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By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO—An Israeli professor of international relations who also has had a controversial career as a broadcast journalist is teaching two courses at San Diego State University this year.
Chanan Naveh (pictured at right) , formerly an editor with the Israel Broadcast Authority, is at SDSU for a one-year appointment as the Department of Jewish Studies’ visiting scholar. He will return to Sapir Academic College in Sderot next academic year to serve as chairman of that school’s Communications Department.
If you look up Naveh’s name on the Google search engine, you will find that he caused quite a stir in 2007 when, as a retired broadcaster, he admitted during a panel discussion in Haifa that he and other editors of the government-owned Israel Broadcast Authority had slanted their newscasts a decade earlier to favor Israel’s withdrawal from its security zone in Southern Lebanon. Israel completed its withdrawal in 2000.
In a rented home near the SDSU campus where he and his wife Tsipi have nearly completed unpacking their boxes for the year’s stay, I asked Naveh whether, on reflection, he felt he had violated journalistic ethics.
“I feel guilty as a journalist; I don’t feel guilty as an Israeli citizen,” he responded.
Naveh said the actions of himself and his fellow editors were not calculated in advance but rather resulted from their emotional responses to a February 1997 midair disaster in which two Israeli helicopters carrying troops to the security zone in Lebanon crashed into each other, killing 73 soldiers and airmen.
There was great mourning in Israel over the deaths, and with such losses the question became persistent about whether Israel would be better off with or without such a “security” zone. The intense debate would have occurred regardless of the coverage of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Naveh said.
However, he added, he and fellow IBA editors were influenced by fears that the lives of other Israeli youngsters could be similarly wasted—perhaps even the Army-aged children of some of the editors.
Most Israeli teens go right into the IDF after graduation from high school. While none of Naveh’s three children were of that age at the time, he said the children of some of his colleagues were in the service—and that they were children whom he had watched grow up.
In assembling reports from the field over the growing policy debate, the IDF editors made certain that both sides were represented in each broadcast, Naveh said. However, he added, if someone were to measure the amount of time given one point of view versus the other, it probably would have come out 55 percent of the air time given to people calling for withdrawal from Lebanon, and 45 percent for those who wanted to stay the course.
Naveh said that his 2007 admission in Haifa prompted a wave of criticism, particularly from Israelis of the political right, and that the criticism exaggerated the impact that he and his fellow broadcasters had on public policy. He said it was not the broadcasters, but such nationally known politicians as Ehud Barak (who would go on to be elected prime minister in 1999) and Yossi Beilin, who persuaded an overwhelming majority of Israelis that it was time to end the occupation of Lebanon.
As a teacher, and chairman next year of Sapir Academic College’s Communications Department, would Naveh urge students to follow a similar course when they go into journalism?
“No,” he responded. “I believe professionally that you have to be balanced.”
But that’s theory, and in practice, journalists like anyone else can be swayed by their political opinions, he said.
For example, at SDSU he will be teaching a course on the history of the Mideast conflict. Although he will make a point of presenting objective material, “I cannot be neutral as an Israeli. But as a journalist I know that the other side of the story, maybe more than two, have to be presented. That is what I will do in the class.”
In teaching about the history of the Middle East conflict, Naveh began this semester with a lecture on the development of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century and hopes in 14 lectures to be able to go all the way through to U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo earlier this year to the Muslim world.
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 In Israel, Naveh had served not only as an IBA editor but simultaneously worked as a professor of international studies, teaching for most of his career at Tel Aviv University. The second course he is teaching at San Diego State—“Theory of Conflicts” – draws on that experience and explo9res the commonalities among conflicts between personalities, political parties, ethnic groups and nations.
I shared with Naveh that San Diego Jewish World takes an open-forum approach to columns from Israel on the situation there, with the hope that the spectrum of political opinion will be reflected. However, I said, the publication routinely receives more correspondence from commentators on the political right than on the political left.
Naveh said that this is not surprising because many English-speaking Israelis made aliyah from the United States or from the United Kingdom for conservative or nationalistic ideological reasons, whereas the Israeli left tends to be drawn more from people, such as himself, who are native Sabras.
Whereas the English-speaking Israelis have an easy time writing their opinions in English, the vagaries of written English is more difficult for many native Israelis. Uncertain of their language ability, they confine their column-writing to Hebrew forums.
Sapir Academic College, to which Naveh will return the next academic year, is located in Sderot, a city that prior to Israel’s Gaza War at the end of last year, had been the subject of almost daily Kassam missile barrages from Gaza, a very short distance away. Sderot is surrounded by the communities of Sha’ar Hanegev municipality, which is the partnership region for the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County.
Naveh said the college offers bachelor’s degrees in various subjects, including communications, and that its students are drawn particularly from the southern region of Israel. However, students from other regions also come to the school—some as commuters, others as boarders—because they are attracted to one program or another. Many future broadcasters attend Sapir Academic College. He recalled that when one particular student applied for admission, she was informed of the situation with the Kassams. She responded that would not deter her as she lives near the Lebanese border and had practice dodging the more powerful Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah prior to the Lebanon II War.
Naveh commuted to the college from his home in the French Hill section of Jerusalem, where our columnist Ira Sharkansky also lives, and which is beyond the “Green Line” marking Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As a Jerusalemite, whose parents immigrated in the 1930s to then-Palestine from Germany, Naveh said he remembered the euphoria with which Israelis greeted the reunification of the city, and particularly the regaining of access to the Western Wall, which had been denied to Israelis during the period of Jordanian rule.
But if the short Six-Day War was euphoric, Naveh said that for Israelis of his generation the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was “traumatic.” In that conflict, Arab nations surprised Israel with an attack on the Day of Atonement and made gains on the ground before Israel could rally and turn the tide. People of his generation “try not to talk about this” because that war still “is an open wound, from which many people have never recovered—especially those who lost people in the war. … On Yom Kippur, some of my friends go on purpose abroad because they don’t want to stay for Yom Kippur in Israel."
Naveh, called up by the Reserves to serve in an intelligence unit near the Suez Canal, recalled how that experience affected him 18 years later: "The minute I heard in the 1991 War (Gulf War I) the first siren, it reminded me of the Yom Kippur War. It may be post traumatic stress disorder—it is probably a social trauma for the whole society.”
A few years after that war Anwar Sadat, then president of Egypt, stunned the world by traveling to Jerusalem and beginning peace negotiations with Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin – a process that culminated with the Camp David accord brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Naveh said he remembers hoisting his 3-year-old son, Tal, to his shoulders during Sadat's visit to that the boy could see the Egyptian flag being flown in Israel – a sight that, at the time, Naveh believed never would be seen again. But peace between Israel and Egypt eventually did come.
Besides Tal, who develops programs for teaching mediation, the Navehs have two other sons: Eyal, who works in Herzliya for Microsoft, and Gil, a professional dancer who also works on the YNet website. Tal and his wife have two children, aged 3 ½ and 1 ½. However nice San Diego proves to be, being away from these grandchildren is one of the most difficult parts of this San Diego assignment, commented Naveh’s wife, Tsipi, a retired interior designer.
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