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DAVID BAR-ILAN, EYE ON MEDIA JERUSALEM POST
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Haon, 15170; Tel: 06-757572; FAX: 06-757554
RE:    MEDIA BIAS
REF:   The New Yorker, "Comment", Sept. 13, 1993
       received by 2nd-class mail in Israel 11/02/93
DATE:  11/4/93
------------------------------------------------------------------
              
The New Yorker "Comment" on the Rabin/Arafat Agreement was noworse than one would expect, except that one would have expectedbetter from The New Yorker.  
	There are no points here that weren't simultaneously madeelsewhere, eg in Newsweek, but it was re-packaged in The NewYorker's trademark style of world-weary gentitlity.

	There was the long overview  -- "Peace comes to the MiddleEast in much the same way that war does."  There was a suitablyagnostic Confucian spirituality, mixed with a sense of suitablydistant historical progress  -- "Inside minds, where peace isreally made, nothing can ever be quite the same after an event ofsuch magnitude."   There was the fashionable evasion of politicalfor interpersonal parameters: "..Israel and the P.L.O. are closeto touching the psychological core of their dispute:  the conflictnot between states but between peoples."

The Phantom Taxi-Driver Rides Again  

A bizarre note bursts in with a conversation "a few years ago"with "an Israeli cabbie", otherwise unidentified but conveniently  immortalized in some New Yorker file-drawer, electronic orotherwise, quoted as saying "'beat them and beat them and beatthem until they stop hating us.'"  Something may be been lost inarticulation of translation; Americans usually assume an imperialright to English literacy from everyone they encounter abroad.

Moral Equivalence

	The editorial speaks judiciously of 'the violence that islikely from extremists in both camps', implicitly equating Likudled demonstrations with rejectionist assassinations, Netanyahuwith Hawatmeh, the better to discount the former in advance.

Mid-East Politics as Bedside Reading

	Appropriately enough for a magzine that has aged with itsreadership  an image of marital discomfort intrudes:
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"Never before have Israelis and Palestinians been able tosynchronize their interests.  When Israelis have been willingto compromise Palestinians have not; when Palestinians havebeen ready, Israelis have not."  
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Here one gets so lulled along by the rhetoric equivalence that oneneglects looking for referents. 
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.a2

At no time, with the arguable exception of the present, havethe foreign-led Palestinian movements been prepared toaccept, as a permanent political fact of life, even theconditional existence of a truncated Jewish state on whatthey see, with sweeping if anachronistic and uncharitablevision, as pan-Arabic land. 
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The image itself is taken from a joke in The JewishTreasury of Folklore which, with a few excellentpaintings, may reprsent the high-water-mark of Jewishculture in better Manhattan flats.  
	The joke is set at a theatre and goes: "It stinks: when he wants, she doesn't want; when she wants, hedoesn't want; and when they both want, down comes thecurtain."

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Liberal Boilerplate
 
And so on.  There is the standard mid-East boilerplate of how theend of the Cold War has numbered Israel's years under the USAumbrulla (which may nowadays be little more protection thanChamberlin's), an inaccurate and cryptic remark that "Israel feelsboth safe enough to make a deal and too worried about the futureto postpone one", another even-handed swipe at Netanyahu: 
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"If they delay, hard and unforgiving men are likely to ascendon both sides"
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((as if Rabin were a creampuff
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(`baba au rhum'?)
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and Arafat, evidently insane, a Dostievskian saint.) )
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Netanyahu is then saddled with the mock-Homeric epithet "thepolished, intransigent ideologue"
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by which token, in obverse, Rabin is cast as Abe Lincoln.

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Embarassing well-bred relatives

Israel must be rather an embarassment to the liberal Jewishcommunity; with impeccable political correctness the New Yorkernotes that Rabin "was brutal enough with the Arabs to acquire theaura of toughness that many Israelis find reassuring"
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(Though machismo is more an import from the USA, Rabin'sdeportation of the Hamas activists and 'OperationAccountablility' do seem to have had little otherjustification)
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Cobra Autonomy

There is one seriously misleading phrase; Arafat is said to have 
"finally accepted autonomy in stages -- and with an imaginativetwist".   The `twist' is that what he has accepted, according tohis recent statements to Arab audiences, is not `autonomy instages' but statehood in phases, aimed as always to the reestablishment of the status quo ante 1967, 1947, and perhapsultimately 1945.  We live in an era of macabre fantasy; it hasmade Arafat a millionaire.

Jericho, possibly the oldest archeologic site in the mid-East andthe only point of entry between Jordan and Israel, is described asa "sleepy town...calm and unthreatening to the Israelis", with theimplication that Arafat's gaining control of it, and even moving200,000 homeless Palestinians would be of negligible strategicsignificance.  
