In an article in Sunday’s New York Times co-signed by Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner, the readers of the “Paper of Record” were informed that “Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.”

So the Israelis have suddenly become aware of the social problems provoked by the rise of state-coddled authoritarian fundamentalists in their midst?

Funny, my friends and contacts from Israel have been talking obsessively about the problem for over 15 years, with many of them predicting quite openly, if left unchecked, the rise of the haredim will eventually lead to the destruction of any remaining semblance of democracy within their society.

But if Kershner, an Israeli citizen, and Bronner, whose son has served in an Israeli army that has been in daily contact with the gratuitously violent behaviors of the fundamentalist settlers on the West Bank, are to believed, this sense of alarm surrounding the issue of the religious right is a brand-new phenomenon.

Their pose of being shocked, just shocked about the rise anti-democratic fundamentalists in the society they have inhabited for years is nothing short of mendacious.

If the two reporters had a modicum of intellectual honesty they would have said something like this:

For years, we, the reporters who inform the American people about the goings-on in Israel and occupied Palestine, a group that — as Allison Weir and Jonathan Cook have shown — is overwhelmingly comprised of Jews with deep emotional, and quite often familial, attachments to Israeli society, have systematically downplayed the scale and impact of religious fundamentalism within the Zionist state.

Since its founding, and with ever-increasing intensity since the rise of the Likud Party under Begin in the late 1970s, the discourse of Israeli identity has been predicated on the idea that Israel is a bastion of Modernity, Rationality, and Democracy surrounded by a sea of essentially medieval people, savage beings beholden to the dark superstitions and violent dictates of the Quran.

After having consumed an Israeli media diet rooted in this master trope for decades, and after having watched many of our friends and family members (if not ourselves) go off to war on this premise, we have become deeply imbued with this way of looking at the world.

Moreover, as people who are acutely aware of how crucially important the implantation of this Manichean narrative of a plucky and democratic Israel besieged by religion-fueled fanatics has been to securing massive U.S. military and diplomatic support for the country to which we are deeply attached, we have a strong disincentive to report on the existence of similar tendencies in Israel.

If the Americans find out that important elements of Israeli society are just as, if not more, chauvinistic, authoritarian, and anti-modern as our own endlessly repeated caricature of “the Arabs,” we are bound to lose support from the States.

As our mothers used to say, some things are best left unsaid outside the confines of the family.

In other words, when we said in the article that “the Israelis” had neglected the issue of the place of the ultra-Orthodox in their society, we were really referring to what we ourselves had done in our roles as reporters before the U.S. reading public.

Yours,

I.K. and E.B.

Indeed, even when Bronner and Kershner finally do get down to telling us about the “sudden” sense of crisis about the roles of religious zealots in Israeli society, they do so in a way that is largely sympathetic.

No one-size-fits-all negative portrayals of the religious haredim here. That treatment is strictly reserved for religious people who derive large parts of their worldview from the Quran.

No, unlike the world’s millions of Islamists who are regularly presented, per se and en masse, by the same guild of Israeli-based reporters as urgent threats to civilized society, the fundamentalists within the Jewish homeland are portrayed here as a diverse and generally reasonable group whose image has, unfortunately, been marred by a few bad apples.

Bottom line: Though “our” pre-moderns may have some rough edges and bad habits, they, of course, really have nothing to do with the nihilist fanatics on the other side.

One of the most important, if least discussed, factors in the advent of industrial-scale bloodletting during the 20th and 21st centuries has been the development of discourses of historical knowledge (the flagship elements of these institutionalized practices being Soviet Studies, Holocaust Studies, and now Security/Terrorist Studies) that effectively place the problem of “massively destructive evil” in places that are remote from the knowledge consumer in both geography and time.

Why are these practices so dangerous?

Because they effectively encourage citizens to suspend their critical faculties regarding urgent moral and civic threats in the heart of their own societies, thus making them much more willing to sign on to crusades designed to extirpate the pure malignancy that allegedly exists in other places.

While academics and think-tank types are the ones who generally develop these “scientific” tropes of the depraved “other,” it is ultimately the reporters at powerful media outlets who, with their daily reporting rooted in the same simplistic premises, cement these “realities” (and their implied solutions) into the minds of the populace.

In this sense, Kershner and Bronner have been “doing their part” for years.

I wonder how many of their readers have any clue regarding just how much — to put it in academic terms — their “positionality vis-à-vis the subject of their inquiry” affects their particular rendering of events?

Read more by Thomas Harrington

• Language and American Perceptions of the World – April 12th, 2011
• Not So Different After All? – March 1st, 2011
• Netanyahu: Intellectual Father of the ‘War on Terror’ – November 9th, 2010
• Livin’ la Vida Barroca – July 28th, 2008