I have an old friend who has achieved considerable success in the field of investigative print journalism and whose counsel I have sought in the past on a variety of matters. He’s visited most places in the more volatile
regions of the world and consistently produced a high standard of objective reporting. One day we were discussing the way he is perceived by the media and indeed, by the general public, and he made a statement that for me should set the benchmark for objective coverage of news in the industry.


He said “One day they love me, the next day they hate me. Jews think I’m anti-Semitic, Muslims think I’m anti-Islamist, and churchgoers think I’m one of those atheists who undermine Christianity! I must be doing something  right!”

 
When you hear right-wing supporters refer to a media source as left-wing, and left-wing supporters refer to the same as right-wing, you can bet your bottom dollar that the source of the argument is almost certainly walking the middle line, and that is how the new Times of Israel website has been perceived by a number of people who have discussed the matter with me in recent days since the site was launched only a week ago. In short, it’s an encouraging start for an online newspaper that has set out with the express intent of trying to reflect as accurately as possible all sides of the argument.

 
The danger, of course, is that if you are not careful you can end up falling between too stools. Most people like to read what they want to hear, and if they don’t have their opinions validated by their newspaper they can easily consign it to the dustbin.

 
The Times of Israel has been created by the respected journalist and former Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz, with financial backing from the hugely wealthy American fund manager and philanthropist Seth Klarman. In his first article on the founding of the new title Horovitz accurately described the internal frictions in Israel as follows:

“I happen to think that we Jews, in this one country where we’re a majority, can be our own worst enemies – spectacularly intolerant of one another, in ways we would never tolerate in Jewish communities overseas. We undermined our two previous attempts at sovereignty millennia ago, through internal hatreds; we’ve murdered our own prime minister this time; we suffer streams of Judaism furiously at odds with each other. We argue bitterly, incessantly, over the best means to safeguard the well-being of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation worldwide.”


Sadly, it’s hard to argue with Horovitz’s assessment of the people of this country, but that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a player in the Israeli and  international media that reflects both sides of the argument to a local and international audience, and does so in English. Most people perceive the long established Jerusalem Post to be a right-leaning publication, whilst it’s hard to argue anything other than Ha’aretz having a strong left-wing slant, and until this month they have been the only two English-language newspapers of any note based in Israel and focusing on Israeli and world Jewish affairs.

 
A few weeks ago I was approached by the Times of Israel to produce additional blog material for their new site - separate from that which appears on my own blog - and like all the other bloggers on their roster have been given a free hand to write about what interests, concerns or amuses me. I’m happy to be able to speak to a wider audience and hope they find my thoughts on life here in Israel and the region of some interest, but I will continue on a fortnightly basis to offer my opinions on developments in this ever more volatile region via this blog and hope you too will continue to visit.

 
With the outcome of so many different regional conflicts and the growing internal conflict here in Israel almost impossible to call, there will be much on which to focus in the remaining 10 months of 2012. Via this blog and the Times of Israel, I hope you will find time to consider my opinion alongside those of many far more learned and high-profile figures than me, and will pass on the  links to both websites in an effort to spread the word and give as many people as possible a broader, fairer view of life in the State of Israel.  

 
“Fair-minded journalism”, wrote Horovitz in his opening message to readers of the new website, “based in Israel, and read both here in Israel and among those who care for the Jewish nation around the world, has a vital, even noble role to play in enabling informed debate over the challenges and the choices that face the Jewish state. Informing that debate is one of the prime goals of The Times of Israel.”

 
I wish him and all the team involved in the project the very best of luck in what is going to be a tough battle for the hearts and minds of Israeli readers and those in international Jewry and far beyond.


 
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It’s hard to believe that 30 years have passed since the needless and highly emotional Falklands War, the conflict that saved Margaret Thatcher from what appeared to be almost certain electoral defeat at the end of a brutal first term as Conservative Prime Minister.  


Faced with rising unemployment and civil unrest, the ‘Iron Lady’ reached for what so many unpopular politicians around the globe have done for centuries and managed to fashion a war to get the country behind her, giving the flag-waving ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ mob something to be proud of. First though, she had to find someone to fight and then be sure she could successfully finish whatever she started.

 
When the half-witted General Galtieri decided to lay claim to the Falkland Islands not so very far from the coast of his football-mad South American nation of Argentina, Thatcher and her cohorts suddenly realised they had been handed an open goal and rushed to step up and put the Argies away. I vividly remember watching a news bulletin at the time when a BBC reporter asked a sample of people going about their daily business if they had ever heard of the Falkland Islands, and if they had, where were they? The few that had heard of them thought they were in the Caribbean or somewhere near the Canary Islands! 

 
The rest is history. The Task Force steamed 14,000 kilometres to defend the rocky outcrop where sheep outnumbered the human inhabitants by 10 to 1, and where, (by general consensus), the less than 3000 islanders were somewhat like the land on which they eeked out a living; remote, rugged and often inhospitable. Battles at Goose Green and Mount Tumbledown cost British military lives together with a great many more on the Argentinan side, most of whom were inadequately trained conscripts. 

 
Whilst the sinking of the General Belgrano remains the biggest stain on her bloodlust-filled reputation for which millions, like me, hated Margaret Thatcher – reports (by the way), leaked some years later confirmed that  the Argentine ship had surrendered and was steaming away from the scene of the military action when Thatcher insisted on it being torpedoed with the ensuing loss of 323 lives – but the fact remains that the victory ensured she would gain another term in office, which eventually stretched to a marathon 12-year stint at the helm of British politics. Looking back 30 years, I still recall people wondering why on earth Britain was putting our soldiers’ lives at risk for land that surely had nothing to do with us and was an outdated relic of the British imperialist past.

 
Now, all of a sudden, as the 30th anniversary of the war has arrived, the current democratically elected Argentine leadership has lost no time in resurrecting their claim to the islands they call ‘Las Malvinas’, and frankly, I believe they have a great deal more of a right to the Falklands than do the Brits, for whom defending the island and keeping a permanent military presence has been a massive cost to the British taxpayer for three decades. The possibility of crude oil being found in the South Atlantic seas around the Falklands however is undoubtedly the main interest the British have in holding on this land after having given away Hong Kong, all their nations in Africa and the Caribbean, not to mention India and many more, without too much of a struggle. All of a sudden, David Cameron has sent a destroyer to patrol the waters in a thinly veiled provocation towards the ‘old enemy’. A huge fan of Mrs T, maybe ‘our Dave’ is attempting to fashion his own Falklands skirmish to distract attention amongst the masses as austerity bites back home. 
 

 
The reason I draw attention to the British government’s “outrage” at the ‘bloody foreigners’ claim to the land 14,000 kilometres from London and  only 700 kilometres from Argentine soil, is that I find it somewhat galling and the height of hypocrisy when Britain attempts to take the moral high-ground and tell Israel exactly what we should be doing with land that we actually live on day-to-day and don’t administer from the other side of the world! Are the British really in any position to lecture to Israel, (or the Palestinians for that matter), on how they should settle land disputes when they refuse to even negotiate or consider handing back land that they clearly have no moral right to, no historical claim over, and that is only theirs because they insist they were the first to land on the rocky backwater back in the 1690’s, although both the Spanish and the Portuguese repeatedly suggest they found it first?

 
Argentina has decided to take its case to the UN and unlike 1982 is heading to New York with the support of most of South and Latin America, just for starters. The British intransigence and pig-headedness about land that has absolutely no bearing on the day-to-day life of 99.99% of British citizens, shows just how two-faced they are, something that should be thrown back at them time and again when they insist on lecturing to Israel about how they should define borders of a piece of land, home to more than seven million people that is barely the size of Wales, and whose collective ancestors have tilled the dusty soil for as many as 4000 years.

 
Surely this is just another brazen case so ably encapsulated in the well known words of the 17th century English academic John Selden, who wrote in his novel Table Talk of 1654, that preachers are often guilty of insisting, “Do as I say,
not as I do”.

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