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THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Why Is The World
Fascinated With Israel?
VICTOR M. BIENSTOCK
Special to The Jewish News
A
851-7200
4 Reasons to Remember
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VISA
newspaper correspon-
dent, one of the best to
report from the Middle
East in many years, is puzzled
why so many people are fasci-
nated by Israel and why Israel,
a nation of only four million, is
so often the focus of the news. It
is a question that has pe-
rplexed every thoughtful
newsman who has ever had to
handle Israeli news. Why must
every news editor snap to at-
tention when an Israeli
dateline comes across the news
wire?
The fact is that the State of
Israel lives in a glass house
under intense scrutiny un-
equalled in any other world
capital. Hardly anything can
happen in this land, the size of
New Jersey, that can escape'
scrutiny of an almost micros-
copic intensity. The foreign
press corps in Israel is ex-
ceeded in size only by the press
concentrations in Washington
and Brussels —NATO head-
quarters. There are some 350
news organizations pe-
rmanently based in Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv and last year
alone, more than a thousand
American correspondences vis-
ited the country.
What makes the Israel
dateline so hot? "Quite sim-
ply," explains Thomas L.
Friedman, chief of the New
York Times Israeli bureau,
"the West has a fascination
and preoccupation with the
story of Israel, a curiosity
about it, an attraction and
even an aversion to itthat is all
out of proportion to its size.
And equally, Israel has an un-
canny ability to inject itself
into the news like no other
country of four million people."
There is a magnetism for the
West in news from Israel,
Friedman says, which can only
be understood by beginning at
the beginning — with the Bi-
ble. Men constantly seek to ex-
plain the world to themselves
and Israel "is central to what is
simply the oldest, most famil-
iar super story of Western
civilization. The Bible is the
first edition".
Israel as a news source,
Friedman points out, also has
many secular news attrac-
tions. "Through Israel," he re-
minds us, "the historical Jew is
transformed from the power-
less to the powerful, from
underdog to hero, from victim
to victimizer, from ghetto
dweller to nation builder, from
the eternal minority to a
majority, from the ultimate
cosmopolitan to the ultra-
nationalist."
That, of course, is the reason
why many Jews who were
never Zionists or religiously
inspired to dream of a return to
an ancestral homeland became
ardent advocates of the Jewish
State. Israel's amazing rout of
the combined might of the
Arab nations in the Six-Day
War made every Jew proud
and elevated the Israelis, in
the world's eye, to a superior
status.
Coincidentally, that victory
cost the Isrelis much of the
sympathy they had received as
an underdog fighting for sur-
vival. It ultimately altered the
perception millions had of
them from an oppressed,
struggling people to an in-
tensely nationalistic state
exercising formidable military
strength.
From 1945 on, as the story of
the Holocaust became known,
Israeli leaders
preferred to deal
with non-Jewish
newsmen who did
not feel obliged to
"prove" their
objectivity.
there was, in the words of a
German stage director, a
"closed season" on Jews during
which anti-Semitism in any
form was virtually taboo. With
the transformation of Israeli's
role, this "closed season"
gradually eroded and anti-
Semitism, as the European cri-
tic, Jean Amery, warned in
1973, began to move center
stage in the "respectable"
guise of anti-Zionism.
Friedman quite properly
dismisses the assumption that
a reason for the predominance
of Israeli news in the world's
press is the large number of
Jews working in the media
who, the argument goes, are
overly sensitive to the Israel
story.
In a score of trips to the Land
of Israel, beginning in the days
of the British Mandate, this
correspondent discovered that
many of his Jewish colleagues
working in the general press,
frequently were more critical
of Israel than their non-Jewish
colleagues — probably a sub-
conscious attempt to prove
their impartiality. In the Man-
date years and in the early
days of statehood, the Jewish
leaders preferred to deal with
non-Jewish newsmen who did
not feel obliged to "prove" their
objectivity.
I think Friedman is closer to
the mark when he quotes an
Israeli political theorist on the
world's interest when "the
Jews, with their moral record
of preaching and advocating,