Covering the Holy Land

Since the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, Israel and stories about the Middle East have been on the cover of TIME more than any other international subject except the Cold War. During that time, we’ve done some 68 covers on the Middle East, encompassing Israel and the unending cycle of Arab-Israeli problems.

As the struggle has intensified between Israel and Gaza, a sad cliché about the Middle East once again seems true–that the more things change, the more they tragically stay the same. In our 1948 cover story on the Israeli victory and its hero, David Ben-Gurion, we wrote that it was “time to stop pondering the settled question of whether there would be a Jewish state, time to start asking what kind of nation Israel was.”

That is the question we are again asking this week as we ponder not only Israel’s endgame with Gaza but also what the future holds for the Jewish state. Tim McGirk, our Jerusalem bureau chief, poses the toughest questions facing Israel: Is a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine still possible? Will Israel’s hostile neighbors ever acknowledge and adapt to its existence? These are the issues that Israel and the world must reckon with.

The hallmark of our coverage of Israel is balance. I know this isn’t a very scientific way of measuring, but I tend to have as many people vehemently informing me that TIME is unfair to Israel as people telling me the opposite. I was in Israel and the West Bank only a few months ago, and I got an earful from all sides. People still recall the libel suit we won against Ariel Sharon in 1985 and Yasser Arafat’s selection as one of our Men of the Year for 1993. But for all that, we strive to make sense of this volcanic part of the world and help our readers understand what’s at stake. We do it using the perspective of our decades of experience covering this never-ending struggle.

McGirk, who has been based in Jerusalem since 2006, says he felt a sense of déjà vu as the Gaza conflict unfolded: his arrival in the region coincided with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the subsequent war against Hizballah in southern Lebanon. “My lament, shared by everybody around here, is that even with this latest bloodletting, it doesn’t appear that Israelis and Palestinians are coming closer to an understanding, not even one based on sheer exhaustion,” McGirk says.

As usual, our reporting has been enhanced by two other veteran members of TIME’s Jerusalem bureau: Aaron J. Klein and Jamil Hamad. During the current round of fighting, Klein and driver Uri Narkis narrowly avoided being hit by Hamas rockets fired into southern Israel. “It was frustrating not being able to go in with the Israeli troops, observing the clouds of smoke rising over Gaza only from a distance,” Klein says. Meanwhile, Hamad worked his contacts on the Palestinian side for insight into how the Palestinian leadership views the crisis. “Impartiality is a dream,” Hamad says, “but honesty is a duty.” It’s one we have always striven to meet.

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR