Ethan Bronner | UN-Truth

A Tale of Two Translations

Does it matter? Yes.

UPDATE: Ethan Bronner went over the translations with me by phone just now, and agrees that the English version we published is closer to the Hebrew text that he received. He says he did not do the translation into English, which was sent to him in the same mail as the Hebrew document… see below for more.

Last week, as we reported on our sister blog, Palestine-Mandate, here, some of Israel’s traditional and now-very-privileged elite held a demonstration in Tel Aviv, outside the hall where Israel’s independence was proclaimed on the night of 14-15 May 1948.

This demonstration, scheduled during the Jewish holiday of Passover — which celebrates freedom, while reminding Jews that they were once slaves — was timed to offer the support of this particular group of Israelis (called “eminent” and “distinguished”) for the anticipated Palestinian move to seek full UN membership and recognition of a Palestinian State, probably in September when the UN General Assembly holds its annual high-level debate in New York, opened by the U.S. President (leader of the UN’s host country).

At the demonstration in Tel Aviv, which was nearly drowned out by a noisy “right-wing” counter-demonstration, the Israeli group read out a document they had signed, which they called a “Declaration of Independence from the Occupation”.

After I posted the story on my blog, I received a comment from someone (the name is probably fictitious) saying that the version of the Declaration I had posted was different from the document posted on the website of the New York Times.

In the meantime, I was having an exchange on Twitter with Ali Abunimah, who disagreed with my view that the Declaration was something new. What’s new, in my view is above all the statement, according to the English-language version sent to me, that (1.) “The complete end of occupation is a fundamental condition for the freedom of both peoples”.

After that, in my view, this Declaration (2.) made a clear endorsement of a Palestinian State on the 1949/1967 borders — the very ones claimed by former PLO leader Yasser Arafat in his Declaration of Independence in 1988. The Declaration states, in the English-language version I posted on Palestine-Mandate: “Therefore we are here assembled, on April 21st, 2011, to welcome the coming Declaration of Independence of the Palestinian State, neighboring the state of Israel, according to our borders of independence, shaped at the end of the War of Independence in 1949. The borders known today as the ‘67 borders”.

This excludes equivocal arguments for any kind of partial or temporary “state” [or “bantustan”], or any entity with provisional borders. And it excludes any lingering presence of the Israeli military occupation. It seems to argue for full sovereignty for both states.

These things do matter, and taking this stand now is significant.

The Document — which is an Israeli paper, and not a joint initiative — argues for full rights within Israel. The signers of this text are not empowered to speak for the future Palestinian state, after all.

As the Twitter conversation continued, Ali was quoting things from the Declaration that were not in the version I had read (which I had posted on my other blog, Palestine-Mandate). He then kindly sent me the link to the document posted on the NYTimes site.

I was very surprised to discover that the two documents were different.

The one I had was sent from the group which had made the Declaration.

On Sunday morning, I started my investigation into the discrepancy between the two versions of the Declaration, and called them to ask about the difference in the two.

I was told by Roy Yellin of Ben-Or (a smooth and professional public relations firm in Tel Aviv which specializes in Israeli human rights organizations) that the Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief, had written the story in the NYTimes, and had done his own translation of the Declaration from the Hebrew version — “he speaks Hebrew, you know”.

UPDATE: Yes, Bronner speaks Hebrew, but he says the rest of this is nonsense — “He’s wrong”, he said about Yellin’s assertion. Bronner told me he was sent the Declaration in Hebrew, and an English translation which he then passed on to the NYTimes web designers, without comparing it to the Hebrew version.

Yellin told me that he believes the translation they did (which is the one I published on Palestine-Mandate) is more accurate — but that there areas that are always “open to interpretation to a certain degree”.

He said indignantly that they did not try to soften the language of the Declaration for PR purposes — “Never!” If anything, he said, he would have wanted it to be harder…

“Our purpose is not to jostle over nuance”, he said, “we wanted to offer an alternative to the present Israeli policy, and to say that September is an opportunity, rather than a threat”.

And, he added, “I’m not getting into an argument with the New York Times”.

Well, this is probably one reason why Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are conducted in English — and it’s not only because the Americans have been involved as facilitator or mediator or whatever since the Oslo process went public in September 1993. [The year-long secret Israeli-Palestinian contacts before that were conducted, also in English, by the Norwegians.] English is simply, now, the world’s lingua franca. English is also the obligatory second language in both Israeli and Palestinian educational curricula. [And, though some will bristle at the memory, English was one of the three official languages in Palestine from the time of the British conquest by General Allenby in December 1917, during the First World War.]

The battle over the subtle linguistic difference between the English-language version of UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted after many months of diplomatic wrangling following the June 1967 Middle East war, and the French-language version [withdrawing from territory occupied, or from the territory occupied, involving an intense and bitter dispute over whether this means all or only some territory] , is enough of a lesson learned to recommend designating one language, and only one language, for purposes of negotiating and concluding an agreement — certainly here.

Yellin did tell me that in any case, the NYTimes, or Ethan Bronner, didn’t translate the whole thing, but only a few sentences.

In fact, looking at the whole translation published by the NYTimes — which Yellin said was done by Ethan Bronner, but which Bronner has now confirmed was in fact NOT translated by him — some sentences were not translated at all, some were moved, and some stuff that wasn’t in the original Declaration was added.

The article Ethan Bronner wrote was published here, and the translation Ethan Bronner did from the Hebrew is posted on the New York Times website here, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/world/PalestinianState.pdf, where it is entitled: “ISRAELI INTELLECTUALS WELCOME AND ENDORSE AN INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN STATE NEXT TO ISRAEL”.

Following is a comparison of the two English-language texts.

Continue reading A Tale of Two Translations

FWIW: What Ahmadinejad really said — though most people have already made up their minds

For what it’s worth — because so few people are willing to listen to any analysis about this matter, as their minds are already made up — Angry Arab (As’ad AbuKhalil) ran this item on his blog last night about what Iranian President Ahmadinejad did — or did not — say:
“A keen and knowledgeable Western correspondent in the Middle East sent me this (he/she does not want to be identified):
“Hi As’ad. This is unreal. Or rather I’m astounded, but I shouldn’t be. We had a story last night on Ahmadinejad in Qatar. I heard the Arabic in passing on TV and it said he said Israel should be destroyed siyasiyyan [meaning, politically]. I come in today and find, as I feared, [..] story misquoting him: Any Israeli attack against Iran means the elimination of the Zionist entity from the world map. no mentioned of ‘politically’ … So I check the Farsi on IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency] … He does NOT say ‘map’ and he says the Zionist ‘regime’, as well as ‘political geography’; i.e. he means that as a political entity it would cease, not that it’s people would be destroyed. The rest you probably know: the original quote from 2005. I got curious and checked it (I read at time it was questioned but I didn’t know Farsi then). [..] ran him saying ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’, baldly; no other words of context. as far as I’m aware, it was this story that provoked the world reaction. but he actually said: imam goft een regime -e ishghalgar -e quds bayad az safheh -ye ruzgar mahv shavad [the Imam said this regime that occupies Jerusalem should be effaced from the page of time] i.e. he’s talking about the political entity. I’m not defending him one bit, but he’s making a point about the state of Israel, not that the population therein should be exterminated as the Nazis did. And look how successful this propaganda has been: the phrase has become so well-known that someone translating automatically jumped to these phrases ‘wiped off’ and ‘map’ when translating what Ahmadinejad said in Doha last night, fitting his words into this linguistic cast pre-prepared by media, without realising the distortion involved. (…I caught it.. but not after the story was translated into every [..] language service you can imagine)”. Posted by As’ad on Monday 6 September at 11:40 AM here.

As’ad is very critical of Ethan Bronner, the Deputy Foreign Editor of the New York Times who has also been serving as its Jerusalem bureau chief for the past couple of years. Ethan Bronner was one of the first (and only) ones in the MSM (main stream media) who, from his desk in New York in 2006, actually did try to look into what Ahmadinejad did actually say, on an earlier similar occasion. (Ahmadinejad is consistent, at least).

Ahmadinejad, who was formerly Mayor of Tehran, and a populist in style, with strong ties to the groups which are the pillars of the Islamic revolution which overthrew the Shah in Iran in February 1979, was elected president in August 2005.

Bronner wrote, in the NYT in June 2006, that “EVER since he [Ahmadinejad] spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel ‘should be wiped off the map’. Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark. Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: ‘Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran’. But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise. ‘Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian'” remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. ‘He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse’.”

Continue reading FWIW: What Ahmadinejad really said — though most people have already made up their minds

On Journalism – the press corps as "courtiers"

The very estimable journalist Chris Hedges wrote in an article published by Truthdig on 1 February: “ ‘The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press’, the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. ‘There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press — I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’ — stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes’.” Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission — the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’”
…
Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists or experts within the narrow confines of the power élite who debate policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term ‘the narcissism of minor difference’, the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than expose truth.

Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective, and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters, hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts, statements, positions, and anecdotes and then select those that create the ‘balance’ permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall Street, Congress, the White House, or the State Department, the more constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy.
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[F]ormer New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote: ‘Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is’. Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble something about telling the truth and serving the public. They prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News is a signal, a “blip,” an alarm that something is happening beyond our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book, Public Opinion. Journalism does not point us toward truth since, as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep. Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees”… The original article can be read in full here.

Now, the also-estimable Jonathan Cook, a British journalist now based permanently in Nazareth with his new family there, has written a reflection on the hot topic of whether or not “you have to be Jewish to report on Israel for the New York Times?”

Cook said that “Shortly after I wrote an earlier piece on [New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem and Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan] Bronner [whose son has just enlisted in the IDF] , pointing out that most Western coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict is shaped by Jewish and Israeli journalists, and that Palestinian voices are almost entirely excluded, a Jerusalem-based bureau chief asked to meet. Over a coffee he congratulated me, adding: ‘I’d be fired if I wrote something like that’. This reporter, who, unlike me, spends lots of time with the main press corps in Jerusalem, then made some interesting points. He wishes to remain anonymous but has agreed to my passing on his observations. He calls Bronner’s situation ‘the rule, not the exception’, adding: ‘I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army’. He added that it is very common to hear Western reporters boasting to one another about their ‘Zionist’credentials, their service in the Israeli army or the loyal service of their children. ‘Comments like that are very common at Foreign Press Association gatherings [in Israel] among the senior, agenda-setting, elite journalists’. My informant is highly critical of what is going on among the Jerusalem press corps, even though he admits the same charges could be levelled against him. ‘I’m Jewish, married to an Israeli and like almost all Western journalists live in Jewish West Jerusalem. In my free time I hang out in cafes and bars with Jewish Israelis chatting in Hebrew. For the Jewish sabbath and Jewish holidays I often get together with a bunch of Western journalists. While it would be convenient to think otherwise, there is no question that this deep personal integration into Israeli society informs our overall understanding and coverage of the place in a way quite different from a journalist who lived in Ramallah or Gaza and whose personal life was more embedded in Palestinian society’. And now he gets to the crunch: ‘The degree to which Bronner’s personal life, like that of most lead journalists here, is integrated into Israeli society, makes him an excellent candidate to cover Israeli political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life. The problem is that Bronner is also expected to be his paper’s lead voice on Palestinian political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life, all in a society he has almost no connection to, deep knowledge of or even the ability to directly communicate with … The presumption that this is possible is neither fair to Bronner nor to his readers, and it’s really a shame that Western media executives don’t see the value in an Arabic-speaking bureau chief living in Ramallah and setting the agenda for the news coming out of the Palestinian territories’. All true. But I think there is a deeper lesson from the Bronner affair. Editors who prefer to appoint Jews and Israelis to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are probably making a rational choice in news terms — even if they would never dare admit their reasoning. The media assign someone to the Jerusalem bureau because they want as much access as possible to the inner sanctums of power in a self-declared Jewish state. They believe – and they are right – that doors open if their reporter is a Jew, or better still an Israeli Jew, who has proved his or her commitment to Israel by marrying an Israeli, by serving in the army or having a child in the army, and by speaking fluent Hebrew, a language all but useless outside this small state. Yes, Ethan Bronner is ‘the rule’, as my informant notes, because any other kind of journalist — the goyim, as many Israelis dismiss non-Jews — will only ever be able to scratch at the surface of Israel’s military-political-industrial edifice. The Bronners have access to power, they can talk to the officials who matter, because those same officials trust that high-powered Jewish and Israeli reporters belong in the Israeli consensus. They may be critical of the occupation, but they can be trusted to pull their punches. If they ever failed to do so, they would be ejected from the inner sanctum and a paper like the NYT would be forced to replace them with someone more cooperative. When in later years, these Jerusalem bureau chiefs retire from the field of battle and are promoted to the rank of armchair general back at media HQ – when they become a Thomas Friedman paid to pontificate regularly on the conflict — they can be trusted to talk to those same high-placed officials, explaining their viewpoint and defending it. That is why you will not read anything in the NYT questioning the idea that Israel is a democratic state or see coverage suggesting that Israel is acting in bad faith in the peace process. I do not want here to suggest there is anything unique about this relationship of almost utter dependence. To a degree, this is how most specialists in the mainstream media operate. Think of the local crime reporter. How effective would he be (and it is invariably a he) if he alienated the senior police officers who provide the inside information he needs for his regular supply of stories? Might he not prefer to turn a blind eye to a scoop revealing that one of his main informants is taking bribes, if publishing such a story would lose him his ‘access’ and his posting? This is a simple cost-benefit analysis made both by the reporter and the editors who assign him that almost always favours the powerful over the weak, the interests of the journalist over the reader. And so it is with Israel. Like the crime reporter, our Jerusalem bureau chief needs his ‘access’ more than he needs the occasional scoop that would sabotage his relationship with official sources. But more so than the crime reporter, many of these bureau chiefs also identify with Israel and its goals because they have an Israeli spouse and children. They not only live on one side of a bitter national conflict but actively participate in defending that side through service in its military. This is a conflict of interest of the highest order. It is also the reason why they are there in the first place”… Like many Jonathan Cook articles, this one is being picked up and republished on multiple websites concerned with covering this area. I first found it on Mondoweiss, here.