Ethan Bronner at Tel Aviv Univ. Photo:Itzik Edri
Sometimes I like reading the url because it tells us about how a writer plans on pulling the wool over our eyes. Ethan Bronner’s article, headlined “Israelis Say Settlements Must Be Part of Israeli State” is like that. The article is about the Quartet’s Jan 26th deadline for both sides to present “comprehensive proposals on territory and security“, although Bronner, unsurprisingly, adopts Israel’s framing of the proposal deadline as merely a request for “an approach”:
[T]he European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States —required both sides to present their approach to borders and security by this week.
But look at the url, and the very top of the browser page: “Details Emerge on Israeli Offer on 2 State Solution”.
There’s no offer of a 2 state solution in the making and no proposal, but we are all quite familiar with the Israeli ‘approach’ by now. Bronner claims Wednesday night the GOI ” formally told the Palestinian Authority how it would seek to handle the territorial part of their negotiations.”
Formally? There’s a lot of wordsmithing going on here and nothing formal about “how it would seek to handle the territorial.” Why, it wasn’t even written down:
A Palestinian official said the offer “effectively abandons international law and the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity on the subject of the talks, as did Israeli officials, the Palestinian said, “If you put it in perspective, it is as if the West Bank were not occupied, just disputed, with both sides having legitimate claims, while the rest of Israel remains outside the dispute.”
“Israel’s response does not lead us to real negotiations,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian official who spoke anonymously added that the Israeli negotiator, Yitzhak Molho, did not provide any written documents or maps in his discussion with the Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, and did not include Jerusalem or the Jordan Valley in what he discussed.
…….
“In some ways, this is their way of reframing the occupation.”
Good stuff, Annie.
FYI–the “Israeli Offer on 2 State Solution” framing is also in print. I’m a subscriber to the NYT, and I flipped to A2, their table of contents-esque page and it had that headline at the top.
annie, far be it from me to defend ethan, but reporters do not write headlines, which are where the urls come from. whatever headline a copy editor puts on the first time the story is published is what beomes that part of the url. the url is ususually never reedited, unless there is something egregiously wrong in it, since it will break older links pointing to that article.
also, A2 headlines in most large papers are done by a different set of editors who work off whtever might be on the story at the time. By the end of the night a couple of editors may have reworked the final headline on the article page depending on print specifications and that is what is usually the final headline on the web, too.
“JERUSALEM — Israeli negotiators told their Palestinian counterparts this week that their guiding principle for drawing the borders of a future two-state solution would be for existing settlement blocks to become part of Israel, an approach that the Palestinians rejected as unacceptable.”
I don’t see how this “We win and you lose” can be considered anything but a demand for “unconditional surrender”, which is what USA (and UK and USSR) did to Germany and Japan in 1945.
This is not consistent with advances in I/L, and is inconsistent with Israel’s promise (made when applying to join the UN) that it accepted the UN Charter (which denies the acceptability of acquiring territory by war or threat of war), and is inconsistent with UNSC-242.
On the other hand, it is far softer than some of the murderous stories to be found in Israel’s “founding charter” (the old testament), and is actually softer than the behavior of the IOF, etc., on the ground, today.
The USA, whose founding charter (the constitution) was written by folks who didn’t know of today’s corporations or the lobbies of the super-rich individuals (such as AIPAC, which I call BIG-ZION to place it up there with BIG-BANKs and BIG-ARMs and BIG-OIL), now allows, as matter of law, these usurpers to perform both “regulatory capture” (long known to students of administrative law, not an everyday topic, but the reason the regulatory agencies are so docile to the corporations they are supposed to regulate) and nowadays also “electoral capture” by which the BIGs have captured BOTH parties on matters of concern to them (thus the two-party BANK BAILOUT and the two-party LOVE FEST WITH ISRAEL).
“the Palestinian said, “If you put it in perspective, it is as if the West Bank were not occupied, just disputed, with both sides having legitimate claims, while the rest of Israel remains outside the dispute.”
“disputed” has been promoted by NPR and many other MSM outlets for decades
It is disputed territory, Israel claims the whole of the occupied territory, the rest of the world does not accept that, rather like Charles Manson who disputes that he is responsible for all those murders, quite an apt anology really.