The July 5 installment of The World, a daily news show co-produced by WGBH/Boston, Public Radio International, and the BBC World Service, included a five-minute report entitled "Jewish activists find inspiration in their faith." Its focus is divided between a leader of settlers seeking to take over Silwan, an East Jerusalem neighborhood just down the hill from the Old City, and a small group of Orthodox Jews who have joined in some of the protests against plans by the administration of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, prodded by the settlers, to destroy 22 Palestinian homes there.
To my knowledge the piece was accurate, as far as it went; I even found it somewhat interesting. But it reveals once again a lot of the problems with mainstream coverage of the Palestine issue, even when – as in this case – it seems to come from a liberal perspective.
First of all, there’s the sheer Judeocentrism of it, and specifically the concentration on the Orthodox. Palestinians have been resisting Israeli efforts to push them out of Silwan at least since 1991, when the Housing Ministry, then headed by Ariel Sharon, began to take over homes there under the pretext that they were "absentee property." Israelis and internationals have been joining Silwan’s demonstrations for years – I myself attended a memorable rally there in 2005, and Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights was arrested there in 2008. Peace Now, Gush Shalom, and the Anarchists Against the Wall have all protested, each in its own way, against the ethnic cleansing plan. A couple of weeks ago Ban Ki-moon issued a statement denouncing the planned demolitions as "provocative" and "contrary to international law."
None of this, however, motivated The World to cover the story. It evidently became news for them only when they found a handful of what they call "liberal Orthodox Jews" opposed to the demolitions.
The report gives time to both the right-wing settlers and their liberal Orthodox critics to recite their Biblical and moral arguments about the neighborhood. No one else – most important, not a single Palestinian – get to say a word.
Then there’s reporter Matthew Bell’s selective approach to the facts he presents. He reports that the settlers know the area as "the historic City of David," a tendentious name they gave it a few years ago to justify their plans to build a Biblical theme park where Palestinian homes now stand. Somehow he forgets to mention that the people who live there call the place Silwan – and have done so since before 985, when the Arab writer al-Muqaddasi identified it as such. Bell doesn’t explain that the whole campaign to "Judaize" the place – the settlements, the archaeological digs, the planned theme park, and the demolitions to make way for it – was engineered by the ultra-right-wing Elad organization, with tax-deductible funding from U.S. bingo and hospital magnate Irving Moskowitz.
And, of course, Bell doesn’t mention that the largest of the Jewish settlements he talks about is named after the imprisoned spy Jonathan Pollard.
More generally, the report provides no historical or legal framework to enable listeners to judge the issue – except as a matter of differing Jewish interpretations of the Bible. It never mentions that the area in question is occupied territory, as repeatedly affirmed by the UN, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and virtually every other authority this side of Tel Aviv, and that the settlements are therefore illegal on their face.
Altogether, the report fails to give listeners any real understanding of what’s going on in Silwan. Even though it’s apparently free of factual errors – unlike so much of what we hear on NPR – it is in the end an insidiously misleading piece of journalism.
————-
On a very different note, NPR’s All Things Considered last Friday aired a piece by freelancer Sheera Frenkel entitled "In the West Bank, Women With a Need for Speed," about women race car drivers in Ramallah. After that report, who can say NPR doesn’t give the Palestinians their due?
