PRESS: The Problem with Facts:

...The reality is one of mistrust, grievance, hurt pride, anger and determination on all sides...

...On paper the Sinai and the Golan Heights belong to Egypt and Syria...

...thomas powers...

...In all the broad Pacific of journalism about Watergate there is not one island of really good writing because, until now at least, it has been the facts which mattered...

...Wherever I went I found a sharp discrepancy between what exists on paper, and what exists in flesh-and-blood reality...

...In reality Cairo is falling apart...

...If two wrongs don't make a right, what do two rights make...

...It is not the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict which matters, in other words, but the conflict itself...

...The question when Muhammad Ali and George Frazier fight is not who is right-that has nothing to do with it-but who will win...

...the reality of Palestinian resentment threatens to undermine every effort at agreement...

...On paper the Egyptians have so many tanks, so many planes...

...It is based on the notion that the best way to understand any complicated political dispute is to cut through the attitudinizing and special pleading and shameless emotional appeal to the facts in the matter...

...none, I think, will volunteer to lose...

...When you are there you are struck less by the complex history which led to this terrible situation, so perfectly suited to the qualification and the footnote, than by its reality as a combat in which someone is going to...

...It is not simply that the elevators are continually breaking down, to give one example...

...In a way, right and wrong have nothing to do with it...

...I think what they make is an old, old reality: a combat...

...thomas powers...

...After they have been crammed in you ought to pay visits to the New York press offices of the Israeli Consulate, The League of Arab States and the Palestine Liberation Organization in order to pick up copies of their books and pamphlets...

...Elevators are expensive...

...They can't all win...

...The facts matter...

...The battle has been joined...

...The number of planes and tanks are facts...

...But I have nothing of the kind, and neither do the reporters for the daily newspapers, who must make do with a column of newsprint a couple of times a week...

...What are wanted in complicated situations are facts, not all that distracting emotion which obscures the facts like a fog...

...On paper and even in conversation all but the extremists say their primary goal is peace, and on paper an exchange of territory for peace seems reasonable and possible, but such talk has an abstract air about it...

...Like good detectives, the best journalists have an eye and a nose for fact, for the discrepancy or contradiction or false note which hint where the bodies lie...

...just tell me what you saw, what you heard, and what you did...

...The fact on paper is all Kissinger has to work with...

...a poor country can be excused for not buying new ones, but how do you explain the fact that the silverware in the hotels is not clean, that the floors of the government press office have not been mopped or the windows washed...

...Too often it means nothing much, or doesn't mean anything yet...

...How can a people organize and maintain a modern military machine when it cannot wash its own windows...

...Well, I did all that...

...the decrepitude of Cairo is only an impression, and yet I think it matters more than the facts...

...The conflict between Arab and Israeli in the Middle East is just such a dispute and when I began to take a close interest in it last fall I proceeded in the logical way by immersing myself in the facts, which in this case means the history of the struggle between Zionism and the native people of Palestine...

...When you go to the Middle East, which of course is the next step, it will not do to be ignorant of Deir Yassin or Ma'alot and the Nazi sympathies of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the 400-odd Arab villages erased from the land and maps of Israel and so on...

...the belligerents cannot be talked out of it anymore than the Germans, British or French could be talked into giving up World War I. All the talk, the argument over fact and justice, is simply pursuit of victory by other means...

...Here there are facts in surfeit for the most ferocious appetite...

...On paper the Palestinians, or at least the Palestine Liberation Organization, has tacitly conceded a willingness to settle for a West Bank State, while in reality no Palestinian is willing to concede Israel's right to continue as a Jewish state on Palestinian territory...

...THE PROBLEM WITH FACTS PRESS When I was a kid I used to watch Dragnet on television and, like most people no doubt, what I remember best is Jack Webb's dead voice and blank, Indian's face saying, "Just the facts, Ma'am...

...lose . . . If I were an artist, and if I had 10,000 words with which I might try to capture some sense of the people I talked to, of their fatal opposition, of the desperation and wounded pride of the Arabs, of the anxiety and determination of Israel, of all the human emotion which obscures the dry and useless facts, then perhaps I might explain why there seems to be so little chance for anything except continued war...

...But that is only part of what I mean when I say the facts don't matter...

...A walk through the bazaar proves that the Egyptians are inventive and intelligent...

...It is their job to establish the truth of the matter at hand, not to figure out what it means...

...His attitude seemed properly objective, a bit cold perhaps, but to the point, and I still get restless when people try to explain too much...

...At the same time the Israelis have a right to defend themselves...

...Don't tell me what you thought or felt or went through...

...That gives them room enough for the facts, nothing more, and in this case the facts only obscure the reality like a fog...

...Even this mountain of fact-rubble will hardly tell you all there is to know but it will at least allow you to talk to the apologists on either side without being constantly surprised by inconvenient facts...

...Now I'm not sure...

...the prospects for peace are dim so long as the belligerents are not too battered to hope...

...A talk with an Egyptian laborer proves he is willing to work all day for next to nothing...

...the facts don't matter...

...I read the books, journals and pamphlets, and I went to the Middle East and spent six weeks talking to people in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Egypt, and what I learned-perhaps instead I ought to say what I came away with, is the uneasy feeling that when all is said and done...

...Not why the President did as he did, which is a matter of conjecture, but what did he know and when did he know it...

...The problem is purely one of management...

...they can make anything out of anything...

...The primacy of fact in journalism has theoretical roots as well...

...Whether or not they also have a right to focus their military energy on women and children and weight-lifters at Munich is quite another question...

...all the rest is special pleading...

...I take it as given that the Israelis mean to preserve an independent Jewish state, that the Palestinians mean to reassert their national rights in their national homeland, and that Egypt and Syria mean to regain the Sinai and the Golan Heights...

...Whole reputations have been made by finding out one fact or group of facts a week before anyone else, and the most interesting journalists are not those with the nimblest literary style, like Garry Wills or Nicholas Von Hoffman, but the fact-gatherers like Seymour Hersh and Jack Anderson...

...The Palestinians have a right to want to go home, and they have a right to use military means to do it...

...As a basic introduction I recommend the books of the prolific Walter Lacquer and all the back issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies, George Antonious' The Arab Awakening and perhaps Christopher Sykes' Crossroads to Israel...

...Two Lord & Taylor shopping bags will do the job...

...Six months ago I thought a close scrutiny of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict might establish who was right, and that knowing who was right might suggest what to do about the conflict...

...in reality they are bleak desert in the one instance, too small to matter in the other, and yet the Egyptians and Syrians have all but wrecked their countries to regain them...