Free Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond Page A

the world, and in journalism, an industry where Jews are overrepresented in terms of their numbers relative to the general population, it was altogether natural that the
Times
newsroom contained a large group of Jews—and that some of them would be promoted to senior editorships.
    (On January 1, 1993, Howell Raines, the Washington bureau chief, and a Southerner in the Turner Catledge mold, became editorial page editor, a position that put him in line to succeed Joe Lelyveld and break the “Jewish succession” string.)
    The paper’s post-1967 coverage of Jewish affairs in general and of Israel in particular was another, more complex matter. As the Middle East became one of the seemingly permanent flashpoints in the world, the
Times
foreign desk regularly had to deal with stories that rolled off the news wires like live grenades, ready to detonate. The editors tried elaborate countermeasures aimed at protecting the paper’s reputation. According to Thomas Friedman, one of the
Times’
foreign correspondents, the
Times
as late as the 1980s had an unwritten rule of “never allowing a Jew to report from Jerusalem.” Friedman was born in 1952 and grew up in Minneapolis—“a Jew who was raised on all the stories, all the folk songs, and all the myths about Israel,” he would later remember. In 1984, Abe Rosenthal appointed Friedman chief of the
Times
bureau in Jerusalem, making him the first Jew to hold the job. Rosenthal thought he had broken the Jewish “barrier” five years earlier when he designated David K. Shipler as the
Times’
Jerusalem man. But when Rosenthal boasted about the move at an editors’ meeting, one of his colleagues corrected him: The bearded, sad-faced Shipler was a Protestant (“He just looked like a rabbi”).
    Friedman served in the Middle East for almost a decade, and thentook a leave of absence from the
Times
to write about his experiences. In his journals he examined how the weight of his Jewish past, as well as the
Times’
past, affected his work—an introspective analysis the
Times’
“objective” format barred from its news pages. Before his assignment in Jerusalem, Friedman covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the
Times.
He entered the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut on Saturday morning, September 18, 1982, soon after Lebanese Phalangists, operating within Israeli Army jurisdiction, had conducted a three-day “mop-up” of Shatila and nearby Sabra. The operation, supposedly aimed at rooting out Palestinian “terrorists,” instead resulted in the massacre of civilian noncombatants, perhaps as many as eight hundred to one thousand men, women, and children. Shatila-Sabra became “a personal crisis” for Friedman, convinced as he was of Israeli knowledge—and probably, approval—of what happened inside the camp. Sitting at his typewriter, trying to reconstruct the massacre, he felt driven by “two conflicting impulses,” the truth-telling role of a
Times
journalist and his private Jewish sympathies. “One part of me wanted to nail [Israeli Prime Minister] Begin and [Defense Minister] Sharon.… Yet another part of me was also looking for alibis—something that would prove Begin and Sharon innocent, something that would prove the Israelis couldn’t have known what was happening.” Friedman’s reporting convinced him of official Israeli complicity. He angrily banged on the table during an interview with the Israeli senior army commander and raged at the general: “How could you do this?” Friedman realized that he was really saying, “How could you do this to me.… I always thought
we
were different.… What do I tell people now?”
    The encounter left Friedman “literally sick to my stomach.” He telephoned
Times
foreign editor Craig Whitney back in New York and told him, “I really don’t want to shovel this shit anymore. Let somebody else write the story.” Whitney reminded him that he was the
Times
correspondent on scene. Duty won out: Friedman’s