By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 8, 2002; 8:48 AM

No matter what you think of the Middle East conflict, this was monumentally dumb.

Israeli troops firing stun grenades and rubber bullets at two dozen journalists awaiting the arrival of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni?

Is this crazy or what?

Could the Israelis be intent on blowing up their international image?

"There were probably six or seven, it was difficult to count, of these stun grenades going off," CNN's Michael Holmes reported. "One landed under my foot, as I moved away, and went off. I could feel the concussion of it under my foot."

What better way to take the focus off Arafat and suicide bombers than to open fire on the press? This is shooting yourself in a far worse place than the foot.

Israel usually draws sympathetic coverage in the West, although its heavy-handed tactics have prompted more criticism lately. But there may be no better way to generate negative headlines than to literally attack the press, without warning or provocation.

An Israeli writer, Aviv Lavie, has an interesting complaint in the newspaper Ha'aretz about how even his own country's reporters are being shut out of Ramallah:

"A journey through the TV and radio channels and the pages of the newspapers exposes a huge and embarrassing gap between what is reported to us and what is seen, heard, and read in the world – not only in the commentaries and analytical pieces, but also in the reporting of the dry facts.

"Israel looks like an isolated media island, with most of the reporters drafted into the cause of convincing themselves and the reader that the government and army are perfectly justified in whatever they do. . . .

"Reporters and commentators get most of their information from the army, and a few also use Palestinian sources whom they regard with great suspicion. Many reporters believed the army was closed off to them for a few days, but as time goes by, they have been proven wrong. Since the journalists aren't on the ground to see firsthand, the soldiers become their eyes, which explains the huge difference between what is reported and broadcast to us, and what the rest of the world sees, particularly the Arab world.

"On Arab TV stations (though not only them) one could see Israeli soldiers taking over hospitals, breaking equipment, damaging medicines, and locking doctors away from their patients. In one interview, a doctor was whispering on a phone, explaining that he had to lower his voice lest the soldier in the next room cut off the conversation. Foreign television networks all over the world have shown the images of five Palestinians from the National Security forces, shot in the heads from close range; one was apparently the manager of the Palestinian Authority orchestra. Some of the networks have claimed they were shot in cold blood after they were disarmed.

"The entire world has seen wounded people in the streets, heard reports of how the Israeli Defense Forces prevent ambulances from reaching the wounded for treatment. The entire world has heard Palestinian residents saying they can't leave their homes because 'they shoot anyone in the streets.' The entire world has heard testimony by Palestinian families who have been imprisoned in their homes for 72 hours, in some places without electricity or water, and the food is running out. There are also reports of vandalism and looting.

"Maybe it's all mendacious propaganda (though in some cases, the pictures speak for themselves) but Israeli journalists have no way to investigate to find out the truth, whether to deflate the stories, or confirm them. In the absence of that kind of reporting, instead, over and over, we hear the worn out mantras about how 'the civilian population is not our enemy,' and reports on how the army takes such strict care not to harm civilians."

Here at home, conservatives usually applaud a get-tough foreign policy. But the right is not pleased with President Bush's blunt intervention in the Mideast. The Wall Street Journal editorial page abandons its usual support of Bush:

"President Bush bowed to pressure from Europe, the Arab world and most of the U.S. media by urging Israel to end its siege against Palestinian terrorists. This strikes us as a mistake, maybe even a large one, though it all might be redeemed if this helps Mr. Bush refocus the war on terror back on Iraq.

"The immediate concern is that the President's renewed pressure on Israel will be perceived as rewarding terror. While his speech was at least free of the State Department's moral equivalence blather, Mr. Bush demanded that Israel make the larger concessions. He handed Yasser Arafat another tongue lashing but asked Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw his troops from the West Bank. In effect the U.S. once again rode to Mr. Arafat's political rescue. . . .

"Mr. Bush has now committed his own prestige to solving the unsolvable Arab-Israeli conflict. While denouncing Mr. Arafat for failing to control terror, the President still props him up as the Palestinian Israelis are supposed to negotiate with."

National Review is also in blame-Arafat mode:

"Responsibility for what is happening rests wholly upon Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians. At Camp David in the days of the Clinton presidency, Arafat could have laid the foundations of a peaceful Palestinian state. Here might have been a rare example of a national liberation movement achieving its ends through political processes. But so contemptuous was he of Israeli concessions that he was not even prepared to offer any counter-proposals of his own, instead hastening home to launch the current intifada.

"In a career spanning over three decades, he has steadily displayed the Pavlovian response that Palestine means violence. He brought civil war first to Jordan, then to Lebanon, and in the years after the Oslo accords he came to exemplify the bad government, corruption, and failure to modernize of so many of his fellow Muslim-world rulers. In their mold, he rigged the electoral process by which he became president. For his unfortunate people, he has been a disaster.

"The United Nations, international Muslim forums, and European politicians now raise a chorus that Arafat must be protected. Their collective rescue of Arafat condemns Palestinians to endure more of the same, while simultaneously they reveal themselves unmoved by the prospect of dead Jews. . . .

"Gen. Zinni and the Mitchell and Tenet plans are so many tokens of good will, perhaps better than nothing but unable to deliver. President Bush and his administration are in no position to remedy the bad government of Arafat or other Muslim rulers. So far, they are blowing hot and cold. Their pronouncements for or against Israel, for or against Arafat, are confused and confusing to Muslims and the rest of the West awaiting a lead."

The New York Times does a scene-setter for the Powell mission:

"Secretary of State Colin L. Powell took off for the Middle East tonight on one of the most urgent and challenging attempts at American peacemaking since the shuttle diplomacy of Henry A. Kissinger in the 1970's.

"Secretary Powell and the advisers on his plane were going with no optimistic illusions about their mission, an enterprise ordered by President Bush with broad implications for his own personal prestige – and for the strategic interests and international standing of the United States.

"'It's going to be a difficult trip,' Secretary Powell said this morning. 'I'm not going to come back at the end of this trip with a peace treaty in hand. I'm not even sure I'll have a cease-fire in hand. But that will be my goal, to try to help both sides out of this tragic situation in which they find themselves.' He spoke on the NBC News program 'Meet the Press.'

"Even as Secretary Powell spoke, the challenges were heightened. Israel showed no public signs of heeding his and Mr. Bush's calls for a prompt withdrawal from its occupation of Palestinian areas in the West Bank. Palestinian leaders have yet to issue firm demands for an end to the violence that prompted the Israeli military moves."

The Los Angeles Times sees black-and-white Bush plunged into a world of gray:

"Since the shock of Sept. 11, President Bush has pursued a sharply focused foreign policy agenda with single-minded zeal: Terrorism was civilization's mortal enemy, he said, and his historic mission was to stamp it out, beginning in Afghanistan and moving on to Iraq.

"'My job isn't to try to nuance,' Bush said recently. 'My job is to tell people what I think. And when I think there's an axis of evil, I say it. I think moral clarity is important.'

"But Bush's one-track agenda appears to have been hijacked by events in the Middle East--and by Arab and European allies who want less attention to moral clarity and more to the nuances.

"As a result, the president finds himself stepping grimly into the nuance-ridden landscape of the Arab-Israeli conflict. On Saturday, that meant taking the unfamiliar step of scolding Israel for ignoring his plea to withdraw its tanks from the West Bank."

The Washington Post looks at life in Jerusalem: "Paula Weiman-Kelman had a $1,200 car insurance check waiting at a lawyer's office but couldn't bring herself to risk going downtown to pick it up. Sara Glaser pleaded without success with her 20-year-old daughter, Naama, to bring friends home for coffee and a video rather than venture out to a popular cafe. Hirsh Goodman, who fought in three Arab-Israeli wars and covered another as a military correspondent, sat nervously in a Burger Ranch on the day before Passover began, prodding his two young sons to finish their kid's meals so that they could flee the crowded fast-food joint before something terrible happened.

"Palestinian suicide bomb attacks and other assaults against such civilian targets as coffee shops, supermarkets and hotels have struck terror and rekindled a state of siege within Israelis. The attacks killed about 110 Israeli civilians last month – the biggest civilian death toll since the war of independence in 1948. . . .

"Many Israelis doubt that the [military] campaign will succeed in eliminating terrorism, and fear it could finish off any chance of a return to peace negotiations. And beyond their immediate anxieties, many fear that the dream of a stable and prosperous society at peace with its neighbors is slipping away, propelling them back in time to the days when Israel was a small, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies. . . .

"The view from Jaffa Street, downtown Jerusalem's main artery, suggests how much the physical and emotional landscape has been altered. . . . Armed security guards stood outside restaurants and shops checking bags and faces. As people briskly traversed the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, eyeing each other warily, many steered around a man window-shopping in a gray overcoat, fearful he could be concealing explosives."

Columnist Charles Krauthammer wants the Palestinian banished:

"What to do with Arafat? Isolating Arafat is no answer, because the isolation must end at some point. Killing Arafat is no answer, because that will make him a martyr. The important thing is to make him irrelevant by expelling him. Let us not hear any more ridiculous talk about Arafat's being the only man who can make peace.

"Can? He had 8 1/2 years to make peace. He has no intention of making peace. He was offered his peace, his Palestine, in July 2000 by Israel and then by the president of the United States. Like the Palestinian leadership of 1947, also offered their own state side-by-side with Israel, Arafat rejected the offer and started a war. . . .

"Why expel him? Because as long as he rules, the Palestinian answer to any offer of peace that genuinely accepts Israel is 'No.' And there will be no one in Palestine who will dare say 'Yes.' (If he does, he dies.) The only hope for any kind of peace is a Palestinian leadership, whether national or local, ready to say yes. And that can only become possible when Arafat has been banished and his rejectionist police state dismantled. . . .

"President Bush offered Arafat yet another olive branch, yet another rescue. This will achieve nothing. This will only postpone the reckoning."

Here's a weird one from Reason's Charles Paul Freund: "When Palestinian residents of the besieged West Bank town of Ramallah turned on their TVs over the weekend, what they encountered was neither news nor any of the usual Palestinian Authority programming; they encountered pornographic movie clips.

"Three of the four TV stations in Ramallah, headquarters of Yasser Arafat, had been occupied by Israeli troops. The town's remaining TV station was meanwhile running a crawl at the bottom of the screen explaining that the porn clips were the work of the occupying forces. 'We urge parents to take precautions,' it read.

"An Israeli army spokesman told Agence France-Press that their forces had nothing to do with such clips, and even blamed Arafat for the footage."

Talk about X-rated warfare.

Want a whiff of hypocrisy? Check out this Wall Street Journal piece: "Four years ago, leaders of the Senate Finance Committee bashed the Internal Revenue Service as heavy-handed and pushed the agency to ease its pursuit of tax dodgers. Audits and penalties, property liens and seizures, declined steadily.

"Now many of the same politicians are prodding the IRS again – to be tougher. And audits and penalties are on the rise.

"The swing of the political pendulum will be on full display Thursday, when the Senate's tax experts hold a hearing designed to boost IRS tax-compliance efforts. . . . A committee press release gives the event this marquee: 'Hearing on Schemes, Scams, and Cons . . . The IRS Strikes Back.'"

Guess they were just kidding last time around.

The politics of personal destruction moves to the Web, in this Washington Times piece: "A Republican effort to demonize Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle for political advantage – in the way Democrats once made then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich their election-year Satan – has ignited a campaign fund-raising frenzy with warring Web sites on the Internet.

"A Republican Web site called DumpDaschle.org has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars since last October for radio and TV issue attack advertisements and other political broadsides against the South Dakota Democrat in his home state.

"Democratic political organizers have countered with their own Web site, DaschleDemocrats.org, which has already raised more than $100,000 to repel the assault and mobilize Democratic faithfuls against 'a right-wing conspiracy.'

"'Despite public calls for a "changed tone in Washington," conservative Republican operatives are engaged in a cynical, coordinated effort to personally malign and politically smear Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle,' said an opening message on the home page of DaschleDemocrats.org."

The American Prowler says one top GOPer may be taking a hike: "Someone apparently seriously mulling early retirement is Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot, who RNC staffers say is fed up with a controlling White House that has made political missteps he advised against.

"'He wasn't part of the recruitment of Richard Riordan out in California, but Marc was very upset at how that Republican primary was handled. He pressed for the White House to at least talk to [now Republican nominee] Bill Simon before the primary election, but he was ignored,' says a senior RNC aide. 'He's disenchanted with the job, because he feels he's been cut out of most of the political decisions. Those are made by others inside the White House and then handed off to the RNC.'

"Racicot is also said to have felt he should have been consulted more in the decision to bring Mitt Romney back to run for Massachusetts governor."

Finally, here's a case of a journalist taking his lumps. David Copley, publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, explains why the paper published a story on his DUI arrest:

"There were no unusual circumstances attending my arrest; I ran a stop sign, and a San Diego police officer pulled me over. He and the sheriff's deputies at the jail where I spent the rest of the night couldn't have been more professional. They did their jobs well. I emerged chastised and embarrassed.

"I am not a TV celebrity, nor an elected official, but if anyone must undergo the further humiliation of having his name in the paper, it must be the person who bears ultimate responsibility for publishing the names of others."