Chapter 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press

Chapter 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press Ronald Kiener and Mark Silk Among Jewish-American conservatives, it is a virtual article of faith that “the media” is biased against Israel. This is not merely a reaction to criticism of Israel— overt, implied, or intuited—in news and opinion pieces in the mainstream press. For decades, the pro-Israel right has singled out examples of such criticism in a concerted effort to demonstrate that such bias exists. Leading the way in this effort has been CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, which was established in 1982. Over the years, CAMERA and others (primarily the site HonestResporting.com, begun in 2004) have focused particular attention on the New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record and the paper with the most extensive foreign coverage (It is hardly a coincidence that the Times, published at the epicenter of Jewish life in America, has a large number of Jewish readers and that its ownership is Jewish). On April 22, 2022, for example, the CAMERA website posted a page titled, “How Bad Has New York Times Coverage of Israel Been?” with ten stories from the previous two months identified as “a partial list describing some of the recent misreporting.” The purpose of this chapter is to assess the question of anti-Israel bias in the US news media by taking a wider and deeper look at coverage of Israel than bias proponents typically provide. We focus on a set of recent stories that have afforded ample opportunity to support or criticize Israeli policy and behavior, as undertaken by a range of leading news outlets—the Times to be sure, but also the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News. In addition—and in contrast to the critics—we compare this coverage to the attention these stories received in the English-language Israeli press. We will show how the Israeli coverage, available on-line to opinion-writers in the US as well as to reporters on the ground in Israel, differs in perspective from its American counterpart in ways that clarify how the latter—indeed, how the US itself—views the Jewish state. At the same time, it is important to recognize that, when it comes R. Kiener · M. Silk (*) Department of Religious Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dashefsky, I. M. Sheskin (eds.), American Jewish Year Book 2022, American Jewish Year Book 122, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33406-1_2 61 62 R. Kiener and M. Silk to coverage of the kinds of stories we look at, the English-language Israeli press and America’s mainstream news organizations constitute one media ecosystem. In a digital world dominated by the English language, this is only what should be expected of the two countries with the largest Jewish populations, especially given Israel’s own history of a free press with open and vigorous political debate—a history that precedes the founding of the state in 1948. Today there are numerous Hebrew-language newspapers, a number of Arabiclanguage newspapers, and a smaller number of domestic “immigrant language” newspapers (notably English and Russian). The only constraint on Israel-based free and open journalism, whether generated by domestic or foreign journalists, is a military censorship regime that on rare occasions preemptively censors material deemed to be a threat to national security, or—in extremely rare circumstances— shuts down a press organ if it publishes an item deemed after the fact to threaten national security. This is the only (and oft-contested) limit to Israeli freedom of the press. Otherwise, there is unfettered newsgathering and opinion on matters domestic and international. In the new print-internet hybrid environment, many venues exist for the dissemination of news within Israel. Among those in English are three prominent and independent sources, two associated with print newspapers (and their concomitant web sites) and one based exclusively on an online platform. The Jerusalem Post is the oldest, going back to its pre-state predecessor, the Palestine Post, which began publishing in 1932. In 1997, the venerable Israeli daily Haaretz (founded in 1918) initiated an English language printed edition and now maintains separate websites for the Hebrew and English versions. The most recent is the Times of Israel, an exclusively online newspaper that began publishing in 2012. Other, less prominent English language news internet sites also exist: YNet, a partial digest of news translated from the Hebrew language mass daily Yediot Aharonot, and Israel Hayom, derived from the Hebrew daily Yisrael Hayom, a free newspaper of limited impact. But it is the first three—the left leaning Haaretz, the centrist Times, and the right-ofcenter Post—that in the on-line age are the go-to venues for the consumer of Englishlanguage Israel news, the most often cited resources for news about Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict in English.1 It is these three that we use to provide the Israeli media context for US-based news and opinion writing. In this chapter, we compare and contrast how the English language Israeli press and the American press handled four recent issues: the inclusion of an Arab party in 1 To be sure, the sizable number of foreign correspondents in Israel have a much richer media environment if they have a command of Hebrew. There are many more print dailies, three domestic television news divisions, and national radio news channels (and their parallel web presences) upon which to rely. The Foreign Press Association (FPA) of Israel, founded in 1957, currently lists over 125 member news organizations from 24 different countries, representing over 400 working foreign journalists. There are 24 separate newsgathering entities associated with US-based media that are members of the FPA. These include the national television networks and news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC/MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, CBN, PBS, and radio-based NPR) as well as news agencies (Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and United Press International) and a smattering of daily newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post). 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 63 the Israeli government, the Abraham Accords, the decision of Ben & Jerry’s to withdraw from the West Bank, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the death of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. 2.1 The Israeli Government Includes Its First Arab Party An understanding of the current political situation is critical to gauging US news coverage of Israel in 2021–2022. Since 2018, the persistent reality of that situation has been instability. In the Spring of 2021, Israel held its fourth general election for the Knesset in the short span of 24 months. Beginning with elections held in April 2019, Israeli voters produced indecisive outcomes that resulted in short-lived caretaker governments or narrow-margin governments, each barely able or actually unable to achieve the requisite 61 seats required to constitutionally govern. Caught in a standoff between right-wing and center-left political blocs; with nearly 20% of Knesset seats going to small and narrowly focused parties made up of Arab Israelis on the one hand and ultra-Orthodox Jews on the other; plagued by ongoing coalition crises over the national budget or the role of ultra-Orthodox men with regards to national service; and saddled by a series of bribery and corruption charges swirling around right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, Israeli voters each time had produced feeble center-right caretaker governments led by Netanyahu, who was unable to govern effectively. The Israeli electorate went to the polls in April 2019 and then again in September 2019 after Netanyahu failed to cobble together a working coalition. The September 2019 election also proved to be indecisive, with neither Netanyahu nor centrist leader Benny Gantz able to assemble the elusive 61-seat Knesset majority. An exhausted Israeli electorate then went to an unprecedented third round of elections in March 2020, resulting in a “rotation government” deal struck between Netanyahu and Gantz, in which it was agreed that Netanyahu would serve as prime minister for the first half of a truncated 3-year term, then Gantz for the latter half. This agreement unraveled over failure to produce a state budget by a mandated December 2020 deadline, and the rotation government had to be dissolved before Gantz ever became prime minister. A fourth set of elections was called for March 2021. Netanyahu, still mired in an ongoing court case surrounding multiple corruption charges, led again his Likud party, while Gantz relinquished his role as the principal alternative to Netanyahu by turning to another centrist, Yair Lapid, to form a center-right alternative. After another singularly inconclusive election result that saw Likud garner 36 seats and the Lapid-Gantz coalition 33, Netanyahu was granted first opportunity to form a government and failed. Now it was Lapid’s turn. Faced with the prospect of yet another election and a growing “anybody but Bibi” sentiment, in a surprising turn of events another “rotation government” deal was struck—this time between Lapid and right-wing politician Naftali Bennett, whose party had garnered a mere five Knesset seats. Under this agreement, Bennett 64 R. Kiener and M. Silk became prime minister for the first half of the government’s four-year term; Lapid, leader of the much larger bloc of 33 MKs, would take over in the second half—or as short-term caretaker if the government fell prematurely. But, even with this arrangement, the coalition fell short of the necessary 61 seats and for the first time in Israeli political history the ruling coalition was formed with the participation of an Israeli Arab political party, the United Arab List, known in Hebrew as Raam. A year later, the resignation of a single Knesset member from Bennett’s party forced a new election scheduled for November 2022 with Lapid, who had served as foreign minister, assuming the caretaker prime minister’s role. This mind-numbing and excruciating electoral struggle was naturally covered in extensive detail by the domestic English-language Israeli press, which is populated with seasoned political reporters. But in 2021–2022, the aspect of this story that garnered most US media attention was the historic and extraordinary inclusion of an Arab Israeli political party into a governing coalition. Indeed, the story of Raam became the dominant template by which the intricacies of Israeli political machinations and the trajectory of Israeli Jewish and Arab communal narratives, were presented to the American public. No American news organ covered this story as extensively as the New York Times. Even before the March 23, 2021 elections were held, bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon (who had previously worked for the Times of Israel) published an explainer on February 22 entitled “Israeli Election Also Gives Arabs a Chance to Gain Influence,” which highlighted the willingness of Mansour Abbas, head of Raam, to join any future coalition. Wrote the Times: “Tired of the peripheral role traditionally played by Israel’s Arab parties, he hopes his small Islamist group, Raam, will hold the balance of power after the election and prove an unavoidable partner for any Jewish leader seeking to form a coalition.” The article pointed to a new willingness of even the fiercely nationalist Netanyahu to court the Arab vote. Israeli Arabs had elected a bloc of 15 Knesset members in the March 2020 election—a historic highpoint—and among them there was widespread concern that when Raam broke away from the Joint List in advance of the March 2021 election, the impact of the “Arab vote” would be diluted. Sure enough, because of low turnout and the splitting of forces, the Joint List (which vowed to remain aloof from the coalition efforts) won just six seats while the newly separated Raam won four. Having been granted first opportunity to try and form a government after the inconclusive vote on March 23, Netanyahu sought to persuade Abbas to bring Raam into the government but ultimately failed. Then it was Lapid’s turn, and, at the last minute, he struck a deal with leftists and embittered centrists who had enough of Netanyahu. But the new coalition still fell short of the necessary 61 and thus Abbas became the kingmaker. The day after the election, the New York Times’ Kingsley and Rasgon prophetically summed up the stalemate in an article titled “Israel’s Election Ended in Another Mess. Could an Arab Party Break the Deadlock?” After a fourth Israeli election in two years appears to have ended in another stalemate, leaving many Israelis feeling trapped in an endless loop, there was at least one surprising result on Wednesday: An Arab political party has emerged as a potential kingmaker. Even more 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 65 surprising, the party was RaamRaam, an Islamist group with roots in the same religious movement as Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip. For years, RaamRaam was rarely interested in working with the Israeli leadership and, like most Arab parties, was ostracized by its Jewish counterparts But according to the latest vote count, RaamRaam’s five seats hold the balance of power between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing bloc and the motley alliance of parties that seeks to end his 12 years in power. The vote tally is not yet final, and RaamRaam has previously suggested it would only support a government from the outside. Still, even the possibility of RaamRaam playing a deciding role in the formation of a coalition government is making waves in IsraelIsrael. An independent Arab party has never been part of an Israeli government before, although some Arab lawmakers supported Yitzhak Rabin’s government from the outside in the 1990s. The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Henry Olsen raised a similar possibility in a post-election explainer, “To Remain Prime Minister, Netanyahu Might Have to Work with Israeli Arabs.” By April 5, even the Wall Street Journal was on the Abbas bandwagon, in “The Abbas Who Is Shaking Up Israeli Politics,” in which columnist Elliot Kaufman, like Olsen, contemplated Raam as the key to Netanyahu’s survival. It is notable how accepting American newspapers were to the likelihood of an Arab coalition partner, while even the left-leaning Haaretz remained dubious for some time. Haaretz actually called this aspect of the election incorrectly—as votes were still being counted, Allison Kaplan Sommer predicted that Raam would not gain any seats in a column titled “Israel Election: Political Power of Israel’s Arab Parties Poised to Drop Dramatically.” A week later, Haaretz was still despondent, although veteran columnist Anshel Pfeffer did entertain the possibility of an Arab party being included in a governing coalition: This is the most obvious of taboos and it can be broken this time by both sides. No Arab party has ever been part of an Israeli government but there are two reasons to think that this time may be different. First, based on the seat allocation in the new Knesset and the size of both blocs—Netanyahu’s or his rivals’—the only way one of the blocs can form a government is with at least one of the two Arab parties. Second, one of those two parties, Mansour AbbasMansour Abbas’ RaamRaam, is approaching the negotiations with both blocs in a business-like manner, without any grandstanding, and conditioning his party’s support on a clear list of demands for the Arab-Israeli community…What are the chances of it happening? If it were up to Netanyahu, he would be signing the deal already…But Netanyahu needs his other partners, Religious Zionism and Yamina, to go along with such a move but they’re dead against it and unlikely to budge. If it were up to Yair LapidYair Lapid alone, both Ra’am and the Joint List would be acceptable…But a LapidLapid government also needs right-wing parties as partners and New Hope, Yisrael Beitenu, and Yamina are all unlikely to join a coalition with either party. Though, now that Netanyahu seems to be okay with Ra’am, perhaps they will change their tune as well… In this instance, the New York Times did the best job, having spotted and interviewed Abbas well before the election. Yet even after the coalition agreement with Raam had been signed by Lapid, Bennett, and Abbas, the enthusiasm for Abbas in the collective American press was not shared by Haaretz, let alone the Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post, all of which remained skeptical of the agreement. Their skepticism was shared by two Israelis who analyzed the situation in the Washington Post on June 7, 2021. Under the headline “An Islamist Party is Part of 66 R. Kiener and M. Silk Israel’s New Coalition Government. How Did That Happen?” Professors Guy Grossman of the University of Pennsylvania and Devorah Manekin of the Hebrew University wrote, “A political taboo in Israel has been broken, but it remains to be seen whether this signals a strategic shift toward equal political partnership—or instead, strengthens the existing system, while depoliticizing minority demands for recognition and equality.” By contrast, on June 3, long-time New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman permitted himself a measure of optimism: …So intense is the desire of the anti-Bibi coalition to oust him that it is breaking the biggest political taboo in Israeli political history: being willing to serve in a national unity coalition with an Israeli Arab Islamist party, whose four seats in the parliament were essential to produce this new ruling majority. As Israeli media has noted, Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Israeli Arab Raam party — known as the United Arab List in English — “made Israeli political history Wednesday by signing an agreement that will for the first time see an Arab party join a government.” He told reporters that he, Lapid and Bennett “reached a critical mass of agreements in various areas that serve the interests of Arab society.” This is amazing… Reality check: One thing I have learned from four decades of reporting about the Middle East is that the eight most dangerous words to ever put into a news story or column after some big event are: “The world will never be the same again.” But it is not hard to be wowed by the unprecedented picture of Abbas, Lapid and Bennett, sitting around a little table on Wednesday, cobbling together their coalition agreement and smiling for the cameras. On June 14, the Times’ Bret Stephens—more conservative on Israel than Friedman— lent his applause as well: Israel’s new government must be a puzzle for anyone who thinks of the Jewish state as a racist, fascistic, apartheid enterprise… What Israelis want is a better form of politics, the one area in which Netanyahu conspicuously failed. It’s a politics freed of his habits of demagogy, vilification, sleaziness and sheer pettiness — a politics that ultimately brought him down. Being willing to abandon a ferocious conviction for the sake of a pragmatic compromise used to be considered a virtue in democracy. Ideological treason can also be a form of civic patriotism. In what’s supposed to be one of the free world’s most factionalized, tribalized, internally divided countries—Jews, Arabs, secular, national-religious, ultra-Orthodox, Mizrahi, Russian, Druze and so on—an Israeli government is giving civic nationalism a go. It may or may not work. But like so much else in Israel, it deserves more respect than it is likely to get. In his own June 14, 2021 column, “This May Be Israel’s Best Chance at Reconciliation,” the Washington Post’s Olsen waxed even more enthusiastic: Israel’s Knesset voted to depose longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, ending (for now) the Bibi era. With the inclusion of a member from the Arab Ra’am party in the nation’s new governing coalition, the Jewish state now has an opportunity to usher in an era of reconciliation… This unprecedented political involvement heralds the chance for a new understanding between Israel’s Jews and Arabs. Much as the Abraham Accords promise the chance for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs among Arab states, these Abbas Accords promise the chance for domestic reconciliation as well. Ethnic violence erupted within Israel during 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 67 the recent war with Hamas, starkly demonstrating how important improving relations with Israeli Arabs is to Israeli security. If Abbas can succeed, more Arabs will see that they have a concrete stake in Israel’s future. That can only make Israel’s future even brighter. Israel shall always be, as its Basic Law says, a Jewish and democratic state. Sunday’s historic vote will help Israeli Arabs to see themselves as an honored part of that state. On the same date, June 14, 2021 CNN ran on its web site an opinion piece by historian Anthony David, entitled “The Real Earthquake in Israeli Politics,” which optimistically concludes thusly: “What Abbas has started may turn Israeli Arabs into the permanent kingmakers of Israeli democracy.” Why were American writers more optimistic than Israeli ones? Bibi exhaustion may have had something to do with it. But the Israelis were hardly less exhausted with the Netanyahu regime than the Americans. Rather, we judge, the hope for reconciliation, for a narrative to break the toil and trouble of the Israel-Palestine conflict, was more alive in American hearts than among Israelis jaded by years of disappointment. For the latter, there are few things more humiliating than to be branded a “freier”—a sucker—and you ran that risk if you dared believe that an Arab party could actually join the government, or that if it did, that would change the face of Israeli politics. One can see a similar American optimism with most things related to the efforts of the Biden administration throughout 2021–2022 to “lock in” the diplomatic achievements of the Trump-Netanyahu-era Abraham Accords, the effort to normalize relations between Israel and a variety of Arab regimes. While skepticism abounded, particularly over the central role of Jared Kushner in formulating the Accords,2 the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were largely agog over the new diplomatic recognitions, the Israeli tourists in Gulf States,3 and the promise of an anti-Iran coalition being birthed in a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post through its opinion page expressed nothing but disdain and predictions of failure in a barrage of opinion pieces.4 Nothing came close to the Washington Post’s sour view of the Accords, and instead a more upbeat evaluation of the Abraham Accords could be gleaned from the domestic Israeli press. In a one-year anniversary summing up, the Times of Israel published a piece by Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency entitled “One Year On, Here’s How the Abraham Accords are Holding Up” (August 17, 2021), that soberly concluded that “the deals are here to stay.” The Jerusalem Post’s anniversary piece was authored by Seth Frantzman, entitled “The Abraham Accords a Year Later: Challenges and Hopes” (August 21, 2021), and it was similarly sober, fretting 2 See in particular Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times outlier opinion piece dated May 17, 2021, entitled “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan has Failed.” 3 Thomas Friedman, “Jumping Jehoshaphat! Have You Seen How Many Israelis Just Visited the U.A.E?” [New York Times, March 2, 2021]. 4 Ishaan Tharoor, “The Abraham Accords Have Already Become a Middle East Afterthought” [May 11, 2021]; Max Boot, “So Much for the Abraham Accords. Trump Made Things Worse in the Middle East” [May 12, 2021]; and Kareem Fahim, “As Arab World Rallies Around Palestinians and Bloodshed Mounts, Trump-era Peace Deal Fades from View” [May 14, 2021]. 68 R. Kiener and M. Silk instead over the lack of enthusiasm that Biden exhibited for the Trump-authored initiative. Haaretz was the least impressed. Alon Pinkas, former diplomat turned journalist, published his anniversary piece entitled “Abraham Accords a Year On: Israel’s Biggest Challenges Remain” (August 13, 2021) in which he characterized the Accords as an unimpressive “barter deal” which left the Palestine issue untouched. Much of the Israel-based analyses instead focused on the boon to tourism and industry. In any event, the historic Arab-Islamist and Jewish partnership, necessitated by dire coalition math, was sorely tested throughout Bennett’s teetering premiership, not least by Jewish-Arab intercommunal violence throughout the late winter and early spring of 2022. But, in the end, it would be one of Bennett’s own party members who brought down the government in May 2022 by resigning over its Jewish religious policies. The 61-seat majority evaporated, and within months the BennettLapid “anybody but Bibi” coalition dissolved. Had the optimistic Americans turned out to be freiers after all? 2.2 The Ben & Jerry’s Affair One month after the Bennett-Lapid government took office it was given an opening to show it could talk just as tough as Netanyahu. The iconic progressive ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s, announced on July 19, 2021 that it would stop doing business in the West Bank the following year. Exactly how this decision came about required understanding the unique arrangement the Jewish founders of the company, Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, made when they sold it to the British multinational food giant Unilever in 2000. Under the arrangement, an independent Ben & Jerry’s board of directors was created and empowered to make Ben & Jerry’stype political decisions even as Unilever ran the operations side. It was this board that decided not to renew its contract with the licensee that had handled sales in the West Bank as well as Israel proper since 1987. In announcing its plan to do so, the board declared, “We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in Occupied Palestinian Territory.” But the company insisted that it would “stay in Israel”—i.e., the territory that Israel occupied before the 1967 Six Day War. The decision provoked an immediate tweet from now former prime minister Netanyahu: “Now we Israelis know which ice cream not to buy.” Whereupon his successor upped the ante. Calling the decision “morally wrong,” Bennett declared, “Ben & Jerry’s has decided to brand itself as the anti-Israeli ice cream.” The other member of the ruling duo, Yair Lapid, described it as “‘disgraceful capitulation to antisemitism.’” (Not to be outdone, Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, called the boycott “a new kind of terrorism.”) Widely covered in the Israeli and American news media, the Ben & Jerry’s affair had everything to do with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement that has played a prominent role in the international anti-Israel culture wars. In the US, 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 69 33 states have passed laws barring the investment of state funds in companies that participate in BDS, and the new Israeli government soon encouraged them to divest of Unilever stock—which a few of them proceeded to do. (On July 26, several American Jewish groups on the left, including J Street, Americans for Peace Now, and the New Israel Fund, called on the governors of those states not to use anti-BDS laws against Ben & Jerry’s.) On July 28, three-quarters of the Knesset signed a letter to the company calling the decision “immoral and regrettable” and asking that it be reversed. The same day, the New York Times gave Ben and Jerry themselves the op-ed space to tell their side of the story. Insisting that they were “proud Jews” and “supporters of the State of Israel,” they characterized the decision as a policy disagreement similar to disagreements the company had with policies of the US government. “In our view, ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history.” Times columnist Bret Stephens was singularly unimpressed, writing on August 10, “What we really have is a feckless political gesture, a corporate fiasco, a de facto boycott of the Jewish state, an enraged Israeli government, and a handful of customers who won’t get their Chunky Monkey cravings satisfied. Just how any of this translates into peace or justice, much less ending ‘the occupation,’ is anyone’s guess.” Over the course of the next year, the story served as a touchstone for sarcastic commentary on both left and right. When comic Avi Liberman organized a tour of Israel in August, the Jerusalem Post happily recounted his proposal for new Ben & Jerry’s flavors: “Heath Allahu Akbar Crunch, Kristallnacht Chip, Charleston SelfHating Chew, PLOrea, Strawberry Shorkike, Mintifada, and Bergen Belgian Chocolate.” In a two-month-in assessment of Washington’s view of the Bennett-Lapid government compared to the predecessor Netanyahu regime on September 7, Haaretz correspondent Ben Samuels wrote that the government’s “stark reaction to Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements—and its subsequent urging of US states to enact anti-BDS laws against parent company Unilever— didn’t help allay suspicions about whether the new government was taking a fresh approach.” On March 1, 2022, after the Israeli government’s ambivalent response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine the previous week, former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas wrote in Haaretz, “It essentially comes down to simple truth: When your foreign policy on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream has more resolve, determination, conviction and moral clarity than your stuttering, tentative and noncommittal stance when Russia invades Ukraine, you may have a serious problem. Not just a problem of moral clarity, but a problem of a coherent and smart foreign policy.” In July 2022, after Unilever announced that it was selling Ben & Jerry’s business interests to its licensee (and thus, according to the Jerusalem Post’s news story, “will no longer boycott Israel”), and the company’s board of directors announced its opposition to the sale, Jerusalem Post columnist Emily Schrader sniffed: 70 R. Kiener and M. Silk Values? Ben & Jerry’s sells ice cream, not defense technology. Its self-righteous statement also neglects the fact that both Israelis and Palestinians pay the price for the ridiculous policy of boycotting the West Bank. Even more absurd. Unilever operates in Iran, heavily in China, and as of April 2022 was still selling ice cream in Russia while Putin’s forces were committing war crimes on a daily basis. Within Israel, the larger issue raised by Ben & Jerry’s was the meaning of the socalled Green Line that marked the 1949 armistice line separating pre- and post-1967 Israeli territory. In August of 2022, for example, after the government of Tel Aviv had 2000 maps showing the Green Line distributed in schools throughout the Tel Aviv and Jaffa area, the national Education Ministry ordered the maps removed— and the mayor of Tel Aviv replied that they would not be. Although no explicit support for the Ben & Jerry’s decision was expressed in Israel’s English language press or the US news outlets we examined, two opinion pieces by Israeli authors made clear that the Israeli government was not as unalterably opposed to the distinction between Israel and the “occupied Palestinian territory” as its response to Ben & Jerry’s suggested. Writing in the New York Times on July 27, 2021, the left-wing journalist Mairav Zonszein pointed out that while “the Israeli political consensus” does not distinguish between Israel proper and the territories it occupied in 1967, in 2014 Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government had itself signed a cooperation agreement with the European Union that excluded the settlements there, “without crying antiSemitism.” Zonszein concluded: In excoriating Ben & Jerry’s, the Bennett-Lapid coalition is, in effect, defending decades of illiberal policies: military rule of the occupied territories, creeping annexation and a blurred distinction between 1948 and 1967 borders that insists on Israeli sovereignty between the Jordan River and the sea. At the same time, they are implicitly acknowledging that it’s not easy to maintain an enlightened and peace-seeking image (the Abraham Accords notwithstanding) when an ice cream company calls attention to the gap between rhetoric and reality. Likewise, historian Gershom Gorenberg, writing in the Washington Post December 14, used Israel’s renewal of the agreement with the EU to argue that Israeli government outrage over Ben & Jerry’s amounted to gaslighting. Gorenberg pointed out that not a single cabinet minister had voted against the renewal, which allowed Israeli academics and companies to apply for research grants—but not those located on the West Bank. There’s an emotional element to the reaction in Israel to a boycott, any boycott. But the official response to sanctions against settlements is a strategic move by the Israeli right. Equating an embargo of settlements with a boycott of Israel is meant to block a legitimate means of objecting to a specific policy — and thus tie the hands of foreign allies and loyal citizens who rightfully regard that policy as a danger to the country’s character and future. Yet when the potential price was endangering Israel’s economy and its ties with Europe, the government abandoned the ruse. While it may have been a rhetorical stretch to call this gaslighting, there’s no question that Ben and Jerry’s called forth performative reactions from the government— and from the media. 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 71 2.3 The Russian Invasion of Ukraine If the Ben & Jerry’s affair was something of a comedy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was anything but. This story centers on the reluctance of thenPrime Minister Naftali Bennett to criticize Russia, choosing instead to attempt to mediate the conflict in what proved to be a fruitless exercise. Bennett’s effort at neutrality stood in sharp contrast to the immediate condemnation issued by his coalition partner and successor, then-Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, as well as to polls and rallies showing strong support for Ukraine on the part of the Israeli public. On March 2, Israel did join 140 other nations in voting affirmatively on a motion condemning Russia in the UN General Assembly. A key moment came the weekend of March 5, when Bennett went on what ultimately became a vainglorious attempt to insert himself directly into the role of mediator, as the first Orthodox-observant prime minister violated Shabbat to fly to Moscow for a 3-hour meeting with Putin, the first sit-down with a foreign leader since the invasion. But in the weeks and months following the invasion, the Israeli government permitted Ukraine to be supplied only with medical services and protective gear, not weaponry, and declined to join other nations in imposing sanctions on Russia. As early as February 25, the day after the invasion, the Times of Israel reported that Israel’s cautious response was largely due to, as the Times put it, “its need to work with the Russian military presence in neighboring Syria.” This working relationship was an arrangement under which Russia allowed Israel fighter jets unimpeded access to Syrian airspace to interdict Iran’s efforts to supply military hardware to Hezbollah, its Shiite ally in southern Lebanon. In subsequent days, this rationale echoed through the American news media. Here’s how the New York Times’ Israel correspondents Patrick Kingsley, Isabel Kershner and Ronen Bergman put it on February 27: “Israel is a key partner of the United States, and many Israelis appreciate longstanding cultural connections with Ukraine, which, for several months in 2019, was the only country other than their own with both a Jewish president— Volodymyr Zelensky—and a Jewish prime minister. But Russia is a critical actor in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Israel’s northeastern neighbor and enemy, and the Israeli government believes it cannot risk losing Moscow’s favor.” The same day, the Washington Post’s correspondent Shira Rubin made the same point, quoting former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror as saying, “We need freedom to act in Syria, to contain the Iranians.” This Israeli position drew vigorous criticism in Haaretz that was particularly focused on Bennett. On the very day of the invasion, the paper published an opinion piece by well-known political writer and investigative reporter Raviv Drucker titled “Israel Can’t Keep Yelling About Iran and Stay Silent on Ukraine.” After the government placed restrictions on admitting non-Jewish Ukrainians into the country, a Haaretz editorial declared on March 1, “Israel cannot preach for more than 70 years about how the world stood on the sidelines and closed its gates to refugees and then, at the moment of truth, do exactly the same thing itself, and even believe it is right to do so.” 72 R. Kiener and M. Silk “Does nobody in the Prime Minister’s Office recognize the irony, and the danger?” began a March 10 Times of Israel column by editor David Horovitz reiterating Drucker’s contrast between Israel’s position on Ukraine and on Iran. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has decided to try to help mediate a deal between the invading, nuclear, would-be reviving empire of Russia and its besieged, defiant neighbor Ukraine — a country that Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared has no right to exist and that he is now trying to quash. At the very same time, Bennett and the Israeli leadership are imploring the international community not to finalize a deal with regional heavyweight Iran, which is seeking nuclear weapons, says Israel has no right to exist, and wants to quash us. So far as Horovitz was concerned, it seemed to “belie even the prime minister’s selfdeclared unique status as an honest broker” between Ukraine and Russia when his office “briefed a handful of journalists… that while it was not for Israel to tell Ukraine’s (Jewish) president whether to cave to Putin’s “denazification” demands — including ceding part of the country and agree to stay out of NATO — or fight on for the survival of Ukraine’s full sovereignty at terrible cost, Volodomyr Zelensky does need to know that Ukraine now faces what amounts to a critical choice: capitulation or calamity.” For its part, the Jerusalem Post featured a number of pieces critical of Israel. On March 31, security analyst Michael Horowitz took the position that Zelensky in his March 20 address to the Knesset “was right to call us out” for not doing enough to support Ukraine. Granting that the Syrian situation posed a legitimate concern, Horowitz wrote, “Let’s not kid ourselves that we’re suddenly defenseless and balled by the Russian military might.” Editorially, the Post balanced support for the government’s cautious stance with criticism, writing on June 23 that the world’s perception that a powerful Israel “can take risks that in the past it was unwilling to…is not wrong.” Israel, it declared, “can do more.” We should note that the Post also published several columns supporting the government’s cautious position (as did Haaretz). In response to one by its senior commentator and former executive editor, columnist Daniel Sherman wrote on July 11, “Amotz Asa-El’s points are compelling and in line with the extremely cautious policies adopted by Israel at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But these policies lead Israel down a dangerous path, making it increasingly vulnerable to aggression, including by Russia. The decision to cleave to what amounts to a neutral position on the war weakens Israel’s stature amongst Western democracies, diminishing its credibility as a steadfast ally.” Overall, Israel’s three major Englishlanguage news outlets treated the understanding with Russia in Syria as insufficient justification for the government’s position on Ukraine, a position even progovernment opinion treated as cautious and equivocal. Among the US outlets we reviewed, this kind of criticism was confined to the Washington Post. In an unsigned editorial April 2, the Post took Israel along with a number of countries to task for declining to impose sanctions on Russia; Israel’s arrangement in Syria, wrote the Post, was its “rationalization” for doing so. In an April 7 column titled “As Russian Atrocities Mount in Ukraine, Israel must take sides,” Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote, “Israel, as the country born out of the 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 73 Holocaust, has a special responsibility to stand against mass atrocities wherever they occur,” CAMERA, which has not shied away from attacking the Washington Post for anti-Israel bias in the past, passed up these overt criticisms in favor of flyspecking its favorite target, the New York Times. In its April 22 catalogue, it cited the subhead on an April 10 story that “falsely claims that Israel has ‘avoided direct criticism of Russia.’” (The subhead begins, “Israel has expressed solidarity with Ukraine but…”) Under the headline “Desperate to Conceal Israel’s Criticism of Russia,” CAMERA assailed an April 18 story by reporter Ian Prasad Philbrick for stating that “Israel’s prime minister has avoided directly criticizing Putin.” Far from signaling anti-Israel bias, both statements correctly conveyed the Israeli government’s cautious position on Ukraine, a position made clear not only in the stories themselves but in the paper’s other coverage of the issue. Indeed, the April 10 story with the offending subhead itself took note of Lapid’s “strong condemnations.” (Let it be noted that CAMERA did not find fault with Fox News for stating on March 20, “While Israel’s foreign minister has strongly condemned the invasion, Bennett has used more tepid language to maintain an air of neutrality.”) Whether CAMERA’s species of fault-finding actually serves the cause of proIsrael partisanship is a question that may be debated. Whatever one’s conclusion, it is the kind of pro-Israel media criticism that acts as though no one in America is aware of what Israelis themselves have to say. But quite apart from the ready availability of Israeli news and opinion online, Israelis regularly write for US publications and Americans write for Israeli ones. Thus, on March 15, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg titled “Israel’s semineutrality on Ukraine can’t last”; while on May 25, Douglas Bloomfield, a Washington consultant who spent nine years as AIPAC’s chief lobbyist, wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post questioning “Israel’s coldly pragmatic approach” on Ukraine. Perhaps the most revealing example in the Israel-Ukraine story is provided by Michael Oren, the American-born Israeli historian and politician who served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to the US from 2009 to 2013. On March 1, Oren launched a scathing attack on the Bennett government’s reticence to support Ukraine in the Forward, the widely read Jewish online newspaper. “In the face of continued Ukrainian resistance, and as reports of civilian casualties mount, Israeli neutrality will become increasingly untenable,” he wrote. “On the Ukrainian issue especially, Israel must act not only out of strategic and political interests, but out of Jewish values.” Then, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed two months later, Oren took the view that such criticism was no longer warranted because Jerusalem had “changed its position.” In fact, however, there was little change. For a member of Israel’s conservative establishment, as for CAMERA and its ilk, the goal is to keep criticism of Israel in the general media to a minimum—in effect regarding internal debate as dirty linen not to be aired in public. 74 R. Kiener and M. Silk 2.4 The Death of Shireen Abu Akleh In what would turn out to be the waning days of the shaky premiership of Naftali Bennett, Israel was struck by a string of terrorist attacks. From March through May of 2022, there were deadly attacks in Beer Sheva, Hadera, Bnei Brak, Tel Aviv, the West Bank settlement city Ariel, and Elad. Some were perpetrated by lone actors inspired by the Islamist idea of jihad; others were networked into Palestinian terrorist cells. Many came illegally into Israel from the West Bank town of Jenin. On the morning of May 11, during an ongoing and often bloody Israeli counterterrorism operation in Jenin, Israeli and Palestinian gunmen began firing at each other. During the exchange, the veteran Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American US citizen based in Jerusalem, was shot in the head and died. Fellow journalist Ali Samoudi, who works for the daily East Jerusalem newspaper al-Quds, was near Abu Akleh and was wounded by fire. Both were wearing flak jackets with the word PRESS emblazoned, and both were wearing helmets. The Israeli domestic press was saturated with coverage of Abu Akleh’s death. Immediately, the Israeli security apparatus and political leadership on the one hand, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) on the other, accused the other of bearing responsibility for Abu Akleh’s death. And that is how the initial round of reporting in the Israeli press handled the incoming counterclaims, with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Government of Israel (GOI) reaction to the incident given prominence in the Jerusalem Post, in counterpoint to the accusations of the PA, which were also reported. Predictably, the Post opened with great skepticism over the Palestinian claims, suggesting absolute indeterminacy: Israeli and Palestinian initial findings on the death of Shireen Abu Akleh have been unable to determine who shot the veteran Al-Jazeera correspondent in Jenin during clashes between armed Palestinians and IDF troops in Jenin. An initial autopsy of her body by Palestinian coroners said that she died after a bullet that was fired several meters away struck her head. Dr. Ryan al-Ali of the Pathological Institute at the a-Najah University in Nablus was quoted by al-Jarmak TV channel as saying that they could not determine who had shot her. The IDF launched an investigation into the death on Wednesday evening. Speaking to journalists on Wednesday night, Gantz said that Israel is “committed to finding out the truth” of the incident and that he has asked the Palestinians to cooperate in the investigation by sharing the bullet that killed her. “Our initial findings from our investigation cannot determine which gunfire hit Shireen and I cannot exclude anything because of the chaos on the ground,” he said. “I hope to get full cooperation from the Palestinians because without the pathological findings and the forensic findings it will be very hard to understand what happened.” Expressing his sorrow and regret over her death, the defense minister said that it will take time to get a clear picture of her death and who is at fault. The Times of Israel covered the story somewhat differently, reporting the PA accusation first, and then the Israeli counter argument: A veteran Palestinian-American journalist was shot dead amid clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen during an Israeli army raid in the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday morning, with Israel and Palestinians trading accusations of responsibility. 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 75 Al-Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot in the head while covering the Israeli army operation in the city, which has seen high tensions in recent days. In footage from the scene after she was shot, Abu Akleh can be seen wearing a press vest and helmet. The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry and Palestinian witnesses, including other journalists, charged that Israeli troops raiding the city fired the gunshots that killed Abu Akleh. The Israeli government, however, said that armed Palestinians likely mistakenly shot and killed her. Defense Minister Benny Gantz told the Knesset that initial findings showed no IDF fire directed at Abu Akleh, whereas “we have seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists, which is likely to have hit the journalist…” Typically, Haaretz initially covered the story by first summarizing the Palestinian charge against Israel, and then the Israeli counterclaim: A reporter was killed on Wednesday during a raid by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin. The Palestinians accuse Israel, while Israel says the journalist was likely killed by Palestinian militants. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, a Jerusalem-based journalist for Al Jazeera, was hit in the head by live fire. The Israeli military said in a statement that it was looking into “the possibility that the reporters were hit by shots fired by Palestinian gunmen.” Al Jazeera’s office in Jerusalem said that Abu Akleh will be laid to rest on Thursday in Jerusalem. The US ambassador to Israel confirmed Abu Akleh was an American citizen and called for a “thorough investigation into the circumstances of her death.” In sum, the first Israeli English-language press reporting took remarkably different points of view, with the right-wing Post giving editorial preference to the initial Israeli contention, while the Times and Haaretz struck a more balanced approach. Turning to the first filings in the American press, the New York Times, with a byline by Raja Abdulrahim and Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, opened by featuring the accusation levelled by Al-Jazeera: A journalist for Al Jazeera was fatally shot in the West Bank city of Jenin early Wednesday, the news network and the Palestinian Health Ministry said, blaming Israeli forces for her death. The circumstances surrounding the shooting of the journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American, were not immediately clear, but she was shot as clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinian gunmen took place in the city. Al Jazeera, citing the Health Ministry, said the journalist had been shot in the head by Israeli forces during a raid. A second journalist was hospitalized after being hit in the back, the ministry said. “Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen,” the news network said in a statement. “It also calls on the international community to condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable.” The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, said it was not clear who had shot the journalist. In a separate statement, the military said it was investigating the possibility that “the journalists were hit by the Palestinian gunmen.” The Wall Street Journal’s first posting, jointly bylined by Dov Lieber, Adam Rasgon, and Fatima Abdul Karim, was somewhat more circumspect, but also situated the counterclaims by first citing Al-Jazeera and then the Israeli response: 76 R. Kiener and M. Silk A Palestinian-American reporter for the Al Jazeera news network was shot and killed early Wednesday during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin, prompting calls for an independent investigation and jolting Israeli politics at a crucial moment for the fragile coalition government. Israeli and Palestinian authorities provided conflicting accounts of the death of 51-yearold Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known journalist noted for her coverage of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Her death comes amid heightened tensions after a spate of violent clashes in recent months between Israeli forces and Palestinians, much of which have taken place in Jenin. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Ms. Abu Akleh was killed by gunfire during the Israeli raid and died from a shot to the head. The ministry added that a second journalist, Ali Al-Samudi, who works for the Jerusalem-based Al Quds newspaper, was shot and injured during the incident. Al Jazeera, Palestinian officials and Palestinian journalists in the area during the incident blamed Israel for Ms. Abu Akleh’s death. The Qatari-based news network said Ms. Abu Akleh was wearing a protective vest that identified her as a journalist when she was killed and called her death “a blatant murder… in cold blood.” Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Wednesday afternoon preliminary findings from a continuing investigation conducted by the Israeli military indicate that no gunfire was directed at the journalist. “On the other hand, we have seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists, which is likely to have hit the journalist,” Mr. Gantz said. The Washington Post’s story, written by Jerusalem Bureau chief Steve Hendrix, Sufian Taha and Shira Rubin, began with a more definitive and one-sided paragraph based on Al-Jazeera’s accusation: Israeli forces killed a Palestinian American journalist for the Al Jazeera news network in the West Bank early Wednesday, according to the network and the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israeli officials said the journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in an exchange of gunfire but said they had not determined who fired the fatal shot. Abu Akleh, 51, a longtime Al Jazeera correspondent and a revered figure on Arab television screens, was shot in the neck while covering Israeli raids in the Jenin refugee camp, according to witness accounts. In a statement, Al Jazeera accused Israeli forces of killing Abu Akleh “in cold blood” and said she had been “clearly wearing a press jacket that identifies her as a journalist.” In interviews, multiple eyewitnesses — including two journalists who were standing next to Abu Akleh — disputed Israeli assertions that she was killed during crossfire, saying there was no fighting in the area just before Abu Akleh was shot. “It was dead quiet,” one of the journalists, Ali al-Samudi, who was also injured by gunfire, told The Washington Post in an interview from his hospital bed. In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the shooting occurred while the Israel Defense Forces were conducting counterterrorism operations in Jenin, after a spate of deadly attacks over the past few weeks in Israeli cities. During the operation, he said, “armed Palestinians shot in an inaccurate, indiscriminate and uncontrolled manner.” Reporting by all sources hewed to the main story line over the next few days, during which Abu Akleh’s funeral turned into a violent confrontation between mourners and the Jerusalem police, both sides refused to cooperate in an investigation of the killing, and the Israeli military issued a preliminary report suggesting the likelihood that Abu Akleh had been hit by Palestinian fire, then revised its position to admit the possibility that Abu Akleh had been hit by errant IDF fire. Haaretz was the most critical of the initial Israeli position that Abu Akleh must have been killed by 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 77 Palestinian fire. Within 24 hours of her death, military analyst Amos Harel, in a blistering piece, declared, “Israeli evasion, coupled with failure to provide evidence for its claim, achieves the opposite of what’s desired and only bolsters the Palestinian narrative of the incident in the eyes of the international media.” Along expected ideological lines, the Times of Israel offered a more balanced account while the Jerusalem Post was the most defensive of the initial Israeli claims. For its part, reporting in the American press tended to be skeptical of the Israeli position, hewing closer to the tone of Haaretz. Of the few opinion pieces published, the first appeared on May 12, the day after the shooting, in the Washington Post. Under the headline “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job,” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist based in Amman, Jordan, asserted that this was just the latest episode in “a long history of harsh treatment of Palestinian journalists.” Two weeks later, on May 25, the New York Times published a guest essay by Diana Buttu, a former legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority along the same lines. Titled “Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was Killed in Jenin, Who Will be Next?” it too went over the checkered history of Palestinian journalists and the IDF. Then, on June 3, the Times published a lead editorial that laid out the competing claims of the two sides and insisted, for the sake of the journalistic enterprise, upon the quick establishment of an independent investigation. Last to enter the opinion fray was the Wall Street Journal, with a June 9 column by Yair Lapid (still foreign minister about to become caretaker prime minister) entitled “Israel Never Targets Journalists.” Lapid offered a spirited defense of the Israeli position, which by this point had been called into question by many American news organs: If the outrageous claim that Israel targets journalists were true, why would she have worked in the region for more than 20 years? How can it be explained that still today hundreds of foreign journalists work in the same place? Al Jazeera, a network run by an Islamist state that is openly hostile to Israel, has permanent staff in Israel who are protected by the state the network slanders on a regular basis? Although that was basically all there was by way of commentary and opinion in the three papers during the first month after Abu Akleh’s killing, the mainstream American media was far from done with the story. As the accusations swirled, and as the Biden administration (facing an upcoming presidential visit to the Middle East) struggled to broker a deal for a joint investigation of the incident, the Associated Press, CNN, Washington Post, and New York Times, all published independent deep-dive investigations into the incident, some using satellite and geolocation imagery, a comparison of all public domain video and sound analysis, and a timeline; and each concluded that the fire that killed Abu Akleh came from an IDF position. It should be noted that not a single Israeli news organization, English-language or otherwise, conducted a similar investigative effort. Here was a rare instance in which the foreign press took the lead and would be extensively quoted by Israeli news organs. First out of the gate on May 24, less than two weeks after the killing, was Joseph Krauss of the AP in a somewhat circumspect article (given the AP’s dispute with 78 R. Kiener and M. Silk Israel over the bombing of the tower which housed, among others, AP’s Gaza bureau back in May 2021) entitled “Review Suggests Israeli Fire Killed Reporter, No Final Word.” The main contention was laid out immediately: Who killed Shireen Abu Akleh? Almost two weeks after the death of the veteran Palestinian-American reporter for Al Jazeera, a reconstruction by The Associated Press lends support to assertions from both Palestinian authorities and Abu Akleh’s colleagues that the bullet that cut her down came from an Israeli gun. While noting that “any conclusive answer is likely to prove elusive because of the severe distrust between the two sides,” the AP’s review of multiple videos and photos from that morning, as well as a report by the Dutch-based OPSINT group Bellingcat, supported the contention that only Israeli army forces were in shooting range of Abu Akleh and al-Samoudi. While acknowledging that definitive proof remained elusive, the “more plausible” scenario was that an Israeli rifle fired the kill shot. Two days later, CNN published a long and far more one-sided investigative piece (seven writers and two cameramen listed) titled “‘They Were Shooting Directly at Journalists’: New Evidence Suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was Killed in Targeted Attack by Israeli Forces.” The key paragraph: [A]n investigation by CNN offers new evidence—including two videos of the scene of the shooting—that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death. Videos obtained by CNN, corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst and an explosive weapons expert, suggest that Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces. This highly editorialized charge, unique among the US investigative efforts, garnered significant pushback from Israeli politicians and spokespeople, as well as criticism from CNN’s principal cable rival, Fox News. It also garnered severe criticism from the media watchdog organizations CAMERA and HonestReporting, who each raised serious questions concerning CNN’s reliance on “questionable” Palestinian eyewitnesses to the incident. Nearly three weeks after CNN’s “targeted attack” accusation, the Washington Post issued its own investigative report, based on dozens of videos, social media posts and photos of the event as well as physical inspections of the area and commissioned two independent acoustic analyses of the gunshots. It concluded that “an Israeli soldier in the convoy likely shot and killed Abu Akleh” but not (as CNN did) that the journalist had been targeted. The last major investigative report, from the New York Times, dropped eight days later, on June 20. Written by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and three colleagues on the ground in Jenin, “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh: Tracing a Bullet to an Israeli Convoy” disputed the IDF’s version of events but did not go as far as CNN. The evidence reviewed by The Times showed that there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot. It contradicted Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at a Palestinian gunman. 2 Coverage of Israel in the American Press 79 The Times investigation also showed that 16 shots were fired from the location of the Israeli convoy, as opposed to Israeli claims that the soldier had fired five bullets in the journalists’ direction. The Times found no evidence that the person who fired recognized Ms. Abu Akleh and targeted her personally. The Times was unable to determine whether the shooter saw that she and her colleagues were wearing protective vests emblazoned with the word Press. In summary: 1. In the initial round of reporting, the Washington Post, relying on Al-Jazeera’s accusation, was the first US outlet to assert that an Israeli shooter killed Abu Akleh, while the other major news organs held that judgment in abeyance. 2. The Wall Street Journal provided an opinion platform for an official Israeli denial of the charge; while the Washington Post and the New York Times provided opinion space for a Palestinian journalist and a former adviser to the Palestinian Authority to attack Israeli claims of plausible deniability. (We should note that Haaretz also provided space to a Palestinian opinion writer, who wrote of the profound impact Abu Akleh had on young Palestinian women.) 3. In the crush of subsequent investigative reports and in the absence of a joint or American-arbitraged official investigation, it was CNN alone that claimed, as Palestinian officials did, that Abu Akleh had been “targeted” by Israel. One might ask: what prompted the investigative frenzy over a killing in Jenin by four major US-based news organizations? Was it herd-induced journalistic animus towards the Israeli “occupier,” as so many media monitoring critics asserted? Rather, it seems plausible that in the absence of a cooperative investigation, and given Abu Akleh’s status as a widely-regarded colleague and an American citizen, there was a kind of “Khashoggi effect”—a prominent American journalist was killed in the Middle East under contested conditions, no one was definitively engaging in an effort to get to the bottom of the case, and thus American journalists attempted to step in to take a crack at solving the mystery. Beyond that, it’s worth noting that, during the outbreak of armed conflict between Israeli and Hamas in Gaza a year earlier, an Israeli bomb destroyed the media tower that housed offices of the AP and Al-Jazeera. This may have enhanced skepticism towards Israeli claims that the IDF does not target journalists and constituted a species of payback. As of this writing, the story is far from over. The PA eventually did turn over the bullet retrieved from Abu Akleh’s skull to the Jerusalem-based United States Security Coordinator’s provenance for a third-party forensic analysis. As a result, on July 4 (a week prior to President Biden’s first visit to the region) the US State Department issued a report that concluded that “gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh,” but at the same time stated that “the USSC found no reason to believe that this was intentional.” This was a conclusion that satisfied neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians. In our survey of press treatment of the death of Abu Akleh, we can conclude that, in the immediate wake of this incident and then the subsequent coverage, the American news outlet most sympathetic to the Israeli narrative was the Wall Street Journal; the outlet most hostile was CNN. 80 2.5 R. Kiener and M. Silk Conclusion In our examination of these four instances of reporting on matters central to the Israel-Palestine conflict over the past year, we note a wide range of critical reporting concerning Israel, often quite nuanced, in both the Israeli English-language press and the American press. When compared to the Israeli domestic press, the accusation that the American press is uniformly biased against Israel is unsustainable. Given the wide-ranging domestic critique of the various Governments of Israel this past year, there is only the “independent investigations” of the Abu Akleh death that stands as an outlier. But even here there are degrees of anti-Israelism, with CNN taking the lead. When it comes to editorials and opinion content of the American press, we see a range of willingness to criticize Israeli policy, and of the major national newspapers, we note a mostly pro-Israel editorial policy in the Wall Street Journal, a balanced approach in the New York Times, and a consistently critical approach in the Washington Post. In general, the domestic Israeli press is given over to the intricacies of day-to-day political maneuvering within the domestic context, while the American press sports a greater readiness to hope for a peaceful resolution of IsraelPalestine and a concomitant greater readiness to hold Israel responsible for getting there. All American news sources have recourse to outside writers as a means of providing critical perspective on Israeli actions, and thereby let others do the criticism or praise. The Journal (and for that matter Fox News) tends to turn to pro-Israel opinion makers, while the New York Times seeks out both critics and supporters. The Washington Post relies largely upon Palestinians and Israeli leftists for its opinion coverage.