Any student of journalism knows that there are certain values to consider when judging whether a story is newsworthy. Is it significant? Is it of interest? Is it timely? And is it relevant to the audience?
These are all questions with which decent journalists grapple regularly. But at The New York Times, it seems that these concepts often don’t apply to reporting on Israel’s alleged misdeeds.
A recent article by David Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon serves to underline the extent of the ongoing bias against Israel at the “newspaper of record.”
Entitled, “An Autistic Man Is Killed, Exposing Israel’s Festering Police Brutality Problem,” the authors depict Israeli authorities as having “failed to rein in the use of excessive force, which has a long history.”
Throughout, the over 2000 words long piece fails to acknowledge that Jerusalem is a city that has been plagued by terrorism and remains at the heart of a territorial conflict. Israeli police and military, as well as civilians, have over the years been victims of shooting, stabbing and car ramming attacks.
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Only in the twelfth paragraph do the writers make reference to this reality and even then in a roundabout way, describing Jerusalem’s Old City as one of the “most volatile hot spots” where “deadly errors” can arise. And only a few paragraphs later do they mention that this is all taking place against the backdrop of “the front lines of a national conflict.”
Prior to contextualizing matters, though, Halbfinger and Rasgon claim that, “lethal force, while rare, is wielded almost exclusively against Arabs and other minorities.” Accordingly, many readers are unlikely to grasp that Arabs killed by Israeli police are beforehand perceived as clear threats. They do not mention decades of rampant Palestinian terrorism, which has placed the Jewish state on perpetual high alert.
Moreover, police brutality is a problem in nearly every country, nowhere more so than in illiberal “democracies” and authoritarian states such Russia, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Venezuela. Yet for some reason, despite this particular story not being highly relevant to American readers, and despite the episode ending months ago, the NYT is now reviving it.
Then there are the perpetual unnamed “critics.” Here, they say that a “culture of impunity pervades [Israel’s] police force, particularly in cases with minority victims. Ethiopian-Israelis, ultra-Orthodox Jews and left-wing activists are disproportionately victimized” along with the Palestinians.
If The New York Times really wanted to provide meaningful detail about the situation, it could have presented Israel as a country with unique challenges — it has absorbed wave after wave of immigrants, contains a subset of religious Jews who are vehemently opposed to the conceptual foundation upon which the modern State of Israel was built, and is home to a vociferous and fractious left/right political divide.
Well-Documented Obsession with Israel
The Times has previous when it comes to investigating alleged Israeli misdeeds. In 2018, for example, it commissioned Forensic Architecture to help conduct a study into the events of June 1 earlier that year, when 20-year-old Palestinian medic Rouzan al-Najjar was killed during violent protests along the Gaza Strip border.
The incident sparked a fierce public debate at the time, and the NYT investigation later re-opened the conversation. It concluded that Israeli troops had fired into the ground, that a bullet had ricocheted, and subsequently killed al-Najjar. These findings led to renewed accusations that Israel had committed a war crime. Indeed, those words were used in David Halbfinger’s report on the investigation (emphasis added) : “Though Israel later admitted her killing was unintentional, the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime.“
At the bottom of that 4,700-plus word article, the Times declared that:
We collected and analyzed more than 1,000 photos and videos taken on June 1 by photographers, protesters, bystanders and medics. We reviewed the visual evidence with over 30 witnesses.
The Times also took drone video of the protest field and worked with the research agency Forensic Architecture to create a 3D model of it. “
It’s worth pausing for a second. The Times examined in excess of 1,000 photographs and videos in a ‘forensic investigation’ of the event, determined that the Gaza medic had been killed by an Israeli bullet which had ricocheted off the ground, and concluded that this was “possibly a war crime.”
It would be laughable if not so outrageous and libelous.
It is also worth noting that the research firm in question, Forensic Architecture, has conducted 66 investigations to date, of which 14 focused on the actions of Israeli soldiers or the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. In other words, one in every five investigations it has carried out has looked into Israeli behaviour.
This should come as no surprise, given that the organization is run by Eyal Weizman, an Israeli ex-pat who also conducted research on behalf of B’Tselem on the “planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,” and who has close ties to multiple radical left-wing organizations in Israel.
B’Tselem, for example, has been accused of “major omissions and distortions,” using figures that are not reliable, and failing to present definitive evidence that would justify its allegations that Israel violated international humanitarian law during the 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza.
Forensic Architecture has also undertaken “research” for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders (MSF), the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations — all organizations with dubious records when it comes to Israel.
Related Reading — The Halo Effect: Why Trust Should Never Be Blind
Lack of Accountability?
At various points, the writers refer to a lack of police accountability, but not once do they reflect upon the nature of Israeli society. Like so many other countries, Israel has its fractures and challenges, which at times create a dynamic which enables police unaccountability. It is a much more complex than the simplistic argument that Israeli police officers or the system itself is racist.
The context of an ongoing conflict means that restricting the police and military is hardly a priority in the eyes of most Israelis, who view the authorities as carrying out a vital job on the front lines. Together with the political divisions such as the left-right split which exist in all democracies, and ethnic and religious fractures, there’s plenty of room to analyze how the police and public interact. Israelis themselves have much to say on the topic.
The reality is that the Israeli police are not inherently more brutal than their counterparts anywhere else. Rather, Israel is a melting pot of different ethnic, political and religious groups, and the police is dealing with both civil affairs and one of the world’s longest-lasting conflicts. These stressful circumstances demand recognition. This does not to excuse unacceptable behavior by the authorities; rather, that focusing uniquely on Israeli society serves to exacerbate tensions, not improve them.
