One of the features of the home I grew up in was sitting down in front of the TV to watch the nightly news. Some of my earliest memories are of news anchor Walter Cronkite signing off the end of his program with \u201cAnd that\u2019s the way it is\u2026\u201d (and then he would give the day and date).<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the way it is.<\/p>\n
I was raised in a world where those who reported the news held that assignment as a sacred trust. Was there unconscious bias? Of course. As Daniel Khaneman suggests in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, that\u2019s just part of human nature, and \u201cexperts\u201d are especially prone to unconscious bias.[1]<\/p>\n
But most of us understood our social contract with the news included journalists who at least attempted to report the facts in an unbiased way as possible and they had editors keeping them accountable to do so.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to today. I don\u2019t think anyone believes the news is unbiased anymore. Though various news outlets will still claim a lack of bias, I can almost discern a wink and a nod as they do.<\/p>\n
In 2024, if you want to get closer to the truth of current events, you have to do some digging and make sure you read deeply on all sides of an issue before coming to a conclusion, and even then, you may not be seeing how it really is.<\/p>\n
All that brings me to the book The Palestinian-Israeli conflict: A Very Short Introduction by Martin Bunton.[2]<\/p>\n
This book that is part of the Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press purports to tell us \u201cThe way it is\u201d regarding an incredibly complex political-historical-cultural-social-religious quagmire. In 114 (admittedly dense) pages, Bunton paints what he feels is a rather black and white picture of a situation that seems to me to be full of every shade of grey imaginable.<\/p>\n
Case in point\u2014He chooses to end his book with the following quote from former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak: \u201cIf, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic\u2026if the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don\u2019t, it is an apartheid state.\u201d [3]<\/p>\n
In Bunton\u2019s telling, that\u2019s just the way it is.<\/p>\n
This book was a compelling read for me. Long before the recent events of October 7 that turned the attention of the world to this region, I\u2019ve had an interest in ancient Biblical history, and early-on that interest extended to the history of modern Israel; the what\u2019s, when\u2019s, why\u2019s, who\u2019s, and how\u2019s of the formation of current day Israel and Palestine. Because of that, I was familiar with most of the \u201cplot points\u201d of the story Bunton is telling here but still, I appreciated the concise way in which it was told (and I was reminded of some of the \u201cplot\u201d I had forgotten along the way).<\/p>\n
However, from the start of the book I noticed what seemed like a slight bias. Bunton isn\u2019t deaf to Jewish concerns, but he largely frames the struggle with an oppressor\/oppressed\u2014or a colonization\u2014 perspective. While he is clearly not advocating for the erasure of the state of Israel, he does seem to place the majority of the burden of the conflict on Jewish activity, and in my mind, minimizes both Jewish motivation and Arab actions. In fact, probably what I grew to understand most after reading this book was a better grasp of the Palestinian position regarding this long struggle.<\/p>\n
As Ari Blaff in The Tel Aviv review of books points out: \u201c\u2026 the value of Martin Bunton\u2019s book lies in revealing a relatively moderate aspect of pro-Palestinian attitudes within academia today. Although Bunton\u2019s ability to condense the conflict\u2019s history in under one-hundred-and-fifty pages (maps and indexes included) is impressive, few will leave his study with a contextual understanding of the Zionist point of view.\u201d[4]<\/p>\n
To Bunton\u2019s credit, I do appreciate the robust reading list found at the end of the book for those who want to dig deeper. I did a cursory review of the material, and it seemed there were voices from multiple sides represented in that list.<\/p>\n
I think a book that embraced multiple voices in the text itself might be a more effective way to wrestle through this issue. For instance, a book like Teaching the Israeli-Arab Conflict [5] explores the nature of the challenges through diverse voices and divergent disciplines. However, that book doesn\u2019t tell the concise and focused historical narrative, which, in spite of its other flaws, Bunton\u2019s book does quite well.<\/p>\n
My approach to navigating the Middle East conflict is to read and pay attention to as many competing perspectives as I can, and then try to work out the conflict in reporting. In the end, I\u2019ve come to anticipate that most reporting is going to, as Emily Dickerson suggested, \u201ctell the truth but tell it slant.\u201d [6] \u00a0And though I can wish for the old days, when writers and reporters told us \u201cThat\u2019s the way it is\u201d, even back then, there was a burden of follow-up and verification, which is a much easier task today with the ready availability of resources through the internet.<\/p>\n
Because even when, and maybe especially when, someone is an expert they may not recognize their own bias that causes them to not fully appreciate the way something actually is.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
[1] Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.<\/p>\n
[2] Martin Bunton, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict; A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.<\/p>\n
[3] Bunton, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, 2013, Page 114.<\/p>\n
[4] Ari Blaff, Teaching the Conflict, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, Spring 2020.<\/p>\n
[5] Teaching the Israeli-Arab Conflict, Ed. Rachael S. Harris, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, 2019.<\/p>\n
[6] The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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