Jerusalem Watchman

November 27 dawned wet and grey, the skies drizzling over the stadium designated for press registration, not far from the Naval Academy where the day’s historic event was to be held.

This was very much a State Department show, and officials from that august branch of the administration were meant to have prepared the way for the anticipated flood of journalists. As many of us discovered upon arriving the day before, however, they’d botched it pretty good. I was one of hundreds who had successfully completed online registration before heading to Annapolis, only to learn that the records had gone awry, meaning I had to wait in a long, painfully slow-moving line to go through the whole process again. A single camera was set up to photograph us one by one - it took up to four valuable hours to get through there.

Returning the following morning, I passed through a comparatively efficient security scan before boarding a bus to the filing center - another stadium, this one on the academy grounds, near the building in which the actual conference would be held.

The drive didn’t take long, but as we wound our way through the quiet streets of what had been America’s first capital city, I found my thoughts drifting back 16 years, to another conference in another capital far away.

On October 30, 1991, I was a member of the international press corps based in the media center near the palace in Madrid. Although very much a greenhorn on the Arab-Israeli conflict, I had found the way open (divinely, I believed) to fly from Jerusalem to Spain for that first International Middle East Peace Conference.

A watershed event which saw Israel for the first time enter negotiations with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian Arabs, the Madrid conference generated expectations that surged and flowed like electricity around those of us who were there.

But while I was fascinated at the site of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his officials seated across from Arab men and women barely able to contain their seething hatred for their Israeli interlocutors, I was almost more interested in monitoring the press and its coverage, as for three days I sat among and listened to many of the 2000-plus journalists who had parachuted in for the conference from their home countries around the world.

Mankind had just entered what President George Herbert Walker Bush designated as a “new world order.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union two years earlier, the way had been opened for some Arab leaders to ally themselves with the United States against a fellow Arab - Saddam Hussein.
 
Throughout that First Gulf War - as it became known - Iraq rained SCUD missiles down on Israel’s population centers. While the Jews donned gas masks and sat fearfully in sealed rooms, Washington pressed Israel not to retaliate for these flagrant war crimes against its people. Wait until it’s over, was the message - then you’ll see.

Following the “success” of Operation Desert Storm, America sat down with its new-found Arab friends to discuss ways of ending their conflict with the Jewish state. Their solution was Madrid, where the whole world would be on the one side, and Israel would stand on the other.

Israel, knowing full well how the odds would be stacked against it in such a forum, balked when the invitations were mailed out. So Secretary of State James Baker stooped to blackmail, forcing the Israeli government to give in.

As the conference progressed, it quickly became clear to me that the greatest threats facing Israel at Madrid were not spitting Syrian foreign minister Farouk a’Shara, or the PLO’s serpentine spokeswoman, Hanan Ashrawi.

Israel’s most dangerous enemy was the hydra-headed international press corps. And I was right among them.

As I wrote at the time, the “impartial” and “objective” journalists who had come to Madrid were neither impartial nor objective. They had, apparently without exception, swallowed the prevailing line; the conventional “wisdom;” the politically-correct point of view.

They had subscribed to the antisemitic view of world history according to which the Palestinian Arabs are the underdog whose land is being stolen from them, while Israel is the bullying, wicked, expansionist thief.

Evidence of their bias was everywhere. If it didn’t come oozing out during their personal interaction with one another, it saturated the reports they filed on camera and computer for their networks and newspapers back home.

I recall the scoffing response to Prime Minister Shamir’s impassioned appeal on behalf of his nation - a nation that just a few decades before had almost been rendered extinct in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. Bored journalists tapped their pencils as the small-statured, courageous Israeli leader described the Jews’ 2000 years of wandering and the persecution they had faced everywhere, of the never-extinguished flame of yearning for their ancient homeland, and the final realization of their dream to return.

I remember the rounds of applause the press gave to Syria’s A-Shara, the standing ovation they gave to the PLO’s Ashrawi, and the almost total silence with which they responded to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

That shameless, unrestrained, perversely propagated press prejudice has, for decades now, successfully worked its poison out into the international community. Where the world once cheered the plucky, newly reborn Jewish state, eulogizing its phoenix-rise from the Holocaust, and dancing in jubilation at its victories over massive aggression in 1967 and 1973, every nation now stands - jaw thrust belligerently forward - fed up with Israel and eager for a painful price to be extracted from the “oppressing” and “occupying” Zionist regime.

At Madrid, and through the subsequent decade-and-a-half, it has been the international press that has worked, far more diligently than any secretary of state, to push Israel into abandoning the cradle of her nationhood and being left at the mercy of the nations. Journalists - the majority of them - are responsible for Israel’s isolation in the world today.

The slowing coach returns me to the present, and I realize we have entered the academy grounds. In my reverie I have missed the sight I was hoping to catch of the protestors gathered outside. Small, faithful groups of Zionists - Jewish and Christian - have come to sound their shofars and voices against what is happening here.

I glance at the journalists around me as I alight and enter the filing center. A row of television cameras is lined up to my left, separated by a strip of water from the lawn on which the helicopters bearing President George W. Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PLO/PA chief terrorist Mahmoud Abbas will momentarily land. Comments a reporter near me: “You know nothing much is anticipated when the television crews are filming their media colleagues.”

Curiously I study these powerful people. I watch as they unpack their equipment and set themselves up at tables on the auditorium floor and on stands lining one side of the room. The atmosphere is ho-hum, lah-di-dah, totally unexcited. After weeks and days of speculative and often sensationalistic reporting, it is the widely-held view here that this will be little more than a photo opportunity - a feeble gasp and wheeze instead of the mighty thrust it was meant to give to the international effort to bring peace to the Middle East.

Lounging on their chairs, exchanging chit chat, or dawdling over to the concession stand for a coke - these often veteran reporters appear to be totally unimpressed that they have come. I call a friend - a journalist with a Washington DC news dissemination operation - and catch him at his home. I’ve flown thousands of miles around the world to be here. He only has to drive for 30 minutes. But he tells me he probably won’t come over. “I’m not expecting anything newsworthy to happen there,” he says.

No, this is certainly no “Madrid.”

But then, just moments after Bush, flanked by Abbas and Olmert, opens his mouth and starts to speak, ripples of excitement start running through the room. By the time the three men have delivered their speeches, boarded their choppers, and left the base, the wires are humming with the news:

The main points:

• The primary purpose of the conference is not to start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs but, in the words of President Bush, “to lay the foundation for the establishment of a new nation” - to be known as Palestine, and which is to be erected on ancient Jewish lands.
• Israel and the PLO have both agreed to work towards the creation of this state before the end of 2008.
• Israel and the PLO have both agreed to award the United States power to judge whether both sides have fulfilled their commitments.

One development not reported but bound to have far-reaching consequences:

• Whereas the United States has hitherto jealously guarded its position as the chief sponsor of this land-for-”peace”-process, withstanding PLO and other Arab demands that the wider international community (which is openly pro-Arab) have more of a say in what takes place, President Bush chose to invite nearly 50 nations to participate at Annapolis. These nations’ representatives sat in the room and heard for themselves the commitments made through Bush by Olmert and Abbas. While the American leader may have wanted them there in order to secure their commitment to help bankroll the birth of Palestine, they will certainly consider that they now have the right to weigh in with their thoughts and opinions as the “peace” process moves ahead.

In the end we can say that, at Annapolis, the nations aligned themselves more solidly than ever against Israel, and Israel will soon feel the combined weight of this world, whose journalists have had new impetus given to their crusade on behalf of the poor Palestinian people.