There are few more qualified than Fletcher — a longtime Middle East correspondent and former NBC Tel Aviv bureau chief — to understand the situation inside the divided country, and he’ll soon be in St. Louis to open the Jewish Book Festival on Sunday, November 5, and discuss both the conflict and his new book Teachers: The Ones I Can’t Forget.
Fletcher spoke with the RFT yesterday by phone from New York City to share his perspective on what’s happening these days in Gaza.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What has it been like to have something you covered professionally hit so close to home?
It's been a rollercoaster of emotion. You know, on the one hand, I'm on NBC and MSNBC, and all the different stations, many times a day. So I'm trying to be cool and professional and analyze strategically what's going on. At the same time, knowing that my wife was crying full time the first week, for instance, and trying to balance the personal emotions and the professional, it's difficult.
What can you tell us about covering Israel from within? What can we not understand not having been in your shoes?
I think probably a lot of people have been in my shoes. So many Jews visit Israel, and have family. They're connected in some way and feel strongly about the question. On the other hand, there's a whole other group of people whose rights need to be met. There’s always a contradiction. People always ask, “Which side is right, which side is wrong?” The problem is no one's wrong. They're both right. Not in what they do but in terms of their needs.
It seems like it's hard for people to balance empathy for both peoples.
The difficulty of balancing both sides is something that most people share. If you're rabidly Zionist, if you're rabidly anti-Zionist, you're never going to agree, and it's not a matter of rational persuasion. You know, anti-Zionism definitely does bleed into antisemitism; you can certainly be against Israel and love the Jews. But in many cases, one roughly bleeds into the other. It is the same with the Arabs, the same pattern; there's a lot of antipathy toward some Arabs.
From the year 632, since the days of Mohammed, the followers of the Quran read the same things in the Quran, which is to kill the Jews, kill the Jews behind the trees in the stones — there’s many different quotations. Mostly, over the centuries, Jews and Muslims have lived in relative peace side by side. But when the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt — and Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — they just went back to the original Quran and well, Muhammad said that's what we're going to do. So they're living in a time of literally 630 AD. How can you balance that with the Jewish desire to have a state of their own? Looking for balance is basically impossible.
Going back so far, you think that's just history. That's so far away, we have to deal with the realities of today. I would have said exactly that, until the seventh of October, when suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute, that phrase ‘never again,’ after the Holocaust ‘never again,’ now it's actually happening.” When a group of people come and slaughter, murderer, cut off their heads, torture, rape and kill 1,400 Jews in a day, you have to think, “Well, maybe.”
Aren’t the Israelis perpetrating something akin to why we say “never again”?
I think the answer to that question is that there's a difference between genocide, what happened to the Jews, and what has happened to Palestinians, which I would say is tragedy. Genocide is when you deliberately sit down and massacre a nation. That's what genocide is. That's what happened to the Jews, 6 million. So is Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians? The answer is no. They're not setting out to massacre the Palestinians or to eliminate the Palestinian nation, but fighting a war against Hamas, which is inside the civilian population. Israel is doing what they think they have to do, and what's happening to the Palestinian civilians is an absolute tragedy. But it's a tragic consequence of the genocide that Hamas wants to commit on the Jews.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is a humanitarian disaster. It is a war crime, but it's not against and it's not aimed against the civilians. They're not trying to kill civilians. That's why they told the civilians to leave the north and go to the south to get out of the way to empty the battlefields so that they can fight Hamas. I think about 700,000 Palestinians have gone south from the north. At the same time, 200,000 Israelis inside Israel have also left their homes in the south on Israeli government recommendation, for the same reason: to clear the battlefield. I think genocide is when you deliberately set out to stamp out a nation. Tragedy is the terrible consequence of war.
The New York Timestook heat after reporting that an Israeli rocket had hit the hospital in Gaza, which later turned out to be false. As a journalist, how do you balance reporting something quickly and knowing that you might be inflaming tensions around the world if you're incorrect?
The fact that the New York Times corrected its site, and also so did the BBC, is excellent. It took them one week to do it, so that's a problem. Many other organizations, including the AP, did not correct themselves.
It's this question of rushing to judgment — simply rushing to quote the first source that came up, which was Hamas. We threw out any possibility of knowing, said, "Israel did it, and there are 500 dead." I mean, they said that within minutes, and when we suddenly saw the pictures, there's a "Wait a minute, that's a car park, all those cars were burned. There's no huge damage to the buildings nearby." You can see that. So what's the story here? There's obviously a question right away from anybody who actually wanted to look, and so I did, that wasn't from above. It wasn't an Israeli rocket: There would have been a huge crater; there would have been a lot more damage. And how come 500 people were in the compound? However many were killed, whatever the final number turns out to be, 500 is obviously way too many.
But let me just say the answer to the wider question, this thing about journalism. In the world of social media, it's all about getting the first eyeballs, right? It's all about getting that first click. When there's news, people rush to see what's going on. They click on probably the first or second story that comes up, and they read it, and that's their information. So all the news organizations are competing now to be first, when before it was really a matter of, “Yes, being first is very important. But more important is to be accurate.” This race between being first and being accurate is a contradiction, and it leads to these kinds of mistakes, when you just use the first source available. In this case, the source was Hamas, which is a totally unreliable source.
By the way, I teach writing, and I talked about this with one of the people I'm working with. What I emphasize is that you don't make a career by getting it right: That's your job. But you can lose a career by getting it wrong.
Catch Martin Fletcher at 7 p.m. on Sunday, November 5, at the Jewish Community Center (2 Millstone Campus Drive) as part of the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival. Tickets are $40. More information at jccstl.com/arts-ideas/st-louis-jewish-book-festival.
Editor's note: We updated this headline after publication to better encompass the totality of the interview.
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