Mideast Facts 'n Spin: Time for Mitchell's Model

There is a very useful document archived on the site Mediate.com, "George Mitchell: Role Model for Mediation," written by Irish mediator Geoffrey Corry after the triumph of the Good Friday Agreement a decade ago.  It's worth reading for tips on how Mitchell's low key, high credibility approach brought together factions as riven by mutual antagonism as Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists.

Reconciling groups that had previously only demonized the opposing side - useful experience for his new job, which pits Israel against Hamas against Fatah.  Given the fight for world public opinion recently waged around the fighting in Gaza, Mitchell's Mediation Model will first need to separate out the spin.

As Corry wrote about Mitchell in Northern Ireland, it all begins with a Conflict Assessment: "undertaken at the beginning of the process... it was a great way of getting to know all the players and hear their underlying concerns."  That's exactly what former Senator Mitchell is doing today, barely a week after his appointment by President Obama.  Everybody's doing an assessment of the most recent fighting (see below).  Mitchell will be assessing what has changed since he last "did" peace processing, and will be looking deeper and broader than the still-smoldering Gaza.

For now, the after-action reports are still focusing on image, PR, spin, and public opinion.  "A Battle Over What Happened in Gaza," as Jeffrey Fleishman recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, sums up the after-action reporting.  Fleishman quotes Ari Shavit in Haaretz who said while the fighting still raged, that Israel was "destroying its soul and its image."

Those supporting the Israeli position saw much more than solidarity in the European "tilt" in favor of the battered Palestinians.  Wrote Efraim Karsh for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA)

The fact that international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has invariably reflected a degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of impartial observers would seem to suggest that it is a manifestation of longstanding prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the conflict.

If the European press erred on the side of the Gazans, that would not appear to be the case in most of the US press, where, as former American diplomat John Brown noted in Common Dreams, "apologists" successfully deployed "the talking point that Israel, by striking at Hamas on its turf, has done the United States a favor."

Belgian journalist, human rights activist, and "Atlantic Progressive" Jean-Paul Marthoz, who knows the press on both sides of the ocean, writes:

The real issue however is much more the growing European awareness that this conflict is corroding the internal situation and constantly endangering international stability. According to most surveys the level of knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is higher in Europe not only because the European media are on the whole more generous in their foreign news reporting and on the whole more diverse in their coverage but also because the mainstream European political debate provides more plurality of voices than in the U.S.

For plurality, there's no place better than in the current issue of the London Review of Books to get a version of events unseen in much of the US press.  In "Israel's Lies," Henry Siegman (former national director of the American Jewish Congress - AJCongress), as Jimmy Carter did in the Washington Post, shows that Israel's intransigence over allowing food and medicine into Gaza was a major factor in ending the ceasefire that had lasted throughout much of 2008.  Siegman demolishes the notion of Israel's search for accommodation with the Palestinians, using Israeli politicians' own words, then asks: "Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers?"

Senator Mitchell, bless him, will have to wade through the multiple dimensions of mistrust as he tries to make up for the last eight years of neglect.  Geoffrey Corry's "Mitchell Model" - which, beyond conflict assessment, involves setting out basic principles, negotiating a set of basic ground rules, establishing a deadline, working from a single text document, and building an inclusive process - is underpinned by what he calls Mitchell's "low profile" style.

If that sounds boring, so be it.  But, as Ehud Olmert once wisely said (before he contradicted himself recently) "It's better to speak than to shoot."