In today’s New York Times, reporter Isabel Kershner devotes a substantial article to a new report from B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, saying that Israel likely committed war crimes in its attack on Gaza last summer.
An Israeli human rights group said Israel’s attacks on residential buildings in Gaza during the 50-day war against Hamas last summer appeared in at least some instances to violate the provisions of international law and raised grave legal concerns in others, according to a report to be published on Wednesday…
[B’Tselem] investigated 70 cases in which more than 600 Palestinians were killed inside homes, a majority of them — children, women and men over the age of 60 — considered unlikely to have been involved in the fighting.
Simple as that. How much clearer can you be? A few paragraphs down, we get the denial from Israeli authorities. But then it goes back to the charges. The bulk of the story is what B’Tselem says in its 49-page report, which is titled “Black Flag: The legal and moral implications of the policy of attacking residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, summer 2014.” There’s even an interview with B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. And a paragraph that begins, “The B’Tselem report contains wrenching testimonies from the survivors of 13 houses that were hit.”
Of course the Times should have been doing this all along. As I reported last summer, the Times’s failure to quote B’Tselem’s reports has been a serious omission in its coverage.
In the past two years, B’Tselem has been mentioned only 20 times — and 9 of those appearances were in “The Lede,” a blog by Robert Mackey that is not part of the printed newspaper.
But better late than never. I feel like I’m reading a normal report in a normal newspaper. We salute Kershner.
Now let’s brace for the backlash. This is the kind of thing that will get hasbara worked up, and the full-scale counterattack on the Times is probably already under way. I cannot recall ever reading a news article in the Times that is so clear about Israeli human rights violations.
What can I say?
Maybe it’s the Baquet effect:
“Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, believes his newspaper – in company with the US mainstream media – failed their audiences after 9/11.
He told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that he agreed with the criticism originally made by an NYT reporter, James Risen,
Baquet said: “The mainstream press was not aggressive enough after 9/11, was not aggressive enough in asking questions about a decision to go to war in Iraq, was not aggressive enough in asking the hard questions about the war on terror. I accept that for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times”.
Baquet, in charge of the NYT since May 2014, was previously editor-in-chief of the LA Times. In his wide-ranging interview with Der Spiegel, Baquet also spoke about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden having chosen to tell his story to the Guardian.
He said he regards the Guardian as “a new competitor [for the NYT] in the digital age.” He said: “Does it make me nervous that they compete with us and in fact beat us on the Snowden story? Yes.”
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jan/28/new-york-times-editor-we-failed-to-do-our-job-after-911
We can only hope for more honest reporting on the issues. Thanks, James.
What is amazing is to use the interactive tool that shows the destruction before and after. Besides the wholesale destruction evident is the erasure of everything green near the border. Clearly a scorched earth of the agricultural land designed to cause starvation and misery. That slide alone is prima facia evidence of war crimes
Via Max B’s twitter:
“Newly published raw video from @Jehadsaftawi showing Israeli attacks on his neighbors in Gaza this summer”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y34LMcmRO-U
https://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
That makes the second time in one week that the NYT has told the painful truth about the Palestinians.
In the Sunday book review (1/25/15), Ilene Prusher reviews a biography of Ben Gurion by Israeli historian Anita Shapira. Prusher writes…
Some readers may find it hard, as I did, to read Shapira’s brief treatment of the moment in 1948 when the commanders Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin came to Ben-Gurion asking whether to carry out “a large-scale population evacuation.” Rabin reported that Ben-Gurion responded with a wave of the hand, saying “Expel them.” Shapira explains here that while he forbade the evacuation of some areas, like Nazareth, “like most of his ministers, he saw the Arabs’ exodus as a great miracle, one of the most important in that year of miracles, since the presence of a hostile population constituting some 40 percent of the new state’s total populace did not augur well for the future.”
There it is! The NYT, the newspaper of record, officially admits that Ben Gurion ordered the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. All that propaganda over the decades (“the Arabs left voluntarily” etc) is now down the drain.
I know nothing about Ilene Prusher. Anita Shapira is a retired Israeli historian who was well connected with the early Zionists, especially the Labor Party leaders.
You can read the entire review here.
Twice in one week ?! Seems like a trend!
I don’t need to resort to hasbara. A report that does not even discuss the use of human shields by Hamas in order to hinder or deliberately compromise IDF attacks is fundamentally flawed if not a complete joke.