The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The New York Times takes 5,000 words and three dozen images to offer what it bills as “a journey into a divided Israel,” based on a ten-day drive through the country by the newspaper’s Jerusalem bureau chief.

They find what they want to find. Not a word about high-tech startup successes. Nothing substantial about army service, other than fervently Orthodox Jews avoiding it. Instead, pejoratives. The Israeli city of Tiberias is described as “shabby, tired”— adjectives that could be used more accurately to describe New York Times journalism.

Israel’s founders, I think, would be impressed beyond their wildest dreams by the miracle of what has been achieved there — the population growth, the prosperity, the military might, the ingathering of exiles, the rebirth of Hebrew as a living language. Yet the Times manages to find two old men — an 86-year-old and an 80 year old — and to open and close the story around them. The 86-year-old claims his father would say of Israel, “This wasn’t the child we prayed for.” The 80-year-old, who gets the last word in the story, claims, “We can be part of any country … We can be part of Israel. We can be part of Israel-Palestine. We keep our identity not because of nationality but because of belief … Who cares whether it was your land, my land … Live anywhere you want.” The population of Jews indifferent to nationality, in Europe and in North America, has in fact lost their identity as they’ve melted into the gentile population.

Not many people in Israel are so indifferent to their national existence. Any politician or political party who claimed “We can be part of Israel-Palestine… Who cares whether it was your land, my land,” would not get very far in Israeli politics. The Times sums up Israel — a demographically young country — by finding two unrepresentative 80-year-olds.

Meanwhile, for all the show up, reportorial road-trip hustle, the Times narrative is exactly the pre-cooked agenda we’ve all come to expect: “the underlying tensions and inequities remained — the unending occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and the social divisions that have split Israel since its founding: between Jews from Europe and the Middle East, between the secular and the devout, between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority.” Never mind that the occupation isn’t actually “unending” because Israel withdrew from Sinai, withdrew from Gaza, withdrew from the Southern Lebanon security zone. Never mind that the “blockade” of Gaza also involves Gaza’s neighboring country of Egypt, and has been sufficiently permeable to allow the entrance of thousands of trucks weekly, carrying millions of liters of fuel and tens of thousands of tons of supplies.

The Times applies a double standard, fretting about the fervently Orthodox labor-force participation rate (“About half of Haredi men don’t work, allowing them to study religious texts full-time”) without offering any statistic about the US labor force participation rate, or about what the people not working in the US are doing — smoking dope and playing video games, not studying religious texts. (By way of comparison, the US labor force participation rate for men 55 and older is 45 percent, and for women 55 and older is 34 percent.)

Not even the Times commenters are buying this nonsense. One wrote, “this article presents an Israel where there are more questions than answers, more problems than solutions. And yet, having visited the country (briefly) a few years, I feel it does not quite capture the energy and exuberance that persists.”

Another commenter said, “It seems like the writers went out of their way to cover strife, identity issues and resentment. Lost is the unprecedented historical context of the rebirth of the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile and persecution. In other words, let’s remember the miraculous overall success of the Zionist project in a very hostile neighborhood after only 75 years of statehood.” And another said, “this article seemed sad. Israel is a wonderful and diverse place. It has problems but much joy too. The majority live in peace with each other.”

Another said, “Doesn’t anyone enjoy living in Israel? You could also drive around America and find disaffected people in almost every county in every state. This article seems to describe the human condition more than anything really specific to Israel. The locations and ethnicities are unique but the situations are not.”

What a waste of time and space.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of the Forward and North American editor of the Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.