The Associated Press’s Faustian Bargain with Hitler’s Germany

In the 1930s, the Nazi government began forcing news agencies to close their offices in Germany; by the end of 1941, the Associated Press (AP) was the only one still reporting from inside the Third Reich, and it continued to do so for the rest of the war. Philip Oltermann describes how this came to be so:

The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by [agreeing] to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.”

This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. . . .

AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently anti-Semitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure Der Untermensch (“The Sub-Human”) and the booklet The Jews in the USA, which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York’s mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, eating from a buffet with his hands.

Read more at Guardian

More about: AP, Germany, History & Ideas, Media, Nazis

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF