Who told America about Palestine

Mohammed Daraghmeh

Reported the northern West Bank for the Associated Press from 1996, and wrote for the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam. He lives in Nablus. In April 2002 Israeli forces took him from his own house in the middle of the night, handcuffed and blindfolded him alongside thirty-five to forty of his neighbors, held him until eleven at night and released him without ever asking him a question. His first byline in this archive is three months later. He went on to be Palestine bureau chief of al-Shark News and to teach journalism at Birzeit.

Committee to Protect Journalists, April 2002

Every clipping bylined Mohammed Daraghmeh →

Ibrahim Barzak

Born in Gaza City, and the second generation of his family to hold the job: his father was the Associated Press’s man in Gaza from the 1950s, and when his father died Ibrahim, about sixteen, began calling the reports into the Jerusalem office himself. Through the winter war of 2008–09 he was the only AP correspondent inside the Strip. On 30 December an airstrike on a compound nearby tore his apartment building apart. He later moved his family to Kuala Lumpur, saying he did not want his sons to grow up hating Israelis.

Committee to Protect Journalists, January 2009 · Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Every clipping bylined Ibrahim Barzak →

Fares Akram

Reported Gaza for The Independent and became the Associated Press’s Gaza correspondent in 2014. On 3 January 2009 an Israeli airstrike killed his father, Akram al-Ghoul, forty-eight, on the family farm near the northern border — a judge who had resigned from the Palestinian Authority after the Hamas takeover and gone back to his land. Akram has written that six of his relatives, three close friends and several colleagues have been killed. Every one of his bylines in this archive was filed afterwards.

Press Gazette · Fares Akram, “The death and life of my father”

Every clipping bylined Fares Akram →

Karin Laub

The longest span of anyone in this archive, from the first intifada in 1987 to 2018. She was Jerusalem news editor and chief correspondent for the Palestinian territories, lived in Gaza City for almost two months during the 2014 war, and later became the Associated Press’s bureau chief for Jordan and then its Middle East news director. Eight of her bylines here are shared with Mohammed Daraghmeh.

Associated Press announcement

Every clipping bylined Karin Laub →

Dorothy Thompson

A columnist carried by hundreds of American papers, expelled from Germany in 1934 over what she wrote about Hitler. She went to Palestine in 1945, changed her mind, and called the state then being planned a recipe for perpetual war. She was accused of antisemitism and lost her column and her radio contract.

In 1951 she helped found American Friends of the Middle East. So did Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the group’s executive secretary and a CIA officer who two years later ran the overthrow of Iran’s government. Ramparts revealed in 1967 that the CIA had been paying for it. Hugh Wilford’s history of the group describes the agency as having created it and partly run it, with money from Aramco as well. Nothing on the record says whether Thompson knew.

This archive holds her writing from Beirut on the refugee camps, never have I seen such conditions, and on Qibya, where she noted that the name of the American manufacturer was stamped on the cartridge shells. In 1957 the Buffalo Jewish Review ran a study of Arab propaganda in America that listed the group she had helped found. On the question of who was paying, that paper was closer to right than it could have known. It got there by listing American Jews who opposed Zionism, which is a different kind of error. In 1958 her column ran above an advice column, beside a note about statues in London.

Karine Walther, Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism, via Connexions · NPR / Georgia Public Broadcasting · Hugh Wilford, The American Friends of the Middle East: The CIA, Arabism, and Anti-Zionism in Cold War America · Ramparts, March 1967

Every clipping bylined Dorothy Thompson →

John Kifner

A New York Times foreign correspondent for four decades. His dispatch from three weeks into the first intifada is on this site: four American papers printed it on the same Sunday, and what each one kept is the argument of chapter five.

Every clipping bylined John Kifner →

Clyde Haberman

Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times in the early nineties. Every one of his clippings here is from the Times itself. Everyone else in this group reaches the archive through papers all over the country, syndicated out from a news service.

Every clipping bylined Clyde Haberman →

James Bennet

Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times through the second intifada, and later editor of the Times editorial page.

Every clipping bylined James Bennet →

Clair Price

In June 1919 he filed a series from Jerusalem that an American syndicate sent out to papers across the country; five of them are here, all printing it within two days of each other. He went to the Muslim-Christian Association and wrote down what its leaders told him: if the Jews have a right to Palestine, we Arabs have a right to Spain and the Indians have a right to New York. Three weeks earlier another American correspondent had described the same objections, in the same country, as propaganda. Price later wrote The Rebirth of Turkey, and said in its foreword that his interest in the region began with a newspaper assignment. He never says which one.

Clair Price, The Rebirth of Turkey (New York, 1923)

Every clipping bylined Clair Price →

Marion Weinstein

Spent three months traveling in Palestine in the winter of 1919 and filed a series that ran in at least five American papers. In February, in Jerusalem, climbed the rocky path at the foot of Mount Olivet to the house of the Grand Mufti and asked him what the Moslems of Palestine made of Zionism — then Jews who plan to come here may expect to find an unfriendly Moslem? — and recorded the answer: if they come to stay. Also talked to fellaheen and effendis, peasants and landowners, and to members of the leading families. March’s dispatches carry what they said. Then, in June, Article IV concluded that the whole crisis was the direct result of a system of anti-Zionist propaganda, organized, unscrupulous, incendiary. The listening and the verdict are by the same hand, eleven weeks apart.

That verdict is the 1919 clipping this site has used elsewhere as the first instance of the word propaganda. Clair Price was in the same country the same month and printed what the Muslim-Christian Association told him without reaching for it. Nothing else about Weinstein is recoverable from the record: no paper of record, no biography, not even a pronoun.

Every clipping bylined Marion Weinstein →

Joel Greenberg

The second-longest run in the archive after Karin Laub, for The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and others.

Every clipping bylined Joel Greenberg →

Isabel Debre

Reported for the Associated Press. Four of her bylines here are shared with Fares Akram, who was in Gaza.

Every clipping bylined Isabel Debre →

Daniel De Luce

Everything of his here is from 1948, filed from Jaffa, Jericho and Amman, each clipping in a different paper. He joined the Associated Press in 1929 as an office boy in the Los Angeles bureau and stayed forty-seven years. His first foreign posting was Budapest in 1939, and he won the 1944 Pulitzer for international telegraphic reporting on the strength of his dispatches from Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. Four years later he was in Palestine.

The Pulitzer Prizes, 1944 · Biography

Every clipping bylined Daniel De Luce →

Fred J. Zusy

All of his bylines here were printed in 1949, each in a different paper, filed for the Associated Press out of Jerusalem. Nothing else about him turned up in a published source, so nothing else is claimed here.

Every clipping bylined Fred J. Zusy →

David K. Shipler

New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem from 1979 to 1984, which is where the earliest of his bylines here begins. He shared the 1983 George Polk Award with Thomas Friedman for the Lebanon war, and the book he wrote afterwards, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It is about how the two populations see each other, and he said in its foreword that it is not about the diplomatic, political or military dimensions.

Biography · Shipler, David K. 1942–

Every clipping bylined David K. Shipler →

Serge Schmemann

Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times from July 1995 until September 1998 — which is exactly the span of his clippings here. He had come from Bonn, where his coverage of German reunification won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Wilson Center

Every clipping bylined Serge Schmemann →

Youssef M. Ibrahim

Senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times from 1986 to 1999, and before that energy editor of the Wall Street Journal; he was also the Times’s Tehran bureau chief, and he won a Polk Award for his Middle East political coverage. All of his bylines here are in the Times.

Middle East Institute profile

Every clipping bylined Youssef M. Ibrahim →

Laura King

Associated Press copy out of Jerusalem, picked up across the country.

Every clipping bylined Laura King →

Lara Sukhtian

Her clippings here all come from a single year, 2004, each in a different paper, filed for the Associated Press. Nothing more turned up in a published source, so nothing more is said here — including where she is from, which a reader would otherwise be left to guess from the name.

Every clipping bylined Lara Sukhtian →

Diaa Hadid

Her bylines here, 2008 to 2010, fall inside her Associated Press years, 2006 to 2015; she went on to the New York Times, 2015 to 2017, and then to NPR — six years in the Islamabad bureau, and South Asia from Mumbai since October 2023. She was raised in Canberra by a Lebanese father and an Egyptian mother and took her degree in Arabic at the Australian National University. She is in this entry rather than the section above for that reason.

NPR biography

Every clipping bylined Diaa Hadid →

Josef Federman

Each of his bylines here ran in a different paper. He joined the Associated Press in 1993 as an international news editor in New York, spent 2000 to 2003 at the Wall Street Journal, came back as a correspondent in Jerusalem, became news editor there in 2006 and was named chief of bureau for Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2014. He is from Westborough, Massachusetts.

AP names Josef Federman as Jerusalem bureau chief

Every clipping bylined Josef Federman →

Ilan Ben Zion

Every one of his bylines here ran in a different paper, five of them shared with the photographer Majdi Mohammed. A Jerusalem-based reporter for the Associated Press, formerly a news editor at The Times of Israel, with a master’s in diplomacy from Tel Aviv University and a degree from Toronto in Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, Jewish studies and English.

Al-Monitor contributor page

Every clipping bylined Ilan Ben Zion →

Tia Goldenberg

Filed for the Associated Press on Israel and the Palestinian territories. Eight of her clippings here are shared with Fares Akram, who was in Gaza — the most of any pairing in this archive.

Every clipping bylined Tia Goldenberg →

Majdi Mohammed

An Associated Press photographer covering the West Bank; his name is on clippings here from 2022 and 2023, each in a different paper. In 2016, covering clashes at al-Ram, he was hit in the back of the shoulder by a rubber bullet fired at close range, in the one area his protective vest did not cover. Israeli authorities said they were investigating. The AP photographed the bruise and ran it.

AP photographer wounded by Israeli fire while covering clash

Every clipping bylined Majdi Mohammed →

Shira Rubin

Most of her bylines here are for the Washington Post out of Tel Aviv, covering Israel, the Palestinian territories and the region; three are shared with Hazem Balousha or Miriam Berger. Before the Post she freelanced from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, France, Germany and Britain. She took a master’s at Hebrew University and a first degree at New York University, and moved to Bloomberg in Tel Aviv in 2026.

Bloomberg hires Rubin for Tel Aviv bureau

Every clipping bylined Shira Rubin →

Patrick Kingsley

Named New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem in October 2020; his bylines here are 2022 and 2023. He joined the Guardian in 2010 and in 2015 became that paper’s first migration correspondent, work for which he was Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.

Biography · NY Times appoints Kingsley as its next Jerusalem bureau chief

Every clipping bylined Patrick Kingsley →