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Reading List - Jeffrey Goldberg

James R Douglas February 23

This week in your Meanjin reading list we draw your attention to American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, current national correspondent for The Atlantic, and former Middle-East and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker.

Goldberg reports extensively on the issues facing Israel today, from the Palestinian conflict, to Iran, to corruption amongst pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington, and he has a rich, conflicted history with that country. From a childhood in Long Island, as the victim of persistent anti-Semetic jibes, he cultivated a burgeoning Zionism, and moved to Israel to joined their defense force, where he served as a prison guard during the First Intifada, the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising. His sole book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle-East Divide, is an account of his time in the prison camp, and of the tentative friendship he formed with Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestinian prisoner there. But the full metamorphosis into an Israeli that he desired floundered in stresses of the Intifada, and he eventually re-Americanized himself. He now writes with considerable authority and access on the highest levels of US and Israel foreign policy. Part of the satisfaction of reading a Goldberg piece is watching him namedrop the various powerful people he gets to speak to. He’s the kind of reporter who can get a personal invitation from Fidel Castro to come to Cuba, visit an aquarium, and chat about the failures of communism.

He also blogs for The Atlantic.


The Hunted by Jeffrey Goldberg

This is the first Goldberg piece that really made me sit up and pay attention. In the course of a US television report in 1996 on Mark and Delia Owens, two wildlife conservationists in Africa, the shooting and killing of a supposed poacher is shown on air – a murder which remained officially unsolved. His moral curiosity piqued by this remarkable event, Goldberg uncovers a compelling, Heart of Darkness-esque tale of two American activists gone pretty much off the rails and running their own private war in a Zambian national park.

When people speak about the detrimental effects that the internet has had on the economic health of newspapers and other journalistic publications, I think this is the kind of piece they’re worried about losing. It has the kind of dense research that only come with substantial amounts of time and money and resources. Goldberg clearly went on several trips to Africa and around America, and spoke with just about everyone he could find connected with the TV report and the Owens, and the effort pays off in the notable and original revelations found in the article.

Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. Vieira introduces the scene: “We were allowed to accompany patrols in Zambia after we agreed not to identify those involved, should a shooting occur. On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.” A game scout in a green uniform walks in what appears to be a recently abandoned campsite. A pouch on the ground contains shotgun shells, and the scout removes a few of them to show the camera. The scout waits for the person camping there, a suspected poacher, to return. A new scene begins, and Vieira continues her voice-over: “Our cameras begin rolling again after a shot is fired at the returning trespasser.”

Onscreen, the scout is shown from behind, running through brush and carrying a rifle. He approaches a man wearing a gray jacket and brown pants, lying prone in a small clearing. The man tries to move, lifting his head a few inches off the ground. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. At this moment, a second figure is seen in the background. His face and upper body are blurred, so that even his race is obscured, but he is dressed in green and appears to be carrying a rifle. The camera turns to the wounded man, and Vieira says, in a voice-over, “The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat.” She pauses, and says, “Conservation. Morality. Africa.” Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.


The Ally From Hell by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder

Our previous Meanjin reading lists, on the likes of John Jeremiah Sullivan and David Grann, have brought you a bunch of literary journalism. This is the other kind: a big, meaty, Woodward and Bernstein-esque report on serious matters of politics. Goldberg and his colleague at The Atlantic Marc Ambinder write on the scary, headache-inducing tangle that is the US-Pakistan relationship, and in particular the precarious security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

What this means, in essence, is this: In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.


Among the Settlers by Jeffrey Goldberg

Goldberg cultivates a measured, complex perspective on the state of Israel, he is equal parts zealous and critical. Worrying though the existential threats posed by Hamas and Iran may be, he is equally concerned by the metastasizing moral and political disaster caused by the Israeli governments schizophrenic approach to Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. In this New Yorker piece from 2004 he reports on the settlers and the untenable, de-facto apartheid situation they are helping to bring about.

Some settler leaders see in the Palestinians the modern-day incarnation of the Amalekites, a mysterious Canaanite tribe that the Bible calls Israel’s eternal enemy. In the Book of Exodus, the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel on their journey to the land of Israel. For this sin, God damned the Amalekites, commanding the Jews to wage a holy war to exterminate them. This is perhaps the most widely ignored command in the Bible. The rabbis who shaped Judaism could barely bring themselves to endorse the death penalty for murder, much less endorse genocide, and they ruled that the Amalekites no longer existed. But Moshe Feiglin, the Likud activist, told me, “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.” When I asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements-the umbrella group of all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza-if he thought the Amalekites existed today, he said, “The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”

I heard similar talk from Effie Eitam, a hard-edged former general who leads the National Religious Party, a coalition partner in Sharon’s government. Eitam, who is Sharon’s housing minister, said, “I don’t call these people animals. These are creatures who came out of the depths of darkness. It is not by chance that the State of Israel got the mission to pave the way for the rest of the world, to militarily get rid of these dark forces.” Eitam told me that he believes there are innocent men among the Palestinians, but that they are collectively guilty. “We will have to kill them all,” he said. “I know it’s not very diplomatic. I don’t mean all the Palestinians, but the ones with evil in their heads. Not only blood on their hands but evil in their heads. They are contaminating the hearts and minds of the next generation of Palestinians.”


 

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