Neither here nor there

You know those annoying people on radio and television who insist on talking into the mike just to let you know that absolutely nothing is happening, but that - don't worry - something will be happening very shortly?

Well, as I was in a cab last week passing the Foreign Ministry on my way to work, the correspondent for the radio station my cab driver was listening to was describing the scene inside the Foreign Ministry, where Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was about to give a press conference on her response to the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War.

Instead of waiting for the press conference to actually begin before broadcasting it, the radio station aired the incredibly inane patter of said correspondent, who was left to breathlessly report rumors of how Livni may or may not have greeted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when she met with him before the press conference.

The breaking news sounded more like 11-year-old girls desperately trying to squeeze some excitement out of an utterly yawn-worthy he said-she said conversation they had overheard.

"She said, 'It's good to see you,' or something like that," the correspondent related, to the best of my recollection. "And he said, 'Well, I’m tired.'"

And then came the speculation - because God forbid we should wait two minutes to actually hear what Livni has to say, when it's so much more informative to just guess.

The announcer predicted that, despite all the Israeli and international reporters impatiently waiting to hear Livni speak, the press conference was likely to be rather "pareve," since she wasn't expected to quit the government.

Pareve is a concept borrowed from kashrut laws, in which food is designated meat, dairy or neither - that is, pareve. Meat and dairy don't mix, but pareve food - like fish, eggs and pasta - can be eaten with either steak or cheese, giving rise to the idea that "pareve" is a rough equivalent to either "wishy-washy” or "bland" because it doesn't take a stance; it's neither here nor there.

But Mr. Radio was not quite satisfied with his careful assessment of what the foreign minister had not yet said, and quickly upped his designation to "pareve plus" (פרווה פלוס) - because after all, he noted, Livni did call the press conference, so she must be gearing up to say something.

The correspondent gave no indication, however, of whether he thought Livni's comments would be more likely to go with steak or with cheese.

The great equalizer?

The Associated Press reported yesterday that a Virginia Tech freshman who had just returned home after last week’s shooting rampage on campus was killed in a car crash Friday. As the Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) siren is about to go off to commemorate soldiers killed in Israel’s wars as well as terror victims, such reports drive home once more the hard truth that death is not, after all, the great equalizer.

Would AP have bothered to report that a Virginia Tech freshman died in a car crash had his campus not recently been the site of a shooting? Obviously not. There’s that call of (perceived) irony that we the media can’t resist - to the extent that, on the other side of the notebook, I started getting excessively paranoid about dying in a terror attack in the weeks before my wedding, because the news reports at the time made it seem that just about every terror victim had been about to get married, just as every soldier killed in combat seemed to be on the verge of finishing his army service. (Back on the media side not long after, I contributed to the general impression by writing this article about a young woman who was indeed killed in a terror attack the night before her wedding.)

And so it is that a mundane car crash becomes a wire story somehow connected to the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. Let’s face it: For all the heartache of the student’s family, from a media perspective, the car accident is not much of a national story - only one victim, and at that, one who’s not a child, a saint or a celebrity. Happens all the time. But somehow, that connection to a larger tragedy - or, more specifically, to the feeling that, Oedipus-like, this student evaded his fate only to encounter it as he attempted to flee - makes the accident (debatably) newsworthy.

I have often thought since moving to Israel during the intifada, when such thoughts were inescapable, that if I had a choice, I would much rather be killed in a terror attack than in a car accident - though my chances of the latter are far higher than my chances of the former. Of course, I hope my family and I live long and healthy lives (ptu ptu ptu), but perhaps this morbid thought is fitting on a day in which we are supposed to think of death.

The families of Israelis killed in terror attacks, as in combat, are afforded a kind of honor and prestige - not to mention the crasser element of financial assistance from the state - that the families of accident victims could never hope for. A family member dying in a car accident is a personal tragedy, while a family member dying in war or by an act of terrorism is a national tragedy. I often think that it must be harder for families of accident victims to deal with their loss because it just seems so pointless, whereas the others can at least comfort themselves with the knowledge that their loved ones sacrificed themselves to some more noble cause than the rehabilitation of a drunk driver.

As the national emotional manipulation machine goes into gear once again - the same slow songs on the radio that they play right after a terror attack, the TV movies about death - I join the country in mourning the loss of the men and women whose early departure from this world is commemorated today. All the same, I can’t help but entertain a sneaking, possibly heretical, sensation that due to the perhaps inevitable value society assigns to some kinds of deaths and not others, their families are - in a way that I certainly do not envy - the lucky ones.

Nukes? What nukes?

Israeli and international media have been feasting this week on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s achievement of adding a whole new layer of meaning to the concept of nuclear ambiguity.

The policy has long meant that Israel will neither confirm nor deny having nuclear weapons – preferring to harvest the benefits of a deterrence wrought by the rest of the world’s decades-long knowledge of the country’s capabilities while avoiding the pitfalls of possible inspections, censure, sanctions or loss of financial aid. But the recent hullabaloo has, for some, narrowed the focus; the latest ambiguity under discussion is not about Israel's status as a nuclear power but about what, if anything, Olmert intended to say about it.

In a prerecorded interview on German TV that was broadcast Monday, during his visit there, Olmert said that the United States, France, Britain and Russia had nuclear weapons, and were "civilized countries that do not threaten the foundations of the world."

Then came the clincher that has set the media and political hounds growling with excitement: "Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

Many interpreted this list as putting Israel in the same league as other nuclear countries, but Olmert’s people said the list was actually one of civilized countries, whose nuclear capability or (wink, wink) lack thereof is incidental to the point he was making. Israeli politicians who would have been happy to see Olmert step down no matter what he said or implied about Israel’s nuclear power called for Olmert to step down because of what he said or implied about Israel’s nuclear power. And some questioned whether the prime minister’s slip of the tongue (which is quite different from the justice minister’s slip of the tongue, but that’s another story entirely) was really an accidental and unfortunate occurrence or whether it was his way of warning Iran.

I found it interesting to see how different media characterized the remarks in their articles on Olmert’s comment: Was it a slip or an admission? Did he announce that Israel has nuclear weapons or appear to imply it?

Some publications, like The New York Times, played it safe, sticking with words like “seem” and “appear.”

A NYT article published Tuesday was headlined, “In a Slip, Israel's Leader Seems to Confirm Its Nuclear Arsenal,” and began by saying: “Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, appeared to acknowledge inadvertently during a TV interview shown Monday that Israel has nuclear weapons, an issue on which the Jewish state has sought to maintain ambiguity for decades.”

Possibly following Olmert’s lead, the Guardian threw caution to the wind in a second-day story published Tuesday on what it called the “nuclear gaffe,” in which it said flat-out that Olmert was under fire for having “accidentally acknowledged for the first time that Israel had nuclear weapons.” Not until the 10th paragraph does the story mention that Olmert’s spokeswoman denied that his comments “mean Israel possessed or wanted to acquire nuclear weapons.”

The most striking set of articles I found came from Reuters, which may or may not have undergone a change of heart in its take on the story.

In a Monday article that appeared on the Washington Post Web site under the headline “Olmert admits Israel has nuclear weapons,” Reuters wrote: “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, lifting the veil over Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity, appeared in an interview broadcast on Monday to admit that the Jewish state had atomic weapons.”

As if there were not enough of it going around in this little nuclear contretemps, this sentence suffers from an ambiguity all its own: the word “appeared” can refer to Olmert’s having appeared on TV (as I read it at first) or as a qualifier that – were it not separated by an intervening reference to the broadcast – would read “appeared to admit.”

By Tuesday, though, Reuters had (paradoxically, perhaps) clarified its position by injecting greater uncertainty, writing: “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert triggered a domestic firestorm on Tuesday after publicly implying, in an apparent reversal of a decades-old secrecy policy, that Israel has the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal.” Note the double hedge of “implying” and “apparent” (not “appearing,” this time).

And finally, the reward for best sense of humor goes to The Associated Press, for a piece about the response to Olmert’s comments that was slugged “Israel-Nuclear Fallout.” Kind of scary at first glance, but, hey, it made me laugh.

Crossposted to Israelity.

The Sunshine State of Gaza

This blog was first posted July 7, 2005, on Haaretz Underground. Slight changes have been made to the original post.

For obvious reasons, coverage of last week's evacuation of the Gaza Strip hotel-turned-outpost centered on the disengagement plan and opposition to it. But let us not forget the all-important issue of identity - in other words, what to call the rundown hotel?

Even in Hebrew the question has more than one answer. Right-wing activists moved into what Israelis call the "Hof Dekalim" hotel in the Gaza settlement of Neveh Dekalim to protest the pullout. Then the hotel residents declared their abode an outpost they decided to call "Maoz Yam," also known as "Maoz Hayam."

So far, only three options. But that's before we tackle the English version.

The two major English-language wire services, The Associated Press and Reuters, seem to have confused the Gaza Strip with Florida. After all, there's sand, there's sea - and there's the Palm Beach Hotel, the literal translation of "Malon Hof Dekalim."

Other options include translating only the word "malon" and going with "Hof Dekalim Hotel," or translating the two more common words in the name, leaving us with "Dekalim Beach Hotel." I lean toward the latter option, which retains the original sound but translates the most relevant words.

I have heard tell, however, of a sign outside the Neveh Dekalim hotel - as Haaretz sometimes calls it in a bit of a copout - that gives the name in English as Palm Beach Hotel. If that is the case, then the wire services can be forgiven for their literalism, since institutions, like people, have the right to decide their own names in whatever language they choose.

But what about the right-wing activists' decision to change the name of the hotel to Maoz Yam/Maoz Hayam?

The CNN Web site replicated (one version of) the Hebrew name, saying in an article from June 30, the day the hotel was evacuated: "Video showed police and Israeli soldiers hauling screaming protesters from the Maoz Yam hotel in Neveh Dekalim."

The Washington Post, on the other hand, applied the lessons of the Sunshine State style used in determining the hotel's original name, writing in a June 2 story: "About 30 families have moved into the former Palm Beach Hotel, renamed Strength of the Sea by its new occupiers."

The Jerusalem Post settled for using the Hebrew name along with its English translation, which differs from the one the Washington Post chose. "The radicals had barricaded themselves in the Gush Katif hotel, which they called Maoz Hayam, or the Seaside Fortress," it wrote on June 30.

Perhaps the switch to Seaside Fortress, or any other variant of the name, was a tactical mistake on the part of those who briefly lived there. After all, if elderly Floridian Jews could accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, surely they might have been persuaded to vacation at the Hof Dekalim Hotel - even if they did think they were heading for that other Palm Beach.