Actually the problem with the peace process has been too much empathy, not too little - by Jonathan S. Tobin

A call for the Trump administration to show more sympathy for the Palestinian perspective demonstrates the flaw in the thinking of peace advocates.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
03 February '20..

Treating the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a zero-sum game guarantees that peace can’t be made. The only way to create mutual understanding, and hopefully, a path towards peaceful coexistence is via mutual empathy.

That’s the sort of anodyne sermon that we’ve been hearing for decades from advocates for Middle East peace. While that is something of a cliché, there is also truth to it. People who don’t recognize each other’s common humanity and the legitimacy of their existence aren’t going to be able to compromise and learn to live alongside each other.

Nevertheless, a call for more empathy for the Palestinians from Jodi Rudoren, the new editor of The Forward, is not only wrongheaded; it also illustrates everything that has been mistaken about the efforts of those Americans who have been most devoted to bringing about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Rudoren is a new edition to the ranks of editors of Jewish publications. She came to the Forward after a long career at The New York Times, including a stint in one of its most difficult and controversial posts. Rudoren served as the Times’ Israel bureau chief from 2012 to 2015. In that role, she became—as was the case with all of her predecessors and successors—the focus of intense interest from media critics (including myself). She was seen as part of a tradition of tendentious Times’ reporting on Israel and for mixing her opinions, which seemed to reflect her affinity for the mindset of the Jewish state’s left-wing political parties, in with her news coverage—a concern that doesn’t apply to her new role as an opinion columnist.

In her most recent column about what she felt were the shortcomings of the Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan, Rudoren resurrects one of the points she often invoked when she was reporting from Israel and claimed that criticism from both sides to the conflict testified to her fairness. In one instance, she was taken to task by a Palestinian official who complained about a piece in which she noted the suffering of a parent of an Israeli soldier who had been killed while defending his country. Even though the soldier had been killed fighting Egypt along the Suez Canal, the Palestinian said that her piece demonstrated a “lack of empathy for Palestinians.”

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