Pressing forward

"Walking Israel" by Martin Fletcher; Thomas Dunne Books

By ARTHUR WOLAK
Martin Fletcher is not entirely pleased with the title his publisher chose for his book, Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation.
In fact, when asked if he found Israel’s “soul,” he has to answer in the negative.
The NBC special correspondent and former Tel Aviv bureau chief had actually wanted to trek along the coast from Rosh Hanikra to Gaza with one of his sons, so his preferred subtitle was was “The Father, the Son and the Holy Coast.”
Fletcher addressed the Vancouver community on November 9 in conversation with Dawna Friesen of Canada’s Global National News. His appearance was a special event to help launch the annual Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival, taking place November 20-25.
Jokes about the book’s title notwithstanding, Fletcher had a serious goal: to help dispel what he believes has been considerable media bias against the State of Israel.
According to Fletcher, any Western journalist defining what a story is will base it around a conflict, which he asserts is the Western approach to telling a story.
“Going back to the Greeks and Romans, a story is about conflict; it’s about overcoming obstacles [and] challenges.”
Without conflict, there’s rarely a story for Western journalists to tell. With Israel’s share of conflicts, the country is always in the news.
Much of Fletcher’s work, like other journalists’, has been covering conflicts “to the east of the Green Line – the security wall – and the occupations, the soldiers, the fighting, the shooting, the killing.” As a result, he says, that’s the view of Israel that the world has through the media.
“I don’t think there is any foreign assignment that you can have where you get as much attention as when you are in Israel,” says Fletcher. “You can be a foreign correspondent in London or Paris or Hong Kong. So what? If you’re a foreign correspondent in Israel, everyone is looking at you. Jewish groups are monitoring every word you say, Palestinian groups, media monitoring groups. Every word you say is under a microscope, under great scrutiny. And I like it. I like that feedback. I think it’s important and I learned a lot from it.”
As for the current state of peace efforts, Fletcher remains ambivalent. In his view, when one lives in Israel, one doesn’t tend to see things in terms of war and peace. From the outside, especially the US, one thinks in terms of the importance of achieving a peace agreement within a year.
“When you live in Israel, it’s more about stability and peace and quiet. That’s enough,” he says.
But he does not see a peace agreement on the immediate horizon. “I can’t see how there can be a real peace agreement,” he asserts. “Even if there were a peace agreement, I wouldn’t trust it personally.”
Yet, he concedes, “Israel does need to make the compromises necessary for peace, and so do the Palestinians.”
On achieving true peace, Fletcher is pessimistic. “Even if there is a peace agreement, I don’t believe for a minute that would be the end of the conflict. But I think Israel needs to reach that point in order to regain the support of the world,” he says.
“The constant emphasis of Israel as a country in conflict is certainly out to delegitimize Israel. It’s the only country in the world today where you can actually discuss the question in polite society, should this country exist? You don’t ask this question of Zimbabwe or North Korea, but only about Israel.”
It’s a tough sell to defend Israel in Europe today, he says. “Israel’s long-term strategic security,” Fletcher contends, “can only be guaranteed within a peace agreement which makes compromises and regains the support of Europe and retains the support of the United States. And therein lies Israel’s security in the long run.”
Having resigned from NBC in January, he remains active as a special correspondent. Fletcher admits that working as a journalist in Israel as a Jew was an advantage. The reason, he explains, is “because this gave me a lot of empathy for the country. The challenge, of course, was to continue to report in an unbiased way.”
There is no hiding the fact that his sympathies remain with Israel, but, concedes Fletcher, “because of the Holocaust and the effect on my family and all Jews in Europe, I always grew up with a real antipathy toward bullies.”
For Fletcher, in the West Bank the “bullies” are, by definition, the Jews, a word that did not go unchallenged by an audience member but which he defended.
“They are the soldiers with the guns and the clubs; they’ve got the power.”
As a result, they are the proverbial “bullies” that attract the attention of journalists.
Consequently, Fletcher could also feel great empathy for the Palestinians as well as the Jews.
“I was always trying to reflect everybody’s story as fairly as I could,” he says.