Total number of comments: 1 (since 2009-08-17 13:19:00)
orlyhalpern
Orly Halpern is a Jewish American Israeli war correspondent. She is also an Arabic speaker who lived in Baghdad and reported for a year during the Iraq war and covered the Second Intifada driving her sedan across the West Bank. When she left Iraq she became the Middle East correspondent of The Jerusalem Post for which she traveled across the Arab and Muslim world learning about the politics, the people, and their views on Jews and Israel. She developed a particular interest in Jewish communities living amongst the Arabs. (She has spent Passover with the last Afghan Jew in Kabul and with Bahraini Jews in Manama.) Today Ms. Halpern is a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem and a reporter for Toronto's Globe and Mail. She has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines, including US News and World Report, Dallas Morning News, Jewish Daily Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Haaretz, McClatchy Newspapers, Hadassah magazine, and Homemakers (Canada). During the Second Lebanon War she reported for US News and was an analyst on Fox News. She's also at http://www.twitter.com/JerusalemBureau.
This is just plain false. Israeli journalists who hold government-issued press cards are allowed to travel across the West Bank. I do regularly.
And some Israelis who aren't journalists do so, too. (Last week 10 Israelis met for two hours with the former Hamas MP Finance Minister Dr. Omar Abdul Razeq in a dialogue session I arranged at his Ramallah office.
No one can say that the editors at The Jerusalem Post believe that Israeli journalists are prohibited from traveling in the West Bank. I was the Jerusalem Post's Middle East Affairs Correspondent until 2006 and I regularly traveled to Gaza and the West Bank to do stories. And my former editors were thrilled that I was willing to do so. Most were not.
It appears that this Israeli JPost journalist, whose name I'd love to know, does NOT WANT to travel in the Palestinian Territories. Unfortunately, most Jewish reporters here are like her.