Matti Friedman [00:00:00] People just choose to live in these silos of information where they’re going to get coverage that makes sense to them, that doesn’t challenge them, rather than being forced to confront a world that’s full of gray and full of nuance, where the choices aren’t really clear and the sides are very rarely good and evil, and that’s that’s not a satisfying world. It’s a very confusing world, but it is the real world.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:00:36] Matti Friedman is an award winning journalist and author. Born in Canada, he lives in Jerusalem and he’s been covering the Middle East for nearly three decades. He’s written four books, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, and the Smithsonian, among other outlets. Matti  waved a red flag through his reporting long before October 7th, exploring how the Western press covers the conflict in the Middle East, what they get wrong, and why. We spoke with Matti about his observations then, and why he is even more alarmed today. Matti  Friedman, thanks so much for joining us.  

Matti Friedman [00:01:14] Thank you so much for having me.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:01:16] Okay, so we’re having a conversation post October 7th. Someone’s watching this. They’re like, oh, this guy’s last name Friedman. Starting to make a list of assumptions about you. What is something that they might not know that they might be surprised by?  

Matti Friedman [00:01:38] I think that for North American viewers trying to understand the Jewish story and the story of Israel, what immediately comes to mind is a story about Europe. And I think that the name Friedman probably evokes, East European ancestry, which is true of the vast majority of Jews who live in the United States. But actually here in Israel, where I’m speaking to you from, I’m sitting in Jerusalem right now. Most of the Jewish population actually has roots in the Islamic world. Countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria. And I think that that’s often surprising to people in America.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:02:18] Yeah. You know, because I have a feeling that a lot of times we are now in an era where we reduce everybody down to try to give a short thumbnail of where we can put them.  

Matti Friedman [00:02:30] Boiling people down to to their identity or to their perceived ethnic identity, or to the geographical origins of their grandparents, does people an incredible disservice. People are much more complicated than that, and it’s very easy to turn people into caricatures. The more distant you are from them. So it’s much easier to imagine other people as being evil or good, or fitting into these very simple identity categories.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:02:57] It’s a bit like saying, oh, you’re American. You must automatically support everything that the Biden administration or the Trump administration, when they were in power at the time, did. Right?  

Matti Friedman [00:03:05] Right. You’re American, you know. Where is your gun? You must be, you know, underneath the table. I can’t see Hari, but you must be wearing boots.  There must be boots. People have these ideas. And the closer you get to people, the more complicated it becomes to maintain those ideas. And I’ve had that experience as a journalist over the past. I hate to say it, but it’s been about 25 years of work in this profession. You know, I often will go out to report a story with a certain idea of what it is and who I’m going to meet. And those ideas are often completely wrong. And that’s why I always try to get out, to report stories, to actually meet the people, not talk to them on the phone, not interact with them through Twitter. You really have to go out physically into the world and meet people, and you will find that even people who are radically different in their views, and I’m including people here, you know, who are from the Palestinian side of things, including people who support Hamas. I’ve met over the years. When you meet them in person, you get a lens into their thinking, and even if you strenuously disagree with them, at the end of the interview, you at least have a glimpse into their humanity, and it becomes much more difficult to condemn them as evil.   

Hari Sreenivasan [00:04:15] Yeah. You know, let’s talk a little bit about your time reporting. About ten years ago, you wrote something. It was after your time as a reporter for the Associated Press, and you really, dived into how stories are framed and what perhaps Americans don’t understand in the layers of complexity of covering the Middle East. What are people from the outside getting wrong when we look at this conflict in the Middle East?  

Matti Friedman [00:04:44] Well, I wrote that that piece in 2014. The piece was based on my time as a correspondent for the Associated Press. Here I was a reporter and an editor on the Jerusalem desk at the AP between 2006  and the very end of 2011. And ended up, I think, learning a lot about how press coverage worked and in some strange way, the most interesting story that I was exposed to at the AP was the AP itself, and how the West tells itself stories about other places, and I ultimately became quite disillusioned with the way the story was being told. And that’s one of the reasons that I left. There was very little connection between the story that I was writing in the Bureau and the country that I could see outside the window of the Bureau. And eventually that tension became too much for me, and I felt like I was writing a story that was very much not just aimed at an American audience, but very much tailored by an American audience. So it was kind of a story that was, molded to fit the prior expectations of an American audience. And it wasn’t ultimately very useful in understanding the place. So it wasn’t a matter of being more or less sympathetic to Israel. It was just the knowledge that if a reader took my story, came to Israel, and tried to use my story as a map for understanding events here, they wouldn’t get anywhere because the coverage was just not helpful as an explanation of events. It was aimed at something else. And what I think that’s something was, was a kind of ideological activism that began to take over the press. In those years, there was a new generation of journalists coming up, many of whom not all of them by any means, but many of whom tended to see journalism more as a form of activism, as a tool in a fight for justice. I was, I guess, more an old kind of journalist, although I wasn’t that old at the time, but I had the idea that it was an explanatory enterprise. My job was to explain this place, and other people were supposed to draw conclusions. But I would say that the two points that really were missed by the story are as follows. One is the scope of this story and one is its regional context. So the scope of the story is blown wildly out of proportion. Our bureau at the time numbered about 40 full time staffers, and that was dramatically more staff than we had in those years covering India. India has 1.3 billion people. And this news story has, including Israelis and Palestinians, about 14 or 15 million. Israel is 1/100 of 1% of the surface of the world. It’s an extremely small country. It’s about one fifth of 1% of the landmass of the Arab world. But the staff we had here was bigger than the staff we had in the rest of the Arab world and combined. And it was bigger than the staff that we had in all 50 something countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. So there were more news staffers covering this story than we had in the entire continent of Africa, south of the Sahara, 50 something countries. So it’s a small country that is really the subject of an incredible amount of attention. So that’s one way that it gets kind of warped as this story moves from Israel to the audience abroad. The second part of it is the regional context of the story. It’s presented as if it’s an Israeli Palestinian conflict. And that is in large part because news consumers need a simple story. And a simple story has two actors, if possible, a good guy in a bad guy. That’s what makes a good news story. Russia Ukraine is a good example of a story that has emotional resonance for people, because it is simple and easy to understand. But most of Israel’s wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel’s fought wars, unfortunately, against Egyptians and Jordanians and Syrians and Lebanese and Israel’s most potent enemy right now, again, unfortunately for us, is Iran. And none of those actors are Palestinian. So clearly there’s a broader regional conflict in play in which Israelis and Palestinians are two of the actors, but not the only actors. And the story of the behavior of the sides is impossible to understand unless you see the regional picture. Understanding reality requires you to zoom out and see Israel where it is, which is in the Middle East, part of a much more complicated Middle Eastern story in a region where there are wars, you know, across across the region, not only here and the place can only be understood in that context, but that kind of story  is too complicated to fit into a 600 word news story, or certainly into it into a tweet.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:09:05] What do we lose here in that reduction in that, trying to squeeze everything down into a tweet?  

Matti Friedman [00:09:11] That’s that’s a great question. I mentioned a very complicated ethnic makeup of Israeli society. Most of the Jews in Israel have roots in the Islamic world. They’re the result of a population movement, in most cases a forced population movement from the Islamic world. That is a complicating factor in the story. So it’s almost never mentioned in order to allow us to kind of imagine Israel as a story about oppressors and the oppressed, or about kind of Westerners and the Third World, and any complicating factor in the story needs to be removed. Either for political reasons, and that comes into play to some extent. But often it’s just about giving people a simple story. So, you know, if we need the story to be simple, you can’t really mention the attempts that Israel has made. You know, for example, to arrive at some kind of rational, reasonable agreement to end the conflict with the Palestinians. And there have been several such attempts. But that, again, is a complicating factor in the story, so you’ll rarely see it mentioned.  

 

Hari Sreenivasan [00:10:13] Matti, I wonder if these sort of almost decades that you’re pointing to of framing this as a fight between good guy, bad guy or two characters, oppressor oppressed has, in a way worked, because that is a very quick frame that a lot of people in the United States are looking at this conflict today.  

Matti Friedman [00:10:40] I think that’s exactly what’s happened. And, you know, I played a part in it to some extent in my years in the international press. And and that’s a big part of what’s happened. By the way, it’s not just the Israel story. I think if I could go back and rewrite that essay from from a decade ago, the way I would expand my understanding of this is that it’s not just a malfunction happening in Israel, which is what I thought at the time. In a broader sense, much journalism has become a very binary ideological campaign against us, against political opponents. And that’s true on the left, and it’s true on the right. So the kind of thinking that I encountered was, if you explain the thinking of the side that is perceived as stronger. So in the case of this story, it would be the Israelis, then you’re somehow abetting injustice. And if you point out the flaws on the side that’s considered the victim, so here it’s the Palestinians. If you point out that they’re not, you know, perfect victims with no agency, then you are abetting injustice. So, you know, for example, the Hamas Charter, which is really worth reading, the founding charter of Hamas blames Jews for starting the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, in the First World War and the Second World War. And it goes on and on with this very conspiratorial explanation of the malevolent role of Jews in the world, not Israeli as Jews. And for some reason, we weren’t supposed to point that out. When Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007, you’d think that that would have been a big issue. But it was in politics a to point it out because it would have muddied the justice narrative. It would have done an injustice to the side that we perceive as being deserving of justice. And there’s a desire for that kind of storytelling, because people want to believe that the world is simple and they want to believe in good and evil, and they’re confused by all the gray, and they cling to these stories. And and I understand that human temptation, but I think that throwing that red meat, is a terrible failing by journalists. That’s not what we’re supposed to be doing in my understanding of what journalism is.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:12:42] But now you also see trying to find parallels. You have people talking about what’s happening in the context of, say, American slavery and oppression in the United States. Again, legitimate facts on the ground that happened, right? But you wrote, Israel’s problems are not like America’s. Explain that if you can.   

Matti Friedman [00:13:08] One of the things that I saw kind of late in my time at the AP, it was that American reporters and editors were reading their own politics and history into the Israel story. So I realized at at some point that Israelis were being portrayed as a version of white Americans. America has its own story about race, which, of course, is a very powerful one and a very painful one. And I understand why it’s the defining issue in America. But that is not the story of Jews in the Middle East who have very little to do with with America.   

Hari Sreenivasan [00:13:41] One of the reasons that I think people. Understand or grab on to these caricatures is because of the imagery that we see. Right. I have not walked through, checkpoint, between Israel or Gaza. But, you know, it’s easy for me to understand that the freedom of mobility is limited for one group or another, or that there’s a massive difference in economic opportunity on this side of a fence than the other side. Right? So I’m able to grab those tidbits from wherever I see them, whether it’s in an article or a news story, and start to form an opinion. What are things that I should consider that might make me think about this differently?  

Matti Friedman [00:14:34] Well,  first of all, I wouldn’t want to be interpreted as saying that there isn’t injustice here. There is. And you’ve mentioned a few very real examples of it. I mean, I think Israel’s made very grave errors of judgment, just as any country has certainly any country in conflict. But I can, you know, I can give you a long list, and I’ve written about it, and I can explain why I think this war in Gaza, which was forced upon us, is justified and necessary. And at the same time, I can explain to you why, you know, so many government policies have been misguided, why the construction of civilian settlements in the West Bank was a bad idea. Mistakes that we’ve made in our dealings with the Palestinians. But I’m just saying that injustice here isn’t parallel to injustice in the United States. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s better. I’m just saying it’s completely different and needs to be understood with a completely different toolbox. And the toolbox that needs to be employed here is essentially a middle eastern toolbox. What is going on in the Middle East and how are people dealing with it? Are they dealing with it well or poorly. And and the answer is often poorly, including us. But the, the the American racial lens will not be helpful.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:15:41] How is the kind of the framing in this conflict rooted in a historical hatred of Jews or anti-Semitism.  

Matti Friedman [00:15:53] I think that that force in human societies that sometimes gets called anti-Semitism is very much present in the response to the events. And you can see it, for example, in the utter lack of interest in the more than 10 million people who are currently displaced in Sudan, which is not far away from here. And there are many other examples of conflicts that are just of no interest to people in the West. The death toll in Congo. Last time I checked was estimated at about 5 million people. And it’s just not. It’s not covered or barely covered, and it’s just not the kind of thing that’s going to energize people. And I think when we see the level of rage in the West, I think we need to ask ourselves what is going on. No other conflict in the world draws the kind of really violent outpouring of emotion that this one does. And in this increasingly binary discussion in the West about good and evil, about oppressors and oppressed. You’re seeing this, this debate emerge in the United States between different political factions in America, which both of which know very little about this very small and complicated country in the Middle East. But see this place as a symbol around which they can mobilize. And it’s been done very effectively. And part of that has to do with the fact that Jews have always been a kind of lightning rod for whatever debate is going on in a given society at a given time. Anti-Jewish sentiment has always been a way to mobilize people. You can’t really mobilize people against China. You can’t mobilize people against, you know, Russia very effectively, but you can mobilize against Jews.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:17:26] Is Hamas aware of this?  

Matti Friedman [00:17:30] I’m not sure that that Hamas would explain it exactly in the way that I did. But I think when Hamas attacked on October 7th, I think that they did understand something that we didn’t understand. Many Western observers, including Jews, that there are a lot of people who are going to support the attack because there are a lot of people in the world, a startling number of people, a very disturbing number of people who believe that Jews constitute a problem that they need to confront in some way. And this, you know, the people who believe this include British labor unions and Russian nationalists and their opponents among Ukrainian nationalists. And it includes people, unfortunately, across the Islamic world, that includes most of the population of Indonesia, according to polls, even though there are no Jews in Indonesia. So this is, you know, a very common thought virus across the world. It seems to affect hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions. And and Hamas recognizes that. So that explains one of the key mysteries, I think, of October 7th, which is you have this incredible attack, really an act of medieval barbarism, something that we haven’t seen here. It’s something that Jews haven’t experienced maybe in 80 years,  since the Holocaust, we have, you know, people burned in their homes and women raped and babies kidnaped and something really kind of awful. And even before the Israeli response gets underway, there are protests against Israel, protests functionally in support of Hamas. And we didn’t see that coming. Many people were surprised, but I think Hamas wasn’t surprised because they realized that they have a lot of support. I think they also understood that whatever the horrors of the attack itself, within a few weeks, a month, two months, certainly four months, the power of the Israeli response would swing the story against Israel, that if Israel is drawn into a war against Hamas, that is going to look awful. And it is, by the way, the tragedy in Gaza is real. It’s a civilian catastrophe. And it’s not. You know, I would never downplay the suffering is heartbreaking. It’s incredible, as a Western observer, to look at the carnage in Gaza and think that anyone wanted that, but Hamas did. This is a war that Hamas started and it’s being fought on a battlefield that they created. But but they knew that that would not be apparent, that people would be kind of galvanized by the horror of the images, and that this would swing global opinion against Israel in a way that would eventually tie Israel’s hands and allow Hamas to walk away and declare victory. And I think that they had that thought in their mind when they launched the attack on October 7th. And I’m not sure that they were wrong.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:19:59] You know, certainly post October 7th, there have been a lot of examples of protests and people celebrating, wanted to be part of what they consider the resistance. You wrote, in the Free Press in December, an article called The Wisdom of Hamas. And you cite an example that back in 2021, the Hamas military commander, Yahya Sinwar, told a vice reporter, quote, I want to take this opportunity to remember the racist murder of George Floyd. Why was that important?   

Matti Friedman [00:20:26] I thought it was an incredible example of how canny the guys from Hamas are, because the George Floyd murder and the incredible debate that was happening in America at that time was. Evident to him, and it was clear that he needed to present his cause as being affiliated with with that cause. And that was done. That seems to great effect after the massacre on October 7th. Several of the affiliates of Black Lives Matter had supportive messages for Hamas, including the emblem of the paraglider,  some of the Hamas terrorists came over on paragliders. So clearly, the affinity between that struggle and this struggle had been established in the minds not just of Sinwar, who’s the head of the Hamas military wing and who’s a real psychopath, by the way, he’s clearly some kind of sick genius. But he’s the engineer of the massacre on October 7th, which killed 1200 people, some of including a few Africans who were in southern Israel who were caught in the in the invasion. So the idea that he’s somehow affiliated with the cause of racial justice is, you know, a bit, a bit of a leap. But he understood the dynamic of the dynamic is you have to convince Americans that you’re part of their story, and people seem to have bought it. There are people in America who believe that Hamas is somehow affiliated with the cause of civil rights in America.  

Sound up Professor at Cornell [00:21:42] Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence.  

Matti Friedman [00:21:48] And one of them was that Cornell professor who, when he heard news of this unbelievable massacre of Jews, he thought it was an exhilarating blow against oppression or something.  

Sound up Professor at Cornell [00:21:57] It was exhilarating. It was energizing.   

Matti Friedman [00:22:01] He was not by any means the only one. These were fairly common sentiments. You know, different Ivy League campuses. So clearly Sinwar knows what he’s doing. And I think that’s just another example of how, clued in Hamas is to Western discourse and why it’s so important to take them seriously. They understand what they’re doing. I think that one mistake Western observers make when trying to figure out Hamas is not giving them enough credit. These are people who are very smart. They have a very coherent ideology that they’re quite honest about. By the way, to their credit. Hamas is a religious organization. They believe that they’re following the will of God as revealed to them through Scripture. So when they say the will of God is, you know that infidels cannot exert sovereignty in this part of the world and that Islam will eventually conquer not only this part of the world, but the world. They mean it. That’s that’s what they mean. And they say it. And it’s not something that Western observers often want to hear.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:23:02] Matti, I want to ask, as an outsider, I want people to stop killing each other. I want people to cease fire. Right? That is not used to not be a loaded political term. But suddenly if I say I want that, then somehow I’m perceived as being pro Hamas or disagreeing with the right of Israel to exist. It’s like I can’t have any kind of a nuanced conversation with people about this without being accused of being for one side or against another.   

Matti Friedman [00:23:36] So much of the rhetoric in this story is so overheated and loaded, and there’s something about this story that makes people crazy on the different sides. It’s certainly not antisemitic to suggest a certain course of action for Israel. It’s certainly totally fine to criticize Israeli policies. And we do it here all the time. The word cease fire sounds great. I mean, I also want a cease fire. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. And, you know, how can you be opposed to a cease fire? Because of course, that’s what you want. You want people to be, you know, to return to living in peace. What a cease fire means functionally here is that we let Hamas win. Hamas has more than 130 Israeli hostages that they’re holding in tunnels in Gaza. So a ceasefire, the call for a cease fire means Israel stands down. That’s that’s what the call means. And it means that Hamas can once again walk away from the fighting, declare victory and prepare for the next round. And what we saw on October 7th is that we can’t let it happen, and we’ve let it happen 3 or 4 times in the rounds of violence that we’ve seen in Gaza over the past decade and a half. And we learned our lesson on October 7th.   

Hari Sreenivasan [00:24:36] So, Matti, what does that day after look like? Let’s say let’s be just a skosh optimistic. Let’s say there is some sort of an agreement to stop killing each other. What happens next?  

Matti Friedman [00:24:50] So the conversation in Israel is very short term at the moment. We’re engaged in something that is incredibly difficult. I mean, just to give you some examples from my own personal life over the past couple of months, I have two 16 year olds who are in 11th grade, and the principal of their school was called up to fight in the reserves and was killed pretty early on in the war. So we were at his funeral, the son of a neighbor’s, people who live not far from where I’m sitting right now was killed at the at the rave that was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, along with about 350 other people. The son of good friends of ours is a hostage. The son of the guy who owns the grocery store was just killed fighting in Gaza. So that’s what we’re dealing with right now. And it’s hard for people to lift their heads up and think about the day, the day after. And I wish we had a government that was capable of long term planning and vision. But unfortunately, we have a government that isn’t capable of giving us that kind of forward thinking vision that that we need not not even to its own people and certainly not to our neighbors. And what I think should happen again, you said we should try to be optimistic. And, you know, someone who lived the first 17 years of his life in Canada, we’re kind of bred for optimism. You know, it’s been three kind of rough decades here in the Middle East, getting the optimistic gene beaten out of my head by the Middle Eastern stick. But, there is another Middle East that’s made itself apparent a few years ago when a few of the Gulf countries signed agreements with Israel. And this was a huge breakthrough. We saw this other Middle East become apparent, a Middle East, where we might be able to have normal relations with with our neighbors. One of the reasons it seems, that this war broke out was in order to torpedo any chance of advancing toward that kind of Middle East, and what I would love to see is a return to that. If Hamas can survive this war and claim victory. It’s a victory not just for Hamas and for, you know, the Palestinian, groups. It’s a victory for the Iranian axis that’s trying to swing the Middle East in a certain direction, which is the direction of of jihad, of holy war. But there’s also a middle East that could be very different. And if we managed to conclude the war successfully, you know, if it’s possible to say such a thing about a war, that’s awful by definition, then I think that we might see better actors in the Middle East step in in Gaza. Gaza could have a different future, and it just needs different leadership. And I pray that that’s what we’re going to see after this war is over. There are reasons for optimism. We just have to somehow let the forces of progress get into the driver’s seat. And at the moment, the feeling is that, that other actors are kind of trying to steer the bus off a cliff.  

Hari Sreenivasan [00:27:40] Journalist and author Matti Friedman joining us from Jerusalem. Thanks so much.  

Matti Friedman [00:27:44] Thank you again for having me.