Transparency in journalism. Tony Judt in the New York Times yesterday:
Israel needs “settlements.” They are intrinsic to the image it has long sought to convey to overseas admirers and fund-raisers: a struggling little country securing its rightful place in a hostile environment…
The settler population has grown consistently at a rate of 5 percent annually over the past two decades, three times the rate of increase of the Israeli population as a whole. Together with the Jewish population of East Jerusalem (itself illegally annexed to Israel), the settlers today number more than half a million people: just over 10 percent of the Jewish population of so-called Greater Israel.
Note that Ron Kampeas, who is the Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, offered a confession a month or so back:
[T]he Israeli government has unnaturally impeded the natural growth of [Jerusalem’s] Arab population and has unnaturally spurred its Jewish growth.
“The mantra of all Israeli policies in Jerusalem is to maintain the natural balance,” Seidemann said. “Which means that the birth of an Israeli child is a simcha and the birth of a Palestinian child is a demographic threat.”
(Full disclosure: I own an apartment in East Talpiot, one of Jerusalem’s post-1967 “new” neighborhoods, one I purchased with a loan that had favorable terms for olim, or new immigrants. The loan would have applied wherever I settled in Israel. There were additional incentives at the time to settle in Ma’aleh Adumim and other West Bank settlements…)
Good for Kampeas for the confession. And does this affect his coverage? It has to. It’s where you sit, isn’t it? By the way, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly says Obama’s demand that Israel freeze settlements applies to East Jerusalem too.
