‘Washington Post’ says there’s no such thing as Palestine, ‘NYT’ runs Gaza whodunnit

On September 5, a Washington Post story on an energy deal between Israel and Jordan said that relations between the two countries

have been strained because of Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank — a swath of territory sandwiched between the two nations — and its partial siege of the Gaza Strip, which borders Egypt.

That same day, according to the Israel lobby group CAMERA, it wrote to the editors to object to “the partisan terminology” in the article. The West Bank, it said, is 

 disputed territory. Its status is to be resolved by negotiations anticipated by U.N. Security Council resolutions 242…

It made this helpful suggestion: 

The Post often has referred to the West Bank as “territory Palestinians want for a future state.” This is correct.

The next day, CAMERA says, the story was corrected in the print edition of the paper, then in the online version. Now the article says relations between the countries have been strained due to “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank— a swath of territory sandwiched between the two nations that Palestinians want for a future state.”  And the article bears a correction that also echoes CAMERA:

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Israel’s occupation of “Palestinian lands” in the West Bank. The Israeli-occupied territories are disputed lands that Palestinians want for a future Palestinian state. This version has been corrected.

Is the Washington Post so knee-jerk responsive to other groups? And notice how there’s now no Palestine in the Washington Post’s geography. There’s no dispute over these territories outside the Israeli right and its mouthpieces in the U.S.: these are occupied lands that are known to the world as Palestine and Israel has illegally moved settlers on to those lands. The Greater Israel lobby sure has a lot of traction in Washington.

By the way, The New York Times did a piece from Gaza the other day that read like a whodunnit, leaving a lot of questions in a reader’s mind about Just who was responsible for some really awful stuff that happened there. I wonder who did these things!

But the fighting between Israel and Hamas over the summer left at least 34 buildings damaged beyond use and dozens more in need of major repair. An additional 31 schools are still sheltering 59,728 residents who lost their homes….

…. said Zahra Hamad, 36, who has five children, including first and second graders at a Beit Hanoun school that was hit by deadly strikes on July 24, when it served as a shelter. “People were killed in this school, so the kids are afraid.”

…..

In Beit Hanoun, the northern border town where whole neighborhoods were leveled, more than 1,000 people staged a sit-in on Saturday at Girls Preparatory A.

Ziyad Thabet, Gaza’s deputy education minister, said government schools suffered $13 million in damage to buildings and $6 million to furniture. …

“Our message to students,” he added, “is they must work hard despite the hard circumstances in order to make their future better than the future of their fathers and teachers.”

One principal, four teachers and two guards at United Nations schools were killed, along with 22 employees of the government’s Education Ministry, during the fighting. Many more are among the estimated 100,000 Gazans who lost homes.