A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond. First published in 2017, updated in 2024.
This is a difficult book to read, because of the amount of evil it describes. The author is an Australian journalist who lived in Israel for six years with his family. The 2017 ending is prophetic in view of the ongoing genocide in Gaza:
As Israel continues to rule over an increasingly large population – a minority Jewish population (based on demographics) is now on the brink of controlling the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – Israel’s occupation is, inevitably, doomed. The only question is whether what comes next will be an orderly, political process or a violent, chaotic one in which many people will die. I am by nature an eternal optimist. But after six years of living amid this conflict I fear that the latter is now almost inevitable.
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| Israeli soldiers walk through the Palestinian market of the Old City of Hebron. |
This book is essential for understanding not only the Middle East, but also the hasbara - the Israeli propaganda machine directed at foreigners, and especially the reporting of events related to Israel in the mainstream media and policies related to Israel and Jews in Australia. An interesting aspect is that even his Israeli acquaintance, and a fellow journalist Noga Tarnopolsky smeared his reputation anonymously (he investigated it, found out, and confronted her).
At the heart of this [Israeli] strategy is very clever lobbying and very clever political diplomacy. The Israelis make sure that in Europe and the US whatever you say about this conflict you risk paying a huge political price.’
It has become almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of any major Australian news outlet to be offered a ‘study trip’ to Israel. Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC, told me that AIJAC has sent at least 600 Australian politicians, journalists, political advisers, senior public servants and student leaders on these trips over the last 15 years.
Today, I barely know an Australian newspaper executive who has not been on one of these trips.
What I had not realised when I first arrived in Israel was that wave after wave of journalists, editors, academics, student leaders and trade union officials were taken to hear the same spin from the same small group of people used to defend Israel’s policies in the West Bank – that is, the occupation through settlements.
I was coming to realise that when you write about Israel you are open to a level of abuse I had never seen before. As a journalist, you quickly learnt that you could have a very pleasant life if you wrote what Israel wanted you to. In contrast, if you wrote what you saw in front of you – such as the massive growth in Israeli settlements in the West Bank – your editors would be hit with complaints and your professionalism would be impugned.
Essentially, the Israeli Government, Army and lobby groups did not want the reality of the occupation reported. Of the many hours of discussions I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Philippe Agret, the bureau chief of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: ‘Everybody.’
We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper. This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.’ But, said Haberman dryly, he finally discovered how to placate Israeli hardliners: ‘If I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: “50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.”’
