How coverage of the Jewish state became a signifier of the ideological activism that now permeates Western culture.
1/ Israel was an early target for adherents of the movement for social justice, but it wasn’t just that. It was a place to manufacture a mobilizing mythology.
2/ This year many people have discovered that liberal life and institutions in the West are in the grip of something resembling a new religion. Anyone following the doings of the past few months won’t need a recap of the attempted “cancellations” of scholars and scientists for heresies, the purge of editors for running the wrong op-ed, or the excommunication of J.K. Rowling.
3/ Upon gaining admission to the tribe of Western journalists in Jerusalem in 2006, I found that it wasn’t enough—or necessary, or sometimes even desirable—to be knowledgeable about the region or to speak its languages. The important thing was adopting a creed, one which seemed strange to me then but is widely familiar now. This outlook included a dim view of America; sympathy for all international organizations; an aversion to fervent Christianity and a healthy respect for fervent Islam; a considerate attitude toward despotic regimes from China to Iran, which are not “the problem”; the idea that the moral high ground has something to do with skin color; the belief that while groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood might sometimes go too far, they do have a point; and the idea that the world would probably be improved if Jewish sovereignty could somehow be reduced to zero percent from the current high of 0.01 percent.
4/ What I was seeing in the mainstream press was a move from rational observation into a kind of moral judgment that I knew from other parts of my life. The guiding idea was no longer to understand what was going on; there was nothing to understand. We knew who was right and who was wrong, and it remained only to anathematize the bad guys so far into disrepute that even the act of trying to understand them would be a kind of sin.
5/ To achieve this effect, the news narrative in Israel was constructed, without undue difficulty, with tricks of storytelling and framing: pretending the conflict is one between Israelis and Palestinians and not a much broader Middle Eastern war; pretending the Palestinian national movement merely wants a state beside Israel; dismissing Israeli attempts to solve the conflict on reasonable terms; erasing the actions of Israel’s opponents so Israel’s own actions and fears seem irrational or duplicitous; and suggesting the Jewish instinct for self-preservation in the Middle East is “right wing” while the Islamist war against Jews or the Iranian drive for regional hegemony are somehow about “human rights.”
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