On Saturday I posted a blog piece about a newly preserved archive of photos and films of the Palestinian refugee experience. In it, I highlighted New York Times journalist Isabel Kershner's unprincipled piece on the subject. A current development in Israel brought Ms. Kershner to mind again.
In an upcoming session of Israel's parliament, called the Knesset, a bill called the Prawer Plan will be voted on. The plan would destroy 35 "unrecognized" Bedouin villages in the Negev Desert (the southern 60 percent of Israel) and displace up to 70,000 Bedouin Arabs. The Israeli government would then move these communities into state-planned towns. Concerns abound, with protests spreading internationally.
Kershner's piece on the protests and the Prawer plan de-emphasizes Israel's handling of the Bedouin. The article talks of plans to "regulate Bedouin settlement," "resolve a land dispute," and closes with a quote by Tzipi Livni, Israel's minister of justice, who calls the plan "a historic compromise." Much ado about nothing, in other words.
The Guardian's account, on the other hand, is sound journalism. It also underlines the fact that, generally speaking, British entertainers and artists are more willing to speak out on this issue than their American counterparts. Actors Viggo Mortensen and Danny Glover, musician Patti Smith, and author Alice Walker are among a very short list of exceptions.
In a 2011 blog post I discussed this phenomenon briefly (second link below). In short, the hesitancy among American entertainers is the same as that shared by American reporters working for top-tier newspapers: Israel is a US client, it is Jewish, the people at the receiving end of its policies are Arabs, and therefore its segregationist policies must be either ignored or described with an antiseptic vocabulary.
Similarly, celebrities and the New York Times tend to do better, more principled work when the political stakes are lower. For the Times, this means taking more civilized positions on domestic issues. For celebrities this means supporting causes such as animal rights and Darfur. Looked at together, the left-most edge of the centrist-liberal viewpoint becomes clearly demarcated.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/29/britons-protest-israel-plan-remove-palestinian-bedouin
