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Marcus Sheff is a media and communications professional based in Israel. He was a student activist in the UK before making aliyah in 1987. After completing his army service, he worked as a journalist at The Nation and The Jerusalem Post and as a correspondent for several foreign publications before setting up a leading advertising and publishing firm. Today he is Managing Director of Intermedia, a media communications company.
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By Marcus Sheff
December 5, 2004
British newspaper The Guardian and its contributor Daphna Baram seem to have developed a cozy if rather unorthodox symbiotic relationship. Baram it seems, has written a book (Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel) published by The Guardian, in which she reaches the utterly predictable conclusion that The Guardian is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Zionist. Absolutely and assuredly not.
In return, The Guardian happily allows Baram to prattle on about Israel (from Oxford) the main thrust of her arguments being that she is really a very nice person, a bit of a revolutionary, and so different than those other horrid Israelis.
It might seem staggeringly obvious that if a newspaper commissions and publishes a book about itself, it can't really expect to have the conclusions taken seriously. A rather odd pseudo-academic exercise of this nature cannot expect to engage Jews around the world who feel threatened by The Guardian's hostility.
Nor can it explain the paper's lead editorial on April 17, 2002, which compared the Israeli incursion in Jenin to the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, and stated that "Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime... Jenin already has that aura of infamy that attaches to a crime of especial notoriety" -- an embarrassment for which The Guardian has never apologized.
Indeed, the book can hardly offer any explanation at all as to why successive Guardian correspondents in Israel are despaired of by some really quite accommodating people who are tasked with dealing with the foreign press on behalf of Israel's various institutions.
But the quid, in this case, might be even more bizarre than the quo. For instance, on November 12, Baram authored a really quite malicious piece for The Guardian at Arafat's death, expressing her disgust at the "extended glee expressed by most Israelis". You would have thought that bunting-bedecked floats were parading down Dizengoff Street for two long weeks, along with festively attired Mariachi bands.
But as anyone who was in the country at the time will attest, ordinary Israelis, by their millions, simply got on with their lives. In fact, when interviewed by journalists, the majority dwelt on what a post-Arafat future will mean for the region, rather than expressing either great joy or sorrow - a fair reflection of discussions that took place around Israeli dinner tables and water coolers.
So God alone knows what she was bleating on about when she wrote that "The consequences of Arafat's death festival will haunt us [Israelis] for years. And for this cruel folly Israelis and Palestinians are likely to pay in the currency of innocent blood." What death festival, exactly? And why the dark and dire prophecy?
If the point was to inform The Guardian readership that, as she regales us in the very first paragraph, she worked in East Jerusalem "next door to the Orient House, where the Palestinian leadership had its headquarters for the human rights advocate, Lea Tzemel." And that "Lea and myself, two Jewish Israeli women working in a Palestinian neighborhood, were already a familiar part of the street's scene", one might have thought that there must be a more honest way of ingratiating yourself to Britain's chattering classes that by slandering Israelis.
Her most recent missive of 29 November is about her Jerusalem plumber and his Palestinian partner, the central point being more riveting details about Daphna's life as a political activist. Elsewhere, we read tales of why she is glad she has no children (something to do with guilt and her racist grandmother, apparently) and how she delicately nurtures young Israeli-Arab writers.
But it is in attacking the Labor Party on 1 December for supporting Sharon's disengagement plan and accusing the party of being serial stealth occupiers who, with Likud and Shinui represent the interests of Israel's pro-American middle-class, that she really loses any touch she might have had with the Israeli reality.
The Guardian readers might be surprised to learn that political life in Israel does not begin and end with a tiny and ultimately irrelevant Ashkenazi, non-Zionist cadre, meeting in Jerusalem cafes and reveling in the anti-establishment frisson as only the educated and well-connected middle-class can.
There are Israelis who actively support the Nusseibeh-Ayalon and Geneva initiatives. There are people involved in Jewish-Arab dialogue groups and there are of course the tens of thousands who turned up for the "so-called left" rally, as she called it, in Tel Aviv in June, supporting disengagement.
But most of all, there is a large center-left in Israel, made up of all classes and ethnic groups, which sent Rabin to sign the Oslo accords and Barak to Camp David to negotiate with Arafat. They are the people who want an end to the conflict more than they want a Greater Israel and who will give up territory in an effort to make it happen. In short, they are the Israelis who she snobbily dismisses, but who can actually effect the change that one can only assume Daphna Baram desires. Because occasionally, when the stars are in alignment, they are the people whose views are represented by the Israeli government.
It's never too late to ask The Guardian whether they think their readers might be inclined to hear voices from the Israeli center-left with the same regularity, rather than hearing tales of faux-revolutionary derrring-do from the extreme outer fringes of the Israeli political community, now residing in some Oxford college. But don't hold your breath.
Views expressed by the author do not
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