Pro-Israel Group Unhappy With NY Times Coverage; Vanunu a TV Hero

By Kurt Holden

A Charge of Genetic Subjectivity

When Joel Brinkley became the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem he already had a Pulitzer prize on his resume, but he was naive about the Middle East. One of his first reports contained a statement critical of the intifada made by a man who described himself to Brinkley as a "West Bank Palestinian." In fact the critic Brinkley quoted was a Jewish settler.

This son of veteran ABC anchorman David Brinkley obviously has come a long way in the past year. Now he's the target of attacks by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel thought patrol well-heeled enough to take out paid advertisements containing McCarthy-style attacks on the media.

In a letter in the March 1 Washington Jewish Week, CAMERA's Bertram Korn, Jr. takes issue with Brinkley statements that "it is hard to imagine a politician much further right than Mr. Shamir" and that the Israeli law prohibiting Israeli citizens from meeting PLO officials "has aroused much dispute."

Brinkley's work, Korn charges, "smacks of 'advocacy reporting'" and "leaves the unfortunate impression that Brinkley's attitude toward news reporting derives from his father," who has written that "to be objective is to be 'a vegetable.'"

In fact the senior Brinkley has been so vegetable—like on the Middle East that he has successfully avoided criticizing Israel throughout a journalistic career that began well before Israel was created. He still looks distinctly uncomfortable when, on his Sunday morning ABC news hour, panelists Sam Donaldson or Hodding Carter, Jr. question the wisdom or morality of Israeli tactics.

Now the father's see-no-evil subjectivity about Israel is being attacked by supporters of its chief beneficiary, Israel. As for son Joel, he may soon deserve another Pulitzer.

A "Traitor to Israel" as Hero?

An even more startling sign of changing times was the appearance, admittedly with little advance publicity, on Turner Network Television (TNT) of a two-hour made-for-television film, "Secret Weapon," in which the hero is not a Mossad agent but the Mossad's real-life victim-Mordechai Vanunu. The semi-fictional docudrama, jointly produced by Ted Turner's TNT and Australia's Griffin Productions, broke a number of taboos. Picking up with Vanunu's break with his Orthodox Jewish family in Israel over his leftist politics and his friendships with Arabs, it followed him to Australia. There he adopted Christianity and, in a church discussion of the dangers of atomic proliferation, described his work at Israel's secret nuclear plant in Dimona where, he said, nuclear warheads were being assembled.

What happened to Vanunu between the time a British newspaper brought him to London to tell his story to the world, and his appearance in handcuffs at a secret trial in Israel, is still the subject of real-life speculation. The film follows the generally accepted version that Modechai Vanunu was lured to Rome by an American-born Mossad femme fatale. The fact that her normal vocation is to lure Arabs into European hotel rooms where Israeli hit squads can riddle them with bullets is made clear, as is Israeli racism. When she realizes the other members of the hit team are prepared to kill rather than kidnap Vanunu, she stops them with the warning, "Remember, he's a Jew!"

Most interesting, however, is the manner in which the film makers finesse the key question about Vanunu. This is not whether Israelis kidnapped him on British or Italian soil. It is whether they wanted his contention that his country may possess as many as 200 nuclear warheads to come to world attention, either as a bluff because it doesn't, or a warning that it does and is prepared to use them.

The film portrays as genuine Vanunu's disillusioned departure from Israel, conversion to Christianity, and warnings about Israeli nuclear weapons. It depicts the Mossad agents, however, as postponing killing or kidnapping Vanunu until they were sure the world had heard his warning. Whatever the truth about Israel's nuclear program, portraying a "traitor to Israel," as the Mossad hit team calls him, as the hero of a film shown on American television is a 20th century first. Perhaps in the 21st century American audiences will be permitted to see on their television sets a film with an Arab hero.

Kurt Holden, a retired filmmaker from California, divides his time between the United States and the Middle East.