Middle East News Service: Mission Impossible

[ Middle East News Service Comments: Another of those interesting reports from what must be a scintillating writers Festival in Hay (Hay-on-Wye in Wales not Hay in New South Wales.) Very useful background on the Haaretz newspaper and its editor, David Landau. A few days ago that paper ran an editorial which did seem out of place, slamming those who call for a boycott of Israel (I am opposed to the boycott but I found the tone of the editorial quite jarring and strident).

Matt Seaton relates the background: “Then, as if to illustrate the receding mirror reflections of anomaly-within-anomaly, Mr Landau referred to the "very vigorous" debate that had taken place among the newspaper's staff about a particular editorial hammering the European hard left for supporting boycotts. In the course of this discussion, which lasted several hours (how ever do they get the paper out?), some, including Mr Schocken [Haaretz’s publisher], felt that ‘the person who wrote this doesn't read Haaretz’ - since they argued the editorial took no account of the newspaper's own critical positions on Israel.”

A must read for anyone with interest in the media – Sol Salbe.]

Guardian.co.uk - Comment is Free

Mission impossible

Matt Seaton
May 29, 2007 3:30 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matt_seaton/ 2007/05/mission_impossible.html

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Since the world is not exactly overrun with liberal newspapers and bien-pensant media organisations, I had a natural curiosity, as a Guardian journalist, to hear (for once) how someone else does it. David Landau is the editor of a newspaper that is avowedly secular and progressive, and which has a set of editorial principles that would not disgrace a human rights organisation, and are certainly recognisable to an employee of the media group owned by the Scott Trust.

But there the resemblance begins to diminish, and special circumstances take over. For Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper edited (since 2004) by Mr Landau, is constitutionally Zionist, as well as secular and progressive. You'd think that being secular and progressive in Israel is the main challenge, and that being Zionist at least would be uncontroversial. But, as Mr Landau reminded us, this was Israel - where the demographic reality is that the fastest-growing political-religious group, because of a spectacularly high birthrate, is the ultra-Orthodox, who, inter alia, do not recognise the state of Israel. So, even to be Zionist in Israel, let alone secular and progressive, can be to go looking for trouble.

"Not a day goes by," said Mr Landau ruefully (and yet also with a sense of it as a badge of courage, almost a sign that he's doing his job correctly), "that I don't get a call or an email saying, 'I cancel my subscription.'" Then he added - and here I could certainly share the ruefulness - "but, of course, then they just go online and read us for free."

Mr Landau, a solid-framed figure in his fifties, with trim beard, is himself a living link between the Guardian, for which he reported for many years, and Haaretz. But, as he emphasised, he is also a former correspondent for the Economist. His point was that, in his job, you have, somehow, to straddle ideological gulfs. Which he does in a third way, too, by being a practising Orthodox Jew - a fact that, clearly to the credit of both men, Haaretz's publisher Amos Schocken ruled as irrelevant when appointing Landau to the editor's post.

And this little bundle of contradictions encapsulated Mr Landau's main theme: that the only way of negotiating your way through Israel's impossibly self-divided body politic (let alone begin to think of the Palestinian question, and Israel's relations with its Arab neighbours) is to invite that warring plurality of point of view in to your editorial pages. And this means, he argued, being willing to contradict yourself.

An example he gave was running a piece by columnist Amira Hass that, in effect, called for an economic boycott of Israel because of its malign interference in the occupied territories, when Haaretz's own editorial policy is to be robustly critical of the various calls for boycotts of Israel - whether its goods or its academics. In general, Mr Landau explained, Haaretz sees itself as the enemy of oppression, abuse of power and injustice in Israel - except when "others cite us, others who are not part of the Israeli body politic; then we rise up and lash out at those very same sentiments we have expressed ourselves." Another anomaly, he acknowledged.

Then, as if to illustrate the receding mirror reflections of anomaly-within-anomaly, Mr Landau referred to the "very vigorous" debate that had taken place among the newspaper's staff about a particular editorial hammering the European hard left for supporting boycotts. In the course of this discussion, which lasted several hours (how ever do they get the paper out?), some, including Mr Schocken, felt that "the person who wrote this doesn't read Haaretz" - since they argued the editorial took no account of the newspaper's own critical positions on Israel.

There you go: even the secular, progressive folk can't agree among themselves. "Life in Israel, and in Israeli journalism, is so difficult and complex," said Mr Landau, "it's a bottomless pit of irresolvable dilemmas." And yet, despite occasional appearances of dysfunctionality, the approach seems to work: Haaretz is flourishing - particularly online, where it is, according to Mr Landau, the largest Jewish and/or Israeli website in the world. "In a good month, we can have 2 million unique users a month - during the war in Lebanon last year, for instance. Or perhaps that was a bad month."

There it was again: the indeterminate, the irreconcilable, in black and white.

ENDS

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