New Leaf

In the JC (subscription required), Alex Brummer reflects on the new and apparently reformed incarnation of Britain's Independent newspaper:

For several years now, the Independent has been cast into the outer darkness among readers sympathetic to Israel. Despite a Jewish editor in the shape of Simon Kelner and the contributions of veteran Middle East writer Eric Silver, of this parish, it has been viewed as being among the least sympathetic of our national newspapers to the Israeli cause.

The dominant voice on the Middle East at the paper has been Robert Fisk — and the paper’s use of an outrageous cartoon, showing Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies would have been enough to put off Jewish readers for life.

That would be a great pity. Because, in its new compact shape, the Independent has become a campaigning newspaper, using modern design and is easier to read than its dense, Blairite rival, the Times.

But, most significantly, in Donald Macintyre, the paper’s former political editor who is now comfortably settled in Jerusalem, it has found a new voice.

Here is a reporter less interested in the daily tit-for-tat headlines and instant analysis — which is the pattern for reporting from the region — and more interested in the sinews of the conflict and in understanding the mosaic of opinion and ethnicity which makes the politics and diplomacy of Israel/Palestine so complex.

The most commonly held complaint I hear from Israeli sympathisers about our national press is its failure to write beyond the conflict and seek to understand Palestinian and Israeli society.

In a recent series of articles — when the focus has been off the immediate conflict — Macintyre has done just that. The past two weeks have seen an insightful interview with the writer A. B. Yehoshua, described by Macintyre as a “moral touchstone for Israelis;” a feature on Macintyre’s visit to Nazareth to speak to the museum owner who has set up the first exhibition aimed at an Arab audience which seeks to understand Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis.

Macintyre has also taken the temperature of the Israeli town of Nitz-anim, which is preparing for the relocation of settlers from Gaza just down the coast. And he has produced an investigative report on Patriarch Irineos, the Greek Orthodox priest who, it is alleged, sold out his Palestinian flock for Israeli gold.

Each of these reports makes for fascinating reading. The Yehoshua profile/interview looks at both the author’s literary output — including his new novel, “The Mission of the Human-Resource Man” — and the novelist’s place in the debate about the future of the Middle East.