Fluff Features as Propaganda?

Something unsettling about today's NYT feature story on the Jewish mother (Israeli and American citizen) Mrs. Mandell, whose child was killed in the West Bank in 2001. (pictured above, holding the sign. That separate story here.)

What's missing,
is any relation to the religious aspect of what this family of settlers is trying to accomplish in settling the West Bank with Jewish and Jewish-American immigrants at the expense of all those Palestinian refugees who remain in holding camps.  The husband (and father of the dead boy) is a rabbi, and yet there's no mention of the religious reasons given, which link so closely to the foreign policy political concerns of American evangelicals.

 “These people are filled with ideas that this is the Promised Land and their duty is to help the Jews,” said Izdat Said Qadoos of the neighboring Palestinian village. “It is not the Promised Land. It is our land.”

That quote comes from  a separate 2010 NYT story about American evangelists working directly with Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, and a tax-exempt fund whereby American dollars can fuel their growth.  Also well worth reading:

HaYovel is one of many groups in the United States using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories — effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace.

The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Today's feature story -- the news timeliness linked to the 3 missing Israeli teenagers in the same area -- speaks of this American-Israeli mother's struggles to go on after her son and his friend were found dead in a cave, their heads bashed in, their bodies bound and stabbed.

At first,
newspapers reported the deaths were thought linked to goat thieves, who had stolen 100 animals from the Palestinian town of Tekoa nearby, the same night the boys bodies were found in the cave. Young teens, the two had skipped school to go exploring in the desert canyon near their homes, and their friends, typical teens, lied about their whereabouts when the boys first went missing.

The murderers were never found, although 20 Palestinian men were arrested immediately after the crime in a roundup of the likely suspects. (Since Israel is like England, in that they can hold prisoners without charging or convicting, one wonders if those men have yet been released.)

One police commander however expressed the view that there was "no doubt" the murders were committed "for nationalistic reasons"^.  Police said the killings appeared to have taken place during a "chance encounter" rather than one that had been planned in advance.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested, and two teens shot dead, by Israeli forces trying to find the three students who have recently gone missing. A whispered "I've been kidnapped" is all they have to go on...

For the record, NO ONE likes to see dead or kidnapped children. But then some of us have troubles too with the spin that would pin everything on the political players of the region. Sometimes, perhaps, two boys wander into something like livestock thieving, and their deaths indeed might have been as non-symbolic as just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like the children shot to death at Sandy Hook.

It's sad enough a story -- senseless deaths of children -- without the political connections. The feature story today tries to downplay what one can find by googling the dead child's name -- the parents are political. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

No doubt, like the evangelists, they share the belief that G-d gave the lands of Judea and Samaria to His Chosen People. The evangelicals believe the Jews must return to the region before the Second Coming of Christ. The Israeli's don't believe this surely (the story doesn't end happily for them), but as noted above, they welcome the investment money.

And boy is there money involved.
Every part of the woman's daily "healing" described in today's article is financed by a million-dollar foundation set up in her son's name. Their family is in Boca. One wonders if the NYT simply doesn't understand the disparity there: how much the same money could be used, if indeed peace in the region was the prayer, to lift the Palestinians way of life.

Instead, the story tells us the dollars help finance Israeli women who have lost their children (the woman has no interest in meeting with any Palestinian women who have lost their sons in the same conflict) doing such "role-playing" activities as talking to water bottles, pretending they were the mothers of the currently missing students.

At the psychodrama group on Wednesday, Tzipi Cedar, who leads the women in role-play, told them to talk to three bottles of water on a coffee table as if they were the mothers of the three missing teenagers.

Be strong, one said. It’s O.K. to cry, said another. We went through the worst, losing a child, but what you’re experiencing is even harder, the uncertainty. A person is known by how they respond to their pain.

At Ms. Mandell’s turn, Ms. Cedar and others quietly correct her Hebrew, the gender of a pronoun, the tense of a verb.

“She doesn’t speak Hebrew well, but she has to express herself, so she expresses herself with mistakes,” Ms. Cedar said later. “Before the circle, she’s organized what they’re doing next week and the week after, and the coffee. But when she sits in the circle, she’s one of them.”

That's sad, really sad, but the part of the story that jumped out at me was the woman's explanation of why she chose to settle in the West Bank in the first place, in relocating her young children from American to Israel:

When she and Rabbi Mandell, who grew up in Connecticut, decided to marry, they made a deal: she would become Orthodox, and he would move back to America. After seven years in Pennsylvania and Maryland, they returned to Israel in 1996 with four children. Koby was the eldest.

They see themselves as “accidental settlers,” moving to the Gush Etzion bloc because they did not want to cram into a Jerusalem apartment. If Israel made peace with the Palestinians, the Mandells said, they would happily leave.

Come on now.
If it were just a money thing, surely they'd have moved by now? Found a bigger apartment in the Jewish half of Jerusalem, in Israel proper?

There's no crime necessarily in making your children pawns in this political conflict, especially if you are motivated by longstanding religious beliefs about ownership of the land. I just wish the Times reporter and editors might have been a bit more honest about background, even if this is just a simple heartbreaking feature story.

It serves, really, as a propaganda piece, when facts, facts, and more facts are really what is needed to show the ultimately religious showdown going on between the two peoples. The more Americans learn of this, I suspect, the more modest Christians and secular civilians here will reject our country committing to support this G-d over that Allah.