Newsweek Starstruck by Abbas
April 27, 2011 15:43 by Alex Margolin
With the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the media’s focus has shifted to the Palestinian effort to win UN backing for an independent state. Newsweek reporter Dan Ephron spent a week with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as Abbas traveled across Europe to win support for his UN-based efforts.
Unfortunately, Ephron’s report reads like a tribute to the PA leader, not the work of a professional journalist.
Ephron describes Abbas as capable of harsh criticism of American and Israeli diplomacy “usually followed by grandfatherly smile,” a leader who represents “the best hope for peace.” At the same time, Ephron brushes aside all of the obstacles the Palestinians have placed in the way of peace, including the ongoing PA incitement, which has contributed to an increase in violence from areas under Abbas’s control.
Ephron demonstrates his lack of objectivity about Abbas:
But Abbas, who has worked every angle for Palestinian statehood for 50 years, the last six as president, says he’s nearly out of time. “I cannot wait. Somebody will wait instead of me,” he tells me. “And I will not stay more.”
In the context of the current reality, it is stunning to learn that Abbas “has worked every angle for Palestinian statehood for 50 years.” Prior to his term as PA Chairman, he spent many years as a founding member of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the driving force behind the PLO which was then known primarily for its hijackings, murder and terror. He has a long history of turning a blind eye to the violence around him.
And it continues to this day. As recently as March 28, 2011, a minister in Abbas’s government presented a special honor to the family of the mastermind of the Passover Massacre, the deadliest suicide bombing of the Second Intifada. The attack took place on March 27, 2002 at the Park Hotel, killing 30 people, mostly elderly Jews as they sat down for their Passover Seder.
The PA continues to name streets, summer camps, sporting events, and schools after terrorists.
While Abbas is often quoted in Western media outlets opposing the use of violence as a method of “resistance” against Israel, his own government continues to place terrorists in positions of honor and prestige.
The result is a hostile environment that continues to serve as a base for violence against Israelis. The two Palestinians arrested for the murder of five members of the Fogel family came from the PA-controlled West Bank.
But to reporters such as Ephron, Abbas bears no responsibility for promoting terrorists as heroes. To him, Abbas is “unequivocally against violence.”
A reporter with more journalistic integrity might also have challenged Abbas to explain why, if he “cannot wait,” did he choose to waste virtually all of Israel’s ten-month construction freeze – a freeze called to meet Abbas’s condition for direct negotiations, which never materialized. Or why he continues to refuse to hold productive talks.
It might also be useful to look at some of Abbas’s earlier comments, such as those he made to Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl in 2009 stating that he planned to wait for the US to pressure Israel to meet the Palestinian demands.
On Wednesday afternoon, as he prepared for the White House meeting in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, Abbas insisted that his only role was to wait. He will wait for Hamas to capitulate to his demand that any Palestinian unity government recognize Israel and swear off violence. And he will wait for the Obama administration to force a recalcitrant Netanyahu to freeze Israeli settlement construction and publicly accept the two-state formula.
But Ephron strongly implies on several occasions that Israel and Israel’s supporters are not interested in peace.
Now, on the flight from Tunis to Paris, I wanted to know how long Abbas could wait. The next 18 months are probably dead time in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy as Obama focuses on his reelection campaign. No candidate for president wants to risk alienating Israel’s supporters by pressing the peace question.
Numerous polls of Israeli public opinion indicate Israeli support for a genuine peace with the Palestinians. So it’s provocative to suggest that “pressing the peace question” would offend Israel’s supporters, especially if it yielded results without compromising Israel’s security. Israel’s supporters want peace. What they object to is one-sided pressure on Israel to make concessions without reciprocity.
The suggestion that Israel’s supporters would move against a candidate for promoting peace in the region also conjures images of a “Jewish Cabal” bent on thwarting progress. It gives the impression that Israel’s supporters care more about keeping the Palestinians down than in promoting harmony between the two sides.
A few paragraphs later, Ephron suggests that an opportunity for breakthrough had emerged when Abbas replaced Yassir Arafat as the PA leader.
The optimism didn’t last long. In short order Abbas lost his Parliament to the Islamists of Hamas and then lost Gaza to the same uncompromising group. By the time he and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert drew close to agreement in 2008, corruption charges made the Israeli leader a lame duck. Then Israelis elected Netanyahu.
Apparently, by choosing Netanyahu, Israelis again demonstrated a lack of interest in peace. His election is the final straw in a sequence of events that began with the Palestinians voting Hamas into power.
If Abbas is fighting for peace, then Israel, by implication, must be fighting against it. Apparently, the close access Abbas provided undermined the distance a reporter needs to see the whole picture.
Please send your considered comments to Newsweek at letters@newsweek.com.
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4:48 pm
Apr 27, 2011
[...] article can be viewed at Newsweek Starstruck by Abbas on [...]
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Dorothy Melvin
5:51 pm
Apr 28, 2011
I cancelled Newsweek some time back. The lack of responsible reporting had deteriorated to a point that I could no longer tolerate actually helping them financially. I occasionally would buy a copy. I will not do so again. They have sunk to an all-time low. Shame on people who call themselves “reporters” rather than what they are, personal commentators. And shame on a magazine that purports to report news in a non-factual and non-responsible manner.
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Jossef
6:05 pm
Apr 28, 2011
I have been a Newsweek subscriber for many years. There are several reasons why I am going to drop Newsweek as soon as my current subscription ends and this kind of “reporting” by Dan Ephron is just one more reason. Following Yasser Arafat, any leader of the PLO would look “reasonable” to western media. It is time to forget the caricature of Arafat and judge the PLO leadership not by relative terms, but based on who they really are. Abbas looks like a gentile grandfatherly figure, but he is deceitful.
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elio bollag
6:06 pm
Apr 28, 2011
No comment necessary : don’t we know enough our “partners” of peace ? The most important item Israel should concentrate today is the liberation of Gilad – at any cost.
After that we can eventually continue the discussion with the palestinians.
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elio bollag
10:00 am
May 22, 2011
first condition to enter peace discussions should be the release of Gilad -
Israel is used to the status quo and doesn’t need changes – the palestinian side has not shown any good will until now and should give an impotrtant sign of good will.
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Shira
6:21 pm
Apr 28, 2011
Yes, we all know how much “grandpa” Abbas has done for the Palestinian ppl and how much he promoted peace in the Middle East. I guess doing NOTHING is admirable to some western journalists who see it as a great improvement of mentality in the arab world…
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maurice kolevsohn
6:40 pm
Apr 28, 2011
I gave up reading newsweek and time,but would like to know if these magazines only select anti Israel articles written by anti israel journalists.its so rare to find someone who writes a balanced article and the truth
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B-A Hensen
7:09 pm
Apr 28, 2011
I’d have appreciated inclusion of the name of the article. It’s unclear.
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nursecrd
7:23 pm
Apr 28, 2011
Abbas’ problem is not so much Abbas as the people he represents, namely cut throats and criminals. Abbas is like a puppet on strings, they yank the string, Abbas jumps. So in essence, Abbas, who might be a credible person, is allowing others to make him look like a jackass.
As to Newsweek, I read them from time to time and their reporting is terribly leftist.
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Rostislav
7:57 pm
Apr 28, 2011
There was time, when KGB was running for those seen with Newsweek. Now I think they should be running for those seen without Newsweek: the magazine has finally become wise enough to sing anthems to the graduate of the KGB-inspired Lumumba University in Moscow – my, what a spectacular degradation! Rostislav, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
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June
8:13 pm
Apr 28, 2011
This is not the first time Newsweek has painted a picture of Israeli intransience and aggression. Where are the pictures of Palestinian children, some as young as three, throwing stones at Israelis (something I have personally witnessed)?
Grandfatherly looking Abbas has been proven not to be a credible person given the discrepency between his version of his phone call with Obama and those present in the room with the US President.
His joining with Hamas belies everything he has professed in the search for peace with Israel.
Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing!
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Shmuel Englard
8:35 pm
Apr 28, 2011
In the same issue of Newsweek, there is a large photograph depicting a young “settler child” throwing a stone at an Arab village. In the byline, it is mentioned that violence has escalated since “an alleged attack by Arab teenagers in which a settler family was killed.” The killing is made to seem as the work of individuals, with evidence that this was a planned attack completely ignored.
One cannot even say that an equivalence is made between the child throwing the stone, and the murders of the jewish family, because one who is unaware comes away from the spread far more sympathetic to the Arabs who committed the brutal slayings.
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Nathan Zafran
10:13 pm
Apr 28, 2011
If it wasn’t so serious this “unity” between Fatah and Hamas would merely be a bad joke. Only a few yeard ago, during the Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Fatah members were shot in the knees, or placed opposite a firing squads (Hamas actually photographed this), dragged them behind vehicles while still alive or simply threw them off high-rise buildings. The quench for revenge is very strong among the Arabs, and it’s difficult to believe that relatives of Hamas’ victims will not seek retribution from the murderers of their relatives. This union is similar to that of the other Iranian proxy, Hizballah, who are now a “respectable” party in Lebanon’s parliament, but are in fact accountable only to their paymasters in Iran, just as Hamas is. I hope that Israel and all other sensible people (not the usual pathological Israel-bashers), will see through this farce and realise that Hamas will not change and will remain the usual butcherous terrorists.
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Okey
11:00 pm
Apr 28, 2011
It appears that Ephron accepts Abbas’ definition of “peace”, namely, Israel’s total capitulation to all Arab extortion demands.
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Mark
11:20 pm
Apr 28, 2011
It was my hope that when the Harmans (and Gurley) took over Newsweek and shed some of their dead wood staff, Ephron would be one of the first to go. What a shame he was not. He has a consistent record of writing only poison pen stories about Israel over the years. It’s a sad fact that when he lived in Israel writing all of his anti Israel rants, it was Israel that protected him and his right to do so. Today he is presented by Newsweek as an “expert” who lived there for many years and is and expert in the issues. He truly seems to be one of those who hates to have been born Jewish, because it’s obvious in his writings that Jews can do no good. How sad it really must be for someone to hate who they are.
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Sammy Finkelman
9:04 pm
Apr 29, 2011
Abbas claimed that Obama came up with the idea of a settlement freeze and he just went along. This apparently was not denied by the Obama Administration, which did deny other things Abbas claimed. This part might actually be true.
Obama probably did not actually originate it himself but adopted an idea that came from somewhere else – maybe the Saudis.
Abnbas also claimed that George Mitchell did not pass along his idea to Israel. The response of the Obama Administration was to say taht “of couyrse” George Mitchell informed both sides of what was said. They also disputed how long the telephone alls between Obama and Abbas lasted and did not quote accept his summary.
This whole interview never revealed anything about the secret negotiations goinbg on with Hamas. But Ephron reported that Abbas’s whole entourage was against Bashir Assad (or cheered on the opposition) saying that was presumably because Syria supported Hamas.
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Sammy Finkelman
9:05 pm
Apr 29, 2011
That should be ideas rather than idea.
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RICHARD
1:17 pm
May 07, 2011
What is Newsweeks answer to all of this?
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Dom
6:55 am
May 21, 2011
Scary stuff. I remember a few months ago walking past a newsstand at the Port Authority in NYC and seeing a cover of Newsweek with, I believe, the Star of David on it along with a title that blatantly depicted Israel as the bully and its enemies, the victim. I couldn’t believe what I saw. From that day forward I’ve known Newsweek is completely askew and unreliable on any matter related to Israel. But what I don’t understand is why?
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