In mid-December of last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "with all due respect," declined a request to write an op-ed for the New York Times. In his rejection letter, Netanyahu's senior advisor, Ron Dermer, claimed to have counted up Times (and International Herald Tribune) articles and concluded that of the 20 articles related to Israel published between September and November 2011, 19 portrayed Israel in a negative light. It would seem, he wrote, "as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel."
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If one puts aside for a moment the question of pro- or anti-Israel bias, it does seem that the surest way to get an op-ed published anywhere in the United States is to write something about Israel. Since I received a request to write this article for Foreign Policy, I've visited the FP site daily and counted the articles on different topics and countries. You can try it yourself using the search engine: Israel was written about more than Britain, Germany, Greece, India, or Russia. And next week it will be written about even more, as Netanyahu comes to Washington to make yet another speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and meet with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss Iran strategy and other matters.
Counting mentions of Israel in various American forums is an old habit of mine. Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, I begged the candidates to "resist the temptation" to constantly talk about Israel or express their profound love for the Jewish state. I wrote then:
Last week in the vice-presidential debate, Israel's name was mentioned 17 times. China was mentioned twice, Europe just once. Russia didn't come up at all. Nor Britain, France, or Germany.
Needless to say, my advice has not been heeded. In December 2011, I listened to the Republican presidential candidates compete to prove their friendship with Israel at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. (Mitt Romney promised to visit Israel before visiting any other country; Newt Gingrich said that he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the first day of his presidency.) In early January, like many other journalists from many other foreign countries, I traveled to Iowa to cover the Republican caucuses and had to wonder again about writers from other countries:
Do they not feel neglected amid all this talk about my country? In the more than one dozen campaign events I attended, I didn't hear one word about Japan or Russia or Germany or France or Italy. Europe was mentioned occasionally, as in, "President Obama wants the United States to become like Europe, and we have to stop him." China was mentioned sporadically; Brazil, maybe once. Israel? Every time.
There's more than one reason that Israel became a topic of such constant conversation among American writers, opinion-makers, politicians, and policy wonks. Undeniably, Israel is interesting. It is conveniently located in an area that is continuously a producer of dramatic news, a place to which journalists can easily travel and from which they can easily write -- the one country in the Middle East that doesn't violently prevent the media from doing its job. Then there's the "special relationship" factor: Israel is a U.S. ally, and a strong and vocal lobby of both Jews and Christians is working to preserve the two countries' ties. It is a place for which many Americans have special affinity for religious reasons, meaning that any story on Israel is likely to generate both pageviews and impassioned comments. There's also the politics: Israel is a tool with which candidates for office hammer one another. That's to say nothing of the fact that American Jews, while a tiny minority of the U.S. population, are well represented among journalists.
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