Nakba Day Killings: The Scoop the New York Times Didn't Want?

Last week I passed on to the New York Times some obvious questions that could lead to a scoop and it seems that they missed the opportunity. After two Palestinian kids were killed on Nakba Day, the New York Times had erroneously reported their ages. I contacted the relevant folks covering and editing these stories at the Times about the error and to their credit they eventually made the correction. 

A few days later, CNN released video that corroborated earlier video of the shootings but also showed the Israeli forces actually firing a kill shot. When I watched the video, something seemed odd to me. Why where the different Israeli forces assembled there in different uniforms? Why was the shooter approached from behind just before the shot by what appeared to be another member of the Israeli forces who was frustrated about something? Why did that seemingly frustrated figure try to take the gun away from the soldier before the shot, why did he ultimately take it away afterwards?

Something seemed fishy here. I decided to write a quick email to the sleuths at the Times, who are trained at uncovering the truth. There were two kids dead and now video evidence showing odd behavior at the moment a shot was fired was available. At minimum, more questions should be asked. I wanted them to look into it as quickly as possible and get the story right. If my hunch about something else going on here was right, the New York Times would break the story, or so I hoped. Below is the exact email I hastily sent to the same relevant journalists at the Times regarding the video (typos, misspellings and all).

From: Yousef Munayyer
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:09 PM
To:
Subject: RE: Nakba Day Killings 

Hello                         , 

CNN has release footage it claims shows one of the kill shots http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/05/22/pkg-watson-4a-west-bank-teens-shot.cnn.html  

Please watch it and focus closely around 1:56 to 2:15. Several armed Israeli forces are filled[sic] on a roof top. One, in what seems to be a green helmet and perhaps from a different unit, is crouched down and aiming. His helmet is different from those around him. Just before the shot is fired, it appears the individual behind him in black fatigues and a black helmet and clear face shield realizes something is wrong. He moves toward the crouched shooter and seems to attempt to get his attention. It almost looks like he was trying to take the rifle from him before the shot and then the shot is fired at which point the man in black fatigues jumps back as if he was not expecting it to come at the moment when his hand was near. He then takes the rifle that fired the supposed kill shot away from the shooter in the green helmet.  

I’m no expert on these matters, but this doesn't pass the smell test. My hunch is that different units were involved here with different commands, perhaps there was a dispute over jurisdiction etc. This would explain why the investigation is taking time and isn’t clear. It seems someone wanted to use live fire and many someone else didn’t. For a couple of shots, the guy that wanted to use the live fire won the battle and two boys ended up dead.  

If you listen to the shots about 10 seconds later from what seems to be the same mic in pretty much the same position they sound different. Perhaps the military policy[sic] unit or whoever those dressed in black were only fired rubber bullets but they may not have been the only ones firing. 

This is at minimum something to look further into. I hope you will be able to now that this footage seems to raise new questions.  

Thanks,
Yousef

It is impossible from the footage to tell exactly what happened between those Israeli soldiers/police but it is clear something was out of the ordinary. I didn't hear back from the journalists at the Times that I e-mailed though I often do. Six days later, today, Haaretz publishes this:

Last Thursday, a week after the incident occurred, the belated broadcast of footage taken by a CNN cameraman seemed to shed new light on what happened. That footage showed one member of a group of border policemen firing at the Palestinians. The camera then showed the Palestinians evacuating Nuwara, who was hit by a bullet in the chest and died of his wounds soon afterward. But it now turns out that the person seen shooting a rubber bullet in that footage was actually a soldier from the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit who had been sent to document the proceedings.  

The CNN video shows a soldier wearing the green IDF uniform, a different shade than the Border Police uniform. His sleeves are rolled up in a way that cannot be done on Border Police uniforms, and his helmet lacks the plastic shield of Border Police helmets. The footage also shows the Border Police commander at the scene taking the rifle away from the soldier immediately after he fired the rubber bullet. The Border Police had been tasked with controlling the demonstration, with an IDF artillery unit present as back-up.  

The belated revelation that this soldier opened fire during the incident reveals a problem that emerged during the second intifada (2000-05): Specialists from other units - from drivers to dog handlers, violated orders - who were attached to operational forces tasked with containing violent demonstrations or conducting arrests behaving inappropriately.  

The fact that the specialist was not fully subordinate to the operational chain of command in the field makes it harder for field commanders to supervise his activities. Yet he is also far from his regular unit commanders back at base, which means they cannot keep a close eye on him either.

Oh, one other relevant tidbit from Haaretz:

The details of the case are under a military court gag order.

Recently the New York Times Public Editor wrote about Israeli gag orders influencing coverage and how she found it  "troubling that The Times is in the position of waiting for government clearance before deciding to publish."

Did something like that happen here? Or rather was this just a case where the journalists at the Times didn't find the deaths of two Palestinian children a relevant enough story to follow up on, even though they were made privy to insight that should have led them to this story almost a week before Haaretz broke it? Maybe they did ask questions and were told the story is under gag order. If so, did they comply and keep what they knew under wraps?

As I'm writing this, the New York Times has just posted a Reuters story on the matter. But it is odd that a paper like the New York Times would use a wire service to cover a story in a country where they have a bureau and multiple reporters and had a lead 6 days before others got around to publishing it.

I just can't figure out why the Times wouldn't look further into this and would be playing catch up today when they could have been ahead of the pack in getting to the truth of what happened here.

Many questions still remain. The shot fired in the CNN video killed Nadeem Nuwara at 1:45pm. The rifle was the supposedly taken away from what Israel is now saying was an unauthorized shooter. But Mohamed Abu Thaher was shot later at 2:48pm. What happened then? Was the gun given back to him? Was it a different shooter? Why are children being shot with any type of projectile at a moment they pose no threat? Why does the official Israeli story on this continue to change every day?

These are the kinds of questions reporters should be asking about this incident now to get to the bottom of it and dig through what seems to be an Israeli cover up. If there are any reporters out there who want to use this info to chase this story down please do, I'd send it along to the New York Times but, well, I'm not so sure they really want it.

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Dennis Ross Authors The Same Old Piece

Dennis Ross has an op-ed in today's New York Times on what the Obama administration should do regarding the Middle East "peace process." The piece comes after news that "peace process" envoy Martin Indyk is packing up shop and two Palestinian children were killed by Israeli fire in demonstrations against the occupation. Below are two excerpts:

The alternative to ending the conflict, however, need not be endless conflict. If neither side is capable of ending the violence now, then more limited, but feasible, goals should be adopted. Indeed, in the coming months, both sides and the United States should focus on defusing the conflict and building a bridge to peaceful coexistence.

and...

If the two leaders are unwilling to take these steps, then it is time for Washington to shift its objective to conflict management. A conflict-management approach would not focus on producing formal agreements, which may be too difficult for both sides. Rather, it would concentrate on brokering smaller understandings and getting the two sides to take parallel or coordinated steps that could improve the reality on the ground.

Got that? Both sides, Ross argues, aren't moving thus the U.S. should take a long-term conflict management approach. The paragraphs seem consistent, which is what you would expect in a single op-ed piece. Except the thing is, these paragraphs are from two different Ross op-eds, basically arguing the same thing. The time in between? Thirteen years. In these thirteen years Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians, built thousands of new homes for Israeli colonists and probably received close to 40 billion dollars in aid from the government Ross is advising. And yet Ross' advice is unchanged; kick the can down the road and manage the conflict.

Seriously, why does anyone listen to this guy? Why does the New York Times publish these tired and recycled ideas on the most prestigious opinion page around? Are we merely trying to find out how many different ways Ross can write, "The Peace Process is Dead, Long Live the Peace Process" in 800 words?

The readers of the New York Times deserve better than this. Policy makers in the U.S. government deserve better than to get the same outdated advice that has failed time and again. Most of all, Palestinians deserve better than the suggestion that their fundamental freedoms should be put on hold as long as the U.S. finds it inconvenient to do anything but "conflict management."

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A Pattern of Nakba Passivity at the New York Times

Last week I wrote about the use of the passive voice in describing the Nakba in the New York Times. This device allows for a sense of ambiguity as to who did what and specifically, who destroyed Palestinian villages.

However, on May 16th this is how Jodi Rudoren described it:

After two young Palestinian men were killed Thursday by Israeli security forces during a demonstration commemorating the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe,” and the word used to describe Israel’s destruction of Palestinian villages as it became a state in 1948 — two Israeli journalists said they were nearly “lynched” by a Palestinian mob.

Wow, that is progress. Now the reader is actually being told who destroyed the Palestinian villages: Israel. But before you get too excited, just four days later and in the next reference of the Nakba in the New York Times Rudoren writes:

The deaths occurred on Nakba Day, in which Palestinians commemorate the destruction of scores of Arab villages around the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

So we are back to the passive voice and ambiguity. Is hiding and obscuring the Israeli role in the destruction of Palestinian villages and the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis just the default way the New York Times writes about the Nakba? If one looks back they find that with rare exception, Israel's role in the destruction of the villages and refugee creation in Nakba descriptions is rarely every mentioned.

Here is Isabel Kershner in 2013:

Palestinians refer to the events of 1948 as al-Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe.” About 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war over the foundation of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were later displaced by the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, some becoming refugees twice over. Tens of thousands have recently been displaced again, reliving the trauma, because of the civil war raging in Syria.

Kershner in 2012:

The two sides had seemed intent on reaching a deal before Tuesday, when the Palestinians commemorate the “nakba,” or catastrophe, on the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. The war that followed the declaration led to the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and the day is traditionally observed with protest marches.

Kershner in 2011:

That echoed the conditions that led to the violence on May 15, the day Palestinians mark as the “nakba,” or catastrophe, of Israel’s establishment in 1948.

Ethan Bronner in 2011(a) (b) & (c)

The occasion was Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark Israel’s creation and mourn the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948. 

Tensions were high in East Jerusalem on Saturday as hundreds of Palestinians buried a 17-year-old demonstrator and preparations were under way for rallies on Sunday to mark the founding of Israel 63 years ago, an event that Palestinians call the “nakba,” Arabic for catastrophe. 

The first is known as “the Nakba bill,” in reference to the Arabic word for “catastrophe” commonly used by Arabs to describe the birth of Israel in 1948. Arabs who are Israeli citizens often commemorate Israeli independence by noting their losses — the destruction of hundreds of villages and the exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Robert Mackey in 2011

It shows Palestinian protesters rallying at the border near the Lebanese town of Maroun al-Ras to mark the anniversary of what they call the “nakba” or the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding and the loss of their homes. 

Isabel Kershner in 2010

Israeli Jews describe the houses of Ein Hod as “abandoned” Arab properties. But for Arabs, 1948 was the “nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” and they consider the houses stolen.  

Ethan Bronner in 2008

On Thursday, which is Independence Day, thousands will gather in their former villages to protest what they have come to call the “nakba,” or catastrophe, meaning Israel’s birth. 

Steven Erlanger in 2007

Dahbour was 2 when his family fled Haifa into exile in 1948. “I’m the generation of the nakba,” he told me recently — the “catastrophe,” as Palestinians refer to the establishment of Israel and their own flight or expulsion. 

Greg Myre in 2005

Also on Sunday, Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip marched to mark the 57th anniversary of the founding of Israel, a day the Palestinians call "al nakba," or "the catastrophe." 

Steven Erlanger in 2004

The Palestinians refer to the Israeli victory over the Arab nations in 1948 as al nakba, or the catastrophe, when many of them became refugees. 

James Bennet in 2004

For Palestinians the scenes broadcast Sunday and Monday of refugees carrying mattresses and clothes as they streamed from the camp recalled images of the Nakba, or catastrophe, when some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. 

So this begs the question, what does Nakba day actually commemorate and what exactly is the Nakba? This is something of a complicated question. Primarily the Nakba describes a historical event or a series of historical events around 1947-1949. But the Nakba is not only in the past but ongoing as well. To this day Palestinians are being forced out of homes, living in refugee camps and having land expropriated by Israel. It is both a part of the past and present.

But the year 1948 is the most significant transition period in the modern history of the native peoples of Palestine. This is primarily the historical moment commemorated on Nakba day. It is when more than two thirds of the native inhabitants of Palestine became refugees and forced into exile.

This occurred in various ways and stages. In some cases, people were expelled by the Israeli state and/or its militias. In some cases, people were massacred by the Israeli state and/or its militias. In some cases, people fled and were forced into perpetual exile when the Israeli state subsequently destroyed their homes, expropriated their land and assets and barred them from returning. But in all cases, regardless of the various reasons for flight, the Israeli state played a central role in the experience of both individual and collective dispossession Palestinians call the Nakba.

So why does the New York Times systematically obscure that when writing about it?





h/t Patrick Conners who brought this pattern to my attention

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Israel, Passive Aggression & the New York Times

Arab villages were destroyed. The state of Israel destroyed Arab villages.

Do you see the difference there? The first sentence is in the passive voice and absent of any agency. Who destroyed the villages? We are not told in the first sentence. All we are told is that the villages "were destroyed." The second sentence does not suffer from this ambiguity. It makes clear who the active agent is, in this case, the state of Israel, and that it "destroyed Arab villages."

The difference seems simple and straightforward enough. For the purpose of clarity, you'd think that in writing about such a matter, a journalist would choose the second sentence to make perfectly clear to the reader who did what and to what that act was done. That isn't the case with the New York Times' Jodi Rudoren.

Last week, on May 8th, we posted about how the New York Times failed to cover two significant stories happening during Israeli holidays. One was the mass gathering and Nakba commemoration in Lubya and the other was the release of the iNakba app by Zochrot. Well, Jodi Rudoren eventually wrote about the iNakba story for the New York Times (although to the best of my knowledge it did not appear in print in the U.S. edition but only in the International New York Times and online). What struck me about the story was the linguistic acrobatics that were employed in what can only be understood as an attempt to hide Israeli agency.

Jodi writes: "I saw scores of villages destroyed or abandoned as Israel became a state 66 years ago" and "The app provides details like the date in 1948 each village was occupied, by which military brigade, and Jewish settlements before and since."

Scores of villages destroyed? Destroyed by whom? The date each village was occupied? Occupied by whom? By which military brigade? Which military?

Unless the reader is familiar with the history, they are not told the answers to these questions. Why go to this extent to hide Israeli agency? As far as the reader is told, these events occurred "as Israel became a state" but what the Israeli state has to do with these events isn't made clear. The fact of the matter is, and this really isn't a disputed fact either, the Israeli state engaged in a massive campaign of destroying structures in these villages during and after the war. This was done to ensure the refugees would have no homes to return to. It was, in effect, the enforcement of ethnic cleansing.

We've written in the past about how the New York Times's present day Nakba narratives in news stories does not even correspond with its reporting from the time. Yesterday morning, two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at demonstrations in Beitunia on Nakba day. When events like this occur on Nakba day, as they did in the Ethan Bronner piece discussed in the link above, some description of Nakba day and what it means are usually included in the reporting. By the afternoon, there was no reporting in the New York Times of the events so I asked on Twitter whether they will be covering it. Jodi Rudoren responded:

Well, Jodi delivered on her promise. Again she writes in this story about what Nakba day is:

Two young Palestinian men were killed Thursday in clashes with Israeli security forces during a demonstration for Nakba Day, which commemorates the destruction of Arab villages in battles that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Don't read that too many times, you might get dizzy. She later writes, "Palestinian leaders made speeches about never relinquishing the rights of millions of refugees and their descendants to return to the land where the destroyed villages stood."

Do you see a pattern yet? Why does Jodi constantly write about this subject in ways that avoid describing Israeli agency in the events? Did these villages destroy themselves? No. Nor were the villages destroyed in "battles." Certainly many of the villages came under attack or were the sites of battles, some even suffered significant damage, but the destruction of the homes to the point of leveling happened for the most part after the villages were depopulated. In many cases, refugee flight occurred during bombardment or even in fear of oncoming bombardment, but the razing of structures to the ground was done systematically afterwards.

Someone wrote recently that when it comes to writing on this topic, "the danger is writing so defensively — to avoid skewering by one side or the other — that regular readers have to suffer through stilted sentences and tit-for-tat terminology." Or even worse, they may not even learn pertinent information.

Jodi should take heed of this warning and apply it as she writes about the Nakba. Say things plainly. Israel destroyed these villages. Was that so hard?

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The New York Times and the Peace Process Blame Game

Well folks, April 29th is finally here and you know that must mean two things 1) The deadline for the 9-month US-mediated peace talks convened last summer has arrived and 2) The New York Times has published its definitive write-up of why the talks failed.

The New York Times article, unimaginatively entitled "Arc of a Failed Deal: How Nine Months of Mideast Talks Ended in Disarray" leaves much to be desired. However, if the measure of an article is whether or not it tells you everything you need to know in the lede, well, this one passes the test:

There were late-night video conferences with Secretary of State John Kerry, including one from beneath mosquito netting in an Indonesian hotel. Mr. Kerry met a total of 34 times with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and about twice that with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Once you get past the lousy attempt at romanticism in the first sentence -the kind of writing that suggest the authors are simply trying too hard - the second tells you more about US-mediation of the peace process and why it perpetually fails than anything else you will read in the rest of the piece. US mediation of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks is about Washington conferring with the Israelis about how to best support their positions.

But the most revealing part of the article is not about what it tells us about Israel, Palestine or Washington but rather what it tells us about the New York Times' coverage of the entire issue. As you get to the end of the piece and the chronology that brings us to today, we are treated to this hogwash:

As the March 29 deadline approached for releasing the final prisoners, a lingering problem re-emerged. Mr. Kerry had allowed the Palestinians to believe Arab-Israeli citizens would be among those freed without securing such a commitment from Mr. Netanyahu. The Israelis said no one would be let go unless talks were extended.

Mr. Kerry dangled the prospect of freeing Jonathan J. Pollard, the American convicted of spying for Israel, despite White House reservations. But on April 1, even as Mr. Netanyahu was gathering votes for the new deal, an old tender for 708 apartments in East Jerusalem’s Gilo, was republished. Soon Mr. Abbas was on television signing documents to join the international conventions.  

Still they kept talking. Negotiators barely slept for three weeks. Last Tuesday, the latest package was presented at a meeting variously described as “serious,” “positive” and “excellent.”  

“We had ups and downs: One day if you would ask me I would tell you it’s going to happen, the next day I would tell you it’s not going to happen,” one Israeli said. That Tuesday, he added, “we felt maybe we are going to make it. They asked, ‘Let’s meet the next day.’ ”  

But the next day, Palestine Liberation Organization leaders held hands aloft with those from Hamas. Israel immediately canceled the scheduled negotiating session, and 24 hours later, froze talks indefinitely.

You got that? The Kerry-led peace process, we are told by the authors and an Israeli (no Palestinians), was on the verge of a breakthrough until BAM, the Hamas-PLO deal happened and that's how the cookie jar crumbled, or, as Secretary Kerry put it about a month ago, POOF.

What parallel universe to Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner live in to see things this way?

One has to wonder whether people living in that parallel universe get the New York Times because if they do, they too would be surprised by this narrative. According to the text above, "last Tuesday" (April 22) there was serious hope for a break through. Well, someone ought to tell Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner about the status of talks that Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner were reporting just last Tuesday.

Here is what Jodi Rudoren was reporting about the status of the talks on April 22:

At the beginning of the Passover holiday last week, an Israeli police commander was fatally shot as he and his family drove to a Seder in a West Bank settlement. The day after his funeral, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met for several hours trying to reach an agreement to extend American-brokered peace negotiations past the April 29 deadline. The negotiators are expected to reconvene this week, amid renewed threats by Palestinian leaders that they might dissolve the Palestinian Authority, forcing Israel to take responsibility for its residents.  

Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department, warned Monday against “that type of extreme step.” Noting that the United States had contributed “millions of dollars” to help build Palestinian institutions, she said a dissolution of the authority “would obviously have very serious implications for our relationship, including our assistance going forward.”

Here is what Isabel Kershner reported about the status of the talks on April 22:

The threat to dissolve the authority was seen by Israeli and Palestinian experts alike as brinkmanship on Mr. Abbas’s part, reflecting both how wide the gulf remains between the Palestinians’ and Israelis’ positions in the negotiations and the difficulty of the last-ditch effort to extend them beyond April 29.  

The peace talks, which began last summer, have been on the verge of collapse since late March, when Israel missed a deadline for releasing a fourth group of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinian side responded by applying to join 15 international treaties and conventions in defiance of Israel.

"Extreme steps", "serious implications", "how wide the gulf remains", "last-ditch effort", "verge of collapse", that was the language around April 22nd to describe the state of the process as reported by the same New York Times journalists who now want you to believe - ONE WEEK LATER - that they were actually on the cusp of a breakthrough.....until the Hamas-PLO deal.

The article that was written today was meant to be a definitive one. One that sets a narrative about what transpired and who is to blame. It was not written last night but has been in the works for some time. The New York Times misrepresented reality by bringing this article to conclusion in this way, leaving readers with the impression that if not for this one Palestinian move, things would have worked out quite differently. There is a lot more reported in the piece about this comment or that, this stance or that, this announcement or that, over the 9-month period. But when the reader gets to the end of the chronology, they are lead to believe the blame lies squarely on the Palestinians for the failure.

Frankly, to attempt this sort of thing the New York Times has to take its readers for idiots. Who's going to notice, they must think? Perhaps people that read your own newspaper and your own reporting by the same reporters reporting this story.

I've raised many concerns about bias in the New York Times before, and recently the public editor at the New York Times took up some of them. This is yet another indication of the New York Times and its reporters in Israel carrying water for an Israeli government that simply can not afford to be blamed for the failure of peace talks even though anyone with half a brain can see that's the case.

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The Painstakingly Slow Evolution of Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen is catching on. Slowly, ever so painfully slowly, but still it seems to be happening. Today Cohen blasts through one of the oft told myths in the Liberal Zionist narrative. But, staying true to Liberal Zionist form, he fails to prescribe the obvious and necessary solutions to the problem he identifies.

Cohen addresses the "myth" that the Israeli occupation is unsustainable. This myth is central in Liberal Zionist lore. Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street Founder and President writes in his book "Our voice must speak the truth as loudly and clearly as possible: The present path that the state of Israel is on is unsustainable."

But Cohen writes: "It is time to retire the unsustainability nostrum. Facile and inaccurate, it distracts from the inconvenient truth of Israel’s sustainable success..." Later, "that 'point' of unmanageability is a vanishing one. Permanent occupation is what several ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government advocate. Backed by the evidence, they are certain it can be managed. They are right."

If this sounds familiar to some of you, you may have come across my comments at a Middle East Policy Council panel last fall where I discuss the three most problematic myths in our discourse on Israel/Palestine. The myth of unsustainable occupation was one of them:

Indeed, in 2011, President Obama said about Israel, quote, “precisely because of our friendship, it is important that we tell the truth. The status quo is unsustainable. The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.” The same was uttered by his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

If anything has been sustainable in the turbulent Middle East for the last half-century, longer than Mubarak and longer than Gadhafi, it has been Israel’s occupation. Sure, nothing is sustainable forever. At one point, I suppose, the Grand Canyon was just a river. But it’s particularly disingenuous to hear this language from the very officials who are crafting policy to ensure that the status quo remains sustainable.  

As I’ve already discussed, not only is the Israeli occupation sustainable, it is profitable. Indeed, Israel has done almost all it can to ensure the occupation persists for generations by carving up the West Bank with colonies and entrenching its presence there.

So even though Cohen successfully identifies the same problem I pointed out, here is where Cohen fails spectacularly. While he identifies that the occupation is very much sustainable, he fails to put the proper blame on Washington for its support of Israel, without which the sustainability of occupation would be in serious jeopardy.  This is a slippery slope for a Liberal Zionist. Liberal Zionists constantly tell us that ending the occupation is in Israel's interest, but if the status quo is sustainable and Israel is secure and thriving, then what would motivate it to change its behavior in occupied Palestine - behavior that even Liberal Zionists identify as morally reprehensible? Not much.

Which is why the next logical step, a step Liberal Zionists generally don't take, is a call for the necessary pressure to change the Israeli decision calculus. So does Cohen call for an end to US military, economic and/or diplomatic support for Israel which helps make the status quo sustainable? Does he call for sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law? Nope. He merely concludes that majorities on both sides must determine "that painful compromise in the name of a better future is preferable to manageable conflict."

But what changes need to take place to get Israelis to prefer making the necessary concessions instead of not making them and enjoying the status quo he only paragraphs earlier identified as sustainable?

Cohen doesn't say. Maybe he will in a column 2 to 3 years from now. And why rush anyway Roger? The status quo is, as we both note, sustainable. Its just a few more years of millions of Palestinians living under the jack-boot of Israeli occupation. If this hasn't driven you to urgency after several decades, what's a couple more years. I'm sure you will might get around to it at some point.

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A Tale of Two Articles: Wonderwater vs Watergate

In the daily universe of what is opinion writing and reporting on Israel/Palestine in the English language press, today offered an interesting juxtaposition. Both the New York Times and an Israeli daily ran stories about water and its availability in the region.

One piece lauded Israel for its ingenuity, mentioned nothing about occupation and the theft of Palestinian water resources and depicted Israel as the generous benefactor of Palestinian water. Here is an excerpt:

Because of geography and hydrology, the Palestinians’ water future is closely tied to Israel’s. In just the few years of Hamas control of Gaza, the water supply there has been polluted, and though no solution to its coming water crisis is likely without an Israeli role, Hamas has refused to cooperate with Israel. 

The Palestinians in the West Bank already receive much of their water from Israel’s national water utility and, sovereignty and symbolism aside, neither a two-state solution nor a continuation of the status quo will change that. Given their proximity to Israel, the Palestinians are likely to be among the few Arab winners in the water race. 

The other piece was far more critical of Israel and accurately described the way in which Israel exploits Palestinian water resources properly contextualizing the situation in Occupation. The author writes:

So here are the facts:  

 * Israel doesn’t give water to the Palestinians. Rather, it sells it to them at full price.  

 * The Palestinians would not have been forced to buy water from Israel if it were not an occupying power which controls their natural resource, and if it were not for the Oslo II Accords, which limit the volume of water they can produce, as well as the development and maintenance of their water infrastructure.  

 * This 1995 interim agreement was supposed to lead to a permanent arrangement after five years. The Palestinian negotiators deluded themselves that they would gain sovereignty and thus control over their water resources. The Palestinians were the weak, desperate, easily tempted side and sloppy when it came to details. Therefore, in that agreement Israel imposed a scandalously uneven, humiliating and infuriating division of the water resources of the West Bank.  

 * The division is based on the volume of water Palestinians produced and consumed on the eve of the deal. The Palestinians were allotted 118 million cubic meters (mcm) per year from three aquifers via drilling, agricultural wells, springs and precipitation. Pay attention, Rino Tzror: the same deal allotted Israel 483 mcm annually from the same resources (and it has also exceeded this limit in some years). In other words, some 20 percent goes to the Palestinians living in the West Bank, and about 80 percent goes to Israelis – on both sides of the Green Line – who also enjoy resources from the rest of the country.  

 Why should Palestinians agree to pay for desalinated water from Israel, which constantly robs them of the water flowing under their feet?

Now, can you guess which appeared in the New York Times and which in the Israeli daily?


UPDATE*: It seems Seth Siegel, the author of the NY Times puff piece on Israel and water scarcity who was identified in the article as "a founder of Beanstalk, a brand-licensing agency, and of Sixpoint Partners, an investment bank" is also....drum-roll.....an AIPAC board member. Why did the NYT omit this very relevant part of his bio in the author description?

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Israel/Gaza Cease-Fire Dynamics Breakdown

For months we have been tracking Israeli cease-fire violations in Gaza. In November of 2012, a cease-fire agreement was brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Previous cease-fire agreements, like the one brokered by Egypt in June of 2008 were shattered by extrajudicial assassinations carried out by Israel. The biggest question after the cease-fire agreement, as I made clear here, was who would hold Israel to account for cease-fire violations? Egypt was not going to play this role. The U.S. was not going to play this role. So effectively, Israel could fire into Gaza without accountability, provoke a reaction and then claim self-defense. Of course this has been similar to what we have seen in the past as we displayed here, here, and here.

So what has been happening since the cease-fire? In anticipation of similar trends, we began tracking Israeli cease-fire violations shortly after the agreement was reached. We have an ongoing list here. The media predictably continued to ignore Israeli cease-fire violations, which is why it was even more important to catalog them. If another massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza began, Israel would surely use the pretext of "self-defense" to fend off any international criticism and the mainstream media's failure to cover these cease-fire violations would have provided and supported the Israeli narrative needed to make war. Thus, we not only tracked Israeli cease-fire violations, but we also tracked if and how these violations were being covered in the mainstream. More on that later.

The chart below depicts a few things; Israeli cease-fire violations, Palestinian projectile launches and Palestinian casualties that resulted from Israeli cease-fire violations week by week of the cease-fire through January 2014. A few notes on the data; first, we refer to "projectiles" because there are different types of projectiles that are deployed, not all are "rockets" and thus "rockets" alone, the preferred parlance of the Israeli state, isn't an accurate descriptor. Additionally, we are not focusing on each individual piece of ordinance but rather on events. So if one projectile is launched or two are launched together, these are the same event. Likewise, we don't count each individual piece of ordinance Israel deploys in an airstrike wherein it routinely drops several bombs in a singular event. If we did, the number of Israeli violations would surely be much, much higher. For example, the Israeli human rights group B'tselem, citing the Israeli Shin Bet, notes that nearly 14,000 projectiles were fired from Gaza from 2005 to 2013. UN OCHA noted that Israel fired about the same number of artillery shells into Gaza......in 2006 alone. Lastly, the Shin Bet keeps numbers on Palestinian fire from Gaza but does not differentiate between fire at Israeli targets that have entered Gaza vs. those outside it. Also, it does not have data available at the week level, only the month level. Even using their numbers for Palestinian fire though, Israeli violations outnumber them nearly two to one.

There really is no comparison between Israel's capacity to destroy and the combined capacity of all the factions in Gaza. The point here is to understand how the events relate to each other, what leads to escalation, and how this effects the durability of the cease-fire agreement.

[Click to Enlarge]

As you can see from the chart, Israeli cease-fire violations have been persistent throughout and have routinely resulted in Palestinian injuries and deaths. Palestinian launches have been rare and sporadic and occurred almost always after successive instances of Israeli cease-fire violations. You can see a steady escalation from around week 48 and onward. This corresponds with mid-December during which Israel committed several cease-fire violations resulting in multiple Palestinian casualties. There was no Palestinian projectile fire in the two weeks prior to these Israeli violations which inflicted high causalities. This means that this week was the escalation point and it was Israel doing the escalating. You can see that the following weeks continue to feature exchanges that included high Palestinian casualties. You may wonder why you don't see Israeli casualties from Palestinian projectile fire depicted on this chart, that is because as afar as I can tell, there weren't any during this period.

So how have these cease-fire dynamics been covered? We've tracked New York Times coverage of the cease-fire during this period. The New York Times is representative of the mainstream and extremely important for shaping public discourse on events and thus an important window into broader mainstream coverage. The Times also has multiple reporters covering these events including a bureau in Jerusalem and a correspondent in Gaza. Finally, we simply can't track everything so the Times, with its easily searchable history, is an effective example to use.

Of the nearly 120 Israeli cease-fire violations during this period the New York Times reported on 17 of them. Additionally, most of these stories (eleven) came either during the first week of the cease-fire, when the issue was still fresh in readers' minds, or since the escalation on December 20th. That means for the bulk of this period, during which Israel committed 87 cease-fire violations and causing some 91 Palestinian casualties over nearly a one year period there were only six stories on the topic. This represents a systematic failure to cover Israeli cease-fire violations.

Making matters worse is the way events are covered in the rare instances they are covered. In most cases, Israeli actions are described as a response to Palestinian actions. So while most Israeli cease-fire violations are not covered at all, those that are are explained as justified retaliation. Thus the reader is completely misled about the dynamics of fire, why the cease-fire is threatened and exactly what is going on in and around Gaza.

The biggest challenge to the cease-fire agreement is persistent Israeli violation and the lack of any accountability for them. The politics of the Gaza Strip are complex. Israel says it wants Hamas to control projectile fire from other factions and yet it persistently violates the truce putting Hamas in a position of having to defend Israel's violations. By targeting groups other than Hamas and by expecting Hamas to crack down on their responses, Israel is playing a dangerous and deadly game of divide and conquer in Gaza that will likely lead to the unraveling of the cease-fire. Once again, Israel has proven security is not its aim, subjugation is.

For more on this topic, I highly recommend a new report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) on Israeli fire into Gaza.

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The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon

It was inevitable, I suppose. The legacy of Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli Prime Minister who died recently after years in a coma, was the subject of much debate and conversation in the Israel/Palestine discourse this week. Some mainstream American media outlets did a particularly poor job, however, in characterizing the life of the man.

My thoughts on Ariel Sharon, for those who might not have already guessed, are here. It is fair to say that in general, Palestinians view Ariel Sharon negatively and, frankly, as a war criminal. But it would be unfair to say that only Palestinians view him in this way, as if Ariel Sharon's legacy was just some other endless point of debate between irreconcilable Israeli and Palestinian narratives. In fact, anyone characterizing points of debate in this way is probably just to afraid to take an objective stance.

In reality, those authoring critical pieces of Sharon's legacy have come from a variety of different backgrounds. The New Yorker carried a post by Raja Shahada and another by Bernard Avishai. Max Blumenthal's piece in the Nation was also stellar, as was Rashid Khalidi's piece for Foreign Policy and Daniel Levy's piece for Al Jazeera America. Sara Leah Whitson from Human Rights Watch made an important contribution as well. There were many more that got it right. The bottom line is Sharon was responsible for some pretty heinous things in his life that included massacres of civilians and the massacre of the peace process through settlement expansion.

Unfortunately, many others failed to get the story right and among them are some of the most mainstream outlets for what is considered serious conversation in the United States. Two particularly egregious examples are The New York Times and The Charlie Rose Show.

 

The New York Times ran an obituary on Ariel Sharon and a number of opinion pieces all by Israelis (as of now I am not aware that they have run a Palestinian voice on Sharon). Here are a few key gems from the obituary and some notes:

"he stunned Israel and the world in 2005 with a Nixon-to-China reversal and withdrew all Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza. He then abandoned his Likud Party and formed a centrist movement called Kadima focused on further territorial withdrawal and a Palestinian state next door." 

The problem with this narrative is that there is no objective evidence proving that Sharon's intention with the unilateral disengagement of Gaza was benevolent. We do however, thanks to the very same New York Times, have this tidbit that Mr. Bronner chose not to include in his obituary from Mr. Sharon's key aide:

''The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,'' Mr. Weisglass was quoted as saying in Haaretz, a liberal daily often critical of Mr. Sharon's government. ''It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians.''  

 ''When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state,'' Mr. Weisglass added. ''Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.''

Why wouldn't Bronner include that? Also, there is that other inconvenient truth for Bronner's narrative. Sharon was perhaps the most pro-colonization Israeli leader ever. I am not only talking about the 1970s and 1980s but all the way through Sharon's premiership. He presided over the single largest period of expansion in the Israeli settler population, some 75,000, since the Menachem Begin era. That bit of info also didn't make it into Bronner's obit. Of course, if it did, it would be hard to reconcile with the unsubstantiated claim that Sharon intended to leave the West Bank to create a Palestinian state.  It gets worse in the obit (emphasis added):

 "The massacre provoked international outrage, and many Israelis, already despondent that the “48-hour” Lebanon incursion had turned into a lengthy military and geopolitical adventure, were outraged. There were furious calls for Mr. Sharon’s resignation. 

Mr. Sharon and Mr. Begin said this was intolerable slander. As Mr. Begin said, using the Hebrew word for non-Jews, “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.” Nonetheless, even Mr. Begin started to distance himself from Mr. Sharon, whose political demise began to seem inevitable. 

The government established an official investigation of the massacre, led by Israel’s chief justice, Yitzhak Kahan. The investigating committee absolved Mr. Sharon of direct responsibility, but said he should have anticipated that sending enraged militiamen of the Phalange into Palestinian neighborhoods right after the assassination of the group’s leader amounted to an invitation to carnage. The committee recommended his resignation. 

Time magazine reported that Mr. Sharon had actually urged the Gemayel family to have its troops take revenge on the Palestinians for the death of Mr. Gemayel. The magazine said Mr. Sharon made this point during his condolence visit to the family. It claimed further that a secret appendix to the Kahan Commission report made this clear. 

Mr. Sharon sued Time for libel and won a partial victory in Federal District Court in New York. The court found that the secret appendix, which contained names of Israeli intelligence officers, included no assertion by Mr. Sharon of the need for Phalangist revenge. But it ruled that Mr. Sharon had not been libeled because he could not prove “malice” on the magazine’s part." 

Bronner tells us about Sabra and Shatila toward the very end of a 4,000+ word piece. He presents it in a way where the facts, and Sharon's role in the events are disputed. He sets up a dichotomy between an official Israeli Government investigation and a US libel lawsuit, as if those two could ever be on equal standing as authorities on actions taken by the Israeli military. He also says that "the investigating committee absolved Mr. Sharon of direct responsibility", which is very odd since the actual committee's report says (emphasis added):

We have found, as has been detailed in this report, that the Minister of Defense [Sharon] bears personal responsibility. In our opinion, it is fitting that the Minister of Defense draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office - and if necessary, that the Prime Minister consider whether he should exercise his authority under Section 21-A(a) of the Basic Law: the Government, according to which "the Prime Minister may, after informing the Cabinet of his intention to do so, remove a minister from office.

Why does Bronner tell us that the committee report says one thing when it fact it said the opposite? The entire treatment of Ariel Sharon's history of war crimes in his obituary in the New York Times is poorly done, to say the least, and there are several signs suggesting that the reporter intentionally downplays Sharon's war crimes.

It is important to remember that many questions have been raised about Bronner's objectivity, in part because his son was serving in the Israeli military as he was reporting about it. That and the public editor of the New York Times saw fit to argue that this conflict of interest should have led editors to take Bronner off the Israel beat. Why editors today saw fit to have him write the obituary is another question all together.

Still another question is what is going through the minds of the bookers and producers at the Charlie Rose show when they were putting together their "appreciation of Ariel Sharon"? Of course, who does Charlie Rose have on to discuss Sharon's legacy? Ethan Bronner. Who else? Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who left for Israel after college in the US to volunteer in the Israeli military as a prison guard during the first intifada.

Is there no one out there without connections to the Israeli military, the very same military that Ariel Sharon committed war crimes while working for, that can objectively discuss the man's legacy? ANYONE?

The discussion that ensues is everything you'd expect and less. Our helpful interns have transcribed the segment from last night.

Goldberg calls Sharon "Israel’s greatest warrior hero" , "the sort of tank commander that any Prime Minister would want to have in his corner at a really stressful moment", "the greatest reckless general Israel had" , "the boldest" , "he was all energy and that energy was always moved forward" , "he wanted to make sure that you were comfortable, that you were happy" . Then, and this is the kicker,in the rare moment of describing Sharon's barbarism, Goldberg descends into some orientalist drivel. "Ariel Sharon was very Middle Eastern" Goldberg said as he likened the trait of ruthlessness to region, "and I don’t mean that in sort of an enlightened way. "

Yeah, no kidding.

Bronner, for his part, calls Sharon "ruthlessly pragmatic" , "Charming certainly, but a difficult guy who wanted to do it his way" and "a funny guy".

Funny? I'm sure the victims at Sabra and Shatila didn't find him funny. Of course Sabra and Shatila was not mentioned at all in the discussion around Charlie Rose's table. And, even though Bronner mentioned Sharon's involvement in the Commando Unit 101, whose members he described as "very bright, very capable young people doing these very daring acts" , he never mentions Sharon's likely earliest war crime as a leader of that unit, the massacre at Qibya. After the Goldberg & Bronner Sharon love fest, the rest of the show featured old interviews with Sharon himself.

What kind of war criminals get this lionizing treatment? The kind, it seems, that get away with it.

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More Zionist than the Zionists

There she goes again. Isabel Kershner's report on what happened when Israeli settlers attempted to attack a Palestinian village is quite something. This story was widely reported in Israeli and Palestinian media.

First, some background.

Basically, as it has happened many times before, Israeli settlers from a colony in the West Bank attempted to attack Palestinians in their villages and destroy their property.

This is sometimes done as a "price tag" attack, which is when Israeli settlers exact a price against Palestinians in the rare instances when the Israeli government limits the expansion of, or dismantles, Israeli settlement structures. Most settler violence, however, is a product of an unequal system of laws that protects and privileges Israeli settlers against Palestinians, providing both the physical infrastructure and the impunity that incentivizes settler violence.

Israeli settler violence is a rampant phenomenon we have documented and studied extensively here at the Palestine Center. In 2012, we published a comprehensive report on Israeli settler violence and how, when and why it occurs covering thousands of events from 2004-2011. We will be producing an update soon to cover the years since then.

I've put together the map below to help you understand where things are located.

View Jalud/Esh Kodesh in a larger map

The Israeli colonies of Eli, Shilo, Shvut Rahel, Ahiya and Esh Kodesh are in blue (running counterclockwise starting from Eli) and the Palestinian villages of Karyut, Jalud and Kusra are in red. As you can see the Israeli colonies surround the Palestinian villages from the West and the South. This particular area is a hotbed of Israeli Settler Violence, in large part because of the geographic proximity and the fact that the Palestinian villages here are in Area B, not Area A where Palestinian security jurisdiction usually deters settlers from entering.

The most common type of settler attack in these villages is destruction of property. Some 40% of all attack types in our database for these three villages fall into that category. In yesterday's event, Israeli settlers from Esh Kodesh went into Jalud.

Here are some of the various headlines from Israeli media on the event:

From the left-leaning Haaretz: "Jewish Settlers Caught and Beaten After Trespassing in Palestinian Village"

From the popular Israeli tabloid Yideot Ahranot: "West Bank Palestinians say protected settlers from locals' revenge"

From the right-leaning Jerusalem Post: "Elder Palestinians protect settlers from lynching in West Bank village"

Yet here is the New York Times' headline: "Palestinians Corner Jewish Settlers During Clash in West Bank"

Let's try this another way by playing a game. Below are two excerpts of the first four paragraphs from different stories describing the same events:

Excerpt 1:

A confrontation between a group of Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers in the West Bank on Tuesday ended when Palestinian officials handed the settlers, who had been surrounded by other Palestinians, over to Israeli forces. 

The episode shined an unusual spotlight on the potentially explosive tensions in the area even as Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were underway.  

Scenes captured on video showed a group of more than a dozen male settlers, including minors, who had apparently been corralled by angry Palestinians in an unfinished building on the edge of the village of Jalud, near Nablus in the northern West Bank. Some of the settlers had bloodied faces.  

The settlers said they had been hiking in the area. But Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settlement activities in the northern West Bank, said they had come to uproot olive trees and clashed with Palestinians who confronted them in the fields among the villages of Qaryut, Jalud and Qusra.

Photos accompanying this story show bloodied settlers cowering before Palestinians surrounding them, being cornered by rock throwing Palestinians and being manhandled as well. Reading the headline, the story and the seeing the images, you are left under the impression that it was Palestinians who were the aggressors in this clash and not the settlers.

Excerpt 2:

Some 15 settlers from Esh Kodesh placed themselves in life-threatening danger on Tuesday as a result of provocative decision on their part to enter the Palestinian village of Jallud, adjacent to Ramallah.  

Residents began to riot and it was only thanks to several village officials and elders that the settlers escaped from the incident with their lives. Villagers accused the settlers, ages 15 to 30, of throwing rocks at farmers tending their fields, shattering the windows of a local home and assaulting three residents.  

Village officials and elders attempted to contain the situation. According to reports, six Palestinian men shielded the settlers with their bodies against what quickly grew into an angry mob, and were able to hold the settlers in an uninhabited structure on the outskirts of the village until Israel Defense Forces troops arrived.

The IDF said the settlers, all known right-wing activists, entered the village with the clear intent of carrying out a "price-tag" attack.

Photos accompanying this story include images of bloodied settlers but also include images of Palestinians protecting settlers, of Israeli soldiers removing the settlers and of a Palestinian victim of Israeli settler violence.

The first excerpt is ambiguous as to who is responsible and presents the situation as a he said/he said dispute. It does not even clearly identify that Jalud, the village the settlers entered, is a Palestinian village. It notes that among the dozen settlers there were minors and all were "corralled by angry Palestinians" setting up a dichotomy between the innocent and the aggressor.

The second excerpt starts by placing blame on the Israeli settlers for entering Jalud, which it clearly says is a Palestinian village. It notes that some Palestinians protected the settlers from what could have been greater violence. Finally, it says the Israeli military said the settlers were all "known right-wing activists" that intended to carry out a "price-tag" attack.

Now, can you guess which of these excerpts is from the New York Times and which one is from the right-wing, pro-Netanyahu rag funded by Sheldon Adelson, Israel Hayom?

Yup, it has gotten THAT bad.

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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". 

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The NY Times' Incorrections

Recently the New York Times published an article about Mohamad Assaf, the young Palestinian star from Gaza who's vocal talents were recognized throughout the Arab world after winning Arab Idol. In the original text published on December 19th, the following was included:

And the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, included in a message to Secretary of State John Kerry a YouTube video of Mr. Assaf singing longingly about cities in Israel that were once Palestinian. Mr. Netanyahu wrote, “Incitement and peace cannot coexist.”

And....

Mr. Assaf grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, an area that often has shortages of water, gas and electricity because of restrictions imposed by Israel.

Well, on Dec. 31st, the New York Times ran a long correction:

An article on Dec. 19 about Mohammed Assaf, a Palestinian singer from Gaza who has become a star in the Arab world after winning the “Arab Idol” competition, referred incorrectly to cities in Israel Mr. Assaf sings about. While they had largely Arab populations before Israel became a state in 1948, they were not “Palestinian” in the sense of being part of a Palestinian political entity. The article also referred incorrectly to shortages of water, gas and electricity in Gaza. While Israel places restrictions on some goods coming into Gaza, and many Palestinians blame Israel for shortages, they were worsened by Egypt’s closing of smuggling tunnels and by a tax dispute between the militant Hamas faction, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority. The article also referred incorrectly to Mr. Assaf’s travels to Cairo for “Arab Idol” auditions. The Sinai Desert is part of Egypt; he rode for hours through the Sinai from the border with Egypt, not to the border.

Corrections are supposed to happen in newspapers when they print factually incorrect information or perhaps because of failures in copy editing like typos, misspellings and so on. What seems to have happened here is that someone complained that the New York Times would refer to cities in Palestine as Palestinian. So by making this correction what the New York Times is saying is that prior to Israel, there was no "Palestinian political entity" that these cities were a part of and thus referring to the cities as Palestinian is wrong.

Well, that sure seems like news to the New York Times of yesteryear. Calling cities in Palestine "Palestinian cities" wasn't a problem for the New York Times 1927 or in 1929 for example. Nor was it odd for the paper that today says those cities were not part of a "Palestinian political entity" to refer regularly to a "Palestine Government."

It is true that the native population of Palestine during that time did not have self-determination (also, they still don't today) but does that mean there was no political entity there in Palestine? Yes, Palestine was under a British Mandate then, but does that make Palestine's cities British? Syria was under French Mandate in the 1920s, does that mean Damascus was a French city? Was it not a Syrian city? Of course these were Syrian cities, and the New York Times reported such at the time.

So why the correction when it comes to Palestinian cities? Its clear here that the editors chose to appease what was likely a disgruntled pro-Israel reader who was displeased at the very notion that the New York Times might mention a historical reality they reported on at the time today when a Zionist narrative has made significant strides in altering the discourse.

As far as the correction regarding the siege on Gaza goes, yes, Egypt is playing a role, but to even put it remotely on par with the role Israel is playing in the siege is dishonest. Israel controls all entry and exit ports for commerce in Gaza. They control the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to enter the West Bank. They enforce a naval blockade. Egypt does none of this. It is Israel of course, not Egypt, which confirmed to US officials on "multiple occasions" that "as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza...they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge" and that "they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis."

In the updated version of the Assaf story, the line about the siege has been edited to the following:

Mr. Assaf grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, an area that often has shortages of water, gas and electricity.

No mention of Israel's role in creating these shortages exists anymore.

Corrections are meant to get a story that was factually wrong right. In this case, the New York Times' correction only managed to succeed at obfuscation, distortion and probably at appeasing pro-Israel readers at the cost of the truth.

*****

New York Times readers today were also treated to a whitewash of Ariel Sharon. Sharon, who has been comatose for years, is said to be near death so his name is again in the headlines. An inevitable New York Times obituary will be written upon his death and if today's article is any preview it will certainly do readers an injustice. The critical excerpt:

Mr. Sharon, a controversial military commander who rose to hold many of his nation’s top positions, suffered a stroke after shaking up Israeli politics at the height of his power.  

An architect of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, he stunned the world and his own constituents with a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. He abandoned the Likud Party he led as prime minister to form the centrist Kadima Party, and he was believed to be preparing for further territorial concessions to establish a Palestinian state when he became ill.

Controversial? What made him controversial? Was it the fact that he led the internationally condemned attack on the village of Qibya in 1953 that left scores of Palestinian civilians dead? Was it that he was found indirectly responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 by an Israeli commission whose recommendations were accepted by the Israeli cabinet to remove Sharon? Was it his provocative visit to the Haram as-Sharif in 2000 to "assert Jewish claims there"? Was it the fact that as Prime Minister he presided of the single most significant period of settlement expansion of any Israeli administration since Menachem Begin?

No. We are not told why he is controversial at all, we are only led to believe by the following paragraph that it might be over his willingness to make concessions. We are told he was "believed to be preparing....to establish a Palestinian state."

Who in their right mind would believe that?

***UPDATE

Back in 2004, a publication reported:

Israel's proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is intended to put the issue of Palestinian statehood on indefinite hold, a close aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview that was published Wednesday and immediately stirred controversy.  

The comments by the aide, Dov Weisglass, who frequently handles delicate diplomatic contacts with the Bush administration, drew sharp criticism from the Palestinians....  

''The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,'' Mr. Weisglass was quoted as saying in Haaretz, a liberal daily often critical of Mr. Sharon's government. ''It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians.''  

''When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state,'' Mr. Weisglass added. ''Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.''

That publication was the New York Times. Perhaps its reporters should try reading it sometime. 

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