders of Israel are not sure about this."
Of course, the reason the wall was constructed was not to make life difficult for Arab Christians. It was to make life safer for the millions of people- Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Bahai and Hindu and Atheist- who live in Israel and have been terrorized by bombers determined to make the act of walking down the street as dangerous as possible. Yet not once does the story interview anyone from the Palestinian leadership. 60 Minutes frames the story as being about what Israel has done to Arab Christians, not as what the fight between Israel and Palestine has done to Arab Christians. So... this was not surprising as the framing, but it was the start of my disappointment.
And as the 60 Minutes piece DOES gleefully point out, Israel is deeply dependent on American Christian tourists for a significant portion of its GDP, so that stories critical of Israel's treatment of Christians in a major American media source have the ability to have a direct effect on Israel's economy. This isn't merely a hatchet job. This is 60 Minutes holding the power to damage Israel's economy in its hand and making the knowing decision to use that power.
And it does become a hatchet job at the end, when 60 Minutes confronts Michael Oren with accusations that... Jews run the media. I mean, holy shit, the idea that in this day and age it's acceptable to try to run a story from that angle on a mainstream American television show!!!! It makes steam fly out my ears.
For what it's worth, and I don't think it's worth much since this ought to be obvious to any thinking person, but for what it's worth, if you're the ambassador and you get word that a biased report is going to run a story that could damage perception of your country, it is your job to try to influence that report positively. This is not something unreasonable and out of control that Michael Oren did. It is not something sinister. He did not call up his secret Zionist conspirators and order them to bury the story. He called the person who made the ultimate call on the story and lobbied him for a more positive spin, and when asked on camera he straightforwardly answered questions about what he did, while his interviewer hurled veiled contempt and ludicrous indignation at him.
So fuck you, Bob Simon.
60 Minutes did a story Sunday before last on Christians in Israel.
And it was in some places a reasonably fair-minded piece on a difficult issue. Israel is not persecuting Christians- even the left-wing Israeli interviewed in the story who opposes the Wall and the Settlements admits that- but the Wall and the Settlements and the whole Situation have made life difficult for Arab Christians living in Israel. This is a fair criticism of Israeli policy. The frustrating thing about gotcha politics is that it can make it harder to say things like "Yes, this happened because someone made a decision about acceptable collateral damage. You can disagree with the line drawn and have a valid point. Even we as defenders of Israel are not sure about this."
Of course, the reason the wall was constructed was not to make life difficult for Arab Christians. It was to make life safer for the millions of people- Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Bahai and Hindu and Atheist- who live in Israel and have been terrorized by bombers determined to make the act of walking down the street as dangerous as possible. Yet not once does the story interview anyone from the Palestinian leadership. 60 Minutes frames the story as being about what Israel has done to Arab Christians, not as what the fight between Israel and Palestine has done to Arab Christians. So... this was not surprising as the framing, but it was the start of my disappointment.
And as the 60 Minutes piece DOES gleefully point out, Israel is deeply dependent on American Christian tourists for a significant portion of its GDP, so that stories critical of Israel's treatment of Christians in a major American media source have the ability to have a direct effect on Israel's economy. This isn't merely a hatchet job. This is 60 Minutes holding the power to damage Israel's economy in its hand and making the knowing decision to use that power.
And it does become a hatchet job at the end, when 60 Minutes confronts Michael Oren with accusations that... Jews run the media. I mean, holy shit, the idea that in this day and age it's acceptable to try to run a story from that angle on a mainstream American television show!!!! It makes steam fly out my ears.
For what it's worth, and I don't think it's worth much since this ought to be obvious to any thinking person, but for what it's worth, if you're the ambassador and you get word that a biased report is going to run a story that could damage perception of your country, it is your job to try to influence that report positively. This is not something unreasonable and out of control that Michael Oren did. It is not something sinister. He did not call up his secret Zionist conspirators and order them to bury the story. He called the person who made the ultimate call on the story and lobbied him for a more positive spin, and when asked on camera he straightforwardly answered questions about what he did, while his interviewer hurled veiled contempt and ludicrous indignation at him.
So fuck you, Bob Simon.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-02 03:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-02 02:28 pm (UTC)It's also designed, incidentally, to try to define a border. It gets underplayed by the Left, but one of the things the Wall does is tell Israeli settlers on the other side of the wall that they're likely to not be part of any ultimate settlement, that they can't expect full IDF support if they're attacked, that they're acting outside of Israel's overall ambitions for the West Bank as an integrated part of Israel. The Wall is Israel's concession that there will be a Palestinian state and it will be given a chance to succeed on its own.
But shit, this stuff is complicated. The truth is that at the moment Israel and Palestine are tremendously intertwined economically and many Palestinians are dependent on work in Israel. The wall has made it harder for them to get to their jobs and has in the short run made life harder for innocents in the Palestinian territories. This is at least partially by design. Like I said, a major goal of the wall is to delineate a Palestinian state and give it a chance to succeed on its own. As long as Israel and Palestine are economically inextricable that can never happen. And also, and I think this is the ugliest and least-spoken about part of the Israeli plan, Israeli and Palestinian utility infrastructures are intertwined and most of the capital structures are located on the Israeli side of the wall. Essentially the wall puts Palestinian access to water and power up for ransom. These two truths are legitimate points of criticism about the wall plan. There is no short term solution to these problems, only long term solutions.