The Grey Lady and Her Man in Israel

James Princeton lay in bed next to the young Reuters correspondent in the same bedroom that Thomas Friedman once called his own. Before he was a world-famous columnist for the New York Times, Friedman was a Pulitzer prize winner for the work he did as Israel bureau chief in the 80s. He also wrote From Beirut to Jerusalem, a book about the conflict between Israel and the Arab world. Israel and the Palestinians.

It was a much celebrated book, especially among aspiring Middle East correspondents. The book didn’t give its readers a magical understanding of Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs. No. Like all great works, it was great because others deemed it so. Thus it became the most important work on the subject for an entire generation of ambitious reporters. After all, it was Thomas Friedman. He was freaking bureau chief for the New York Times. And then he became a global media rockstar! A man whose opinion mattered on the hottest topics on Earth. He had access to the most powerful people. Young reporters read the book because it was the first step in emulating his career.

The apartment in Jerusalem the New York Times bought for Friedman, and then kept for every subsequent Israel bureau chief, was built in the 60’s on top of a home abandoned by a Palestinian family in 1948. It was a big place, certainly by the standards of Israeli Jews. There were four bedrooms and spacious living room. The bookshelves were lined with works on Middle Eastern history. Islam. Judaism. Christianity. Of New York Times authors. The walls were full of picture frames showing every previous bureau chief sitting with prime ministers. Accepting awards. Wearing bullet proof vests and helmets. It had to be so. Everything the New York Times did had to reflect its power.

It was a home, yes, but homes are boxes of a particular kind of memories. Little children taking first steps. Family gatherings on the holidays. Fights between spouses. Where the people who live in them are themselves. This home in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem was different. The people in the picture frames lived there long ago. The prizes were won by past bureau chiefs. They all held court in the apartment — secret meetings with Israeli government officials, Palestinian bureaucrats, Mossad agents and foreign diplomats. It was all a reminder to James of the legacy he had to live up to.

So powerful was it that it opened up any door in Israel for him and his team. Professionally, and not. He met Kelly, the naked woman in his bed, on a reporting trip with the prime minister to the UAE. James was not tall or strong but he was handsome. He had dark brown eyes that conveyed a seriousness of purpose. All the other reporters knew who he was — no one wrote articles about the other journalists for starting their jobs. There was an aura around him. It was an unspoken jealousy and an acknowledgment of the hierarchy of foreign correspondents. James had arrived the year prior, in 2021, and already his competitors resented his access and clout. They read his articles, looking to pick them apart for flaws to make themselves feel better. To tell themselves that they knew better than the New York Times guy.

Kelly wanted to be one of the rare few who writes the story everyone reads about for her outlet. Reuters was a different kind of beast than the Times, she knew that. It was a newswire focused more on volume rather than quality. The basic physics applied — both Reuters and the Times were conduits to speak to a huge audience. It’s just that the audiences were different. Politicians read the Times. Their staffers briefed them about Reuters and the rest. James seemed otherworldly to her.

Their relationship began over their mutual obsession. They both loved reporting, but no matter what Kelly said she was working on, she felt James was doing something more ambitious. They didn’t share too many details. They were competitors after all. But Kelly’s sources mentioned his work more than she felt James heard of hers. She harbored a resentment against her employers for blocking her potential. In the back of her mind she was plotting her way out.

She loved listening to James’s journey to the Times. She picked up on bits here and there over the following months. It was her eagerness to listen, to give him the captive audience he craved, that attracted him to her. He told it his way, but the version Kelly understood was as follows.

James grew up in London. His parents voted Labour as a principle. They were academics. His mother taught in primary school, his father in secondary. Both were union members and well-read. His father favored history. His mother fiction. He would read The Guardian over evening tea. She would watch the BBC every night. The news was often the subject of dinner table discussion.

There was a lot of controlled outrage. The first example to make an impression on James was the UK’s decision to join the war against Iraq. His parents joined the protests and voiced solidarity with the Muslim world. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with Sept. 11. It was a yankee tragedy anyway. No Brit had to die over someone else’s fight. “This is why we need the media, son,” his father once told James. “You can’t trust what the government tells you.” This mistrust of authority was the reason his parents said they did not tolerate academic mediocrity. They had one child, and they weren’t about to loose another mindless fool into the world to vote cynical monsters into positions of power.

James was accepted into Cambridge and immediately joined the school paper. He said he was drawn to injustice. It was what they liked to hear. The global recession had just began and young people all over the world voiced their anger. First needless invasions against innocent Muslim countries. Now this. It was a time of great fear. His generation was faced with calamity. Yet James and most of his colleagues at the paper were somewhat soothed when the Americans voted in a black man as president. Whatever mistakes the previous generations had made, it felt that his generation would repair. They were going to be better. He would do his part by highlighting their screwups.

Cambridge was a competitive place. Everyone had their sights on a high office. For James, it was at the New York Times as a war correspondent. Being a journalist already gave him a fuller sense of himself. It was like magic. All he had to say was that he was a journalist for the Varsity, the school paper. No stranger could resist it. He was someone people talked to. He was someone people found interesting.

He wrote about the lack of diversity in Cambridge theater. How it was “out of touch with modern political realities.” He was mirroring what the pros did. The U.K.’s top journalists came to Cambridge for dinners, debates and lectures. They spoke of their work traveling the world. Of the wreckage left behind of what was once the British empire. One of them, a Irish man by the name of Ian White, who had documented massacres in Lebanon, Iraq, and in Afghanistan of late, particularly enthralled James. He worked up the courage to ask Ian, after he finished his lecture, if he could teach him how to be a war correspondent. “It has to outrage you,” he told him. “It has to be personal. Otherwise it won’t last.”

He kept in touch with Ian. He saw parts of himself in James. It made him want to help. James would email him his articles. Ian would always push him to aim higher. He saw progress in his writing — James began to tackle the suffering of students from immigrant families, particularly those of Muslim background. Ian connected him with the UK managing editor at the Guardian. Old mates they were from Cambridge. He signed off on the email by saying “James has a sense of outrage which would serve your readers well.”

The editor trusted Ian and his pedigree. He invited James to the newsroom for coffee. It was unlike anything James had ever seen before. It was 2011 and there were rows and rows of desktops. People shuttling in and out of the office. They hurled their reporter bags over their coats as they walked outside. They were locked in discussion with their colleague as they rushed back to their desks. There were books everywhere. Stacks of them. Flat screens mounted on the walls. Digital clocks showing the hour in major capitals. It was chaos and overwhelming for James. Somehow all of this action became what informed hundreds of thousands of Britons each day. He wanted to be part of it. That was obvious to the editor.

On the one hand, James had no real experience. Articles about Cambridge were cute, not consequential. But James had the same youthful self-righteousness that permeated the Guardian. “Look, lad,” the editor said to James. “I’m willing to give you a shot. But for the first few years you keep your fucking opinions about stories to yourself. Do as I say and I’ll make sure you do great here.”

There was another reason the editor hired James. He was under pressure to cut the fat out of his newsroom. The Guardian had gone through two rounds of layoffs in the past three years. Those who survived were demoralized. Complaining about the declining resources. Career reporters who were used to support from fact-checkers and assistants all of a sudden had to take that work on themselves. They blamed their declining work on management. Management, including the editor, didn’t care all that much. They had the leverage.

You see, James entered into a new world of journalism. Gone were the days when the rookies learned the craft for a few years at a small paper before they moved onto the national scene. The old-schoolers proved their mettle with tenacity. They didn’t just survive the abuse of the newsroom — everyone was under a deadline and therefore had little patience for bullshit — they thrived on it. They anticipated editor’s questions — did you get comment from everyone mentioned in your story? are there enough voices who criticize your angle? have you triple checked the spelling and grammar of every sentence? — before they wrote the first draft. Young reporters became pros by mastering the fundamentals and refining their sense of news judgment. They got so good they worked on autopilot. They knew who to call to confirm a tip. They knew who would gossip. They knew how to get people to talk.

The Internet destroyed that. The economics of journalism had imploded. No one saw it coming because, well, no one had ever experienced the speed at which the Internet could disrupt an entire industry. Journalism was the first. Looking back it should have been obvious. The world had discovered a technology that connected everyone. More importantly, it allowed them to communicate. Those whose business it was to communicate were therefore the first to have to adjust.

Change is hard for people who fancy themselves as important. News gathering and delivery were done a certain way. If young reporters had no business telling the newsroom how to do their jobs, why should young Internet entrepreneurs have that right? Newsrooms had to spend large on flying out correspondents and hiring stringers and translators all over the world. One doesn’t go cheap when going after the truth. This is the weakness that the Internet exposed.

The job of the media was not to write about the truth. The world was rapidly progressing. Hundreds of millions of people had risen out of poverty since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn’t serve this to their readers, and for one simple reason.

The primary job of the media was to attract an audience.

This is why, when advertisers realized they could reach far more people online, and at a fraction of the old cost, they dumped the local and national papers. For the first time, the media faced an enormous challenge to their primary cause. The Internet was immediate. Smartphones put it in the pockets of hundreds of millions of people. The monopoly was finished.

At first the revenue drop killed the local papers. Thousands of experienced reporters were fired every year. Supply of young journalists outpaced the demand. Then the national outlets started cutting back too. First came the ancillary people – the fact checkers, the assistants. Then the experienced guys who were already demoralized, and at midlife, paralyzed by thinking they could not do anything else. They could not imagine being like the tainted masses who worked for money. They hung on as expensive mediocrities until they were shown the door.

It’s not as though the people running the newsrooms didn’t try to revive their careers. They were former reporters themselves. Being nice didn’t help though. Fear was their weapon of choice. The old-timers hated seeing young hotshots outwork them. Appealing to the pride of the old-timers had temporary effects. They just couldn’t keep up with the pace of change. Every new responsibility, every new digital skill to learn, hammered away at their sense of self-respect. The young generation was hungry and foolish and cheap. They hadn’t the years yet to overestimate their importance.

James didn’t understand this at the time, but this is what he was walking into. He was hired to write features. This was unheard of for someone his age a decade ago. It pissed off many of the old-timers. In the old days, a reporter had to spend at least ten years earning their stripes, preferably winning a major prize along the way. The best James had was a student journalist of the year award. Hardly anything reporters coveted.

The editor protected James from the envy and sabotage of the newsroom. He made sure he knew it too. Now he had a young and driven journalist he could control. He commissioned his work, and rewrote most of his copy. In effect, James was there to present a version of the world that the editor knew their readers wanted.

Unapologetic attacks on the rich and the powerful.

That’s what the paper stood for. After all, the rich and powerful were human, and therefore selfish and greedy and prone to embarrassing error. Why should they have more? They didn’t know any better than The Guardian. It was merciless. The pugnacity pulsed through the copy. Anyone who dared take a public stance made themselves targets. They had better stand up for the working class, the poor, the minorities, the immigrant – the victims – or else.

After a few years, the editor and James noticed the unfolding story that would define Europe for decades to come, if not for their entire lifetime. The demographics were changing. Europe was becoming less European. Immigrants were pouring in from Africa. From the Middle East. From eastern Europe. There was growing resentment from the locals. There was growing fear of Muslims. Right-wing parties were making headway. When the U.K. voted to leave the European Union in the summer of 2015, the editor and James were convinced that the perfect journalistic storm had arrived. James was going to be the person who chronicled this ongoing crisis and the incompetent manner the political class dealt with it. He became the world’s first migration correspondent.

He traveled all over the Middle East and Northern Africa for his articles. They were truly foreign creatures, these migrants. On the one hand human, and on the other victims of power games by flawed people in European capitals. He admired their strength but that could not come across in the copy. What the reader had to feel was pity. His job was to document their dangerous journeys, a world in which no reader of the Guardian could scarcely imagine — the threats of rape and torture, the days without food or shelter, the run-ins with corrupt police, the sudden break from their families. Horror. Grief.

Outrage.

It was everywhere. He traveled to Egypt and wrote about the massacres of Islamist activists and the imprisonment of anyone. Throughout southern Europe he wrote about the cramped and anxious conditions in the refugee camps. The editor always pushed him for details — how were they killed? at what time? what did the neighbors hear? what prayers were they reciting? how many participated in the killing? He did it so much that it too became ingrained in the way James approached every interview. He developed a habit of mapping out the story in his mind first and then filling in it with the details he heard. It was difficult, painstaking work. He loved it. It was thrilling. More than that, he was being rewarded for it. Lauded. The editor would send around James’s work to everyone in the newsroom, holding it up as an example of what the Guardian was capable of. What he was capable of.

There was something destructive about the work as well. James spent all his waking hours chasing down tiny details, all of them gruesome. Not very flattering to humanity. His information diet was war, mass murder, political indifference, racism, xenophobia and egomania. It hurt his pride to see his home country leave the EU so it could control its borders. Now the rest of Europe was developing the same xenophobia. It was depressing.

The job was all-consuming. He couldn’t date. He was in another country every month. He was beholden to an unpredictable news cycle. Yet he couldn’t stop. Not least because the New York Times offered him a job to write about the same miserable topic for them.

This was it. He was twenty eight and one giant step closer to his dream. The editor understood. It saddened him that their last piece together, about Mongolian herders who moved into the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was not widely read. No more than a few thousand people in the first twenty four hours. To the editor, it was more proof of the evils of capitalism and its ugly progeny, climate change. To James, it was another notch on his count of countries he had reported from.

In the beginning, James covered his nerves with his work ethic. His direct colleagues were Pulitzer prize winners and acclaimed authors. He had no guardian angel. No “rabbi,” as they were called in the newsroom. He was alone, this time in Istanbul. All he had was the work and it had to shine. Whatever social life he did have was spent with other journalists and social activists. None of them truly understood him. It was lonely at the top and he couldn’t let go.

The Israel bureau chief role was opening up and one of the managing editors back in New York asked James if he might be interested. He was already in the region and his knowledge of Arabic was a plus. The previous handful of bureau chiefs had been American Jews. That James was neither Jewish nor Arab worked in his favor. What mattered most was that James had proven bona fides challenging the power centers of the world. In this region, that meant Israel. They were illegally occupying Palestinian territory. They were causing endless psychological harm to millions of people in the West Bank and in Gaza. The newsroom in New York concluded that the Netanyahu government was an obstacle to peace. Though the man said he would enter negotiations with Palestinian leadership so long as there were no preconditions, the top editors applied the full force of their cynicism at this farce. It was unfair to expect the victims of this conflict to shed whatever dignity they had left by agreeing to Netanyahu’s maximalist demands.

The Israelis were the lucky ones too. They held tremendous political leverage in the US and received billions in American aid. That privilege gave them the necessary head start to become a regional powerhouse. It also provided the New York Times the framing to make their coverage of Israel-Palestine relevant — how U.S. taxpayer money was spent on this brutal occupation.

Kelly shared this view. After all, she dreamed to see her byline on the New York Times. She was also a like-minded companion for James. He could vent to her about the inadequacies of his stringers in Gaza and in the West Bank. About hot shot journalists flying in from all over the world to write articles about his story, and on his turf. Even Tom Friedman. James thought of him as a has-been. Like the Cambridge theater — out of touch with modern political realities. If anyone is to inform the world of what is happening in this never-ending conflict, it would be the people who live it and breath it. It would be James.

When he was with Kelly, he felt something he hadn’t felt in a while. Understood. It was comforting. He didn’t need to explain himself. It was as if she was an extension of his office life. They didn’t talk about much else beyond the job and office politics. No. They rarely strayed from talking about James and the New York Times. That one night, on October 6, 2023, they stayed up past midnight at the American Colony hotel in east Jerusalem, talking about their two favorite subjects. Her apartment was in Tel Aviv and she would have to take a taxi back. They were both drunk. “Why don’t you stay at my flat? There’s plenty of space,” he told her. She looked down and smiled. “You don’t mind?”

“It’s too late for you to go home alone,” he said.

He picked up the tab and the two started to walk to the apartment Thomas Friedman christened all those years ago. As they passed the Old City, she took in the lights on those ancient structures set against the clear night sky and clutched her arms around her chest. The temperature had dipped to seventeen degrees and they were hit with a breeze. He put her arm around her, if only for a few minutes as they worked out how to walk without their bodies colliding into one another. She stopped and looked him in the eyes. She kissed him. He kissed her back.

They held hands in the back of the taxi and didn’t say a word to one another.

Their first sex was not his greatest performance. He had been out of practice and he lacked the raw confidence to dominate her. It had shades of their intellectual relationship, where men and women are equal and the like. But the second time, he got the courage to pull her hair, gently. She responded with a moan. That was the high point of the night.