Why does the NY Times treat "Occupation" as a taboo?

Taboo is a board game that involves players talking about certain words without actually saying those words and Isabel Kershner, a correspondent for the New York Times in Israel, would probably do very well at that game. Her most recent piece is about Israel's occupation of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank but here is the thing, in the 1,266 words she writes about this, she only mentions occupation ONCE and does so ambiguously and in passing. In fact, throughout her piece, not only does she avoid using the term occupation, but she consistently describes events or realities in ways that remove Israeli agency when in fact Israel bares most responsibility for them. It is so persistent throughout the piece that I could not just choose one excerpt to highlight. Instead I've annotated the piece below in red. 

The residents of this neglected Palestinian farming village in the northern Jordan Valley area of the West Bank say they get running water once every three days, which they store in bottles and cisterns. Neglected? By whom and why? Why don't they get running water?

The neighboring Jewish settlement of Mehola is a small paradise by comparison, with green lawns and a swimming pool. Hmm, how come?

The contrasts across this stark landscape of jagged hills reflect the complexities of the fierce contest for control of the Jordan Valley, and the challenges the Palestinians face in administration. Fierce contest? There is no contest here, let alone a "fierce" one. Israel exerts full control over this area and its army is among the most powerful in the region, whereas Palestinians have no army. There. Is. No. Contest. As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators struggle to make headway on peace talks initiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, they have remained bitterly at odds over the strategic corridor that runs between the populous heartland of the West Bank and the border with Jordan. Yes, Israel wants to maintain its OCCUPATION of this Palestinian territory and Palestinians want it to end.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel insists on maintaining a long-term Israeli military presence along the border to prevent infiltrations and weapons smuggling from the east. Israel has had a "long-term military presence" in the Jordan Valley for 46 years, it is called OCCUPATION, and they want it to continue. Some in his Likud Party say there is no security or strategic depth without the settlements and argue that Israel should annex the area permanently. The Palestinians insist that Israel withdraw its forces and settlements so they can control their own borders as part of an independent and sovereign state. What Palestinians are asking for here is what is required by international law. Characterizing this as a dispute is like characterizing theft as a dispute.

But for the residents of the Jordan Valley, where the long summers are intense and the black flies ubiquitous, the diplomatic jockeying is secondary to the hard realities facing two intertwined, adversarial communities. While settlers worry they will lose their homes, the Palestinians, who view the fertile valley as the breadbasket of a future state, are concerned that Israel will continue to control nearly all the water and land. I’m sure Israeli colonists are concerned about what would happen when the system of privilege they have benefited from due to Israel’s violations of the 4^th Geneva Convention comes to an end. Putting those concerns on par with Palestinians who have suffered from that very system is absurd.

“We live at their mercy,” said Dirar Sawafta, an employee of the Bardala village council. This is true.

Some 60,000 Palestinians live here in scattered villages and the ancient oasis city of Jericho. They farm about 8,600 acres of the land, much of it leased from wealthy Palestinian landowners in Jerusalem and Nablus. Many complain of mismanagement and dysfunction on the part of the Palestinian Authority, which administers Jericho and the villages, as well as the strictures of Israeli military rule. Do they complain about anything else? Say, oh, I don't know, OCCUPATION.

The 6,500 Israeli settlers live in 21 small communities interspersed with army bases. Farming nearly 13,000 acres, they use treated wastewater to irrigate their abundant date groves and employ 6,000 Palestinians in a thriving agricultural enterprise adapted to the semitropical climate. This dichotomy is a product of a discriminatory system that privileges settlers and denies resources to Palestinians, this is called OCCUPATION. But the reader is led to believe it is about “mismanagement and dysfunction on the part of the Palestinian Authority.”

Palestinian leaders contend that Israel wants to remain here indefinitely out of economic interests. Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator, who lives in Jericho and represents the Jordan Valley in the Palestinian legislature, listed the settlers’ assets: “The biggest palm farms, the biggest grape farms, turkey farms and alligator lakes.” An intrepid and diligent reporter may want to provide some information here about the economic benefits Israel actually reaps from occupying this area.

Yet the Jordan Valley settlers — many of whom came in search of a pastoral life under the aegis of security-minded Labor-led governments after the 1967 war — live with growing uncertainty that the government will support their continued presence there. Government support? Hmm, tell us more about this.

In 1997, during his first term as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu wrote a letter to the settlers saying that “the Jordan Valley will be an integral part of the state of Israel under any agreement.”

But many settlers here note that Mr. Netanyahu now speaks only of maintaining a military presence. But isn't that what OCCUPATION is? 

In Bardala, the issues are complex, as occupation and internal Palestinian problems have left the wells dry. Before Israel conquered the area from Jordan in 1967, Bardala’s water came from a nearby spring. But the Israelis dug a deeper well nearby. “Ours dried up,” Mr. Sawafta said. There it is, the O-word! But wait whose occupation? Israel’s.

A deal was made in the 1970s, and the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s brought new water agreements, but with the second uprising in 2000, Palestinians stopped paying their water and electricity bills to the Palestinian Authority. The Bardala council owes the authority about two million shekels (more than $560,000) in unpaid utility bills. So, Mr. Sawafta said, the authority has delayed funding for projects like new roads, a dam and a water network in the village. So the lack of water is due to Palestinian mismanagement, not unfair allocation by the regime which controls the resources that just so happen to be in Palestinian territory? Wrong.

Israel deducts the utility debts from the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the authority. Then the ever-cash-poor Palestinian government uses the rest to pay its employees’ salaries. Why is it ever-cash-poor? Maybe because OCCUPATION? Yup.

After that, there is little left to aid the farmers. Rifaat Hamdallah Daraghmeh, a Palestinian who employs 15 families on a farm he runs in the Jiftlik area of the valley and sells produce in Israel, said the authority owed him 300,000 shekels (about $85,000) in unpaid tax refunds over the past four years. Abdul Ghaffar Dawabshe, the deputy director of the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture department in Jericho, said there were 60 such cases in his office.

Khirbet Makhoul, a Bedouin-style encampment in the northern Jordan Valley, has in recent months become a symbol of the continuing struggle over every inch of Jordan Valley land. Why is this encampment struggling? Do they have access to water, electricity and so on? If not, why?

In September, Israeli army bulldozers arrived at dawn and razed all the temporary structures, including those that housed animals and people. Supporters brought new tents, but the army came back three more times. The women and children moved to permanent homes in Tamoun, a village near Nablus.

“We used to live like kings,” said Ashraf Bisharat, 30, a member of one of the dozen or so families raising livestock here, who noted that before September, the bare hillside was filled with animal shelters.

Makhoul sits between three army bases, Whose army bases? That of the OCCUPATION. and soldiers in training provide a steady background noise of booms and gunfire. Israeli defense officials said the shelters had been destroyed because they were erected without permits. The families have refused to leave the land they say they have owned or leased for decades. Now the authority is helping them register their plots and obtain permits. One animal shelter was rebuilt. Some of the local men were sleeping under nylon sheets, each on the ruins of his family tent. 

Most of the Jordan Valley is classified as Area C, the part of the West Bank that remains under full Israeli control. Permits, whether for agricultural packing houses or zinc-roofed shacks, are hard to come by, and demolitions take place almost daily. Hard to come by? Why is that? It is because they are placed atop bookshelves beyond the reach of the average Jordan Valley resident? Do they fall from the sky once every 25 years? Who controls the permits? Are permits equally as “hard to come by” for all residents of the Jordan valley or just for Palestinians? If permits are much harder to obtain for Palestinians, why don’t you ask and report why that is? Hint: OCCUPATION. Permits are not “hard to come by”, they are systematically denied to Palestinians by the OCCUPATION regime.

For now, the Jewish settlers are guarding their positions, too. After two Palestinians from the Hebron area bludgeoned a retired Israeli colonel to death in October in the yard of his home in Brosh Habika, an isolated tourism village here, yeshiva students and families from a nearby religious settlement temporarily moved into the holiday chalets to reinforce and demonstrate a presence. The settlers have a military guarding their positions; this is because of the OCCUPATION again. Palestinians don’t have such protection, which is why Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is rampant but readers of this piece won’t know this since you chose to ignore it.

In recent years, the settlers have planted part of a demilitarized zone between the border security fence and the actual border along the Jordan River with thousands of date palms. Children of the founders of the settlements who left for the city are now returning, attracted by cheap housing and rural community living. This week, a senior Likud minister dedicated a new neighborhood in Gitit, a remote, once-secular settlement that has been revived by an influx of religious settlers. Hmm, government support again? Tell us more about this.

“It took us 30 years to understand what to grow and how to grow it,” David Alhayani, the Likud head of the settlers’ Jordan Valley Regional Council, said in a recent interview. Mr. Alhayani runs an herb farm in his hilltop settlement, Argaman, where he employs more than 20 Palestinians. He spoke of quiet friendship and cooperation with his workers and some local Palestinian notables.“They called us pioneers, salt of the earth, the true Zionists,” he said of the Israeli mainstream. Now, he said, the Labor Party and many others seem to have abandoned the Jordan Valley settlers. 

“We came because our government sent us here — all the governments of Israel,” he added. “If the Israeli government decides differently, we will accept the decision.” 

Fair and accurate reporting on Palestine in the New York Times, THAT is what is "hard to come by". 

Share |