Jewish Book Week Gets Vigorous 'Last Word'

by Zoe Strimpel
Tue, 4 Mar 2008 at 8:12 PM

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Jewish Book Week came to a fraught close on Sunday night in a Bloomsbury hotel conference room with a "discussion" called "The Last Word: Reporting the Middle East." It was a strange shift in atmosphere, as immediately preceding had been the presentation of the first-ever Chaim Bermant Prize to a journalist who best captured the spirit of the late commentator and wit. (It went to the established Times columnist and associate editor Danny Finkelstein.)

Anyway, there we were in a packed hall, old and young, intelligentsia and students. I hesitate to call it a debate, since the two would-be combatants aren't traditionally on opposite sides. They were David Landau, the grim-looking, British-born, and controversial editor of Haaretz, Israel's best attempt at homegrown anti-Zionism (though the paper does say it supports the existence of the state of Israel), and Alan Rusbridger, editor of the left-wing British broadsheet, the Guardian.

Questions from moderator Alex Brummer, city editor of the Daily Mail, may have begun slightly critically toward the two editors. Mr. Rusbridger was asked to justify the huge discrepancy between the number of reports on Sderot (very few) and Gaza (many) in his paper and on the BBC over the past few years. Mr. Landau was asked to discuss his paper's responsibility to report unbiased news in the wider world. Both men managed to evade particulars; no answer at all emerged on the Sderot-Gaza question. But Mr. Landau was far and away the more difficult presence — he had come there, he said, to tell Anglo Jewry to stop "Guardian-bashing" and "counting mentions of Sderot" and channel their "love" of Israel into "helping us think" and work out a solution.

It stands to reason that there were lots of "How can you justify yourself, Mr. Rusbridger?" sort of accusations from the floor. (An American friend noticed how tense British Jews are in general on the question of Israel, almost incapable of tolerating any criticism of its policies.) There were also, of course, bursts of applause when Mr. Landau said something metaphysical about Israel's "disaster" or was highly critical of the state's policies toward Palestinians. At one point, he said "apartheid" might soon be a fair and accurate way to describe the situation in Israel.

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