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Purchase by Richard Ben Cramer.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer admits he doesn't really know Israel, yet he feels free to lecture us on what Israel's done wrong.
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| By Ellis Shuman June 14, 2004 |
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Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer knew in advance that his new book would be controversial. Anything written about the Middle East conflict would be considered controversial, he decided, and over the years, he had been aware how everyone perceived his own views as heretical. So he dived unabashedly into Israel and the Palestinian territories, areas which he had covered previously as a reporter in 1979, to tell the story in his own words, even if he ended up with "nasty conclusions."
The result, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (Simon & Schuster, May 2004) lays out with rare candor, vividness and provocative insight the dangerous situation Israel finds itself in today, in the author's perspective.
In the book, which admittedly reads well and is full of anecdotes and a very personal style, Cramer asks four questions, but in reality, he only asks one, central question and to that provides one sole answer. The four questions which account for the four divisions of the book are:
 Why do we care about Israel?
Why don't the Palestinians have a state?
What is a Jewish State?
Why is there no peace?
Cramer contends that the reason Americans care about Israel was due to the highly competent Israeli public relations machine, which "convinced us that Israelis are like us." But after 35 years of occupying Palestinian territories, Israel no longer seems like home to many Americans. "Or to put it another way: somewhere along the line, we got the feeling, 'they aren't like us.' Or maybe we don't want to be like them. And this is just one of the ways - one big one - how Israel lost," Cramer writes.
As for the Palestinians, Cramer is highly critical of Yasser Arafat and Arab governments. But, in Cramer's opinion, the Palestinians have no state today because Israel hasn't let them have one. Israel is responsible for the waves of suicide bombings as well, Cramer writes, because it was Israel that violated attempts for Palestinian cease-fires. Israel, the United States, and the world cannot ignore the extent to which the occupation is creating "factories for suicide bombers," as one Israeli journalist put it.
Cramer jokes that everybody's going to hate him for explaining why there is no peace today in the Middle East. There is no peace, he claims, because no one in a position of power on either the Israeli or the Palestinian side really wants one. "Let's drop the gloves. It was a phony 'peace process' from the jump."
Only one answer
Although on the surface the book gives answers to the four previous questions, Cramer is really asking only one central question all along. He reported from the Middle East in 1979, and for that he won a Pulitzer Prize. Returning to Israel 25 years later, he discovered that "the ground had shifted - something big was up." The book project, therefore, was born to answer the question: "What happened?"
And for this central question, Cramer provides a simple, one-word answer: Occupation. According to Cramer, Israeli society hardened, and moral standards in public and personal life declined, all because of the occupation. Cramer suggests that the callousness in decreasing Israeli concern about the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians and even the many corruption scandals that have engulfed so many Israeli political leaders, all have their source in Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
"It seems to me a real loss," Cramer writes. "And as I've said (and shown, as my powers permitted) - I blame the occupation. It is corrosive."
"The Palestinians are a nation - and they're in their country," Cramer lectures us. But Israel is the only nation in the world that can't see that Jews and Arabs should both be regarded as humans, with "an equal right to a place on the planet," he says.
The way to end the Middle East conflict, to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Israel and its Arab neighbors, is very simple in Cramer's eyes. "No Israeli government has ever tried to make peace on the formula everybody knows is a winner: Give back the land," he writes.
Unfortunately, before he arrives at this judgment, Cramer reaches some conclusions that are not exactly based in fact. Apparently not a student of history, he believes the first terror attacks on Israeli citizens followed the Six Day War. And he regards the statement that the roots of the conflict are religious as a myth. Perhaps he has never paid attention to the Arab media or listened to sermons of Muslim clerics.
Cramer also has his facts wrong regarding the "separation fence," which the author determines is "not really a fence, but a massive concrete wall - about twenty feet high." And finally, Cramer concludes that Israel should end the conflict because the Palestinians "would give up their claims to their old homes in Israel."
Cramer "has written an ignorant and hence irrelevant attack on a country and its people in a state of war," concludes journalist Elena Lappin in her review of this book in the New York Times. She suggested that "it would have been a different, far more honest book if it had contained his own personal truth: How Richard Ben Cramer Lost Israel."
"See, I thought I knew the country - but it turned out, I didn't," Cramer admits early in the book. And for someone who doesn't really know what Israel is all about to lecture readers on "what happened" to Israel makes for a pretty sloppy case of reporting.
Cramer is the author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life and What It Takes: The Way to the White House. He lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions
By Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster
May 2004
288 pages
Purchase How Israel Lost: The Four Questions.
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