Israel’s responsibility for the Salama family tragedy: a critical analysis of the New York Times’ coverage of Friday’s 92NY
The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. The early versions of the coverage relied on Hamas claims and didn’t make clear that those claims wouldn’t be verified immediately. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.
Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. The rocket is thought to have come from Palestinian fighter positions.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.
A father is searching for his son after a fatal school bus crash in the West Bank but his search is hampered by Israel. Thrall, the former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, uses his reported account of the Salama family’s tragedy to offer a panoramic look at life under Israel’s occupation. He is deeply concerned with Palestinian grief, but also writes rich portraits of Israelis, including Beber Vanunu, founder of a settlement in the West Bank, and Dany Tirza, architect of the separation wall that cuts through the territory.
I asked the man if it was good to be asked that question. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.
Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated. On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was supposed to speak at 92NY, a major literary venue in Manhattan formerly known as the 92nd Street Y. That afternoon, however, the talk was abruptly called off, apparently because of an open letter Nguyen had signed about the “violence and destruction in Palestine,” as well as because of his past support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. The talk was held at a downtown bookstore. The Boston Palestine Film Festival moved online, nixing its live screenings. A conference of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights in Houston was canceled by a hotel.
I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing with rules of the left when they canceled his Friday evening appearance. Defending Israel is not the only cause of a censorious atmosphere; it is also the cause of being intimidated on college campuses. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.
Even though a commitment to free speech should not depend on others’ response, such commitments are worth attempting to maintain in the face of unfairness. One of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, is the ability to see beyond the hatred of war, which can make us understand that we can not be separated from each other at the same time.
If the statement he signed didn’t live up to his own words’ generous spirit, 92NY would have been a good place to ask him why. The moments when dialogue is most fraught and bitter is when leaders most need to model it.
The Ezra Klein Show: The Jewish Left’s View of the Day of Sept. 11, 2009 and the Status of the Palestinian Dialogue
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Here you can find book recommendations from our guests.
Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. In the first week of the conflict, Israel dropped over 6,000 bombs on Gaza after Hamas took hundreds of Israelis hostage and killed at least 1,400. More than 5,000 Palestinians have been reported dead and many more have been injured. There’s no one way to cover this that reconciles all that is happening and all that needs to be felt.
My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. I invited both Spencer and Peter on to the show.
The Nation has an award winning column by Ackerman entitled “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and PRODUCED Trump.” he is also the author of “Forever Wars” and a newsletter. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. I think that the way that Sept. 11 should inform Israel’s response and how we can empower other kinds of actors if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.