Veteran Israeli Journalist Ben-Dror Yemini on Israel and The Media
When the opinion editor of Israel’s Maariv newspaper, Ben-Dror Yemini, visited the San Francisco Bay Area earlier this year, he gave a lecture tour stretching from the campus of Stanford University to the network of Bay Area JCCs. He talked about the things he knows: Israel, the media and multiculturalism.
“The main problem that I recognize here is ignorance,” Yemini said from across a coffee table in his hotel in downtown San Francisco. He wore a crisp black suit and round, wire-framed glasses. “They don’t hate Israel or love Israel. They just don’t know.”
For all the noise and clout this pundit stirred up, Yemini was a compact morsel of opinion, a small, doughy man, with dark, curly hair and open, candid eyes. When we talked he had already begun to go hoarse as a result of his jam-packed lecture and presentation schedule. His voice was rough and wavering, at some points breaking in a whisper that rolled out covered in the gravel from the bottom of his throat. He leaned forward against his knees as he spoke.
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most covered conflict on earth,” Yemini said. “Not Darfur, Pakistan, Chechnya.” He referred to the conflict as the only conflict completely exposed to everyone. Yet he felt that there is a vast discrepancy between that widespread media image and the reality.
“There is a drive to portray Israel as the new South Africa,” Yemini said. “That image has nothing to do with reality.”
At one his lectures, Yemini asked the audience if they knew that the judge that sent former President of Israel Moshe Katsav to jail was an Arab. “No one knew. And do you know why you don’t know?” Yemini asked. “Because it’s a non-issue.”
“In Israel you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, and you’re Arab. In South Africa there’s no way that a black judge would have sent the former president to jail. I’m not saying we are a perfect democracy,” Yemini said. “I do criticize Israel so much, me, myself. I’m against the settlements. Criticize the settlements and occupation, fair enough. But when you deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. […] Palestinians have the right for self determination but Jews have the same right. Two states, for two people,” Yemini said.
Yemini believes that the media sensationalizes the facts and ends up playing a negative role in the conflict. “They think that the process of demonization will help them, instead of putting pressure on both sides,” Yemini said. When focusing so intensely on Israel, the international media often falls into the age-old pattern of anti-Semitic rhetoric. “Single out the Jews and demonize them and create a danger to the world. Some don’t even realize that they are following the same pattern.”
And Yemini does not exclude Jews or Israelis from the ranks of those that demonize Israel. “Israeli media is left-wing in general. We help the demonization, not intentionally,” Yemini said.
He went on to say that international audiences hear the criticisms from Israelis like Gideon Levy and forget that they are all part of the democratic debate in Israel. “They see the statements but don’t know the context. The context proves the opposite of what you think the statement means,” Yemini said.
Yemini left a successful career practicing law in Israel to do what he does today, writing, speaking, publishing and fighting what he calls “the industry of lies.” “My research is comparative, looking at the big picture,” Yemini said. “What are the real facts? That’s my research. If you know the facts then do whatever you want.”
Yemini estimates that 12 million people in the Middle East have been killed since the creation of Israel, in conflicts among themselves that did not involve Israel. But it’s when Yemini gets to numbers about Israelis and Palestinians that the story gets complicated.
“In all the conflicts and wars and occupation and everything since the start of Israel there have been about 60,000 deaths related to Israel,” Yemini said. “Less than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in the occupation, mostly combatants.”
Yemini still has other crucial numbers up his sleeve. For example, 76, the average life expectancy for an Arab living in Israel, an older age than the average man could expect to live in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon or Jordan. And 6 percent, the rate of illiteracy among Arabs living in Israel, compared to Jordan where it is 10.1 percent, Lebanon at 13.5 percent, Syria at 20.4 percent and Egypt, where Yemini estimates that 28.6 percent of the population is illiterate. Yemini said that he feels the acute focus on Israel as the cause of Palestinian’s suffering hinders reform and democracy within Palestine.
“You need to criticize from the inside,” he said. “To criticize the settlements does not delegitimize Israel. Israel is not exempt from criticism. I just don’t want double standards.”
I asked him how the Arabs living inside Israel would be able to acknowledge their Palestinian identity while living in a Jewish state.
“You can do both,” Yemini said. “People do it all the time here. You can be American, but you still have an Irish identity.”
My mind wandered to the conversations that I have had with Arabs living in Israel, where the topics of institutional discrimination and societal prejudice always reared their ugly heads.
But Yemini seemed to be on to something about the sovereignty of Israel as a Jewish state not being diametrically opposed to pluralism and multiculturalism. So I pushed him a little further. I asked him about the controversial Nakba law that has been causing such a ruckus.
“I don’t mind about celebrating the Nakba. Freedom of expression,” Yemini said. “But there is a huge difference between public money and freedom of speech.”
But what if exercising their right to free speech cost, for example, Arab educational organizations their access to government funding? Then they would have lost, quite literally, their right to free speech. I asked Yemini if Israeli citizens have the right to commemorate the Nakba. Yemini’s answers swayed back and forth, never landing squarely on either side of the debate. In one sentence, he would express the supreme importance of democratic principles, and in the next, whisper suspicion of any Israeli that would mourn their own state. In secret, he said, they might support terrorists.
Finally, in a high-pitched, cracking voice, an exasperated Yemini cried, “I don’t care, whatever you want! After peace, whatever you want.”
I asked Yemini if commemorating the Nakba would be different after a peace agreement is someday reached. He blinked at me for minute, answering my question with his appalled silence before he even spoke. “Of course,” he said.
With the international media grasping for scandal and the Arab Israeli fifth of Israel’s population still feeling underrepresented, ignored and ostracized, peace with those living beyond the green line still looks a long way away.
