Matti Friedman is a freelance journalist and the author of Pumpkinflowers and Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. Based in Israel, Friedman joined the Jerusalem bureau for the AP in 2006. After leaving the AP in 2011, Friedman has continued to report from the region, and his essays for publications such as the Atlantic, Tablet, and the Smithsonian have often focused on the distorting role of what he calls the “Israel story” in the Western press and imagination.
This summer, Point editors Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg spoke to Friedman to get a better understanding of how the war looks from inside Israel, what he believes the international media is getting wrong about the conflict and how the “Israel/Gaza story” might be changing. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You can find more of The Point’s coverage of the region in Ursula Lindsey’s interview series with Palestinian intellectuals, “Preserving Gaza,” and in “After October 7th,” a dialogue featuring the Israeli-Palestinian social justice group Standing Together.
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Jon Baskin: What led you to begin covering the region as an AP reporter?
Mattie Friedman: I moved to Israel when I was seventeen from Canada, intending to be here for one year, and then I stayed. I milked cows for a year on a kibbutz, then served in the military, then went to Hebrew University, where I did Islamic studies. Then I got a job at the Jerusalem Report, which has fallen on hard times now but used to be a good English-language newsmagazine. Then I got a job at the AP.
That was the summer of 2006 during the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Part of the reason I got the job was because I know the north pretty well, both because I had served in Lebanon and also because of my family (my parents live close to the border in a city called Naharia). It was initially a temporary job, and then I managed to stay on for almost six years.
JB: You’ve written about your disillusionment with the AP in several articles. For those who haven’t read them, could you summarize what disturbed you about the experience?
MF: Going into the job, I had a very Woodward and Bernstein picture of American journalism. And I come from what I would have said at the time was the left of the Israeli political spectrum. So I didn’t expect to have any real problems working for a mainstream American news agency. I thought I’d bring my Israeli expertise to a team that, at the time, was very large. There were Palestinian colleagues who’d bring their expertise, and then we had Western editors. Altogether, I thought this would create a more or less accurate picture of what was going on in Israel for an audience abroad.
Instead, what I found—and it took me years to figure out exactly what was going on, and then, years after that to put it into words—is that many of the journalists at the bureau had left explanatory journalism behind for a kind of political activism. Today, I think this phenomenon is familiar: we know it’s hard to get any journalism that’s just explanatory and not dependent on serving some ideological fantasy, whether it’s at Fox or MSNBC or the New York Times, or from random websites. But back then, for me, this was new, and I didn’t understand what was going on. The news decisions were being made to a large extent for reasons that were not journalistic, but political. And the story was an ideological parable about good and evil. The parable came out of the world of the human rights NGOs and the academy. Instead of independent arbiters of reality, the journalists and editors had come to see themselves as a megaphone for the progressive NGO world.
Once I figured this out, I realized why there was so little connection between the country where I was living and the stories I was writing. I remember having these moments where I was sitting in the AP bureau, which is near the central bus station in Jerusalem, and I’d look out the window and realize that there was no connection between what I was seeing and the story I was writing. After a while that wasn’t tenable for me. I fought a series of losing battles in the bureau about how we were going to cover things and then, at the end of 2011, I left.
I guess you could add that there’s this incredible focus on this one story. I mean, Israel is one hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world. And it’s one fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world, and the AP had more staff here at the time than we had in all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. We had more staff here than we had at that time in China, and we certainly had more staff in Israel than we had in all the countries where the Arab Spring eventually erupted. So this was the AP’s biggest international bureau when I was there, meaning that for an American audience this was the most important story on earth outside the United States.
What explains the incredible scope of coverage, or the incredible emotion that is triggered by this story, or the size of the audience for it? An ordinary news story will peak and fade. Russia-Ukraine, in terms of Western consciousness, has peaked and faded, just like Yugoslavia was a big one when I was a kid, for a year or two, but then it went away. But the Israel story doesn’t go away. The Israel story functions on a different level than any other news story, and my sense is that it’s not really a news story. It’s a morality story, which uses a familiar character in Western storytelling, Jews, to illustrate the problems that people now think of as the most pressing problems in the world.
Currently, if you’re on the left, those problems are inequality, colonialism, racism, nationalism, militarism, things like that. Looking to Western history, any time you have an ideology, a certain number of people will believe that the opposition to that ideology involves the Jews. That’s true of Christianity where Jews are kind of the anti-Christians. And it’s true of Karl Marx, who thought that Jews were the anti-communists. And it’s true of capitalists who thought that Jews were communists. And its true of the race obsessives in Germany in the Twenties, and the Enlightenment philosophers, and today of the anti-globalists and hard or alt-right who are preoccupied with the erasure of national boundaries and the movement of capital. This is a deep storytelling technique in the West that allows you to put a face on evil and project your problems onto someone else, and then convince yourself that if something could be done about this group of people, your problems would be solved or ameliorated.
JB: You’ve talked about the way the Israel story has been turned into a moral narrative, which is divorced from the facts. What are some of the things you think are being missed when people tell the story in this moralized way?
MF: If I had to put my finger on the biggest thing that’s missing, it’d be the regional context, which goes more to the nature of the conflict itself. People have been convinced that the conflict is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because that’s the way that we journalists have framed it. Every day at the AP we had to write a story which we called, internally, Israeli-Palestinian. It had to be done every day. It was a wrap-up of: Netanyahu, Abbas, rockets, settlers, etc. That framing for writing about Israel has become so accepted that people forget that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many people think. Most of Israel’s wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel, unfortunately, has had to fight wars against Jordanians and Egyptians, and Iraqis and Lebanese and Syrians, and, of course, Israel’s most important enemy at the moment is Iran. The Iranians are not Palestinian. So clearly there is a broader conflict going on here, and Palestinians are one part of the conflict, but they’re not the only part.
If you confine the story to an Israeli-Palestinian frame, then you get a picture that suits what Western activists are looking for, which is the story about empowered white Westerners oppressing third-world innocence. In fact, there are 300 million Arab Muslims in the Arab world, and there are six million Jews. And the entire number of Jews on Earth is a lot smaller than the population of Cairo—just of Cairo. If we zoom out farther to the level of the Islamic world, we’ll see that there are two billion Muslims. So if you see the story regionally, then it’s not only a story about an empowered Jewish majority kicking around weak people. That is a part of the story—I’m not saying it’s an invention. It exists. But in the larger context many of us see ourselves as an embattled minority. Part of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian component of the conflict is that both sides see themselves as an embattled minority, and both sides are right.
Anastasia Berg: One response that we’ve seen post-October 7th in the Israeli ecosystem is that people have been disillusioned with how they understand their power. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “We’re the strongest army in the world, or certainly in the Middle East. How could this have happened?” Coming up against the limits of their power is a big part of how they experience the failure. This testifies however to the fact that, previously, they actually felt, I would say, at least militarily, invincible or at least very powerful. You were saying there is an embattled mentality of being a minority. But at the same time, one of the things October 7th is blamed on is, in a word, the smugness, the arrogance of it all. I wonder how the two fit in with one another.
MF: It’s all true. I mean, there’s always been a split personality here between, you know, Look how great our army is, and also, Oh my God, the Holocaust could happen in twenty seconds! You know, that’s very Jewish, I guess, and it’s also part of the Israeli mindset.
Anyone who knows the army from the inside as I do has, I think, always been a bit circumspect making claims about the army. The army knows how to do certain things, and it does them well when the conditions are right. But we’ve been surprised in the past, and we’ve had wars that have been unsuccessful. I served at the very tail end of quite an unsuccessful eighteen-year-long war in Lebanon. It’s the nature of human systems to collapse. Something’s going to happen that you don’t expect. You have some kind of concept about what’s going on, and it turns out not to be true. And that’s what happened to us.
The government doesn’t like to say it, but it’s quite clear that we cannot fight a war on two fronts. Before October 7th we had this very inflated sense of what our intelligence did and didn’t know, similar to the mistake that led to the Yom Kippur War, which is also a story about hubris and blindness. The idea is that we have intelligence and the intelligence guys are going to tell us when we need to be worried. And if they say everything’s okay, then everything’s okay. Now we’re seeing that we had limits. We don’t know where the hostages are; we’ve been unable to get them out. We seem to be unable to find the top guys at Hamas and kill them. We have a very powerful army, active in Gaza, and even given that, Hamas is still there. One of the reasons I think this feels like a very dark moment in Israel is because we’ve come up against the limits of force: the recognition that our surroundings are scarier than we thought, and we’re weaker than we thought, and our alliances might be flimsier than we thought. That’s generating some panic, and some pretty serious despondency as well.
AB: You’ve started touching on the ways in which the attacks and the subsequent war have changed the mindset in Israel. How has the Israeli response to the war evolved? At the beginning, you would hear about the profound shock of 1,200 people being killed in one day in this very small country. But now that we’re nine months out, I’m wondering how the public response has developed since then.
MF: The initial response here was just, as you say, shock, and a kind of theater of revenge. But to be honest, Israelis are really still living on October 7th. It’s Groundhog Day here. It’s not eight months after October 7th, it’s still October 7th, because people still can’t believe that it happened. And we’re still learning more about what happened. We keep finding people who we thought were hostages but who were actually killed on October 7th. And the state we depend on to keep us safe, the state that was supposed to represent this leap in Jewish history from powerlessness to power, didn’t exist for 24 or 36 hours for people around Gaza. So for Israelis the shock is real.
But where the shock has somewhat worn off, I think people are despondent. That’s my sense right now. I just was meeting with a few friends who were in reserve duty for months after October 7th and have to go back in now, and the spirit is very different. There was initially a sense that we’ve been hit with this terrible thing but we were going to be able to solve it. And now people aren’t sure. We’ve lost a lot of soldiers, but the war seems almost certain to end inconclusively, which is not what people thought eight months ago. And there’s a lot of anger about the segments of the Israeli population that don’t serve in the reserve army—particularly the ultra-Orthodox—which is under incredible strain, and that’s exacerbating the social divisions inside the country as well.
AB: I have friends who are in Israel, and I consume some internal Israeli media. But I also follow the international response closely, and I expect that many of the people around me in the U.K. who are reading this answer would think, “It’s remarkable he hasn’t said anything about the thing that we, as an audience, care almost exclusively about, which is Gaza.” The international coverage of the story today is not about Israelis and the evolution of their attitude; it’s about the colossal damage done to civic infrastructure, to homes and, most of all, to human lives. I wonder whether you can say something about how Israelis are relating to that issue in particular, which is, again, what most of the world and its media are preoccupied with.
MF: There’s a huge divide, and there are a few reasons for that. One is that in Israel we’re very wrapped up in our own pain, right? Friends of mine, who live not far from where I’m sitting, lost their son, and the guy who runs the grocery store in our neighborhood lost his son, and the guy who runs the bakery where I go every week, he lost his son. I have a nephew in the army. So everyone’s very close to it. It’s not like in America where the wars are eight thousand miles away. This is very close for people, and people don’t have a lot of sympathy or emotion left over for the other side, and that’s unfortunate. But I do think that it’s human. It’s not that Israelis don’t care about civilian casualties on the other side; it’s just that, in war, you’re fighting for survival. We need all of our emotional energy just to get through this, and I imagine that that was true of Americans in the Second World War too. I don’t think people were delving deep into the suffering of Japanese kids or kids in Dresden. They were trying to win the war, and I think that for Western audiences who are a few generations removed from any war like that, the mindset is very hard to understand.
At the same time, wars do make people callous about civilian life and about suffering on the other side, and that’s something that we need to struggle against. It doesn’t help that we have a government that includes voices that are not just indifferent to civilian suffering on the other side, but worse. And we have overtly racist and Messianic radicals in the government. They’re not the dominant voices in the government that is running the war, but they’re very much there. They certainly don’t make our society more amenable to sympathy for the many innocent people who are being killed on the other side.
AB: You’ve talked here and written before about the ways the Israeli-Arab conflict is interpreted through the lens of a monolithic polarizing narrative: a morality play of evil oppressors pitted against the innocent oppressed, and you’ve demonstrated just how much this narrative leaves out. You’ve made the case partly by pointing out how unexceptional the facts of the conflict have been historically compared to the outsized attention it receives: more people die elsewhere, there are far worse human rights violations elsewhere, etc. I’ve been aware of and sympathetic to this line of argument over the years. But the current situation in Gaza raises the question of whether that can be all there is to say in response to what the world is seeing. You may be right about people today having very short memory and weak stomachs as far as war is concerned, but Israel’s own policies and moral standards seem to have shifted recently, e.g., concerns have been raised about new, increased tolerance for civilian casualties in the selection of targets of aerial bombings, there’s mounting evidence of severe violations of the rights of detainees and even conservative, pro-Israel outlets are reporting on an alarming humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
So I wonder if you think that the corrective narrative that you introduce—the idea that media and Western attention more generally are far too interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict—has, for supporters of Israel, itself become a distorting interpretative frame. Might it make it harder for them to appreciate what’s unique about the current situation by making them assume all coverage and all criticisms are unfair and possibly antisemitic?
MF: When I speak about how the global understanding of the conflict is warped, I’m talking about the international audience, which is also the one I’ve written for. The way Israelis see things is very different—the domestic information environment is also skewed, but in different ways. Israelis see much less of the destruction in Gaza on TV and very few horrific images of civilian death. On the other hand, because they have friends and family members in combat, they have a stronger sense of what the fighting really feels like and of the risks involved.
The death toll is higher in this war than in past wars because the goal of the war is different—the goal is not just to restore deterrence but to destroy Hamas entirely. That goal dictates far more aggressive military action, and because Hamas has made itself indistinguishable from the civilian landscape in Gaza as a matter of strategy, it means more civilian death. Israel is responding to decisions that Hamas made before, on and after October 7th.
We have to be careful with the word “moral” here. Journalists and academics without experience of war often imagine themselves as a kind of international morality police, when in fact they’re simply a few generations removed from any similar dilemmas and ignorant of what they entail. Decisions made in war, and analysis of those decisions, must be done by people who know the profession of war. This means making awful calls in an environment where the moral questions are beyond the imagination of most Westerners in 2024. Is it moral to kill a child? Of course not. Is it moral to destroy Hamas and prevent more wars, even if this requires killing children placed in harm’s way because of Hamas tactics and Hamas’s decision to start a war? Yes—in the long run, this will save lives. You can go back to more ambiguous examples of this debate, like the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, or to more extreme examples, like Dresden and Hiroshima, but I’m not sure we need to. In the West there’s a vast gap between the soldiers and the intellectual class. It’s a major problem, and we’re lucky it’s not one we have to the same extent in Israel. That doesn’t mean that every Israeli decision is right. It just means that the motivation behind the decision is defensible.
It’s also important to remember that information coming out of Gaza is unreliable—it’s controlled, directly or indirectly, by Hamas, and typically funneled through an array of NGOs that share a deep animosity to Israel and often collaborate directly with Hamas. While the genuine civilian tragedy is spotlighted and usually inflated, the reasoning behind an Israeli action is almost always opaque. (For example, you might see images of a family killed in an airstrike but you won’t know why the house was targeted.) Hamas has an interest in obscuring the target, both to conceal its tactics and to make Israel seem inhumane, and the people telling the Gaza story to Westerners share those goals. This strategy is working.
Israelis understand that the “international community” suffers from real derangement where their country is concerned, and that includes the press, the UN and the hard-left world of human rights NGOs. This awareness is true of liberal Israelis as well, and this understanding is accurate, as we’ve seen very clearly since October 7th, when international women’s-rights bodies wouldn’t condemn Hamas for the rape, murder and hostage-taking of women, to give just one example. Much of the progressive world of the West has been captured by an ideology that has more sympathy for radical Islam than for Israel. As you suggest, one unfortunate effect of this is that people here are unlikely to listen to anything these bodies say, even in the cases when it would be worth listening.
JB: So what do you think responsible journalism about the conflict would look like today?
MF: Everything has to be treated with suspicion. Everyone’s lying. That’s where you start as a journalist.
A journalist also needs to have a working knowledge of the history of this place and what the states are up to, and I think that if you do, it is possible to write a new kind of story. You can explain what Hamas is doing. And you can explain what Israel thinks it’s doing. Hamas is very honest about what they’re up to—that’s what I like about Hamas. They’re a religious organization. They have a religious script. It’s related to their reading of Scripture, and it has nothing to do with the values that Westerners generally care about. But I think you can see what they believe and set that out in a way that allows people to see that there are irreconcilable desires here.
For many years when I was in the press we were writing that the desire of the Palestinian national movement was to create a state in the West Bank, in Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem. That was boilerplate, which means that we could write it without attributing it. That was the basic truth of the story. And it wasn’t true. The desire of the Palestinian national movement, whether it’s Fatah or Hamas, is to replace the state of Israel and create an Arab state. And I’m not saying that‘s illegitimate! If I were Palestinian, maybe that’s what I’d want. But I don’t think we can lie about what they want once you understand what they want, and then if you understand that you can understand why Israelis have a very suspicious attitude toward the Palestinian national movement and toward the possibility of any withdrawal, which would certainly lead to continuing attempts to achieve the goal of the Palestinian national movement, which is the destruction of Israel.
Another thing a journalist can do is compare this to other wars. That’s always helpful. If you have the ability to compare this war to other wars fought by America or fought by the U.K. in the last twenty years, then it allows these events to be placed in the context of human actions, and not in the context of good and evil.
AB: What is the role of the diaspora Jewry right now? Right before the war you wrote an open letter addressing diaspora Jews. You said that when you love something, it doesn’t require you to spare it from criticism. For the love of your country, you wrote, this is a time to make your voices heard in a very particular way, namely, against the government and its pushing of “judicial reforms” that, you argued, would compromise the democratic character of the country. In fact, it’s your responsibility as people who are invested in the future of Israel to step up and to prevent its self-destruction.
From what you’ve said, I think we can gather what you think about many of the campus protests that unfolded this spring. But let’s think about a person who knows some history, who is not so quick to believe any sort of blood-libel-type slander about Israel. They love the country, they believe it should exist, and they believe it should thrive. But what they’re seeing going on right now is still giving them more than pause. They’re horrified. Even though they know the history, and they understand the policy of Hamas. They look at a discrepancy in the casualties, they look at the level of destruction. They look also at a lot of reports about dissent and political motivations for the war—after all, the Israelis themselves are no longer all that confident about the goals of the war. What would you say to that American Jew who is concerned for Israel at this moment, and is thinking that the way it’s conducting the war or carrying on with the war is not serving its own interest?
MF: I always like to ask when I hear criticism of Israel, Are we talking about how to make Israel better, or are we talking about how to make Israel go away? A lot of the discussions that claim to be about making Israel better, when you really drill down, are about wanting Israel to disappear in some way, and that’s not a discussion I’m willing to have. I’m just not going to debate my existence. But if it’s people who are interested in making Israel better, then yes, absolutely. Not only can we have that discussion, we must have it.
So Israel and the mainstream Democratic Party can have a dialogue, but now what you’re seeing on the progressive left in the U.S. and internationally is just this idea that Zionism is by definition racism, and that has nothing to do with a two-state solution, of course, and nothing to do with trying to make Israel as liberal as possible, or as equitable as possible.
JB: What is the state of the Israeli left right now? And how does it relate to the international left?
MF: I’d like to see the Israeli left become stronger than it is, although we’re paddling upstream. Everything the Israeli left has wanted to believe has turned out to be false. You know, we thought the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was good. I certainly supported that, and here we are in 2024, with a terrible war in Gaza that started with the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 people. The idea that if you withdraw from territory, and that territory will be filled, if not by democracy, then at least by stability—that ideal turned out to be false. We pulled out of the territories throughout the Nineties and in Gaza in 2005. And what fills that vacuum is a force that’s much worse than the one that existed there before. I think we see that in Iraq too, and in Syria.
In general, things don’t seem to be going according to plan. So the question for me and other liberals here in Israel is: What does it now mean to be an Israeli liberal? And what is that going to look like? These are deep questions that need to be asked. We keep bemoaning our political failures, and the perennial presence of Netanyahu. But I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don’t really know who we are or what we want, especially in the absence of a two-state solution.
Obviously we can’t leave, and we can’t pull out of territory that will be taken over by Hamas. And the Middle East is not moving toward brotherhood, peace and love. So in that context, how do we keep this country as open and liberal as possible without opening ourselves to risk? How do we create a bubble where we can have a place like Tel Aviv, which will require soldiers doing very illiberal things on our borders? This is all very troubling, although it might also be a question for the West in a kind of microcosm. Because, of course, every society has to ask itself, How liberal can you be in your own defense when threatened by illiberal forces? We’re asking this in a very urgent way.
JB: From the outside, that image of the bubble seems quite grim. Is that where you think the discussion is heading?
MF: In 2016 I wrote this book called Pumpkinflowers, which is about an IDF outpost in Lebanon called Pumpkin. I wrote in that book that the outpost ended up being a kind of parable for Israel. We had soldiers in the guard post. We were surrounded by embankments and barbed wire, and inside the outpost we could watch movies. We had a VCR. We watched Starship Troopers on repeat and hung out, but on the perimeter we always had to have guys on guard, and if we let down our guard we were screwed. I think that’s very much Israel right now. We let down our guard and the result was catastrophic. We’ve learned that lesson. But the question is, How do you learn that lesson without becoming Sparta?
We want to have a liberal country, with an adherence to human rights. And we want to have a generally optimistic attitude. The national anthem of Israel is called “The Hope.” The whole national project is based on this idea that we’re hopeful, that things will be better. If we didn’t believe that, Israel would never have been created. So how do we know what kind of fuel this country is going to run on in the future? All of these are very good questions.
Art credit: Ted Eytan (CC BY / Flickr)
Matti Friedman is a freelance journalist and the author of Pumpkinflowers and Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. Based in Israel, Friedman joined the Jerusalem bureau for the AP in 2006. After leaving the AP in 2011, Friedman has continued to report from the region, and his essays for publications such as the Atlantic, Tablet, and the Smithsonian have often focused on the distorting role of what he calls the “Israel story” in the Western press and imagination.
This summer, Point editors Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg spoke to Friedman to get a better understanding of how the war looks from inside Israel, what he believes the international media is getting wrong about the conflict and how the “Israel/Gaza story” might be changing. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You can find more of The Point’s coverage of the region in Ursula Lindsey’s interview series with Palestinian intellectuals, “Preserving Gaza,” and in “After October 7th,” a dialogue featuring the Israeli-Palestinian social justice group Standing Together.
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Jon Baskin: What led you to begin covering the region as an AP reporter?
Mattie Friedman: I moved to Israel when I was seventeen from Canada, intending to be here for one year, and then I stayed. I milked cows for a year on a kibbutz, then served in the military, then went to Hebrew University, where I did Islamic studies. Then I got a job at the Jerusalem Report, which has fallen on hard times now but used to be a good English-language newsmagazine. Then I got a job at the AP.
That was the summer of 2006 during the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Part of the reason I got the job was because I know the north pretty well, both because I had served in Lebanon and also because of my family (my parents live close to the border in a city called Naharia). It was initially a temporary job, and then I managed to stay on for almost six years.
JB: You’ve written about your disillusionment with the AP in several articles. For those who haven’t read them, could you summarize what disturbed you about the experience?
MF: Going into the job, I had a very Woodward and Bernstein picture of American journalism. And I come from what I would have said at the time was the left of the Israeli political spectrum. So I didn’t expect to have any real problems working for a mainstream American news agency. I thought I’d bring my Israeli expertise to a team that, at the time, was very large. There were Palestinian colleagues who’d bring their expertise, and then we had Western editors. Altogether, I thought this would create a more or less accurate picture of what was going on in Israel for an audience abroad.
Instead, what I found—and it took me years to figure out exactly what was going on, and then, years after that to put it into words—is that many of the journalists at the bureau had left explanatory journalism behind for a kind of political activism. Today, I think this phenomenon is familiar: we know it’s hard to get any journalism that’s just explanatory and not dependent on serving some ideological fantasy, whether it’s at Fox or MSNBC or the New York Times, or from random websites. But back then, for me, this was new, and I didn’t understand what was going on. The news decisions were being made to a large extent for reasons that were not journalistic, but political. And the story was an ideological parable about good and evil. The parable came out of the world of the human rights NGOs and the academy. Instead of independent arbiters of reality, the journalists and editors had come to see themselves as a megaphone for the progressive NGO world.
Once I figured this out, I realized why there was so little connection between the country where I was living and the stories I was writing. I remember having these moments where I was sitting in the AP bureau, which is near the central bus station in Jerusalem, and I’d look out the window and realize that there was no connection between what I was seeing and the story I was writing. After a while that wasn’t tenable for me. I fought a series of losing battles in the bureau about how we were going to cover things and then, at the end of 2011, I left.
I guess you could add that there’s this incredible focus on this one story. I mean, Israel is one hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world. And it’s one fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world, and the AP had more staff here at the time than we had in all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. We had more staff here than we had at that time in China, and we certainly had more staff in Israel than we had in all the countries where the Arab Spring eventually erupted. So this was the AP’s biggest international bureau when I was there, meaning that for an American audience this was the most important story on earth outside the United States.
What explains the incredible scope of coverage, or the incredible emotion that is triggered by this story, or the size of the audience for it? An ordinary news story will peak and fade. Russia-Ukraine, in terms of Western consciousness, has peaked and faded, just like Yugoslavia was a big one when I was a kid, for a year or two, but then it went away. But the Israel story doesn’t go away. The Israel story functions on a different level than any other news story, and my sense is that it’s not really a news story. It’s a morality story, which uses a familiar character in Western storytelling, Jews, to illustrate the problems that people now think of as the most pressing problems in the world.
Currently, if you’re on the left, those problems are inequality, colonialism, racism, nationalism, militarism, things like that. Looking to Western history, any time you have an ideology, a certain number of people will believe that the opposition to that ideology involves the Jews. That’s true of Christianity where Jews are kind of the anti-Christians. And it’s true of Karl Marx, who thought that Jews were the anti-communists. And it’s true of capitalists who thought that Jews were communists. And its true of the race obsessives in Germany in the Twenties, and the Enlightenment philosophers, and today of the anti-globalists and hard or alt-right who are preoccupied with the erasure of national boundaries and the movement of capital. This is a deep storytelling technique in the West that allows you to put a face on evil and project your problems onto someone else, and then convince yourself that if something could be done about this group of people, your problems would be solved or ameliorated.
JB: You’ve talked about the way the Israel story has been turned into a moral narrative, which is divorced from the facts. What are some of the things you think are being missed when people tell the story in this moralized way?
MF: If I had to put my finger on the biggest thing that’s missing, it’d be the regional context, which goes more to the nature of the conflict itself. People have been convinced that the conflict is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because that’s the way that we journalists have framed it. Every day at the AP we had to write a story which we called, internally, Israeli-Palestinian. It had to be done every day. It was a wrap-up of: Netanyahu, Abbas, rockets, settlers, etc. That framing for writing about Israel has become so accepted that people forget that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many people think. Most of Israel’s wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel, unfortunately, has had to fight wars against Jordanians and Egyptians, and Iraqis and Lebanese and Syrians, and, of course, Israel’s most important enemy at the moment is Iran. The Iranians are not Palestinian. So clearly there is a broader conflict going on here, and Palestinians are one part of the conflict, but they’re not the only part.
If you confine the story to an Israeli-Palestinian frame, then you get a picture that suits what Western activists are looking for, which is the story about empowered white Westerners oppressing third-world innocence. In fact, there are 300 million Arab Muslims in the Arab world, and there are six million Jews. And the entire number of Jews on Earth is a lot smaller than the population of Cairo—just of Cairo. If we zoom out farther to the level of the Islamic world, we’ll see that there are two billion Muslims. So if you see the story regionally, then it’s not only a story about an empowered Jewish majority kicking around weak people. That is a part of the story—I’m not saying it’s an invention. It exists. But in the larger context many of us see ourselves as an embattled minority. Part of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian component of the conflict is that both sides see themselves as an embattled minority, and both sides are right.
Anastasia Berg: One response that we’ve seen post-October 7th in the Israeli ecosystem is that people have been disillusioned with how they understand their power. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “We’re the strongest army in the world, or certainly in the Middle East. How could this have happened?” Coming up against the limits of their power is a big part of how they experience the failure. This testifies however to the fact that, previously, they actually felt, I would say, at least militarily, invincible or at least very powerful. You were saying there is an embattled mentality of being a minority. But at the same time, one of the things October 7th is blamed on is, in a word, the smugness, the arrogance of it all. I wonder how the two fit in with one another.
MF: It’s all true. I mean, there’s always been a split personality here between, you know, Look how great our army is, and also, Oh my God, the Holocaust could happen in twenty seconds! You know, that’s very Jewish, I guess, and it’s also part of the Israeli mindset.
Anyone who knows the army from the inside as I do has, I think, always been a bit circumspect making claims about the army. The army knows how to do certain things, and it does them well when the conditions are right. But we’ve been surprised in the past, and we’ve had wars that have been unsuccessful. I served at the very tail end of quite an unsuccessful eighteen-year-long war in Lebanon. It’s the nature of human systems to collapse. Something’s going to happen that you don’t expect. You have some kind of concept about what’s going on, and it turns out not to be true. And that’s what happened to us.
The government doesn’t like to say it, but it’s quite clear that we cannot fight a war on two fronts. Before October 7th we had this very inflated sense of what our intelligence did and didn’t know, similar to the mistake that led to the Yom Kippur War, which is also a story about hubris and blindness. The idea is that we have intelligence and the intelligence guys are going to tell us when we need to be worried. And if they say everything’s okay, then everything’s okay. Now we’re seeing that we had limits. We don’t know where the hostages are; we’ve been unable to get them out. We seem to be unable to find the top guys at Hamas and kill them. We have a very powerful army, active in Gaza, and even given that, Hamas is still there. One of the reasons I think this feels like a very dark moment in Israel is because we’ve come up against the limits of force: the recognition that our surroundings are scarier than we thought, and we’re weaker than we thought, and our alliances might be flimsier than we thought. That’s generating some panic, and some pretty serious despondency as well.
AB: You’ve started touching on the ways in which the attacks and the subsequent war have changed the mindset in Israel. How has the Israeli response to the war evolved? At the beginning, you would hear about the profound shock of 1,200 people being killed in one day in this very small country. But now that we’re nine months out, I’m wondering how the public response has developed since then.
MF: The initial response here was just, as you say, shock, and a kind of theater of revenge. But to be honest, Israelis are really still living on October 7th. It’s Groundhog Day here. It’s not eight months after October 7th, it’s still October 7th, because people still can’t believe that it happened. And we’re still learning more about what happened. We keep finding people who we thought were hostages but who were actually killed on October 7th. And the state we depend on to keep us safe, the state that was supposed to represent this leap in Jewish history from powerlessness to power, didn’t exist for 24 or 36 hours for people around Gaza. So for Israelis the shock is real.
But where the shock has somewhat worn off, I think people are despondent. That’s my sense right now. I just was meeting with a few friends who were in reserve duty for months after October 7th and have to go back in now, and the spirit is very different. There was initially a sense that we’ve been hit with this terrible thing but we were going to be able to solve it. And now people aren’t sure. We’ve lost a lot of soldiers, but the war seems almost certain to end inconclusively, which is not what people thought eight months ago. And there’s a lot of anger about the segments of the Israeli population that don’t serve in the reserve army—particularly the ultra-Orthodox—which is under incredible strain, and that’s exacerbating the social divisions inside the country as well.
AB: I have friends who are in Israel, and I consume some internal Israeli media. But I also follow the international response closely, and I expect that many of the people around me in the U.K. who are reading this answer would think, “It’s remarkable he hasn’t said anything about the thing that we, as an audience, care almost exclusively about, which is Gaza.” The international coverage of the story today is not about Israelis and the evolution of their attitude; it’s about the colossal damage done to civic infrastructure, to homes and, most of all, to human lives. I wonder whether you can say something about how Israelis are relating to that issue in particular, which is, again, what most of the world and its media are preoccupied with.
MF: There’s a huge divide, and there are a few reasons for that. One is that in Israel we’re very wrapped up in our own pain, right? Friends of mine, who live not far from where I’m sitting, lost their son, and the guy who runs the grocery store in our neighborhood lost his son, and the guy who runs the bakery where I go every week, he lost his son. I have a nephew in the army. So everyone’s very close to it. It’s not like in America where the wars are eight thousand miles away. This is very close for people, and people don’t have a lot of sympathy or emotion left over for the other side, and that’s unfortunate. But I do think that it’s human. It’s not that Israelis don’t care about civilian casualties on the other side; it’s just that, in war, you’re fighting for survival. We need all of our emotional energy just to get through this, and I imagine that that was true of Americans in the Second World War too. I don’t think people were delving deep into the suffering of Japanese kids or kids in Dresden. They were trying to win the war, and I think that for Western audiences who are a few generations removed from any war like that, the mindset is very hard to understand.
At the same time, wars do make people callous about civilian life and about suffering on the other side, and that’s something that we need to struggle against. It doesn’t help that we have a government that includes voices that are not just indifferent to civilian suffering on the other side, but worse. And we have overtly racist and Messianic radicals in the government. They’re not the dominant voices in the government that is running the war, but they’re very much there. They certainly don’t make our society more amenable to sympathy for the many innocent people who are being killed on the other side.
AB: You’ve talked here and written before about the ways the Israeli-Arab conflict is interpreted through the lens of a monolithic polarizing narrative: a morality play of evil oppressors pitted against the innocent oppressed, and you’ve demonstrated just how much this narrative leaves out. You’ve made the case partly by pointing out how unexceptional the facts of the conflict have been historically compared to the outsized attention it receives: more people die elsewhere, there are far worse human rights violations elsewhere, etc. I’ve been aware of and sympathetic to this line of argument over the years. But the current situation in Gaza raises the question of whether that can be all there is to say in response to what the world is seeing. You may be right about people today having very short memory and weak stomachs as far as war is concerned, but Israel’s own policies and moral standards seem to have shifted recently, e.g., concerns have been raised about new, increased tolerance for civilian casualties in the selection of targets of aerial bombings, there’s mounting evidence of severe violations of the rights of detainees and even conservative, pro-Israel outlets are reporting on an alarming humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
So I wonder if you think that the corrective narrative that you introduce—the idea that media and Western attention more generally are far too interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict—has, for supporters of Israel, itself become a distorting interpretative frame. Might it make it harder for them to appreciate what’s unique about the current situation by making them assume all coverage and all criticisms are unfair and possibly antisemitic?
MF: When I speak about how the global understanding of the conflict is warped, I’m talking about the international audience, which is also the one I’ve written for. The way Israelis see things is very different—the domestic information environment is also skewed, but in different ways. Israelis see much less of the destruction in Gaza on TV and very few horrific images of civilian death. On the other hand, because they have friends and family members in combat, they have a stronger sense of what the fighting really feels like and of the risks involved.
The death toll is higher in this war than in past wars because the goal of the war is different—the goal is not just to restore deterrence but to destroy Hamas entirely. That goal dictates far more aggressive military action, and because Hamas has made itself indistinguishable from the civilian landscape in Gaza as a matter of strategy, it means more civilian death. Israel is responding to decisions that Hamas made before, on and after October 7th.
We have to be careful with the word “moral” here. Journalists and academics without experience of war often imagine themselves as a kind of international morality police, when in fact they’re simply a few generations removed from any similar dilemmas and ignorant of what they entail. Decisions made in war, and analysis of those decisions, must be done by people who know the profession of war. This means making awful calls in an environment where the moral questions are beyond the imagination of most Westerners in 2024. Is it moral to kill a child? Of course not. Is it moral to destroy Hamas and prevent more wars, even if this requires killing children placed in harm’s way because of Hamas tactics and Hamas’s decision to start a war? Yes—in the long run, this will save lives. You can go back to more ambiguous examples of this debate, like the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, or to more extreme examples, like Dresden and Hiroshima, but I’m not sure we need to. In the West there’s a vast gap between the soldiers and the intellectual class. It’s a major problem, and we’re lucky it’s not one we have to the same extent in Israel. That doesn’t mean that every Israeli decision is right. It just means that the motivation behind the decision is defensible.
It’s also important to remember that information coming out of Gaza is unreliable—it’s controlled, directly or indirectly, by Hamas, and typically funneled through an array of NGOs that share a deep animosity to Israel and often collaborate directly with Hamas. While the genuine civilian tragedy is spotlighted and usually inflated, the reasoning behind an Israeli action is almost always opaque. (For example, you might see images of a family killed in an airstrike but you won’t know why the house was targeted.) Hamas has an interest in obscuring the target, both to conceal its tactics and to make Israel seem inhumane, and the people telling the Gaza story to Westerners share those goals. This strategy is working.
Israelis understand that the “international community” suffers from real derangement where their country is concerned, and that includes the press, the UN and the hard-left world of human rights NGOs. This awareness is true of liberal Israelis as well, and this understanding is accurate, as we’ve seen very clearly since October 7th, when international women’s-rights bodies wouldn’t condemn Hamas for the rape, murder and hostage-taking of women, to give just one example. Much of the progressive world of the West has been captured by an ideology that has more sympathy for radical Islam than for Israel. As you suggest, one unfortunate effect of this is that people here are unlikely to listen to anything these bodies say, even in the cases when it would be worth listening.
JB: So what do you think responsible journalism about the conflict would look like today?
MF: Everything has to be treated with suspicion. Everyone’s lying. That’s where you start as a journalist.
A journalist also needs to have a working knowledge of the history of this place and what the states are up to, and I think that if you do, it is possible to write a new kind of story. You can explain what Hamas is doing. And you can explain what Israel thinks it’s doing. Hamas is very honest about what they’re up to—that’s what I like about Hamas. They’re a religious organization. They have a religious script. It’s related to their reading of Scripture, and it has nothing to do with the values that Westerners generally care about. But I think you can see what they believe and set that out in a way that allows people to see that there are irreconcilable desires here.
For many years when I was in the press we were writing that the desire of the Palestinian national movement was to create a state in the West Bank, in Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem. That was boilerplate, which means that we could write it without attributing it. That was the basic truth of the story. And it wasn’t true. The desire of the Palestinian national movement, whether it’s Fatah or Hamas, is to replace the state of Israel and create an Arab state. And I’m not saying that‘s illegitimate! If I were Palestinian, maybe that’s what I’d want. But I don’t think we can lie about what they want once you understand what they want, and then if you understand that you can understand why Israelis have a very suspicious attitude toward the Palestinian national movement and toward the possibility of any withdrawal, which would certainly lead to continuing attempts to achieve the goal of the Palestinian national movement, which is the destruction of Israel.
Another thing a journalist can do is compare this to other wars. That’s always helpful. If you have the ability to compare this war to other wars fought by America or fought by the U.K. in the last twenty years, then it allows these events to be placed in the context of human actions, and not in the context of good and evil.
AB: What is the role of the diaspora Jewry right now? Right before the war you wrote an open letter addressing diaspora Jews. You said that when you love something, it doesn’t require you to spare it from criticism. For the love of your country, you wrote, this is a time to make your voices heard in a very particular way, namely, against the government and its pushing of “judicial reforms” that, you argued, would compromise the democratic character of the country. In fact, it’s your responsibility as people who are invested in the future of Israel to step up and to prevent its self-destruction.
From what you’ve said, I think we can gather what you think about many of the campus protests that unfolded this spring. But let’s think about a person who knows some history, who is not so quick to believe any sort of blood-libel-type slander about Israel. They love the country, they believe it should exist, and they believe it should thrive. But what they’re seeing going on right now is still giving them more than pause. They’re horrified. Even though they know the history, and they understand the policy of Hamas. They look at a discrepancy in the casualties, they look at the level of destruction. They look also at a lot of reports about dissent and political motivations for the war—after all, the Israelis themselves are no longer all that confident about the goals of the war. What would you say to that American Jew who is concerned for Israel at this moment, and is thinking that the way it’s conducting the war or carrying on with the war is not serving its own interest?
MF: I always like to ask when I hear criticism of Israel, Are we talking about how to make Israel better, or are we talking about how to make Israel go away? A lot of the discussions that claim to be about making Israel better, when you really drill down, are about wanting Israel to disappear in some way, and that’s not a discussion I’m willing to have. I’m just not going to debate my existence. But if it’s people who are interested in making Israel better, then yes, absolutely. Not only can we have that discussion, we must have it.
So Israel and the mainstream Democratic Party can have a dialogue, but now what you’re seeing on the progressive left in the U.S. and internationally is just this idea that Zionism is by definition racism, and that has nothing to do with a two-state solution, of course, and nothing to do with trying to make Israel as liberal as possible, or as equitable as possible.
JB: What is the state of the Israeli left right now? And how does it relate to the international left?
MF: I’d like to see the Israeli left become stronger than it is, although we’re paddling upstream. Everything the Israeli left has wanted to believe has turned out to be false. You know, we thought the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was good. I certainly supported that, and here we are in 2024, with a terrible war in Gaza that started with the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 people. The idea that if you withdraw from territory, and that territory will be filled, if not by democracy, then at least by stability—that ideal turned out to be false. We pulled out of the territories throughout the Nineties and in Gaza in 2005. And what fills that vacuum is a force that’s much worse than the one that existed there before. I think we see that in Iraq too, and in Syria.
In general, things don’t seem to be going according to plan. So the question for me and other liberals here in Israel is: What does it now mean to be an Israeli liberal? And what is that going to look like? These are deep questions that need to be asked. We keep bemoaning our political failures, and the perennial presence of Netanyahu. But I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don’t really know who we are or what we want, especially in the absence of a two-state solution.
Obviously we can’t leave, and we can’t pull out of territory that will be taken over by Hamas. And the Middle East is not moving toward brotherhood, peace and love. So in that context, how do we keep this country as open and liberal as possible without opening ourselves to risk? How do we create a bubble where we can have a place like Tel Aviv, which will require soldiers doing very illiberal things on our borders? This is all very troubling, although it might also be a question for the West in a kind of microcosm. Because, of course, every society has to ask itself, How liberal can you be in your own defense when threatened by illiberal forces? We’re asking this in a very urgent way.
JB: From the outside, that image of the bubble seems quite grim. Is that where you think the discussion is heading?
MF: In 2016 I wrote this book called Pumpkinflowers, which is about an IDF outpost in Lebanon called Pumpkin. I wrote in that book that the outpost ended up being a kind of parable for Israel. We had soldiers in the guard post. We were surrounded by embankments and barbed wire, and inside the outpost we could watch movies. We had a VCR. We watched Starship Troopers on repeat and hung out, but on the perimeter we always had to have guys on guard, and if we let down our guard we were screwed. I think that’s very much Israel right now. We let down our guard and the result was catastrophic. We’ve learned that lesson. But the question is, How do you learn that lesson without becoming Sparta?
We want to have a liberal country, with an adherence to human rights. And we want to have a generally optimistic attitude. The national anthem of Israel is called “The Hope.” The whole national project is based on this idea that we’re hopeful, that things will be better. If we didn’t believe that, Israel would never have been created. So how do we know what kind of fuel this country is going to run on in the future? All of these are very good questions.
Art credit: Ted Eytan (CC BY / Flickr)
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