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In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat?
(JTA) — For years, critics and supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alike have seen Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a model for his politics.
Netanyahu long called Orban a “true friend” who consistently backed Israel against criticism in Europe, and his allies said Orban’s policies kept Hungarian Jews safe amid increasing danger. His critics say he followed Orban down a dangerous path of democratic backsliding.
Now, in the wake of Orban’s spectacular defeat in Hungary’s election earlier this month, the comparison has taken on a different cast.
“Israel, soon,” Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of Knesset from the liberal Democrats party wrote as he published a photo on his social media page of vast crowds gathering in Budapest to celebrate Orban’s defeat.
The election in Hungary comes as Israel looks ahead to an election in the next six months, with polls showing Netanyahu facing an uphill battle to retain power. For his many critics, the results are fueling optimism for an Orban-like upset in Israel.
“Congrats Hungary. A new chapter is on the horizon for Israel too. It’s time for everyone who believes in a Jewish and democratic Israel to stand together and commit to that shared vision,” wrote UnXeptable, the Israeli opposition movement that launched in response to Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary’s independence. “A brighter future is possible.”
On the right, too, the comparison was clear. In the hours after Orban’s defeat, one of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement’s most recognizable slogans, “Israel will not become Hungary,” was repurposed, ironically, by voices on the right as reassurance that Israel would not follow Hungary’s political trajectory.
Olga Deutsch, vice president of pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor and a researcher at the right-leaning Misgav Institute, said the discussion in Israel has been overwhelmingly inward-looking.
Israelis “view news from abroad through very local lenses,” she said. “There is much less debate on whether Orban had an amazing human rights track record inside of Hungary, or even about the Russia versus Ukraine discourse in the context of the EU. Rather, they debate his loss in the context of what that will mean for Israel.”
One strain of implications revolves around whether Magyar will be as supportive of Israel and its leader as Orban was. Early indications suggest that the answer is no. After Netanyahu suggested that Magyar had invited him back to Hungary this fall, Magyar announced that he would abide by the compact creating the International Criminal Court, meaning that Netanyahu cannot visit without facing arrest.
Tom Gross, a journalist with expertise on Middle East issues, said in an interview that he believed Israel was functioning as an “easy sacrificial lamb” for Magyar as the new Hungarian government seeks to unlock frozen EU funds.
“Even though Magyar may not personally have animosity towards the State of Israel, Israel — and in particular Bibi — will be the easiest sacrificial lamb to offer up to win over Brussels on other issues,” Gross said.
Yonatan Levi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a fellow at Molad-The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a Jerusalem-based policy group focused on democratic institutions, said the “intense public attention” to the Hungarian vote among Israelis was unusual for reasons going well beyond the Hungary-Israel relationship.
“I don’t remember any elections in a foreign country in recent years, except for the United States, that Israelis followed as closely as the Hungarian elections,” he said.
He attributed that focus to the widespread perception that Hungary has seemed like a blueprint for Netanyahu and his partners.
“Many of the laws and reforms that allowed Viktor Orban to take control of the courts, eliminate the free media, and completely politicize the public service have also been promoted in Israel in recent years,” Levi said. “So until now, Israelis have looked at Hungary to understand what might happen in Israel if it continues on its current path of democratic retreat.”
Suddenly, they have been given a glimpse of a different future, he said.
“Now, thanks to the dramatic developments of recent weeks, Israelis are examining Hungary closely precisely to understand how populist leaders such as Netanyahu and Orban, who are gradually eroding democracy in their own countries, can be defeated,” Levi said. “From a threatening model from which to learn what to be wary of, Hungary has become a source of hope.”
Exactly how Israel might replicate Hungary’s results is less clear. The two countries have different electoral systems, such that Orban and the man who defeated him, Peter Magyar, together garnered about 85% of the vote, with Magyar’s Tisza party drawing an absolute majority.
In Israel, there are 18 political parties, with most polls showing 11 currently polling at the level that they would achieve seats in parliament if the election were held today. No party comes close to a majority and while polling currently shows the opposition bloc likely to be able to form a majority coalition, it would do so only narrowly. The pool includes not just right, center and left but religious Jewish parties and an Arab party — a much wider span than in Hungary.
Various opposition leaders have taken the opportunity to suggest that they are Israel’s version of Magyar, a conservative who came up in Orban’s Fidesz party and broke with him only in recent years.
“I see that all the trumpeters and conspiracy enthusiasts are now explaining that Orbán lost in Hungary because of the ‘global left.’ They missed the fact that the election winner, Péter Magyar, is far from left-wing,” tweeted Yair Lapid, the head of the Yesh Atid party who was briefly prime minister after negotiating a deal to seize power from Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2021.
Lapid went on: “The man grew up in Orbán’s party and defines himself as a ‘conservative liberal’—which is the Hungarian version of center on democratic issues and economic right-wing (yes, like Yesh Atid).”
Yair Golan, who leads the liberal Democrats, which is heading toward its first election, said he, too, saw hope in Hungary.
“Orbán tried everything: he took over the media, weakened the judicial system, and tried to create a reality in which he couldn’t be replaced. But in the end, the Hungarian people had their say at the ballot box. The citizens proved that no poison machine and no cheap populism can defeat the simple human desire to live in a free society, clean of corruption and functioning,” he tweeted. “For us, this is a living reminder of what’s about to happen right here.”
For some Israeli observers, the lesson from Hungary is that Netanyahu’s opponents should look to his own camp for a candidate to unseat him. Gross said that when it comes to Orbán, Magyar “shares his political outlook and comes from inside the Fidesz party establishment.”
That, he said, points to a similar dynamic in Israel. Israelis may be tired of Netanyahu because of the longevity of his time in office, Gross said, but he has already “won the battle of ideas in the sense that the only likely successor to Netanyahu would be somebody who shares those ideas.”
For the opposition, he said, “their best bet of unseating Netanyahu is finding someone else such as Naftali Bennett and rallying around him,” rather than trying to challenge those ideas directly.
Perhaps the closest cognate to Magyar in Israel, Bennett was the other half of the power-sharing arrangement that briefly knocked Netanyahu out of power, but unlike Lapid, he started his career in politics in Netanyahu’s party — and while he left it sooner than Magyar left Fidesz, he remained in Netanyahu’s coalition until 2021.
Bennett is a center-right politician who aligns with Netanyahu’s outlook on some major policy issues but distances himself from Netanyahu’s politics, which he says are filled with “poison” and cronyism. He has been hiring technocrats who say they can build a government without the corruption that Netanyahu has been accused of fostering. And like Magyar, he has been stumping across his tiny country, working determinedly to build support for an election in which he is rising in the polls.
Bennett did not publicly comment on Orbán’s loss — but he sent a powerful signal the same day when he announced the recruitment of two prominent women who previously served as government ministry director-generals, Keren Terner and Liran Avisar Ben Horin, to his party.
The comparison has limits. Bennett has already served a term as prime minister, giving him a track record and public perception far more fixed than Magyar’s. Unlike with Magyar, Bennett’s break with his political mentor required allying himself with ideological enemies, making it far less likely that he can peel off votes from Netanyahu.
“Right now it seems like Bennett is able to take a lot of votes from the center left but not necessarily a lot from the right wing,” Ofir Gutzelson, a founder of UnXeptable, said during the group’s webinar last week unpacking the election results.
The Israeli journalist Yair Navot said on the webinar that Bennett could take a page from Magyar and negotiate with other parties to form an informal coalition ahead of the election, which is not yet scheduled but must take place before the end of October.
That way, Israelis would be able to vote for their own preferred parties, rather than have to compromise on their beliefs, even as it would be clear going into the election that Bennett would be the prime minister if the coalition prevailed. But he said he understood that such an arrangement would be challenging in Israel, with such a wide range of ideologies at play.
Navot offered the example of Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief whose son was killed in Gaza, as another figure who could potentially play the same role — without the added baggage of a previous term.
But Navot said he thought Israelis should be focused on tactics as much as who is running. “If there is one important lesson to learn from Hungary for Israelis, for Israel, it is first of all the importance of the turnout,” he said.
Hungary’s turnout was historically high, near 80%. Turnout in Israel’s 2022 election, the most recent, was about 70%. Since then, emigration has spiked, particularly among young families and more liberal Israelis who have felt alienated by years of war and the country’s internal political fights. Unlike Hungary, Israel does not allow absentee voting, so those voters will need to fly back to Israel — buying historically expensive tickets in the process — if they want to participate in the coming election.
But some who want to see Israel pull a Hungary say there’s no need for left-wing voters to get involved.
In the Facebook group Right-Wing People Against the Conduct of this Government, the psychologist Chen Herman drew approval with a video in which she proclaimed that the Hungarian election results were “a celebration, not in a mystical sense but in the most practical sense.”
She said Hungarians had not gotten carried away in their vision for what the election could accomplish — and in doing so had been able to deflect the same criticism that anti-Netanyahu Israelis tend to face from his party acolytes.
“The voters in Hungary chose between right and right. They understood that to beat the system, they needed to step outside themselves and vote strategically. What were people trying to say about them? That they’re traitors to security? That they’re ungrateful? That their leader is Trump’s best buddy? … Sound familiar?” Herman said.
“But they decided to choose a government that isn’t corrupt, and that’s why it worked. They didn’t get scattered. They didn’t ask for too much. Simple,” she went on. “So if there’s anything to learn from the Hungarians, it’s to get grounded, to understand reality. If there’s a majority here holding right-wing views, and it might affect the elections, you just need to choose: corrupt right-wing or non-corrupt right wing.”
With at most six months to go before Israel’s election, it’s not clear how shaken Netanyahu himself is. He waited hours before congratulating Magyar, but some of his ministers embraced Magyar sooner.
“Netanyahu’s worst nightmare is not losing a friend in Budapest,” Jonathan Meta wrote on Substack. “It is watching Hungarian voters do something he has devoted considerable energy to making sure Israeli voters never quite manage to do themselves.”
Netanyahu and Orbán were more than just leading avatars of the global right, along with Trump. They also share staffers and even a pollster, the conservative American John McLaughlin.
The night before the election, the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who is seen as close and friendly to Netanyahu, invoked past Israeli elections in which media polling — long criticized for being out of sync with voter behavior — failed spectacularly in capturing the final result.
He noted that McLaughlin had defied the consensus of mainstream Hungarian media by projecting a victory for Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Segal said during a broadcast in which he indicated both that he believed Orbán could prevail but that if the Hungarian leader did not, it could bode poorly for Netanyahu this fall.
As it became clear that McLaughlin had indeed misjudged, the clip circulated widely in Israel, with comments piling up. A typical one: “If it can happen there, it can happen here.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat? appeared first on The Forward.
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House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries calls for ‘dramatic change’ in Israel policy
(JTA) — U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat poised to become the chamber’s speaker in January, called for a significant shift in the U.S.-Israel relationship but stopped short of opposing defense partnerships.
“The status quo is unacceptable, and we need dramatic change,” Jeffries told reporters at a Thursday press conference.
Jeffries expressed a need for such change with respect to the West Bank, to Gaza and to a memorandum of understanding with Israel over military aid set to expire in 2028. That agreement, signed by the Obama administration in 2016, pledged $38 billion in military aid for Israel from fiscal years 2019 through 2028.
President Donald Trump has said he will wind the aid down before it is set to lapse, citing Israel’s unpopularity, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also backs ending military aid and replacing it by strengthening U.S.-Israel military cooperation.
But when asked about recent demands from Sen. Chris Van Hollen to remove provisions on defense collaborations with Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act – the model of what Netanyahu hopes to sustain – Jeffries responded that he hadn’t spoken with the senator. Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, plans to challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer leadership of the Senate Democratic caucus when Democrats take over the chamber in January.
Instead, Jeffries said that “things have to dramatically change over in the Middle East,” without elaborating on the details of such changes. He stressed the importance of ensuring “a safe and secure Israel living side by side as a Jewish and democratic state with an independent Palestinian state that provides dignity and self-determination for the Palestinian people.” Netanyahu and much of the Israeli public oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state.
While Jeffries noted that he wasn’t saying anything he hasn’t “previously said publicly,” his decision to reiterate this need for change following the election as Democrats are set to seize control of Congress demonstrates how the party is adopting a more critical posture on Israel.
This past summer, Jeffries wrote to colleagues urging them to reject an amendment proposed by Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, that would have cut military aid to Israel. While a slight majority of Democrats voted in favor of the measure, it was defeated after getting no Republican support aside from its sponsor.
Jeffries had argued at the time that “there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government,” warning that Massie’s amendment would have restricted Israel’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror groups.
Nonetheless, Jeffries also noted in the letter that the Obama-era memorandum of understanding “expires imminently,” and that “a meaningful change in direction is needed.” Writing that Israel has a robust economy and is capable of paying for its own weapons, he said that future security arrangements “should be structured consistently with defense agreements that exist with our other Western allies.”
Since writing that letter in July in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Jeffries focused primarily on domestic issues and didn’t often address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Thursday, however, the topic was back on the table.
“We’ll work as a caucus to make sure that we can bring about the just and lasting peace that Israelis and Palestinians deserve,” Jeffries said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Ahmed Moor, John Fetterman’s first challenger, envisions ‘Palestine-Israel, from the river to the sea’
(JTA) — When Ahmed Moor started his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he remembers navigating an atmosphere of Islamophobia around the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11.
He recounted how as he was exiting a derelict math building known for what Moor described as its “dungeon-like” interior, he overheard a kippa-clad student commenting on the grossness of the neighborhood, noting that “it’s not like Ramallah or anything.”
“It was a tough environment,” Moor said, recalling that during a campus protest in 2003 against the Iraq war, he was met with “Go home, terrorist” and other such slogans. “You kind of build a muscle around that early on.”
More than two decades later, the 42-year-old Palestinian American writer is now Pennsylvania’s first candidate to announce a 2028 bid for Democrat John Fetterman’s U.S. Senate seat – running on a platform of dignity, equal rights and affordability.
Though still two years away, this high-stakes race could change how much support Israel gets from the Democratic Party. Fetterman, who hasn’t declared if he will run again, has irked many fellow Democrats by joining Republicans on certain issues, particularly in defending Israel, but has also maintained a powerful voice in a caucus that has held just 47 seats for the past two years. But that influence may soon dissipate, with the Democratic caucus poised to have at least 55 out of 100 seats when Congress convenes in January.
Regardless of whether Fetterman chooses to run, for Moor – a Democratic Socialists of America member from Philadelphia – to secure the seat would require a dramatic shift in voter trends across purplish Pennsylvania.
Moor enters the playing field with radically different stances on Israel and foreign policy from those that Fetterman has espoused. Moor’s priorities include stopping the funding of wars and trimming the military’s budget in general, as well as many domestic issues that Fetterman has historically supported, such as universal healthcare and childcare and affordable housing.
“The DSA presents a really good opportunity for the Democratic Party to re-energize, reinvent itself,” Moor said, describing the DSA as “a blood transfusion.”
An avowed anti-Zionist, Moor wants economic sanctions against Israel and to hold the country’s leaders accountable for what he alleges are war crimes. Ultimately, he said he hopes to see the development of one “Palestine-Israel” state that has equal rights for all — a dream that he said is rooted in American principles of emancipation.
Born in Gaza, Moor moved to Philadelphia as a child and went on to earn degrees from both Penn and Harvard, and started a career in finance. He then switched to journalism, reporting in Beirut and Egypt for The Guardian and other outlets, and co-editing the book “After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.” He also spent many years in Jordan, where he launched a peer-to-peer lending organization, before returning to Philadelphia in 2021.
Looking back at his years as a college student, Moor recalled experiencing some “ambivalence about being an American, the promise of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, the equality before the law,” particularly while he felt like people viewed him as an outsider.
But he said that things began to look up when he joined the Free Palestine Action Network, a fledgling campus group that existed before Students for Justice in Palestine.
Turning to the situation in the Middle East today, Moor said he still has family members in Gaza, as well as some in the West Bank. Many of his relatives in Gaza, he added, were killed during the war.
He noted that his aunt “was diagnosed with cancer and died a very painful death shortly after that because the hospital itself was destroyed.”
In the future, Moor said he would envision “all of Palestine-Israel, from the river to the sea” as one state with equal rights for “Jews, Palestinians, Druze” and everyone else, including “all of the East Asians who work there, who built lives there.” Lebanese areas currently under Israeli military occupation would go back to Lebanon, while the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, would go back to Syria, he added.
The leaders of this hypothetical state, according to Moor, would need “to represent everyone who lives under its authority,” with the Knesset legislating laws, the military serving all the people and Palestinians earning a right of return.
Moor compared the current phase of this conflict to mile 15 of a marathon: “Every footfall from here to the finish, 11 more miles, is painful.” Crossing the finish line, he argued, will require “the emancipation of the Palestinians, the right-sizing of our understanding of equal rights, where Jews don’t have superior rights in that country.”
Whether Moor’s Middle East positions will resonate with Pennsylvania voters when they choose their next senator in 2028 remains uncertain.
“If we look at the surveys leading up to the election, that issue didn’t come up a great deal,” Berwood Yost, a public policy expert at Franklin & Marshall College, told JTA. “It was the concerns about personal finances and economics and affordability that were largely driving voters.”
Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told JTA that although the conflict is “highly evocative and emotive,” his polls have shown that “relatively few voters rank it as an important issue,” except in deep blue Philadelphia.
Yet even if the conflict doesn’t have a direct influence on most voters, Hopkins said that its divisiveness helps candidates distinguish themselves from rivals. For example, he continued, a stance on this subject can often serve as a shortcut to other views.
“The issue partly functions as a within-party issue that helps certain Democrats differentiate themselves from other Democrats,” he added.
For Moor, the idea of maintaining the status quo, which he described as preserving alliances just “to shore Israeli apartheid” would be inconsistent with American ideals.
He rejected the notion of a possible path forward with Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of Israel’s opposition bloc, who recently received a mandate to form a government to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“Jewish Israelis are confronted with a difficult frame now,” Moor said. “They don’t have any credible leaders who aren’t also implicated in genocide or massive war crimes.”
Asked if he considered Hamas militants to be war criminals, he responded that “everybody who’s committed a war crime is a war criminal.” But he argued that naming Hamas as such would be irrelevant, as the Israeli military had already killed most Hamas combatants, including former leader Yahya Sinwar.
Fetterman was still posting on X this week about “disarming Hamas,” noting that “this vote and voice will always follow our special ally.” Fetterman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Moor characterized the senator as “in the rearview mirror for Democrats,” adding that “Fetterman’s story is finished.”
Hopkins, from Penn, disagreed with that conclusion, pointing out that “no one knows whether Fetterman will seek reelection,” and that if he does so, it’s also unclear “whether he will do that as a Democrat.” Hopkins acknowledged, however, that the senator’s vote would be less powerful when it comes to legislating because of the decisive Democratic majority.
As for other possible candidates, Hopkins is looking at potential contenders such as U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, who represents southwestern Pennsylvania residents in Beaver and Allegheny counties, including some Pittsburgh suburbs. He also named Conor Lamb, an attorney who served in Congress from 2018 to 2023.
Yost, from Franklin & Marshall, cited these names as well, while noting that “Fetterman has alienated a number of people in his party.”
“There’s been increasing dissatisfaction among his base, including people who voted for him,” added Yost, who directs the college’s Center for Opinion Research and its Floyd Institute for Public Policy.
But Yost also stressed that “running in a state like Pennsylvania for an office like the U.S. Senate is a significant undertaking” that requires large amounts of travel, networking and fundraising.
“Starting now is not a bad idea,” he said. “Two years will be here before you know it.”
Although voters might not be “dialed in” to the 2028 elections for a while, Penn’s Hopkins added that “now is the period of time when candidates are beginning to jockey.”
“One strategy by declaring early might be to try to tell other contenders who would be in your lane, ‘Hey, I’m in this lane,’” Hopkins said.
As for the chances of a Democratic socialist in a swing state like Pennsylvania, Hopkins didn’t rule Moor out but said that “any such individual would have an uphill climb.”
Another Democratic socialist who Moor said he finds inspiring, Chris Rabb, recently won a U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania, but he did so in a heavily Democratic district of Philadelphia, Hopkins noted.
“Pennsylvania has not often nominated candidates who are on the extremes of their party,” he said.
But Yost also acknowledged that “these days, people want to see non-politicians running,” so Moor’s novice status would not necessarily create a barrier to his success.
Despite his relative inexperience, Moor said he is reaching for the Senate seat due to his passion for foreign policy. He said he has concrete ideas for optimizing the military, by deflating a “bloated weapons program,” focusing more on drones and then reinvesting in both jobs programs and climate resilience initiatives.
Recognizing the mammoth expense that running in a state like Pennsylvania involves, Moor said that his fundraising efforts have started out strong, with a lot of “small-dollar” contributions, including from many Jewish donors.
Asked if he had a message for Jewish voters, Moor said that he would convey that “we’re Americans first” and that he believes “in the dignity agenda for all Americans.”
“Poverty is indifferent about whether you’re Jewish or Palestinian, Black, white, whatever,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel
The one time I got to talk to Muhammad Ali was a summer evening when I was working at one of my favorite college internships — in the McClurg Court newsroom of WBBM Newsradio 78, the Chicago affiliate of CBS Radio.
The scene came to mind earlier this week when I released a new audio documentary called Broken Hologram about Ali and his brief stint as a Broadway star. But back then, I was one of a quartet of interns who included a cool girl from Hyde Park named Gwen Billings with whom I occasionally took lunch at a nearby hot dog stand and discussed important news figures like, say, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. There was also Linda, a hard-nosed news reporter in the mold of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Sometimes she came around to my cubicle and took sips of my Dr. Pepper. Not in a flirtatious way, more in a proto-Daniel Day-Lewis “I drink your milkshake” kind of way. There was a fratty guy named Scott who wore a class ring from (redacted). He went on to a lucrative career, just not in journalism. There was one other dude; he was from Crown Point, Indiana, but that’s just about all I remember.
My job consisted of answering phones, ripping wire copy from the AP and UPI machines, getting sources on the phone and calling every major fire and police station every night to see if there was a story to be reported (“Hi, Sergeant Kupka, it’s Adam from WBBM: Do you have anything working in your area?”).
Even though every sergeant told me the same thing every night, I kept calling because that’s what journalists do: You keep making the calls. In fact, I did pretty much whatever was asked of me, and turned feisty only when one of the few asshole reporters tried to get me to run downstairs to the loading area to fetch him a “Green Streak” edition of the Tribune so he could check on his stocks or intimated that my job description should include making him coffee.
“Sure could do with a cup o’ coffee right now, Adam.”
“Cool, why don’t you make yourself one?”
Note: The individual referred to is decidedly not John Cody, a truly great man who remains a friend to this day. (Fun fact: During Vietnam, John worked for Stars & Stripes alongside Seth Lipsky, founder of the English language edition of the Forward)
Nor am I referring to sports reporter Rich King, a prince of a man who always offered to get people sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry (“Anyone need anything from ‘The Hen?’”).
Sometimes, when the news day got super-slow — for example, when Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz was in the studio doing a live call-in show — I passed the time by trying to guess the usually ridiculously easy passwords for the WBBM staff’s new computers and snooping in the reporters’ early version of email in a futile effort to find anything interesting. Apologies to the late Dale McCarren (DMC123).
I was working the evening shift when the top news story was about Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Catholic priest from Joliet, Illinois, who had been taken hostage in Beirut while he was working for a relief agency. Muhammad Ali was part of a delegation that had flown to the Middle East to try to arrange his release.
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My supervisor was a terrific guy named Duane Gray, an African-American Conservative who was big on conspiracy theories (“You should read this book. It’s called The Terror Network.”). He was a great manager and colleague who made sure that we kept to the schedule and that traffic, weather, sports and news headlines always came right when they were supposed to. On this particular night, Duane gave me a mission: “Get ‘The Champ’ on the phone.”
“Uh, how do I do that, Duane?”
“Call every hotel,” he said.
He scrawled a list of hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on a legal pad and I started calling Information to get their numbers. Advantage of working for a CBS affiliate: You got to make all the long-distance calls you wanted.
How many calls did I make? What were the names of all the hotels? I have no idea. But I do remember that one of them was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem because this time, when I asked to be transferred to Ali’s room, no one said, “Sorry, no one here by that name.”
Ali picked up. His voice had that raspy quality it got after he retired from boxing. “Hullo?”
“Hi, I’m calling from Newsradio 78. I was hoping one of our anchors could speak with you.”
“You’re calling from Chicago?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Man,” Ali told me, sounding weary but amiable. “It sounds like you’re calling from right next door.”
Duane could be a wise-ass and a cynic, but now he was star-struck. He sprang to his feet. “Is that the Champ?”
I nodded.
Duane grabbed the phone. “How’re you doin, Champ? You’re gonna be on with Dale McCarren. I’m gonna patch you through, Champ.” He gave me a hearty high-five.
Some time later — perhaps after a week, perhaps after two — when Madonna was in town for some concert, movie junket or photo shoot and Duane told me he wanted to get her on the air, I knew exactly what to do.
After I got her on the phone at her hotel and transferred the call to Duane, he shouted: “This kid,” he said, complimenting both me and his own managerial talent, “has the best news instincts of anyone in this newsroom!”
“Hello, Madonna?” Duane said into the phone. “You’re gonna be on with Dale; let me patch you through.”
The post What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel appeared first on The Forward.
