In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, says Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson is taking a one-side look at the Israeli-Arab conflict.
In the April 6 Globe and Mail, Ian Brown wrote about his interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, author of the recently released and much praised biography of U.S. President Barack Obama, The Bridge.
When the conversation turned to the simplistic stereotypes of Obama promoted by "Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News dogs" (as Brown put it), Remnick dismissed such treatment with an expletive but quickly explained his own approach: "All I’m insisting on, as a journalist is complexity. Everything is always more complex than the cartoon.”
Looking at much of the reporting and commentary on Israel cannot but make you regret that Remnick's insight is not more widely shared. Instead of complexity, all too often there is the cartoon instead.
Currently, the cartoon about Israel amounts to the following: Israel's in occupation of Palestinian land and must act to end the occupation, except that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to comply and so the conflict continues. Full stop.
If one objects that this characterization is itself a caricature of what's passing for analysis of Israel in some prestigious circles, consider what veteran columnist Jeffrey Simpson had to say in the Globe and Mail on April 20 (“Cracks in the bedrock of U.S.-Israel relations?”).
Simpson wrote of “[t]he failure of Israelis and the Palestinian Authority even to talk to each other,” without noting that Netanyahu has repeatedly called upon the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table without preconditions. PA President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to do so, using Obama’s tough approach with Israel over the settlement issue as an excuse to avoid taking Netanyahu up on his offer (even after Netanyahu agreed to a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction). Abbas even refuses to enter into indirect talks with Israel, using Obama’s disagreement with Netanyahu over Jewish housing in east Jerusalem as an additional excuse not to engage with Israel.
Yet in Simpson’s account, Abbas’ refusal to speak with Israel was simply not mentioned. It’s as if it doesn’t really matter. For Simpson, the onus for the failure to return to negotiations falls entirely on Israel. Virtually ignoring what Netanyahu has said, Simpson argued that “Netanyahu occasionally says he’s willing to talk, but little in his long career suggests he is committed to serious discussions, let alone formal negotiations.” Netanyahu’s policy is reduced by Simpson to one term – “obduracy.”
Simpson’s only reference to the Palestinians is to describe them merely as innocent victims of the “grave injustices that have systematically been done to [them]” by Israel, in particular by Israel’s settlement policy.
According to Simpson, Abbas and the PA, and Hamas, bear no responsibility at all for the impasse in the peace process. Since Simpson ignored history, there was no mention of the fact that Abbas refused former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of a Palestinian state, an offer made during a negotiating process that wasn't conditioned on the cessation of settlement activity. For all the controversy that surrounds them, settlements aren't the core of the impasse. (As this column has noted before, while a complicating factor, the settlement issue is resolvable, unlike the far deeper and seemingly unresolvable Palestinian rejection of Jewish sovereignty and their insistence on the “right of return” to present-day Israel.)
But, again, in Simpson’s simplistic rendering, Palestinian rejectionism is not a factor since, apparently, Palestinian intentions and actions are of no concern.
All that matters is putting pressure on Israel alone. “That the Israelis can’t be pushed [toward a deal] is obvious to objective observers,” Simpson wrote, no doubt counting himself among this privileged “objective” crowd.
By failing to acknowledge the Palestinians as central actors with moral responsibility for their fate, and by reducing Israel’s leaders to obdurate officials refusing to be “pushed’ to a deal (under the wholly unwarranted assumption that a deal is just waiting to be had), Simpson drew what amounts to a caricature – a distillation of convenient clichés and what passes for conventional wisdom these days.
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