‘A matter of commitment’: On Mideast desk, fighting fatigue with focus

Episode transcript

Clayton Collins:  It’s among the world’s most drawn-out fights, but the flame of the Israeli Palestinian conflict surged to new heights October 7 with a brutal cross border incursion by Hamas and an Israeli military response that continues, and that some believe still threatens to widen. 

The Monitor’s Ken Kaplan, Mideast and diplomacy editor, is central to the orchestration of regional coverage. (Find our latest news at csmonitor.com.)

Ken’s portfolio also includes Ukraine. Two of his writers have been in the Monitor’s rotation during the nearly two-year-old war there. 

Ken (somehow) found time to join me in the studio. 

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Collins:  This is “Why We Wrote This,” a podcast about how our journalists do their work. I’m Clay Collins. Welcome, Ken!

Ken Kaplan: Thanks for having me, Clay.

Collins:  When I see you in the newsroom, Ken, looking a little rumpled and sleep deprived, I think, ah, “the war desk.” When I was in international news in the late ’90s, I was with the Mideast Balkans desk for a bit. It’s exhausting, but it’s also energizing, and it can mean putting your life on hold. What keeps you going?

Kaplan: You know, for myself and for all of us on the Mideast desk, there’s a matter of professional commitment to an enormously important and really horrible story. But there’s also, for many of us, a personal connection to the story as well. My career in journalism started in Israel, and I know the country well. I have friends there. Taylor Luck, our Arab world correspondent, lives in Jordan [and] is completely immersed in society there.

Neri Zilber, who lives in Tel Aviv, has for many years ... when the war started, he was responding to air raid sirens and running to a shelter. And we have correspondents in the West Bank and Gaza who are absolutely living the story. So what keeps me and what keeps all of us going is two-fold. It’s professional and it’s personal.

Collins: As one of your writers (and our mutual friend) Scott Peterson recently said, you all huddle on Sundays in a combination war cabinet/therapy session. How important is that team contact in thinking about everything from correspondent safety to staying on top of developments? And how did what you were talking about before October 7 position you to stay on top of that story?

Kaplan: I even circle back to your first question about what keeps us going. These Sunday meetings keep me and keep us going. We are sharing not only ideas about stories that we want to do, but we were all reacting as human beings to what we were hearing. We’re a diverse group of people who come to this story from many perspectives. But there’s a relationship of trust and respect. And friendship, really, honestly. 

Now, the dynamic in these meetings is not, top-down or bottom-up. It’s really collaborative. You know, these Sunday meetings have been the highlight of the week in many respects. 

So, when the war broke out on October 7, as surprising as it was, it didn’t really happen in a vacuum. And the world that existed on October 6 was very different from the one we’re looking at now. In many respects, I would say it was a better world, a more optimistic world. But what were the things that we were covering at the time? 

Neri Zilber, our correspondent in Tel Aviv, had been covering for months the intense Israeli political dissent over the government’s judicial reform plan, or judicial overhaul, as its critics call it. And the internal Israeli political divisions were an important part of the context for how Israel’s adversaries saw Israel at the time, and how Israel responded to the threat that it suddenly found itself with on October 7. So Neri was primed to cover that. 

Taylor Luck and Fatima AbdulKarim in the West Bank had been writing about Palestinian frustration with their own leadership. How the Palestinian Authority was not responsive, had become too authoritarian. Many young Palestinians were becoming more supportive of militant groups in the West Bank. 

And then another big story that was happening, and we were still wrestling with, was the prospect of normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And we believe, and many analysts have said, that the timing of this attack on October 7 was in reaction, to a large part, to Hamas’ understanding that this Saudi-Israel deal could happen and, this was a way of preventing it from happening. We had been on top of all of the main pieces before this war started. And obviously, one of the missions we have at the Monitor is not to just breathlessly report the news, but explain what we’re seeing, why people do what they do. 

Collins:  At what point in the discussion of a story does it become about Monitor distinction, as opposed to what’s happening on the ground and how can we report it accurately and quickly?

Kaplan: So, first of all, this story has been such a [fast-paced] news story, that in some cases, we had to be reactive here in dealing with October 7 and the aftermath. So, we’re looking for a way of melding events as they happen with getting access to real human beings and hearing from them what their experiences and thoughts are.

Early on in the war, when we had Taylor in Amman, Taylor was interested in getting to the West Bank, and he wanted to go to East Jerusalem, but the bridge between Jordan and Israel, the Allenby Bridge, was closed for security reasons. So Taylor was going to use another border-crossing point, in the northern Jordan Valley, that was going to have fewer security issues. So when he mentioned that to me, I said, you know, Taylor, if you go into northern Israel, there are these Israeli Arab communities. And there might be some interesting perspective on the conflict if you could talk to them. Taylor went to Nazareth, then went to Haifa, interviewed a bunch of Israeli Arabs, and came out with a truly terrific story that I think many other newspapers didn’t get, but we were certainly among the very first to do. Which was, Israeli Arabs, they’ve been living coexistence between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Arabs, within Israel. They know it’s possible. They have relatives in Gaza who’ve suffered from this war. They have Israeli friends who’ve been affected by October 7th and subsequent violence. They see both sides. 

On one of our Sunday gatherings, at the time, the death toll among Palestinians in Gaza was soaring. And, just conversationally, we asked: “Neri, what are Israelis saying about the horrible suffering in Gaza?” And he said: “Well, you know, Israelis aren’t really seeing that on the evening news. They’re so absorbed with the trauma of October 7.” And this was in December. And he mentioned that just the day before he’d been at an art exhibit in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend, which was showing photos taken from the Israeli concert that was a target of the Hamas attack, where so many young people were killed. And I immediately said, and others on the phone call said, “that’s a story.” If Israelis are so consumed with their own trauma that they’re not even seeing what’s happening on the Palestinian side, that’s an important story. And he went and wrote that story: what Israelis see and don’t see about the Palestinian suffering in Gaza. And to be sure, the Israeli media does cover it: in print, but the nightly TV news, and the imagery that TV brings to coverage of a story, there’s certainly a difference there. 

Howard LaFranchi also went down to the general region. I had no idea how he got a handle on doing this story, but he found a volunteer organization that was going down to help some of the farms in the area pick their crops so that the crops weren’t going to rot on the vine. And he went down, and he picked tomatoes, and he talked to these other volunteers, and that gave us insight into the thinking of these people. I mean, it was a terrific, small, narrow story that he found about how people were talking about their future. 

Our reporter in the Gaza Strip, Ghada Abdulfattah, she has been living this conflict. Her family has had to move as a result of Israeli airstrikes and Israeli ground moves. so the fact of the airstrikes, the fact of Palestinians in Gaza having to relocate. 

I mean, these are reportable news events. They speak to larger dynamics, but we are able to deal with that breaking news from a human perspective on the ground. 

Collins:  Ken, besides [our writers] being intrepid and enterprising … you touched on the fact that all of these writers come with different backgrounds and different lifetime inputs. I mean, your own background is quite different than Fatima’s. So I’m just wondering how backgrounds affect perspective on this story, how you collectively ensure that you’re maintaining a broad and balanced view. And also, how can you center this divisive story on common humanity?

Kaplan: In terms of balance, we are fortunate that our overall team really is a diverse group of individuals. We have Muslims, Christians, and Jews on this team. We have Palestinians and we have Israelis. And even though perspectives may differ greatly, we can still agree that facts are facts and people are people. A human narrative of what a real person is enduring has value.

So, I had an experience many years ago. In 1982, I was a soldier in the Israeli army, and my unit did border patrols on the Lebanese border. In fact, not far from where my home was, which was on a border kibbutz. On the eve of battle, in the 1982 Lebanon War, we worked all night preparing for the war that was going to be coming in the morning. And an hour, two hours before we rolled into Lebanon, our battalion commander addressed the unit. And I’ll never forget this because it was so unusual. The message that this battalion commander left us with before we, I think we said a final prayer, the message was to remember that we are human beings and that the people on the other side are human beings. And that we as soldiers, we’re also, as he put it, emissaries, for the state of Israel. And that how we conducted ourselves was going to matter and that we needed to be respectful of the social mores of the Lebanese people, and that we should treat civilians with respect. 

And he followed that up with punishing a deputy company commander, who, a couple of weeks into the war, had taken a metal washbasin out of someone’s home and perforated it in order to make a shower for his troops. Overall, not the worst example of stealing someone’s property, but that crossed the line, and that officer was thrown out of the unit and sent back to Israel. And I mention this because that really reinforced to me that soldiers are humans. Soldiers have fears. And as much as soldiers can be perceived to be brutal – and war is, after all, brutal – their humanity is something we can still address.

And there’s one, one other anecdote, and it was later in the war. It was in a Palestinian refugee camp on the Lebanese coast called Ain Hilweh, near Sidon. And my mission for my unit that day was to provide security at a hospital, a Palestinian hospital, that had been damaged in the fighting, but still had many functional rooms. 

The civilians living in the Palestinian refugee camp were coming to the hospital for treatment, and there was an Israeli medical team working together with a Palestinian medical team. One of the Israeli doctors was a reservist. This was his reserve duty to go into Lebanon and provide medical care for the local Palestinians. And I was so taken with, in the midst of war, that there was still an attempt to have human to human contact, and show some compassion. And so I took this fellow’s name and address and phone number on a piece of stationary from the Ain Hilweh Hospital. And I’ve carried that talisman, a talisman to humanity in times of war. I’ve carried that with me every day since 1982. It’s, I think, on its third or fourth wallet.

Collins:  Wow.

Kaplan: That’s been worn out over the years, and I have it with me today, right now.

Collins:  Wow, those are powerful stories about compassion and humanity, you know, in the bleakest situation. Unfortunately, we also see humanity eclipsed in situations like this. I want to ask you something because when Ned Temko, our colleague, was on the show, early on in the conflict, he was somewhat hopeful about the current severity of this conflict actually forcing parties to address some root issues, finally. But I wonder, from your perspective, are we seeing another generation of both Palestinians and Israelis being radicalized, is there a point from which they can’t come back, or are you still hopeful? 

Kaplan: Well, I’m still hopeful. I think the Israelis knew, when they reacted to October 7, that they ran the risk of creating a new generation of radicalized young Palestinians. And it goes both ways. But I think as Ned pointed out correctly, even from a really dark place, it is possible to move forward. We’re looking for signs that even amidst all this trauma, there are Palestinians who might be asking deep questions about why they are in the situation they are in. And for Israelis to do the same thing.

Bit by bit, it’s dribbling out. There are some residents of Gaza who are finding the courage to ask: “You know, what was Hamas doing here? What was the goal of October 7? Why were we not informed about this in advance? How does this improve our lives?” 

And on the Israeli side, where polls show there’s less support today for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are still people who are saying: “Without a political or diplomatic mechanism to address the overall conflict, a focus on security alone doesn’t give us security.” (“Us” meaning the Israelis.) So we’re looking for signs that new leadership might emerge. Because ultimately, the Israeli public is going to need to support an Israeli leadership that has more vision. And the Palestinian public is going to need to have faith and trust in their leadership. 

Sometimes there’s a certain impatience that we have as journalists. You look at the Palestinians and Israelis and say: “Why aren’t you making better decisions? Why are you engaging in yet another round of violence?” We have to keep our impatience at bay. We have to focus on where people are now. 

I refuse to accept that the worst outcome should be ordained. I’ve been following or covering this conflict for all of my 38-plus-year career in journalism. This war, in many respects, would be worse than all the others. And right now the search for credible hope is rather frustrating. But I certainly want to be on hand when that hopeful moment is arrived at. That’s what keeps me going. 

Collins:  Well, thank you, Ken, for coming on the show, for sitting at the center of – and bringing some light to – this very important coverage for the Monitor.

Kaplan: Thank you, Clay. Thanks for having me.

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Collins:  Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with links to the stories that Ken and I discussed today, along with some earlier shows featuring Ken’s writers, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus and Jingnan Peng. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.