Lincoln Center went forward with Israeli-government-sponsored play this summer. But BDS campaign scored victories. Four newspapers that ran an ADL op-ed claiming that the BDS movement is bigoted against Israelis were compelled to correct the error to make it clear the target is a government that persecutes Palestinians.
PEN American Center released a statement last Friday expressing concern over Israel’s arrest of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was arrested in October 2015 over a poem and two Facebook posts. The PEN American Center statement is welcome because it uses the organization’s credibility to draw attention to the injustice of Tatour’s detention, yet it denies Tatour’s very self-identification as a Palestinian, denies the existence of Israeli military occupation, and fails to call for Tatour’s release.
US media outlets, including the powerful New York Times, refuse to report basic elements of Palestinians’ experiences, including the perspectives of Palestinians living in Israel. Reporter Diaa Hadid’s January 3 article in The New York Times on Palestinian citizens of Israel living in Haifa provides a recent case in point.
An analysis of last month of New York Times articles reveals that references to occupation are a stock phrase for the West Bank. The articles are almost devoid of any context of what Palestinians are experiencing in East Jerusalem, and readers are left with the sense that there is simply a conflict over holy sites.
The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner says the stabbing of Israelis by a Palestinian in Jerusalem “broke a period of relative calm.” Can we retire that phrase permanently? Have Palestinians ever experienced a period of relative calm?