Yesterday, the well respected Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill ran an article entitled “Before Obama-Abbas meeting, members chime in.” The article, written by online editor Bridget Johnson, offered a state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inside the beltway leading up to the Obama-Abbas meeting. It primarily focused on an AIPAC-backed letter that collected 329 signatures in the House before being delivered to President Obama. The article did briefly mention the proposal that Abbas was expected to bring the meeting which focused on the Arab Peace Initiative. However it had an odd way of describing the Initiative. The article said:
The Arab Peace Initiative would involve Israel relinquishing Judea, Samaria, the eastern half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in exchange for recognition, plus releasing all Palestinian prisoners and offering resettlement within Israel for millions of Arabs.
Judea and Samaria? This language is directly from the Israeli right wing which uses it to refer to the West Bank by its biblical name (implying Jewish ownership and control). While this terminology is perfectly expected on the the settler-friendly website Arutz Sheva, it is never used in the mainstream US media.
I called Bridget Johnson to ask her about it. She said the language was taken directly from the Arab Peace Initiative. I seriously doubted it, but I hadn’t checked the Initiative’s language, so I thanked her and hung up. After checking the Initiative’s language I found, not surprisingly, the language isn’t there. It uses “Palestinian lands occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
and with Jerusalem.” That’s a bit different.
I called Johnson back to ask her about it. I was curious where she found this language. I expected that she had been given a bad translation, but Johnson insisted that she hadn’t been given the language. She couldn’t remember where exactly she found it, but she had used the same language in an earlier article and just reused it. She did acknowledge that the initial language was confusing, so after our first conversation so she edited the article on The Hill website to this:
The Arab Peace Initiative would involve Israel relinquishing the
Israeli-administered Judea and Samaria Area of the West Bank, the
eastern half of
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in exchange for recognition, plus
releasing all Palestinian prisoners and offering resettlement within
Israel for millions of Arabs.
This doesn’t really clarify things. Also, the language “offering resettlement within
Israel for millions of Arabs” is not accurate either. The Initiative calls for a “just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in conformity with Resolution 194,” which is open to negotiation and certainly doesn’t assume “millions of Arabs” resettling in Israel. Again, this language was more typical of right wing smear campaigns that want to discredit the Initiative by playing on Israeli and Jewish American fears.
Out of curiosity I checked out the earlier article that she had mentioned, to see how the language was used there and found more biased reporting. That article, “Differing two-state solutions coming from Obama, Bibi,” used the same original language to misrepresent the Arab Peace Initiative but also added,
Netanyahu favors a long-term two-state solution whereby the fragile
Palestinian Authority would be strengthened through economic efforts to
shore up the territories’ infrastructure and government.
This is simply not true. If anything Netanyahu has been notable for his complete refusal to endorse the two-state solution, a major sticking point with the Obama Administration. Now I was really beginning to get interested.
Things became a bit more clear when I did a bit more searching into Bridget Johnson. It ends up she also writes for the conservative website Pajamasmedia.com. Just this past January she wrote an article during the heat of the Israeli election called “Facebooking with Bibi Netanyahu” which dealt with the use of social media in political campaigns, and especially by the Likud. She begins the piece talking about how she became “friends” with Netanyahu and other Likud politicians on Facebook and then she writes,
Never have I seen such proactive social networking like what’s come out of Likud staffers this campaign season. . .
Especially considering Netanyahu and [Likud MK Michael] Eitan were sending friend requests to a non-Israeli. But again, that’s a wise move. Do I have a history of supporting Netanyahu and Likud? Yep, like lauding Netanyahu’s foresight on the Gaza withdrawal in a reflective 2006 column. Does Israel’s future depend solely on the support of Israelis? Of course not. So identifying global supporters and keeping them up to speed on the campaign is also wise.
So, Johnson self identifies here as a “supporter” of Netanyahu and the Likud – did that not raise any red flags back at The Hill when she was asked to write about the Obama Administration’s engagement in the Middle East peace process? It would seem to be relevant information. And while this personal predilection might not have disqualified her in and of itself, it certainly has been evident in her reporting which has adopted the terminology of the Israeli right wing.
If The Hill is really going to offer “solid, non-partisan and objective reporting on the business of Washington,” they’re going to have to do better than this.
