FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

The media coverage of the Palestinians seems to be based on the idea that nothing can possibly be their own fault. Every problem they have is a direct result of Zionist colonialism. That’s nonsense. But every story like this buttresses the position of those who want to solve all the problems by making the Zionists go away.

None Dare Call it News Coverage

By Barry Rubin

I realized something important when reading a relatively marginal feature story from the Associated Press.

It shows us that Palestinians don’t really exist as a society but only as a set of victims. By definition, all — or to be fair, almost all, of their problems are said to come from Israel. Yet since the continuation of the conflict and their difficult situation comes first and foremost from within Palestinian politics and society, this kind of interpretation makes it impossible to understand why there is no peace, no Palestinian state, and no end of violence.

Karin Laub, “Amid poverty, a Renaissance villa in the West Bank,” November 26, 2008, provides a great opportunity to talk about the problems within Palestinian society. The story is about a “Palestinian tycoon [who] has created a tranquil paradise on a Holy Land mountaintop, with a replica of a famous Renaissance villa, sculpted gardens and a wrought-iron pavilion that once belonged to a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.”

We are immediately told, however, that this is to be compared, not to the impoverishment of his own society but rather to guess-who: “But even one of the West Bank’s richest men cannot entirely shut out Israel’s military occupation, army bases and Israeli settlements occupy hills surrounding the 100-acre estate.”

Note that the mere existence of Israeli installations nearby is the “terrible” thing that allegedly cancels out this individual’s Garden of Eden. Not that there is any direct effect, but the message is that all Palestinians are a subject people, no matter how rich they are. He may never meet an Israeli, he may live in a situation where he can accumulate wealth and act as a lord, he may live under Palestinian Authority rule but — we are told — this is deceptive. Because nothing matters but Israel’s presence, even if it is barely in sight.

I have learned not to take even the most basic claims of AP for granted so I do not assume that there are “army bases” or settlements in the area.

Only afterward however are we informed that maybe, just maybe, there is something wrong with this conspicuous display of wealth in the Palestinian context:  “And some say such a display of wealth, the honey-colored Palladian mansion is visible for miles, is jarring at a time of continued economic hardship. At the foot of the mountain in Nablus, unemployment runs at 16 percent and the mayor says 40 percent of the 180,000 residents live in poverty.”

Jarring? How about asking the most basic questions, the kind that would be asked in covering any other society on earth?

The person in question is Munib Masri. The Masris are a large clan closely associated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA). We are given the bare facts — he was close to Arafat, he formed a development company. But the points are made with the greatest possible delicacy: “Critics say some of the profits were made possible by a lucrative telecommunications monopoly the company held for several years.”

We are not told from whence this monopoly came — from the PA. The word corruption is never mentioned. Such a lack of curiosity about the sources of his wealth does not accord with journalistic practices in covering other stories.

Indeed, the story of the telecommunications monopoly is one of the best-known stories of corruption among Palestinians. How PA and Fatah factions competed over the loot, how Arafat intervened directly into the issue.

But for AP it is a story untold. The story should be as follows:

• The Palestinian upper economic and political class cares nothing for its own people.
• In its fourteen-year rule of the West Bank, the PA has focused on looting it rather than on raising living standards and providing good government.
• Billions of dollars in international aid donations have disappeared, probably paying for a large portion of Masri’s mansion.
• The PA’s failures are blamed on Israel both by the PA itself, Western governments, and the international media.
• Palestinian suffering is not primarily due to Israel but to their own leaders.
• A lot of Israel’s success has been due to Jews around the world making both investments and donations.  Palestinians have not been forthcoming in supporting their own “state,” a point well-known in Palestinian circles (an exception here, of course, is in backing Hamas’s terrorist campaign in recent years).
• Anyone who keeps their eyes open will see other huge, albeit less impressive than this one, mansions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Even other members of Masri’s own family have been criticized for their ostentation. While this estate may be the most extreme case, it is hardly an exception in that regard.
• Wealthy Palestinians do not give charity to help their poorer cousins. The PA doesn’t even have a comprehensive tax system. Thus, the international community is left to support the Palestinians, and their oversized security apparatus.
• Violence sponsored by the PA was responsible for destroying the chance for their people to work in Israel, hitherto a major aid to their economy; the destruction of infrastructure; and the hesitation of investors, who are also put off by the PA’s corruption and incompetence.
• Intransigence and the failure to reach a compromise solution stem from the Palestinian leadership, including Masri’s buddy, Arafat.

Meanwhile, despite the hints in this article about a stifling Israeli occupation, Masri has no difficulty in proposing huge projects costing more than a half billion dollars. I suspect that these projects will never materialize but will be scams for ripping off foreign aid money.  “Masri remains optimistic, even though independence appears no closer than when he first returned to the West Bank.”  Hm, I wonder why they haven’t achieved it yet. I sure won’t learn it from AP coverage.

And to switch to the broader picture, consider another Karin Laub effort, “Abbas ads make appeal to Israelis,” November 21, 2008. The subtitle is, “The Palestinian’s ads detail withdrawal terms first offered in a 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.” Well, if the ads detail the terms, Laub certainly doesn’t.

The 12-paragraph story never gets around to telling us what’s in the offer and why Israel has a problem with it. The only reference to that point says, “An Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem would bring them recognition by the Arab world.”

Of course, Israel has already withdrawn from all of Gaza, but at any rate it would have been easy for Laub to mention that the terms are for Israel to leave all of the West Bank and all of east Jerusalem, not one centimeter less. She merely had to insert the word “all.” The point is that the way it is worded makes the offer seem more attractive than it is.

But that’s not the worst part. Laub doesn’t mention that the plan also demands that all — there’s that word again — Palestinians who ever lived in any part of what is now Israel and all their descendents must be allowed to ‘return’ to Israel. That’s a few million people.

To distort points of fact about the terms is scandalous and shameful. A couple of decades ago, AP would have issued a correction. But that’s not the way things are done nowadays, is it? Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is only paraphrased as saying “its positions on key issues such as final borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees are not acceptable.” There’s no explanation as to why it is, presumably lest Israel’s rejection be understood as a rational response.

And as always there is no mention of Palestinian refusal to meet Israel’s needs. As always, we aren’t even told about such things, which Abbas’s adds don’t mention: end of incitement to terrorism, a declared end to the conflict, no foreign troops on Palestinian soil. One might think that an ad campaign by the PA would say something about Palestinian positions.

The article concludes, “Many Israelis are also skeptical about a peace deal, in part because the embattled Abbas no longer speaks for all Palestinians.”

Thank goodness that while it is impermissible to criticize the PA or Fatah, at least the media can talk about Hamas. We are then given a decent description of it as an  “Islamic extremist group” which staged a “violent 2007 takeover, two years after a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territory,” and its firing of “thousands of rockets and mortars on Israeli border towns since the pullout.” The article then notes, “Israelis fear a West Bank withdrawal could bring more attacks.”

Of course, that’s in the last paragraph. But two more reasons for Israeli skepticism should also be added: the failure of the PA to keep its past promises and its demands that Israel give everything without offering anything itself.

Can we coin a phrase here? Much of the coverage can be called “anti-news” because it is deceptive nature. Perhaps there should be little labels affixed, like those on cigarette packs: Warning! Reading this article can be hazardous to your intellectual health.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, West Bank, AP, Karin Laub

Criticizing the BBC for lack of context is as easy as the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel (which in reality would probably be not so easy and somewhat dangerous).

For example, here is a long article on the BBC website called “Mixed emotions on Hebron tour” by Heather Sharp. It describes a tour sponsored by the Hebron Jewish community of the historic city where today about 700 Jews and 150,000 Arabs live.

The tour has recently been promoted as a way to create support for the community, which has been demonized in most of the Israeli media. Note that as is common in BBC articles, Ms. Sharp includes a gratuitous remark about “international law”:

Adverts proclaiming “Judea and Samaria [the Jewish name for the West Bank] - the story of every Jew” have recently appeared on billboards, buses and the websites of Israel’s left-leaning newspapers.

Some were immediately defaced with left-wing graffiti, reflecting the strong differences among Israelis over the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law — although Israel disputes this.

And she adds that

The tour explains little of the misery caused by the Israeli restrictions, or the brutal treatment that human rights groups say Palestinians suffer at the hands of some settlers and Israeli troops.

The most important site, of course, is ma’arat hamachpela, the tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are said to be buried (Rachel’s tomb is near Bethlehem). The writer seems to be put off by the sight of Jews praying, but she toughs it out in order to remind us of Baruch Goldstein:

Entering the Tomb of the Patriarchs as hundreds of religious Jews rock back and forth in prayer, too, is a mixed experience for the secular visitors.

Access to the site is controlled by the Israeli military. The complex is divided into two parts, Muslim and Jewish, with separate entrances. Jews can enter the Muslim side for 10 days a year, and vice versa.

But for the most part, the two sides have been sealed off from each other, a legacy of the massacre by a Jewish extremist [Goldstein] of 29 Palestinians there in 1994.

The overall impression one gets is that the Jews of Hebron are simply perverse, living where they are not wanted, and that they get their jollies by brutally oppressing Palestinians.

The article does not mention any of the following:

There was a thriving Jewish community in Hebron from biblical times until 1929 when local Arabs, incited by the Arab leadership including the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, mounted a pogrom against them, killing at least 65, raping and maiming many others, making Hebron 100% Jew-free. Some returned but were forced out by more Arab violence in 1936. Since Hebron was in the territory occupied — against “international law” for whatever that is worth — by Jordan in 1948, Jews were not permitted to live there until 1967.

In Hebron in 2001 a Palestinian sniper shot and killed 10-month old Shalhevet Pas in her father’s arms. The atrocity was barely noticed by the international media, unlike the non-murder of Muhammad al-Dura.

Finally,

Nov 15, 2002 - Col. Dror Weinberg, 38, of Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, was one of 12 people killed — nine soldiers and three civilians from the Kiryat Arba emergency response team — and 15 wounded in Hebron when Palestinian terrorists opened fire and threw grenades at a group of Jewish worshipers and their guards as they were walking home from Sabbath Eve prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs…

Col. Dror Weinberg was buried in the Kfar Sava Military Cemetery. He is survived by his pregnant wife, Hadassah, and five children: a son Yoav, 14, daughter Yael, 11, and sons Eitan, eight, Yishai, five, and Uri, three. Hadassah gave birth to a baby boy in April: “This is the special gift Dror has left me,” she said. — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

A personal note — I had the honor of meeting Col. Weinberg in 1999 at a ceremony marking the completion of training for my son’s  group in the maglan [special paratroop] unit, which Weinberg commanded. He said something about my coming all the way from America to watch him stick a pin on my son’s shirt (which was not properly tucked in); it was the least I could do, I said, considering what the young men were facing.

Technorati Tags: Hebron, BBC, Hebron massacre, Shalhevet Pas, Dror Weinberg

Last week, we found the AP doing a relatively decent job of reporting Israel’s internal politics. But every time they write about relations between Israel and the Palestinians, the same old bias appears.

AP Blames Israel For Making Palestinians Want to Destroy It
By Barry Rubin

In an article of September 20, Ali Daraghmeh, “Army says troops kill Palestinian with firebomb,” there is a long discussion of the current state of the peace process.

Let’s be clear: virtually nobody in Israel who is not speaking as an official government spokesman believes that there is any chance that there will be a peace soon with the Palestinians. The great majority of them place most or all the blame on the Palestinians. In addition, most people in political life who would say publicly that there is a chance for peace have the opposite view in private conversations.

These two points, which hold true across the political spectrum except for the far left — doubts about the process and blame on the Palestinians — never appear in coverage. Never, ever. Yet these are the two most important facts about the most over-covered issue in the world. Articles lately will say that the deadline will probably not be met, but present that as sort of an accident or due to Israel’s fault — the fall of the government.

This article, like so many others, gives a lot of space to Palestinian viewpoints and none to Israeli viewpoints. In this case:

“Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, warned that time for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quickly running out.” It then quotes a Mahmoud Abbas op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal blaming, “Israel’s continued settlement expansion and land confiscation in the West Bank makes physical separation of our two peoples increasingly impossible.” Actually both settlement growth and land confiscation (pretty much exclusively for the separation fence and often reversed by Israeli courts) is pretty limited.

Another really long article is dedicated to proving that Israel is destroying any chance for peace, basically serving as a Palestinian propaganda statement. This article, Steven Gutkin, “Palestinians despairing of independence effort“, September 20, 2008, basically says that the nice Palestinians really want peace but Israel won’t give it to them. As a result, the frustrated Palestinians may have to resort to violence. Well who could blame them under these conditions, right?

Here’s the lead:

Prominent Palestinians are lighting a fire under Israel’s feet by proposing a peace in which there would be no separate Palestine and Israel, but a single state with equal rights for all.

So let’s ask some questions. The Palestinians use the phrase about lighting fires as a code word for terrorist violence, though the American reader will understand it here as sort of, urging Israel to move forward. Is a Palestinian demand for Israel to disappear and millions of Palestinians to be allowed to live there a peace proposal? And does anyone take seriously the idea of equal rights for all, a phrase taken from the U.S. Supreme Court building?

In the next paragraph though we are told that it is not just a single state with equal rights for all but a “binational” state, which is sort of like creating the perfect conditions for daily violence and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe, the article continues, this is “little more than a Palestinian pressure tactic fed by frustration over the failure of talks on a two-state solution, but it has set Israeli leaders on edge.”

My, my. Now why would it set them on edge, it seems so harmless, sort of like how things work in America? Oh, right, it is a binational state that would include radical Islamists and radical nationalists who have been murdering Israelis for decades.

Such a merger of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly result in the Jews being outnumbered by the faster-growing Arab population. For most Israelis it would result in a nightmare choice: Give the Arabs full voting rights and lose Israel’s Jewish character, or deny them equality and be branded an apartheid state.

You think?

But even in the above paragraph which pretends to explain Israel’s point of view a key point is left out: Palestinians have never abandoned their goal of replacing Israel with a Palestinian Arab Muslim state. It isn’t something new. And the idea of using a “binational” state as an interim step in that direction has been around for 35 years.

Instead, we are told that this “idea is gathering important Palestinian adherents,” as if up until now they have been in favor of an end to the conflict, permanent peaceful coexistence, and the resettlement of Palestinians in a Palestinian state. Note that their refusal to accept such things was critical in the collapse of the “peace process” in 2000 at and after Camp David and has been the continued cause of inability to achieve a diplomatic solution since.

The rest of this extremely long article repeats the false themes of Palestinians just yearning for peace but being forced, unwillingly, to demand Israel cease to exist.

On another front, the AP finds room for a very long article by George Jahn, “Diplomats: Syria passes 1st test of nuclear probe,” September 20. The article uses a dozen paragraphs to clear Syria of any guilt for having been engaged in an effort to build a nuclear facility to produce materials for gaining atomic weapons. Note that this is a leak, not an official report, and even then proves nothing. It was immediately pointed out, for example, that the Syrians had been working on the site and might well have removed or buried the evidence.

Now, however, hundreds of thousands of readers will say: Ah, so that attack on Syria was about nothing, then, and the Syrians were victims.

Just like the Palestinians.

And, it would be far more true to say, just like the people who read these stories.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: AP, Israel, Palestinians, Middle East, media bias

Here is this week’s commentary on the print media from Barry Rubin. 

How Does AP Cover Israeli Politics?
By Barry Rubin

How does AP cover Israeli politics?  Generally speaking, much better than it covers issues relating to the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian politics. One reason for this is that the reporters tend to be people living in Israel who have more knowledge and fewer political preconceptions, at least when covering these stories. Perhaps, too, there is less pressure from editors to push the approved line on the conflict.

On September 17, AP issues, “Next steps after Kadima primary election,” a factual summary of the situation (AP “factual summaries” on conflict issues are often remarkably biased). This one is reasonable:

Israel’s ruling Kadima Party held a primary election Wednesday to pick a successor to the party leader, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. But the winner will not automatically succeed Olmert. A look at the process:

The winner of the primary election must get 40 percent or more of the vote to become party leader. If not, the party holds runoff between two top vote-getters the following week.

Once the party has a leader, Olmert formally submits his resignation to ceremonial President Shimon Peres. The Cabinet resigns with him.

After consulting with party leaders, Peres picks a member of parliament, likely the Kadima leader, to form new coalition government.

The prime minister-designate has 42 days to form a new coalition and bring it to parliament for approval. If no new government is formed, a general election is held within 90 days. The process of forming a government begins all over again. Olmert remains in office as caretaker prime minister until the new government is approved by parliament.”

Fair enough, no gratuitous swipes.

The more substantive article is from September 17, 2008 by Steve Weizman, “Israeli party rivals face off in power bid.”

Israel’s popular foreign minister faced off against a grizzled former military chief on Wednesday in the leadership race for the ruling Kadima party , an election that could determine the country’s next prime minister.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who hopes to become Israel’s first female prime minister in more than three decades, held a strong lead over Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff and defense minister, in opinion polls ahead of the vote….

Kadima convened the primary to choose a successor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is being forced from office by a corruption scandal. Whoever wins has a good chance of becoming the next prime minister, overseeing peace talks with the Palestinians and dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Livni, a former lawyer and one-time agent in the Mossad spy agency, is a soft-spoken diplomat who has played a central role in peace talks with the Palestinians and prefers negotiation to confrontation.

Mofaz takes a tougher line, demanding the Palestinians fulfill a series of conditions before a final deal can be hammered out. He also is more willing to order military action in times of crisis.”

It is a bit funny that it is worth noting when one of a country’s leaders actually asks that the other side in a negotiation fulfill its commitments!” But it is rare enough that this idea is heard in an AP dispatch.

Male rivals have called Livni “weak” and “that woman.” And there is talk about ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmakers being uncomfortable with the idea of a female leader….Mofaz, meanwhile, hopes to become the first Israeli of Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, descent to lead the country. Sephardic Jews have long complained of discrimination at the hands of Ashkenazi, or European Jews.

OK, fair enough remarks on Israeli society though I would bet that Israel’s two “firsts” don’t stir many voters to oppose them solely on that basis.

It is refreshing to see a paragraph stating:

The country’s next leader will inherit a peace process begun by Olmert last year aimed at reaching a final agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by January 2009. Despite months of talks, both sides have acknowledged they are unlikely to reach that target.

That’s two good points: Israel pressed for the peace process and it isn’t going to work.

Immediately after came Dion Nissenbaum, September 18, “Livni is apparent winner in tight Israeli race,” for the McClatchy newspaper chain which includes the Philadelphia Inquirer. It calls Livni “a popular, diplomacy-first advocate” and Mofaz, “a more uncompromising former defense minister.” Actually, the funny thing is that it is precisely Mofaz who wants to compromise–that is, both sides to make concessions, another insight into how the media views Israel.

The article continues, “By choosing Livni over Mofaz, Kadima voters implicitly endorsed the foreign minister’s diplomacy-before-warfare approach to tackling Israel’s biggest concerns: making peace with the Palestinians and neutering Iran’s nuclear program.”

This reminds me of the Atlantic magazine article whose cover headline tells voters–hint, hint, nudge, nudge–that Republican nominee Senator John McCain wants war. Livni won mainly because she is seen as an honest new face while Mofaz is amazingly uncharismatic and has committed huge political mistakes in the past, notably his indecisiveness about joining Kadima in the first place, his silly blustering about how his victory was inevitable. (That, too, is a sign about media coverage: Israeli politics can only be considered to deal with “peace process” and international issues, domestic considerations apparently don’t exist.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: AP, Israel

Israel’s enemies have lots of allies in the information war.

Things We’re Not Told
By Barry Rubin

In the olden days, when night watchmen patrolled the streets of towns, they had a standard chant: “Ten o’clock and all is well!” Sleep soundly; nothing’s wrong.

Each week, when I start to write this column I hope to be able to do the equivalent. I could just write one sentence: “This week, the stories are fairly and accurately reported so there’s nothing to write about.”

Unfortunately, for your reading time, my workload, and the state of the world, each week there is indeed something to write about. Alas, such is true this week.

Increasingly, print media coverage comes from Associated Press and Reuters as newspapers close down costly foreign bureaus. This should be good news since these two wire services are supposed to be fair, objective, and balanced — even bland — in their presentation of events. At times in the past they have been biased against Israel, though not all the time by any means and also aware that it was not right to slant their coverage. Like Adam and Eve, driven from the Garden of Eden, they knew their nakedness and were ashamed.

Nowadays, however, both shame and restraint are gone. Many articles — again not all — are extraordinarily biased. For this to happen requires several things:

• The reporters know they will not be punished for doing so, either by verbal criticism, a slowing of their career rise, or firing.
• Editors know the same.
• High-ranking executives do not fear the complaints of their media subscribers.
• And all have redefined the purpose of journalism from fairness and accuracy to political advocacy.

Of course, they will say that this is all nonsense and they do a very good job, thank you very much. The problem, however, is that it is so ridiculously easy to show this isn’t true that it is hard to believe that the evidence will not persuade at least those outside these organizations that the case is proven.

One of the most common patterns, presented repeatedly in my columns on AP, is the presentation of the Palestinian but not the Israeli side.

A second is to give Israelis who oppose their country’s policy and support Palestinian positions more space than the Israeli government and mainstream view.

A third is to blame Israel for problems but not the Palestinians, or at least not the Palestinian Authority or Fatah. It is permissible to criticize Hamas.

Among the most frequent abuses is to say what the Palestinians want but not what Israel needs; to stress alleged Israeli failures to meet commitments but not even to mention — even as issues raised — Palestinian failures.

Consider Mark Lavie, “Palestinians reject Israel’s offer on interim peace plan,” September 1, 2008. It is true that the lead attributes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection of Israel’s idea for an interim peace agreement as “insisting on an all-or-nothing approach that virtually ruled out an accord by a January target date.” Yet this is more than made up for by the space given for Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat to explain his side’s position:

We want an agreement to end the [Israeli] occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

What does Israel want? We don’t know. We could be told: a permanent end to the conflict, incitement, and terrorism along with security guarantees for a starter. One might add border modifications or other things. But I literally cannot remember ever seeing such a passage.

We are told:

Officials in Olmert’s office said Israel has proposed giving the Palestinians all of Gaza, 93 percent of the West Bank along with Israeli land equivalent to 5.5 percent of the West Bank, as well as a land corridor through Israel to link the two territories. The Palestinians have said that offer is unacceptable.

But we are not told what the Palestinians offered Israel.

There is, however, room for two paragraphs of Palestinian complaints:

….The Palestinians complain bitterly about continued Israeli construction in West Bank settlements, despite an Israeli pledge to halt the building as part of a 2003 peace plan that still serves as the framework for negotiations. Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo called settlement construction “the most critical issue that threatens the whole peace process now.

The Palestinians accuse Israel of swallowing up West Bank land that they claim for their state. Israel counters that it is not expanding settlements; rather, it is building inside settlement blocs it plans to keep in a final peace accord.

Does Israel have complaints? Do Israelis accuse the Palestinians of doing anything?

The rest is silence.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: media, Barry Rubin, AP, anti-Israel bias

A recent survey of the British media on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary shows, unsurprisingly, that the British media don’t like Israel very much. This is not a shock to anyone that has ever looked at the BBC website or read the Guardian but there is one particular aspect that I want to discuss:

Eighty-three per cent of articles in all newspapers which took a position on Israel’s stance on peace contained the message that Israel did not seek peace…

Overall, only 6% of articles carried the message that Israel seeks peace. This message was only contained in three articles in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph…

Twenty-six per cent of coverage [on the BBC website] contained the message that Israel is not seeking peace.

A neutral observer on Mars, for example, might have trouble understanding this. After all,

1. Israel was attacked by the Arab nations in 1948,  preempted an imminent attack in 1967, and was attacked again in 1973. The 1948 and 1967 wars were declared by Arab leaders to be genocidal in intent. Insofar as Israel initiated hostilities, it was in response to clear acts of war such as the closing of the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in 1956, and the Katyusha attacks on northern Israel by the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.
2. In 1978 Israel agreed to return the entire Sinai peninsula to Egypt in the interest of peace, giving up a huge strategic advantage and a large amount of natural resources, including oil.  In return, she received a ‘cold peace’ — really just an extended truce.
3. In 1993, Israel signed the Oslo agreement with terrorist Yasser Arafat in the interest of peace. In return, she received several years of escalating terrorism against her population, culminating in Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton-Barak proposals and the murderous second intifada. Israel offered to transfer 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinian authority, give up control of Judaism’s holiest sites in east Jerusalem, etc., all for peace.
4. Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000 in the interest of peace and received in return the Hezbollah buildup which led to the 2006 war.
5. In the interest of peace, Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005, at great cost to uprooted residents — who still have not received just compensation as promised — and to the nation. In return, she received a Hamas terrorist state, thousands of rockets fired on her population, cross-border attacks, and will soon have to fight another war.
6. Israel is presently negotiating with the Palestinian Authority for what may be a ‘do-over’ of the Clinton-Barak proposal, in the face of clear evidence that neither Fatah nor Hamas is prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state of any size.
7. Most of the Arab nations, as well as the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas movements, have never stopped the continuous barrage of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda and incitement in their official media, while the Israeli government always stresses its desire to live in peace with its neighbors.

Considering all this, you would think that the Arabs are the ones who are uninterested in peace, and that Israel has been, over and over, prepared to make great sacrifices for peace — even after they’ve been kicked in the teeth in response.

Yes, you would think this. But you are not smoking the same stuff as the British media.

Technorati Tags: British media, Israel, peace

We complain over and over about the dishonesty of the media. Do we really understand just how much damage they do? Caroline Glick does:

Over the past eight years of the jihad against Israel, among countless examples, three instances of open media collusion with Israel’s enemies stand out for their strategic impact on the course of events. First there is the al-Dura affair. It was followed by the mythical “Jenin massacre” in April 2002. That in turn was followed by the fabricated “massacre” at Kafr Kana in Lebanon in July 2006.

The al-Dura story solidified the Palestinian narrative of victimization by Israel just months after they rejected statehood and peace at Camp David [and became the emblematic justification for the intifada, the murder of the Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000, and the decapitation of Daniel Pearl — ed]

When the so-called Jenin massacre was reported in April 2002, the IDF was in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield. Just before the Palestinians began making allegations of an Israeli massacre, IDF forces uncovered documentary evidence proving that the Palestinian war against Israel was run by the PA and Yassir Arafat. By fabricating the massacre, the PA was saved from being delegitimized as an actor in Washington. The Israeli peace camp was also resuscitated from its death throes.

As the Winograd Commission documented in its final report on the Second Lebanon War, the media reports of the fabricated massacre of Lebanese civilians by an IAF bomber in Kafr Kana in South Lebanon caused US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to end US support for an Israeli military victory over Iran’s Lebanese proxy and to pressure Israel to accept a cease-fire leaving Hizbullah intact. [my emphasis]

Read the whole article here

Technorati Tags: media, Israel, Caroline Glick, Mohammed Dura, Kafr Kana, Jenin massacre

Let’s look at this paragraph and try to guess who wrote it:

Israelis and Palestinians involved in the talks on borders, an issue considered to be relatively “easy,” say there is a big gap between the reports on the talks’ progress and the reality around the negotiating table. It seems Olmert’s representatives expect Mahmoud Abbas to allocate to Israel larger pieces of territory than those Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton discussed with Yasser Arafat in 2000. This means that after seven and a half years of struggle, thousands of dead, tens of thousands injured and enormous economic losses, a weak Palestinian president is being asked to surrender principles that a powerful leader would not dare give up.

The author is clearly sympathetic with the Palestinian ’struggle’. If he said this to me, I would point out that while some of this struggle is comprised of guerrilla warfare against the IDF, a great deal of it took the form of murder by terrorism — hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed since 2000, in suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, rocket and mortar attacks, etc.

I would point out that the offer made by Barak and Clinton in 2000 was really quite extraordinary — despite Arafat’s lies — and represented a huge compromise by Israel, a compromise whose implementation would have almost torn the state apart, forcing the relocation of more than 100,000 Jews, the loss of Judaism’s most holy sites, etc.

If that wouldn’t have been a sacrifice for peace, I don’t know what would count as such, and I would have contrasted that willingness to sacrifice with the hard line taken by Yasser Arafat, who began the ’struggle’ our writer mentions (I would have used the word ‘war’) in response to this offer of peace.

The writer says that Arafat would not give up his ‘principles’. The use of the word ‘principle’ in connection with Arafat makes me gag, but I would have pointed out that the ‘principles’ which Arafat would not give up were primarily the right of ‘return’ and complete sovereignty over Jerusalem, and not arguments over borders.

The writer suggests that Arafat would not ‘dare’ to accept Israel’s offer. This is always the Palestinian line, that they would like to have peace but the ‘extremists’ won’t let them. But Arafat proved that he was the extremist when he paid and commanded terrorists while the ‘peace’ talks were going on and when he funded the huge Karine A arms shipment.

The writer seems to be saying that by virtue of their ’struggle’, the Palestinians today deserve a better deal than they were offered in 2000! They’ve struggled so hard, how can we offer them less than they’ve earned?

OK, so who wrote this? Who thinks that Palestinians should be compensated for their hard work and sacrifices in murdering Israelis?

None other than Akiva Eldar, Diplomatic Affairs Analyst for the great Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Eldar’s bio says that he majored in Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. He must have been asleep in Psychology class when they discussed the phenomenon of abuse victims identifying with their abusers.

Technorati Tags: Akiva Eldar, Israeli-Palestinian conflict

As Israel’s 60th birthday celebration approaches, those who want to destroy her are redoubling their efforts to delegitimize her, both by rewriting history and by feeding the irrational hatred that is fast becoming part of the common consciousness of ‘humanity’.

Karin Laub and the Associated Press do their part — along with the tens of thousands of Syrian and Hezbollah missiles which are today aimed at all parts of Israel, paid for and controlled by Teheran — to make possible again the mass murder of the Jewish people that was so rudely suspended in 1945.

AP Explains to you why Israel shouldn’t exist
By Barry Rubin

If I would choose one article in the Western media that I have read over many decades as the worst piece of anti-Israel propaganda of all, it might well be Karin Laub’s April 26, 2008 piece, “Palestinian plight is flip side of Israel’s independence joy.”

Why? Because many articles have slandered Israel on various points or told falsehoods ranging from the disgusting to the humorous or been based on assumptions that were at odds with the truth. But in this case, the article encapsulates the way in which much of the world has turned from admiration to loathing of Israel, and the way in which Israel’s destruction — which in other contexts would be seen as genocidal — has been justified.

Sound exaggerated? No doubt, reading the above two paragraphs would shock the author who, I believe, had no conscious intention of perpetuating such a verbal atrocity. It is, once again, the unchallenged myths that are blithely assumed, that do so much damage.

Let me explain, first briefly and then at length. Israel is the only country in the world which is regularly slated for extermination and it is certainly the one most reviled. Without entering into a discussion of why such extraordinary double standards are maintained, the core issue is that Israel is allegedly an illegitimate country because it is founded on the theft of other’s property and the suffering of other people.

This is the modern equivalent of the blood libel, which held that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for the Passover matzoh. But if that myth is too exotic for people, remember that its “secular” equivalent was responsible for even more anti-Semitic persecution. That was the idea that any Jewish prosperity was based on the blood-sucking of Christian peasants or of society at large.

In this case, Israel is said to have murdered, ethnically cleansed and otherwise persecuted the Palestinians. Therefore, nothing it does can be good, no achievement of itself counts, and it has no right to self-defense. Obviously, such claims are often greatly diluted but nonetheless rest on this basis.

The Laub article is a systematic restatement of this thesis. To begin with, it is extraordinarily long for an AP article, 1,724 words. If this isn’t a record for an AP dispatch, it must be up near the top. Obviously, this is a message that the AP editors are especially eager to convey: that everything Israel has is at Palestinian expense.

That this is a lie can be explained on many levels but at least two must be presented here. First, why is this measure applied only to Israel, and certainly only to Israel on an existential basis? It is well-known, certainly, that Germany has taken responsibility for Nazi crimes, and also there are applications for reimbursement of Jewish property seized in eastern Europe during the Nazi period.

Yet most countries are founded on expropriation, often of Jewish property. For example, Oxford University, where recently debates were conducted calling for Israel’s destruction, was started on property stolen from Jews expelled in 1290. Far more recently, many Arab states received a huge infusion of capital from the expropriation of Jewish property after Israel’s creation. Does France’s or Britain’s or Belgium’s independence day require discussion of colonial depredations? We don’t read articles that Japan’s independence day is blighted by Chinese or Korean suffering, though the Japanese did engage in mass murder of those people. What about the fact that every country in the Western Hemisphere is based on the suffering of the indigenous natives? Or even in the case of Russia, given Czarist and Soviet behavior? In no case, however, is far worse behavior said to have poisoned any other country’s very existence.

But perhaps even more important is the question of where true responsibility for Palestinian suffering lies. Here is how Laub’s article begins:

JALAZOUN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - Mohammed Shaikha was 9 when the carefree rhythm of his village childhood, going to third grade, picking olives, playing hide-and-seek , was abruptly cut short. Uprooted during the 1948 war over Israel’s creation, he’s now a wrinkled old man. He has spent a lifetime in this cramped refugee camp, and Israel’s 60th independence day, to be celebrated with fanfare on May 8, fills him with pain.

For 60 years, Israel has been sitting on my heart. It kicked me out of my home, my nation, and deprived me of many things,” he said. And each Israeli birthday makes it harder for 70-year-old Shaikha and his elderly gin rummy partners in the camp’s coffee house to cling to dreams of going back to Beit Nabala, one village among hundreds leveled to make way for the influx of Jewish immigrants into the newborn Jewish state.

Well, let us ask the following questions: How did Shaikha leave his “carefree” utopia of Palestine? Most likely because his parents decided to get out of the way while, they expected, the Jews were exterminated by Arab armies. He was in fact “kicked out” by an Arab decision to reject partition — in which case at worst he would be living as an Arab citizen of Israel and at best, depending on where he lived, be a citizen of Palestine celebrating its own sixtieth birthday.

Consider a worst-case alternative history:

Mohammaed Shaikha sat in his nice house and recalled how in 1948 his family left its village and moved a few miles into a village in the new state of Palestine. “It was rough for a while,” he said. “But with the compensation money we got for making peace and aid from Arab states I was able to build a very nice life for myself.”

In fact, it was the Palestinian and Arab leadership which — in contrast to every other refugee situation in modern history — insisted on keeping these people suffering and in refugee camps to use as political pawns. They, too, rejected every offer of peace and resettlement.

For example, if Yasir Arafat had negotiated a solution on the basis of the framework proposed at Camp David in 2000, Shaikha and the other refugees would have shared out over $20 billion in compensation and a Palestinian state might be celebrating its seventh birthday. The PLO refused — a policy pursued since 1993 by the Palestinian Authority — to move people out of refugee camps. They must be kept there as tools with which to blame Israel and also to continue the fires of hatred and violence burning.
A hint of the truth is inadvertently given in the article — though not explained — by a Palestinian ideologue:

Anthropologist Sharif Kaananeh urges his fellow Palestinians to take the long view and learn from Jewish history: “If they waited 2,000 years to claim this country, we can wait 200 years.”

During those 2,000 years, however, Jews whenever possible built up their own lives and acted peacefully and productively. In Kaananeh’s version, he is willing to keep Shaikha and his descendants in refugee camps for 200 years. And why not, since the media will blame their suffering on Israel and provide it as a reason why Israel should disappear, or make endless concessions or be denied full support despite the assault on itself.

By the way, this is what the author prettifies as “perseverance” as if it were something admirable. Don’t make a peaceful compromise; keep fighting and spilling blood unless or until you achieve total victory. In any other situation, this would be decried as a foolish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical world view.

If the Palestinians want to make this their strategy they certainly should not be allowed to blame this on Israel. The true nakba (catastrophe) was not Israel’s creation but the Arab failure to create Palestine and their continuation of conflict to this day. But only Israel is branded, in effect, as a war criminal nation. In this light, the hateful and vicious attacks on it make sense.

Yet why don’t we see the following headline: “Israeli plight a flip side of Palestinian celebration,” or substitute “Israeli plight is flip side of [insert name of any Arab state name or Iran]” or “Israeli [or Jewish] plight is flip side of [insert name of any European state]”?

This could be followed with interviews of displaced Jews (living in poverty since they never left post-World War II refugee camps in Europe or the transit camps built in Israel to house Jewish refugees from the Arab world. Or interviews with Israelis who were maimed or whose families were murdered in wars or terrorist attacks?

For, indeed, Israeli misery is built on the support of terrorism and hatred by Arab states, the incitement to murder and appeals for genocide among Palestinian groups.

Even in direct Palestinian terms, the irony doesn’t stop. The same week as this article was written, it was reported (by Reuters) that while Arab states have promised $717.1 million in aid to the Palestinians, only $153.2 million, that is a bit more than 20 percent, was actually delivered. If Palestinians are not well-off perhaps this is what one must examine, or at least acknowledge.

How about this, from Laub’s article: “The 1948 war had largely separated Israelis and Palestinians, except for some 150,000 Palestinians who stayed put and became Israeli citizens.” No mention of the fact that those Israeli Palestinians have prospered.

And this: “The symbols of occupation, settlements, army bases, roadblocks, are visible across the West Bank.” No mention of the fact that Israel has withdrawn from large parts of the West Bank, and in all the populated areas (except a section of Hebron) Palestinians have had self-government, with massive international aid for 14 years!

And this: “Palestinians under Yasser Arafat took to bombings and hijackings to make the world notice their existence…” So the sole purpose of terrorism was as a misguided public relations’ campaign so the world would take pity on Palestinian suffering, not an attempt to destroy Israel [or just to kill Jews — ed.].

Or this, “Few refugees can realistically expect to go home again, because Israelis fear being swamped by a mass repatriation.” That makes the Palestinian predicament especially harsh, said Karen Abu Zayd, commissioner of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency which helps the Palestinian refugees.” While at least a motive is given for Israel’s refusal (though not that the problem here is not just that a massive influx of Palestinians might overwhelm social services but that the “returnees” goal would be turning Israel into a Palestinian Arab nationalist or Islamist state through violence), no other alternative is presented, not even resettlement in an independent Palestine.

That last point was, after all, the whole idea of the 1990s’ peace process. But the reporter collaborates with the Palestinian line: the only two choices are suffering or total victory, wiping out all other options.

I could literally write a book on the misstatements and misleading basis of this article. But it can be summarized as follows:

This is the Palestinian narrative adopted by a large sector of the American media, as well as academia: It is a zero-sum game in which either Israel must be eliminated or poor Palestinians suffer.

That the continued conflict — and their own suffering — is due to Palestinian actions or that it could be resolved by the kind of compromises Israel has long been advocating (and Palestinians rejecting) and taking risks to bring about is not mentioned. Equally, the perspective that Palestinian radical leadership (by both Fatah and Hamas) and doctrine must be eliminated as the source of Israeli suffering is understated or ignored.

The real victim here is both Israelis and Palestinians. The real cause of the suffering is Arab state intransigence and the kind of Palestinian leadership, strategy, goals, ideology, and behavior that this and so many media stories extol.

Remember that the poisonous forest of hatred and violence grow from the acorns of articles like this.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: Israel, AP, Karin Laub, Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Politicians are not the only ones who determine whether there will be war or peace. Media have a lot to do with it, because they can form opinion in such a way as to provide the support for the policies of governments in democracies, or the screaming mobs on the streets of dictatorships. Hearst’s New York Journal is often accused of starting the Spanish-American war of 1897; while this may be an exaggeration, it certainly made it possible.

In the case of the Israeli-Arab conflict, major organs of the media — the BBC is probably the most important of these, but we can also include CNN, Reuters, and others — have taken sides in such a way that can only prevent peace and bring war.

Note that I did not say that the problem is that they favor the Palestinian cause. Of course they do, but I would prefer to put it this way: they distort the basis of the conflict to promote policies that in fact lead directly to war, not peace.

If your understanding of the conflict was based solely on what is presented in the above media, here is what you would believe:

• Israel is an aggressor which undertakes military action to take Palestinian land and (for some unspecified reason) to make them suffer;

• Palestinian terrorism (they wouldn’t use this word) is a reaction to an illegal occupation, and therefore understandable if not justified;

• The Palestinians just want their human rights and to live in peace, but Israel refuses to end its punitive occupation.

All of the above are false. And there are important elements of the conflict that are left out. For example, here are some things that you would not learn from the BBC, CNN, or Reuters:

• The Palestinian quarrel with Israel is not about a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but about whether there should be a Jewish state at all;

• Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews has been the going on since before the founding of the state, and continues — indeed gets worse — when Israel withdraws from occupied territory;

• Most Israelis would end the occupation and give up the right to live in traditional Jewish sites such as Hebron if they thought it would not bring massive terrorist attacks from the West Bank;

• Terrorism from Hamas and Hezbollah, which are financed and armed by Iran, combines with threats from Israel’s enemies among the Arab nations to constitute an existential threat to Israel.

So, for example, the average BBC consumer will probably support the policy of forcing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank without insisting that terrorist groups be disarmed. As a result, the West Bank would shortly be under the control of Hamas, making probable a three-front rocket assault from Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be in mortal danger, and the likelihood of the conflict expanding into a regional war involving at least Syria and possibly Iran would be great.

On the other hand, a correct reading of the situation would tend to support polices to disarm terrorists, both in the territories and in Lebanon. It would support Israel’s maintaining a posture of deterrence against its external enemies. It would make clear to both the Palestinians and the Arab nations that Israel cannot be destroyed by violence, and that a peaceful end to the conflict which leaves Israel standing is the only way to end it.

The decision for peace or war, interestingly, is less up to Israel than to the other players, in the Mideast and elsewhere. Israel, although you wouldn’t know this from the media, really wants to be left in peace and has shown over and over that she is prepared to make sacrifices to this end. But as long as her enemies think that they can actually succeed — and today they are encouraged in this by international policy — they will continue to try.

And the BBC, CNN, Reuters and numerous others continue to help them.

Technorati Tags: media, Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, BBC, CNN, Reuters, terrorism

The stupid bias of the media is one of the reasons that the world does not understand the Israeli-Arab conflict, and this lack of understanding encourages Arab and Iranian plans to wipe out Israel. When the inevitable war ensues, the media will bear much of the blame.

What’s More Important: Blue Jeans or Being Blown Up?
By Barry Rubin

It’s hard to satirize a lot of media coverage about Israel and the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The truly dreadful stuff is in the details, the small stories and big assumptions on which they are based, rather than in any “scoops” or blockbuster articles.

There are basically two types of such articles. In one, the author’s basic and extreme political bias comes out clearly. The writer is consciously determined to slam Israel. This happens more often in large elements of the European press and in Reuters.

A Reuters reporter called me and told me that they were writing a story on how Israel destroyed the Palestinian economy. I suggested that perhaps they should do an article about the problems of the Palestinian economy rather than assume the answer. When the story came out, my short quote was represented fairly, but the rest of the article was totally biased, trying to prove a thesis, and even misquoted a World Bank report. In the article, the report blamed Israel for the problems but the actual text–available online–said the opposite.

Another personal experience. Australian Broadcasting Company, that country’s main and official television network interviewed me on the main events of the Middle East in 2007. I said that the most important single thing was Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, an action which set back the chances for peace by many years, even decades.

When the story was broadcast it had been edited so that I appeared to be saying that Israel policy had set back the chances for peace by many years, even decades.

I filed an official complaint and in the end they came down on my side, sort of. The decision was that the piece had been carelessly edited or something like that. In the online correction, however, they didn’t even say that but merely that I had asked that an explanation be added to make clear my point was not about Israeli policy.

Of course, the reporter had done it on purpose.

(more…)

Here’s how the AP tells a non-story:

Israel to Build on Contested Land

JERUSALEM (AP) — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had barely left Israel on Monday after her latest peacekeeping mission when Israeli officials announced plans to build 1,400 new homes on land Palestinians claim for a future state…

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to keep building in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, dismissing Palestinian claims that construction on contested land is the greatest obstacle to peace…

He continues to support construction in disputed areas, over the objections of the Palestinians and the U.S., because it allows him to keep his fragile coalition intact.

The Israeli construction plans threatened to make it even harder for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to overcome his people’s skepticism that diplomacy, not violence, would win them a state.

So we understand that Olmert, in defiance of the US, acts in a manner calculated to damage the possibility of peace, for political reasons.

Although I would be the last to deny that Olmert’s motivation for much of what he does is crassly political, in this instance he is doing nothing that in any way — other than by giving the AP and the Palestinians something to get excited about — should prejudice a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

No less than eleven paragraphs down in the AP story, we finally read what Olmert’s provocative act has been:

The city of Jerusalem said it planned to build 600 new apartments in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood, which lies in the eastern sector of Jerusalem that Palestinians see as their future capital.

The Shas Party, a powerful partner in Olmert’s coalition government, said the prime minister had promised to revive frozen plans to build 800 homes in [Betar] Illit, an ultra-Orthodox settlement in the West Bank.

First of all, note that these are not “new settlements” in any sense. And they are ‘expansion’ only insofar as they are new construction. They do not represent any expansion of boundaries.

Second, everyone knows that if a two-state solution is possible, final borders will have to be drawn on the basis of Jewish and Arab populations. While outlying settlements might be abandoned (one wonders why ‘outlying’ Arab settlements within Israel will not), established Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem like Pisgat Ze’ev will have to be on the Israeli side. And settlements abutting the Green Line like Betar Illit will be kept. So who cares if there is construction there?

Third, since the parameters of a settlement have not been decided upon, why do the press and others automatically accept Abbas’ point of view that any settlement East of the Green Line is illegitimate?

Fourth, “Shas said that Olmert promised” is not exactly the same as “Israeli officials announced”.

And fifth, do we really think that the “greatest obstacle to peace” is some construction inside existing Jewish neighborhoods?

Or rather is it the dramatic way the Palestinians continue to express their ’skepticism’ that diplomacy is more effective than violence?

Update [1 Apr 1238 PDT]: Our local newspaper, the Fresno Bee, ran this story today. But they only included the first 10 paragraphs of it.

Technorati Tags: Olmert, Israel, Palestinians, media