Not the Right "Time"

By Abram Shanedling

I normally can’t stand clichés. However looking this past week at Time magazine’s latest cover story, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace,” (September 13, 2010 print edition) I couldn’t help but judge a magazine by its cover.

Just as peace negotiations have re-started with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen, and right in time for the Jewish High Holidays, Time decided to run its bluecover adorned with a full-page Star of David composed of pretty daisies and in the middle, in bold black letters, the title statement that Israel doesn’t care about peace.

Here we are with yet another example of a media outlet taking Israel’s situation out of context and applying a double standard that no other country must face with the world public.

(An excerpt from the story by Karl Vick can be read online here. The whole story appears in the print edition and on the magazine's iPad application.)

Drawing from interviews from a pair of successful Tel Aviv real-estate agents, a columnist, and a few other entrepreneurs and academics, Vick concludes that Israelis no longer care about Palestinians or see peace as a priority. Why would they, the story asks, if the economy is good, startup companies are lucrative, suicide bombings are down, and “they’re enjoying the rays of late summer”?

“In the week that three Presidents, a King and their own Prime Minister gather at the White House to begin a fresh round of talks on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the truth is, Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer. A watching world may still define their country by the blood feud with the Arabs whose families used to live on this land and whether that conflict can be negotiated away, but Israelis say they have moved on.”

What Time misinterprets for its readers is that there’s a fine line between Israelis apathetically enjoying “the good life” and learning to cope with a life of constant threat, anxiety and frustration with not having a true partner for peace.

Missing from the story are testimonies from the countless Israeli citizens of Sderot or Ashkelon who have endured a decade of rocket attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, or the hundreds of Israelis forced by their own government to leave their homes in Gaza as a gesture of peace, or more importantly Israeli families who every day, still send their children to the army, and whom according to most polls still strongly support a two-state solution.

Maybe the reason Israelis are skeptical of achievements in peace process (not of the hope of “peace” as the title suggests) is because of the countless times the Arab world, especially the Palestinians, have ignored Israel’s various peace offers: Oslo in 1994, Ehud Barak’s Camp David offer of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank, Ariel Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, or Netanyahu’s recent settlement freezes.

Daniel Gordis, the Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, goes even further in his own response to the Time article:

“[W]e Israelis have, indeed, built a good life for ourselves now that we’ve figured out how to squelch Palestinian terrorism, for the most part. And most us of would gladly sign a deal, if we could only be convinced that the West Bank won’t turn into Gaza and that a treaty would genuinely end the conflict. But by and large, we’re not convinced. The implication that Israelis are not overwhelmingly concerned about the peace process because we’re more interested in money is well … so stereotypical that it’s hard to believe that Time actually went that far. But that’s the world we live in. The line between Israel-bashing and Jew-baiting is so thin as to be nonexistent.”

Echoes Henry Oliner of The American Thinker:

“The fact that Israel manages to enjoy the success that every modern tolerant society also enjoys while its neighbors labor under oppressive theocratic fascist rule does not mean that they do not want peace. They have come to realize that succumbing to the wishes of peace at any cost is simply the peace of surrender and self destruction.”

Yet even worse and more important than the text of Vick’s article, is how the Time editors chose to package the article for a public, that as we all know, pays most attention to the big pictures and headlines. And big pictures and headlines were what Time served up.

After the outrageous front page, the pictures that accompany the cover story all seem to suggest that Israelis really are simply living the stress-free life – sitting at a Tel Aviv beach smoking hookah or enjoying coffee at a boardwalk café. The main, full-page photograph for the story shows an Israeli enjoying a book at the beach, with a huge Star of David tattoo and an Israeli flag in the distance.

This unfortunately is the image of Israelis that Time now serves the average bookstore or newsstand browser, who will not take the time to read the entire article.

And next week, will we see a front page story about why the Palestinian Authority, Gaza or any of Israel’s other neighbors that don’t recognize Israel’s existence don’t want peace? Maybe an article about the Palestinian streets and squares still named after terrorists, the anti-Semitic cartoons that run almost daily on Arab TV, the Palestinian textbooks that still leave out Israel on maps or the continued support of terrorism? Probably not, because an article about why the Arab world and its leaders don’t want peace with Israel and have time and time again refused peace offers by Israel would be old news – the same story that could have been written in 1948.

As the saying goes, “a picture speaks a thousand words.” And when images are misleading, as those by Time so clearly were, they can speak even louder (and sell more copies).

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Suggested Reading:

An August 28, 2010 poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by the Arab World for Research & Development reveals some timely answers to several questions:

1. With regards to rebuilding confidence in the peace process please indicate which of the following options you consider to be ‘Essential’, ‘Desirable’, ’Acceptable’, ‘Tolerable’ or ‘Unacceptable’.

Resist occupation through violence to achieve a state:

Essential 36.7%; Desirable 18.7%; Acceptable 16.8%; Tolerable 14.0%; Unacceptable 13.7%

2.With regards to the final status of Palestine and Israel please indicate which of the following you consider to be Essential, Desirable, Acceptable, Tolerable or Unacceptable as part of a peace agreement.

Historic Palestine – from the Jordan River to the sea as a national homeland for Palestinians

Essential 78.2%; Desirable 12.5%; Acceptable 4.3%; Tolerable 3.1%; Unacceptable 2.0%

3. With regards to Jerusalem please indicate which of the following options you consider to be Essential, Desirable, Acceptable, Tolerable or Unacceptable as part of a peace agreement.

All of Jerusalem (East and West) should remain in Palestine

Essential 84.1%; Desirable 10.3%; Acceptable 2.2%; Tolerable 1.6%; Unacceptable 1.7%

More results from this survey can be found here.