FIRST PERSON
The Dilemma: A spokesman for Israel by day, a journalism student
by night
Over my desk at the
Department of Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General
of Israel in New York hung a cartoon I’d clipped from The
New Yorker. It featured an ox, his eyes agog, his tongue sticking
out of his mouth at an impossible angle. Below him, in black letters,
it said, “oxymoron.” I put that picture there realizing
that I, too, was an oxymoron: a spokesman by day and a journalist
by night, a left-winger preaching the gospel of Ariel Sharon’s
right-wing government. The same day I put up the cartoon, I put
a bottle of Ballantine’s in my drawer. A double life requires
a potent elixir.
Two years earlier, in October 1999, I had arrived in New York from Israel with a plethora of dreams, some money, and no clue. The plan I quickly concocted was simple: get into journalism school, find a job to pay the rent. I was lucky enough to secure both, but doomed to pay a price I didn’t understand at the time.
Having served in the Israeli army as a non-commissioned officer in the spokesman’s unit, I managed to get a position as a press officer at the Israeli Consulate, a diplomatic job with its prestige and perks (free parking in Manhattan!). Showing me around my spacious new office, my boss, a wiry man with hair like a Brillo pad, barked out the job description: “Journalists call, you tell them whatever you need to. Show them Israel with a human face. Toe the party line. Tell the truth when possible. Good luck.”
It soon seemed to me, however, that more than luck was needed. The job required me to be dogmatic, preaching the gospel of the foreign ministry. The journalism I was struggling to learn at Columbia University, on the other hand, required me to be relentless in my pursuit of fairness and balance.
In addition, I had my own personal politics as an Israeli citizen to reckon with, adding additional ambiguity to this mix. One thing that placated me was that Israel’s government, then headed by Ehud Barak, seemed determined to make peace with the Palestinian Authority. In July 2000, when the summit in Camp David was announced, I bought myself a little notebook; I needed, so I thought, to write all of this down, to document this great moment in my country’s history.
And then it all went to hell.
The summit failed, a result of misguided Israeli zeal to end an age-old conflict instantaneously, and of Palestinian reluctance to grasp real opportunities through a veil of demagoguery. The Palestinians, thus, prepared for an armed conflict, killing an Israeli soldier in the Gaza strip in September even before the official beginning of the Intifada. Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the Israeli opposition, added fuel to the fire with his ill-conceived visit to the Temple Mount. Violence escalated, the framework of the peace accords rapidly crumbling with every Palestinian suicide bomber and every Israeli military incursion into Palestinian territory. In February 2001, Barak lost his seat to Sharon, who was for years a pariah to members of the Israeli left, myself included. Gradually, the daily briefings and talking points sent by the ministry in Jerusalem began addressing not peace but retribution, not coexistence but conflict.
My increasingly hectic work schedule, meanwhile, clashed with my newly minted position as a student of journalism, and other, more significant, clashes soon followed. Shortly after the current round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began, I accompanied my boss to a presentation at the very school I was attending. It was a class taught by a renowned correspondent and editor focusing on covering international conflicts. My boss stood and spoke of Israel’s moral superiority. Standing in the back of the room, I examined the faces of the students, my more seasoned classmates. They were smiling those little disdainful smiles that journalists, as I later came to know, reserve for anybody trying to sell them a particular version of the truth. The students wasted no time in trying to rip my boss apart: Why was Israel still present in Palestinian territories? Why does Israel still allow the building of settlements? My boss had answers, clinging fiercely to the party line. I, however, felt lightheaded: I wanted so much to be like them, the hard-driving men and women, the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the future. Instead I felt like a little Nixon. I was forced to hide one identity, that of the assiduous journalism student, in deference to another, that of the self-assured spokesman.
It must have shown on my face. “What’s the matter?” my boss asked on the way out, smiling. “Those liberals disgust you too much?”
It only got worse. At the office, journalists would call with questions, and often I would cringe. Now that I was learning the journalistic credo, I began viewing my press contacts more as colleagues than as pawns I must seduce en route to achieving my goal of favorable coverage for Israel. Unable to subject a colleague to intentional spinning, I resorted to haiku-like answers, describing the situation in the Middle East as “dire, but hopeful, if we know what to do,” sounding more and more like Yoda than a serious spokesman. In school, there were discussions about the importance of objectivity, and I felt my secret identity, my own personal blue-and-white Scarlet Letter, burning my skin.
As if this dual loyalty was not enough to induce angst, there was also the matter of my political views: I could still recall my father, dusty and weary, coming back from the war in Lebanon and telling me of the horrors he’d seen, thus condemning me to a lifetime affiliation with the peace camp. It was a war largely credited to Sharon’s sensibilities. How, I often wondered, could I work for that man in clear conscience? It was more than a theoretical question.
Sometimes my job required explaining the inexplicable. One afternoon, for example, the phone in my office rang. My bag was packed and I was ready to rush off to school, but instinctively I picked up the phone. On the other end was one of my contacts, a seasoned journalist working for one of the New York tabloids. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the deal with you guys in Gaza?” He was asking about an event earlier that day in which five Palestinian kids, all members of the same family, died from an Israeli mine intended for Palestinian militants. I put him on hold. What do I say? Collateral damage? Unfortunate accident? Unintended tragedy? I pressed the hold button again. “Look,” I told him, “It’s breaking my heart. It was obviously not what the army had intended. We’re fighting a war, you know . . .” My voice failed me; I stared at the bottle of whisky in my drawer. “Write whatever you see fit,” I told him quietly. “There’s nothing more I can say to you.” My politics, my ideology, my views as an Israeli citizen were drilled into my arguments, and my training as a journalist forced me to examine each issue from a multitude of angles. I had lost the essential quality required of a good spokesman: single-mindedness.
I shared my views with my consulate colleagues. As the yarn goes, we were four Jews with at least twice as many opinions. One colleague, a modern Orthodox woman with a progressive ideology, chose to overlook her progressiveness as soon as the matter at hand pertained to Israel. As far as she was concerned, the Palestinian violence — the suicide bombers, the shooting attacks, the incitement — merited a forceful response, any forceful response. Another colleague, a young man straight out of college, was often swayed by events, preaching compromise one day and, in the light of some gruesome terrorist attack, advocating retaliation the next. The overall, unspoken consensus, however, seemed to be that when the phones ring, we better not question what we preach.
But a journalist is taught to question. Always. Everything. Everyone. Even superiors, especially men in positions of power.
As I grew more and more conflicted, I became detached, reading the news from Israel as if it were some nation in Asia that I knew nothing of and cared little for. I tried to limit my answers to the few and simple truths I could still mutter wholeheartedly: yes, I believed that targeting innocent civilians was morally reprehensible. I stressed that point without delving into all the politics around it, without offering my contacts — my fellow journalists — any more insight into the conflict. For me, insight meant introspection, and that was the one thing that would have imploded my triple identity, that of the spokesman, the journalist, and the human being. I was in, as they say, an untenable position.
As is the case with so many conflicts (save for the one in the Middle East), resolution was forthcoming. As I was nearing the end of my journalism studies, the three identities I had nurtured for so long demanded prioritization, demanded choice. So I handed in my notice. I would test the precarious job market.
I put the oxymoron cartoon, the bottle of Ballantine’s,
and other belongings in a cardboard box. I left my office like
a teenager leaving his parents’ home to go off on his own;
nostalgia, anxiety, and remorse all flooded me in waves. But above
all I felt unhindered, ready to commit myself to the journalistic
endeavor, to pursue the career I always wanted, the one I believed
in, without the burden of party lines and spins and talking points.
I would be complete.
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