NY Times Mideast Coverage Wins Pulitzer For Fiction

The writing contains fiction that illuminates the human condition as seen from inside the minds of characters unable to see outside a certain myopic framing of the region’s troubles.

New York, September 9 – The paper of record added another award to its sizable collection today, with its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict earning it the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

All of the New York Times’s many other Pulitzer awards came for journalistic excellence, but this year the Pulitzer committee saw fit to laud Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren and her staff for their contribution to the literary genre of fiction, as contained in the corpus of articles the team published in the twelve-month period of July 2014-June 2015, often more than one per day. In the aggregate, said the committee, the writing contains fiction that illuminates the human condition as seen from inside the minds of characters unable to see outside a certain myopic framing of the region’s troubles.

“Ms. Rudoren and her colleagues give us an all-too-realistic first-person portrayal of what happens in the minds of people so committed to a specific and simplistic understanding of a multifaceted, complex situation that they blind themselves to blatant facts,” noted the committee. “Collectively, the writers of these articles have made an invaluable contribution to our understanding and experience of human nature, bias, and the primal need to give an emotionally satisfying explanation for sometimes-incomprehensible events.”

Specifically, the committee cited reporting last year during Operation Protective Edge, when the publications’ articles on the IDF-Hamas conflict repeatedly neglected to mention Hamas locating its rocket launchers amid civilians and journalists, a phenomenon attested to by myriad reputable journalistic sources, as well as completely omitting discussion of press intimidation by Hamas. “In fact Ms. Rudoren’s writing – in tweets as well as articles – gave us a rich performance of someone determined not to see things before their eyes so that the identity- and mission-defining narrative of Israeli brutality and Palestinian victimhood could be preserved,” wrote the committee. They also noted the attention to detail in this aspect of the fiction, pointing out the characters’ unquestioning reliance on the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza for civilian casualty figures, and a near-total dismissal of the Palestinian leadership’s corruption and intransigence as significant factors in the story.

The committee also gave special mention to reporter Diaa Hadid, who convincingly wrote as someone who uncritically accepts Palestinian claims while qualifying or casting doubt on Israeli ones. “These writers intuitively grasp the need for a limited, flawed perspective in the first-person characters they portray. Ms. Hadid’s character, especially, is written as possessing the confidence of being able to shoehorn inconvenient facts to fit her preconceived notions, but with the barest sign of unease that her world view might collapse if it were hit directly with certain facts,” such as Jewish indigenous status in Israel; the IDF’s strict adherence to the Laws of Armed Conflict; and cynical Palestinian manipulation of emotions, cameras, and statistics.