Lederman, the doyen of foreign journalists in Israel, has written a minor masterpiece, 1992's book-of-the-year on the Middle East. His thesis boils down to this: Palestinians stumbled into a media victory through the intifada, Israel blundered into a media defeat, and the PLO then saved Israel from disaster. Lederman uses U.S. media coverage of the intifada to probe some of the deepest issues of Israeli and Palestinian life and to dissect key issues of politics and journalism. Page after page, he turns up bon mots, aphorisms, and top-drawer insights.
For example, all four books on my shelves titled Intifada, plus the two titled The Intifada, and the one called Echoes of the Intifada all agree that the uprising began when Palestinians, fed up with Israeli occupation took stones in their hands and rebelled, Lederman differs. The real story, he writes, had to do with generational change in Palestinian society: "There is a social revolution going on inside the Palestinian community in the occupied territories," with leadership passing from the elderly to the teen aged. Lederman offers an equally original analysis of the conflict itself, de-emphasizing conventional indices (deaths, property damage, financial burden) and seeing it as a "media war." This leads him to portray the media as through it were a full-fledged actor in the conflict.
Not surprisingly, given Lederman's tough critique of the media, fellow journalists little appreciate his work (the Columbia Journalism Review accuses him of "pomposity" and "big-think babble"). But that makes it all the more valuable for the rest of us.
