Israel is the victor.
It is a pioneer.
An innovator.
It took a land without a people
and made it blossom at the hands
of a people without a land.
Israel is necessary.
Israel is a haven.
It is moral.
It is a democracy.
Israel is...
America.
Israel occupies, no pun intended, a unique position
in the American news media landscape,
in its political landscape, and, more than
anywhere else, in the American consciousness
and imagination.
So let me be clear about what I believe.
I stand with Israel because of our shared values
which are so fundamental
to the founding of both our nations.
Advocacy itself is not the cause
of the bond between the United States and Israel.
Its cause is the shared history and common values
that draw America
and Israel
together.
There is an assumption of virtue, of a greater good, in America's official history
that has been consciously reproduced by Israel's advocates for a large part
of the last century in an attempt to
Americanize the Israeli project.
And so when the curtain is pulled away to reveal
the violence that upholds Israel's existence,
there is an understanding from the United States
of the "necessity" of this violence.
Because Israeli violence is necessary to protect Israel from threats to its exceptional existence.
Just as American violence is necessary to protect the United States
from threats to its exceptional existence.
How Israel is covered in the U.S. news and popular media serves to obscure the biggest thing
that ties the United States and Israel together.
They're both settler colonial states
which have been built on the displacement and ethnic cleansing
of other peoples.
And so to tell the story of Israel in U.S. news media
has required, for over seven decades,
the disappearance of Palestinians, their history
and their right to their homeland.
Because a cultural narrative about Israel
where Palestinians and their history
are front and center, would also then require that
we are honest about the violence
that belies every part of the myth
of American exceptionalism.
Welcome to “Backspace,” where we tell you how the story is told in the headlines, and then
we think about how we can tell it a little differently.
In the seven decades since Israel was established
as a state in the British mandate of Palestine,
American engagement - ideological, political,
cultural - with the Jewish state has seen
different iterations.
But at its core, these iterations have relied on being a mirror of the American nation.
And in that mirroring, Israel has been assigned a duality,
as both the victim and victor.
Israel is a victor,
emerging from one of the cruelest crimes of the 20th century
as a successful, unified people
who have built a formidable nation despite thousands of years in a persecuted diaspora.
Modern Israel was born in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Holocaust.
It was created to fulfill the long-standing dream of the Jewish people to return to the
home of their biblical origins.
Israel is a beacon of democracy
in a sea of violence and hostility.
Israel is the most important technology force
in the world next to the United States.
Israel is a victim
surrounded by enemies who want to drive it into the sea.
Israel has a right to defend itself.
Israel is surrounded by countries
and entities that want to drive them into the sea.
Tensions are rising after the deadliest wave of
Palestinian terror attacks inside Israel in years.
It has the right to eliminate the cancer
that is threatening its very existence.
There are many reasons why the U.S. has this
distinctive relationship with Israel, but
I think the one that is most important
is actually cultural.
That is, we have a long history of representing Israel as being tied
to U.S. interests, but also to U.S. values, to religious values and democratic values.
Those representations have shaped most of us in one way or another
to think of Israel as more than just a strategic ally
or a good military partner.
For a cultural history that extolls shared values,
it must build those shared values in opposition to other ideas, other values,
and in the case of state and nationalist identities,
other people.
U.S. news and popular media have built a case for Israel
reliant on the disappearance of Palestinians and any claim they have to their land.
On the disappearance of their history of ethnic cleansing, the theft of their lands,
and their ever-expanding diaspora.
- It's a time of border trouble for Israel.
And another incident on the Jordanian frontier results in a roundup of Arab infiltrators,
action that follows an attempt by these illegal entrants into the country
to terrorize the Israeli populace living near this troubled line.
- The militant Arabs claimed a territorial right to Jerusalem and Palestine
that was a thousand years old.
But the determined leaders of Zionism pleaded a right that was even older.
- Four Israeli settlers gunned down yesterday in the West Bank
by Hamas, the Palestinian faction which opposes peace talks.
- To return to Palestine would be to displace Israel.
We want to think about how Palestinians are not just entirely invisible,
but made visible in a particular way, which is either as terrorist or as victims.
If we think about the comparison between the United States as a settler colonial state
and Israel as one, we can think about how people in the U.S. presented Native Americans.
They were presented as disappearing,
as not having political claims.
You know, often people were very sad about what had happened to them, but what to do?
Palestinians are not seen for a long time, but when they are seen,
starting in the 1980s more,
they begin to be seen as people who might have political claims,
but the story of them is
a story of people who are victims,
who have a sad story,
but Israel had to be Israel.
A counter-narrative to the American story about Israel that would be told from the
Palestinian vantage point would also indict the sustained American histories
and realities of violence against its Indigenous and Black populations.
Thus, Palestinians must be made into, at best,
pitiful victims caught as collateral
in Israel's attempt to defend itself,
and at worst,
as generation after generation of
“terrorist” threats.
- It doesn't really matter what the Palestinians do.
They can they can blow up
whomever they want to blow up,
they can elect Hamas
when given an opportunity to move forward,
they can take one chance after another
to recognize the state of Israel and their
right to exist, and they will not do it.
The last few times that
negotiations have taken place,
the emphasis has been on asserting that Israel
has been victimized by terrorist activities,
by Hamas,
by the failure of the Palestinians
to govern themselves.
In both representations of Palestinians,
the purpose of the state of Israel, the political status quo and its carefully curated image
remain intact.
Even when Israeli crimes and transgressions
beyond the expanding occupation, land theft
and apartheid are clear,
Israel's moral authority isn't questioned.
Questioning that moral authority is akin to
questioning the necessity of Israel.
So how did we get to this point,
where deference to Israel's moral power is reflexive and unquestioned,
a privilege not enjoyed by other countries
and nations?
It's too reductive to think that a pro-Israel lobby is alone
in building Israel in the American landscape, that they alone have had this power.
It's also not enough to look at U.S. foreign policy interests
in the region as the sole determinant of Israel's narrative power
in U.S. news and popular media.
Both those things are central, of course,
but what brings it all together
is the cultural history of Israel in the United States,
how Israel was understood
by Americans in the aftermath of the
Second World War,
and how much of that has been a mirroring of
how the United States sees itself.
There's a tendency to believe that the horrors of
the Holocaust are what led to American support
and sympathy for the establishment
of a Jewish state in Palestine.
But the late Dr. Amy Kaplan, in her 2018 book,
“Our American Israel,”
makes the argument that for Israel to be
embraced by Americans,
the idea of Israel had to be Americanized.
She writes, Israel's "proponents attributed
New World meanings, symbols, and mythologies
to a European movement to establish
a Jewish polity in the Arab Middle East.
They drew parallels between 'Mayflower' Pilgrims
and Jewish pioneers
in the familiar landscape of the
biblical Promised Land,
and they presented Zionist settlement as
enacting American ideas of modern development."
- In 1948, David Ben-Gurion,
the George Washington of Israel,
led his people and his country to independence.
And this mirroring, according to Kaplan, wasn't hard to do, especially when both shared a
belief in their exceptionalism as signified by how they celebrated their anti-colonial origins,
struggling against the British Empire, and distancing themselves from the
violent conquest at the center of their founding.
Just as Indigenous peoples are erased from the founding of an America free from
British colonizers,
Palestinians are mostly disappeared
in Israel's founding.
- At the founding of the Israeli state,
there was almost no recognition
of Palestinians at all.
Even the word Palestinian was often used
to refer to Palestinian Jews,
people who had moved there.
Palestinian Arabs were all but invisible.
They were talked about only as refugees.
The idea that they even represented a national
consciousness was nowhere to be seen.
So it was the Israelis who had the narrative of
decolonization and nationalism behind them.
While some major news media like "The New York Times"
were vehemently anti-Zionist,
the narrative of decolonization and nationalism was embraced by many non-Jewish American
liberals and progressives.
They saw a Jewish state as the perfect rebuke
to Nazi fascism, paralleling the official narrative of the
U.S.’ defeat of Nazi Germany.
They also saw Israel as an actualization of socialist ideals,
especially with the establishment of
kibbutzim and the Soviet Union’s
initial support for Israel.
“The Nation,” a left-leaning magazine,
was home to some of the biggest and most active support of Israel
and helped create the blueprint
for how the narrative of Israel would come to be embraced in the United States news media
for the coming decades, even if “The Nation” evolved its own position on Israel over time.
The Jewish Agency, founded by socialist Zionists
who helped organize and fund Jewish immigration
to Palestine,
gave “The Nation” a grant of $50,000 in 1947,
for the purposes of, “conducting research and publishing articles and reports and promoting
the Zionist cause among American liberals and foreign delegates to the United Nations.”
Emboldened by this, its longtime editor,
Freda Kirchwey, dedicated the pages of
“The Nation” and its entire publishing institution
to lobbying for the Zionist cause.
Between 1947 and 1954, the Nation Associates,
which was responsible for publishing the magazine, produced 12 widely distributed reports
campaigning for the Zionist cause.
Kirchwey even wrote a 133-page memorandum
for the UN on behalf of “The Nation,”
making the case for Israel
and tying the Arab Palestinians to the Nazis,
which became a mainstay of liberal arguments
against Palestinian self-determination,
thanks to her efforts.
She ultimately even took credit for
pushing the Truman administration into
recognizing the state of Israel.
The Jews organized a government over there,
and it's been a successful one ever since.
Now, Kirchwey is just one of several examples of American media liberals and progressives
who worked diligently and successfully alongside Zionist groups and leaders
to make Israel into a liberal project and ideal that looked like the United States.
And for every sentence dedicated to
what a beacon and necessity Israel was
as a pioneering nation of the so-called “new Jew,”
there were many more dedicated to trumpeting
the barbarity, jealousy and backwardness
of Arabs and Muslims.
This early period of creating myths around Israel isn't the only critical era in the cultural history
of Israel in the United States, but it is the bedrock of how Israel comes to be essentially
Americanized in the eyes of the public.
This is the time where there is buy-in from Americans from all different backgrounds
that yeah, maybe Israel is necessary.
Maybe Israel is good.
And following this period, we see tourism to the
"land of the Bible," which had existed
well before Israel's establishment,
flourish throughout the '50s and '60s,
as do epic biblical films and the
relationship between Hollywood and Israel itself.
The '60s, in particular, are bookended by
two critical moments that guaranteed
Israel's positioning in both an American consensus
about its necessity and goodness,
and in the U.S.' foreign policy future:
the release of the 1960 film "Exodus,"
which was supported by the Israeli government
and based on the novel by Leon Uris,
and Israel’s quick victory over its neighbors
in the war of June 1967.
I think the book "Exodus" resonated differently for different audiences.
I think for non-Jewish people, the book, but especially the movie,
tells the story of Israel in an American register.
It tells the story of Israel as the settling of a frontier.
1967 is an incredible turning point in Americans’ views of Israel.
Almost every newspaper or magazine has some
joke or comment about how maybe we need
to bring Moshe Dayan over
to end the Vietnam War.
Israel takes on this new vision or new version of a
myth in the U.S. as an invincible
and admired military power.
So that image that emerges after 1967,
that the U.S. should be both
with Israel and like Israel
in terms of foreign policy, I think is one of the structuring realities to this day
in how many people think about Israel.
Palestinians during these years more or less disappear from having any claim,
only significantly reappearing as so-called
“terrorists,” with high-profile acts of violence
like the 1972 Munich massacre
of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes,
and then as victims in 1982,
with the Israeli-backed massacre of Palestinian refugees
in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Lebanon.
And in "Our American Israel,”
Dr. Amy Kaplan also and most emphatically
notes that while we saw decades of Israel being Americanized for an American audience,
following 9/11, we see an Israelization of the United States.
We see a shift from the long-held, “admiration of Israel as a mirror of America's idealized self-image,
to emulation of Israel as a model for fighting America's worst nightmares.”
It may take a century,
two centuries,
three centuries,
but we will exterminate you.
Now, while there have been moments of sympathetic visibility of Palestinians
in U.S. news media,
there hasn't been a staking of the legitimacy of Palestinian claims.
Israel, as it exists, always requires that
its legitimacy, existence and moral authority be upheld.
So a Palestinian narrative about the Nakba, about
apartheid, about the refugees and land theft,
hasn't even been allowed to be written
in American cultural history.
And that's been for many reasons,
like Israel as an arm of American empire,
anti-Muslim and Arab sentiments as fundamental to Israel's case for legitimacy,
evangelical eschatology that's anti-Semitic
and, of course, the fact that the majority of American Jews fall into the category of whiteness.
So how can journalists in U.S. news media engage with Israel and its role in U.S. history
in a way that is honest and adheres to the
basic principles of journalism,
like punching up and never down?
Well, it involves a lot of reimagining of how we've embraced Israel
and disappeared Palestinians for seven decades
based on whose humanity we've determined is worth more because of how it looks like ours.
I think there is a question of why it has been so hard for Americans to imagine
that Palestinians have an absolute right to self-determination.
That Palestinians, as much as anybody else, have
the right to represent themselves,
to have some kind of sovereign control
over their lives.
It is a bit shocking to me that it's been so hard
for Americans to understand that.
But I think it's a combination of Islamophobia - even though many Palestinians are Christian,
many are Muslim
and that Islamophobia gets in the way.
In the pilot episode of “Backspace,” back in May 2021,
we broke down the sort of language
that contemporary news media uses in coverage
of Israeli occupation and apartheid,
language that obfuscates not only the daily crimes
committed by the Israeli state, but also the
realities that Palestinians have experienced
since 1948.
But language is easier to revisit and rectify than an entire moral framework built on
not only shared values,
but ideations about a shared so-called Judeo-Christian heritage,
about shared myths of revolution,
about shared pioneering and
shared exceptionalism.
Good journalism about Israel
that does what it's supposed to do
doesn't separate Israel from its position
as an occupying state and from its
origins as a European settler colonial project
born out of a European movement
led by European Jews.
Good journalism about Israel
doesn't ignore what sustains Israel's existence
as it is:
the apartheid,
Gaza as an open-air prison,
the ever-expanding settlements,
the checkpoints,
the land theft,
the incarcerations and
killings of Palestinian youth,
in addition to so much else
that is meant to ensure that Palestinians
never can have self-determination.
Good journalism doesn't ignore Palestinians and doesn't question or belittle their claims to
nationhood, resistance and return when it does offer them
some semblance of humanity and coverage.
But for that kind of good journalism to happen, it needs to untangle and deconstruct
the myths that tie together Israeli and American exceptionalisms.
Otherwise, our journalism guarantees
that those myths, which are used to justify the cruelties that sustain
both Israel and the United States, are strengthened.
And thus concludes another episode
of “Backspace.”
You guys are really the real ones for watching.
So, listen, we could really use your input.
We're getting ready for another season
of “Backspace.”
Yay, I know. But, we need your help.
We want to know, what are some other topics
that are covered in U.S. news media
that need that "Backspace" treatment?
Let us know in the comments and don't forget
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