Writes a friend: Did you see Isabel Kershner, in this New York Times story about Israel training Jewish settlers to suppress Palestinian demonstrators, was unable to bring herself to refer to the occupied Golan Heights but instead called them disputed?
In what some here saw as a rehearsal for September, thousands of Palestinians and their supporters, some wielding firebombs and stones, tried to breach Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and the frontier between Syria and the disputed Israeli-held Golan Heights in May, with a repeat on the Syrian frontier in June.
Indeed, the whole story never uses the word occupied, or occupation! Also, she cites settlers’ biblical claims,
There are high levels of hostility — and past clashes — between some Palestinian villages and neighboring settlements and outposts dominated by Jews claiming territory they consider their biblical birthright.
but doesn’t note that international law regards such actions as illegal. So the Bible has greater relevance to her than international law? Would the NYT do this on any other issue?
