NPR’s popular Sunday show “Weekend Edition” was hosted today by Jerusalem correspondent Daniel Estrin, who provided two reports from Israel that thoroughly marginalized Palestinians and offered listeners several tired liberal Zionist claims about the politics of the conflict.
Here are some of Estrin’s assertions, which ultimately reflect an anti-Palestinian bias:
— In a report on Netanyahu’s new far-rightwing government, Estrin said that the new coalition replaces the “outgoing liberal government that included an Arab political party.” This is not true. The Bennett-Lapid government was center-right. (At most 13 parliament members could be considered liberal or left.) That government has killed over 200 Palestinians this year in the name of security. A further-rightwing government is now replacing Bennett-Lapid’s coalition because the existing government was considered by Israeli Jews to be too soft on Palestinians. Yes it is true that the outgoing government — and it’s historic — included an Arab party. But that party was a rightwing Islamist party. Most Palestinian politicians refused to have anything to do with the rightwing government. Their voices went unheard in this report.
–“Gathered around [Netanyahu] will be some of Israel’s most far right figures… There will be a West Bank settler leader who wants to block Palestinians from having their own state alongside Israel, what’s called the two-state solution,” Estrin said of the likely Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This is a misrepresentation. Smotrich is no outlier. Netanyahu is opposed to a two-state solution. So was Naftali Bennett. So is almost the entire Israeli political class. The centrist Yair Lapid offered some lip service to a Palestinian state but did absolutely nothing to allow the two-state solution, just helped to bury it. Because voicing support for Palestinian sovereignty is a death-knell in Israeli politics.
–Secular Israelis are worried about the new government’s religious ministers. “We’ve even heard one who says he wants to shut down soccer games on the Sabbath,” Estrin said. I suppose it’s true that secular Israelis worry about this. But wait, why should this concern be prominent in a report on a fascistic racist government? Isn’t this the fretting of liberal Zionists? Don’t Palestinians have more pressing worries about the government?
–At minute 5 of his report, Estrin asks Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute of the new government: “What about the lives of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank? This is the big issue for the international community, Israel’s occupation, its overarching control of the lives of Palestinians. What are Israelis thinking about that today?” Hermann gets to answer that most Israelis “don’t see a partner on the other side.” This is a tired claim, again reflecting a Jewish audience. Israel has done all it could to destroy the two state solution. Palestinians live under “apartheid,” and countless human rights organizations say it’s apartheid. Estrin never represented those views, never said the word “apartheid.”
–Also, if the occupation is the “big issue for the international community,” then why doesn’t Estrin get to it before minute 5? What does the international community care about soccer games on Saturday?
–Hermann says, “there is a big difference between what the international community is saying and what it is doing on the level of actions, from the economic point of view, from the commercial point of view, the security point of view. Everyone is cooperating with Israel.” True. Well-said. But is that the whole story? Estrin does not point out that there is a Palestinian-led boycott movement that has made some progress despite efforts by the Israel lobby to ban it. 27 American governors, urged on by the Israel lobby, have sought to make the BDS campaign illegal. Imagine reporting on South African apartheid without naming apartheid or the international campaign to disinvest from it.
–In his second report, Estrin interviews the rap artist Shaanan Streett as he goes around Jerusalem on Hanukkah. Streett is a coexistence type, who just wants everyone to get along and laments the second-class status of Palestinians. Very liberal Zionist. But Streett too reflects a narrow experience. Estrin says, “He still remembers hearing the booms followed by the eerie silence of death, of Palestinian bombings in the city 20 years ago,” during the Second Intifada. This is a racist lens. Palestinians remember a different kind of violence: Far more Palestinians were killed than Israeli Jews during the Second Intifada. So this is an incomplete history. (Estrin/Streett then throw in the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in May, but it’s a token reference, and why should an Israeli Jew be the only voice about her killing?)
That’s the structural racism of these reports. Three people are interviewed, all good Jewish Israelis that liberal Zionists want to hear from. There are no Palestinians. “We’re worried about violent cycles that will be longer and more extreme than in the past,” Rabbi Noa Sattath tells Estrin.
We can only wonder what Palestinians think and fear about this government. NPR erases them. It’s about to be 2023. This kind of racism ought to be embarrassing for a mainstream media outlet.
But if we broaden the topic to consider how the mainstream press is covering Israel, there are some (tiny) improvements from what would have been allowed a few years ago. The New York Times published this letter to the editor a few days ago (emphasis mine): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/opinion/letters/israel-netanyahu.html
To the Editor:
Re “The Ideal of Democracy in Israel Is in Jeopardy” (editorial, Dec. 18):
As the editor of a progressive Jewish magazine that closely covers Israel and Palestine, I was deeply dismayed by the editorial…Though the editorial is critical of the Biden administration for failing to push back more strongly against Israeli extremism, it doesn’t urge any specific actions. Mr. Biden has many forms of leverage at his fingertips: He could place human rights conditions on the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. sends Israel annually, or halt the sale of U.S. weapons that are used against Palestinian civilians, or end our country’s decades-old policy of shielding Israel from accountability at the U.N. The editorial presses for none of these…Instead, it echoes the president in emphasizing the inviolability of the U.S.–Israel alliance — a bromide that assures Israel that its blank check is guaranteed...Israel is indeed on a dangerous path, but the contention that its “democracy” is “in jeopardy” as a result of this election obscures the state’s undemocratic 55-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories, which denies Palestinians their basic human rights...This new extremist coalition has substantial domestic support, which means that international pressure, especially by the U.S., is crucial to ending Israel’s rule over Palestinians. The Times has meanwhile offered a master class in how to offer nothing but hand-wringing.
Arielle Angel
Brooklyn
The writer is editor in chief of Jewish Currents.
RE: Estrin says, “He still remembers hearing the booms followed by the eerie silence of death, of Palestinian bombings in the city 20 years ago,” during the Second Intifada. This is a racist lens. Palestinians remember a different kind of violence: Far more Palestinians were killed than Israeli Jews during the Second Intifada.
SEE: “The Dogs of War: The Next Intifada” | By Uri Avnery | CounterPunch | September 2, 2011
[EXCERPT] . . . The second (“al-Aqsa”) intifada started after the breakdown of the 2000 Camp David conference and Ariel Sharon’s deliberately provocative “visit” to the Temple Mount. The Palestinians held non-violent mass demonstrations. The army responded with selective killings. A sharpshooter accompanied by an officer would take position in the path of the protest, and the officer would point out selected targets – protesters who looked like “ringleaders”. They were killed.
This was highly effective. Soon the non-violent demonstrations ceased and were replaced by very violent (“terrorist”) actions. With those the army was back on familiar ground.
All in all, during the second intifada 4546 Palestinians were killed, of whom 882 were children, as against 1044 Israelis, 716 of them civilians, including 124 children. . .
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/the-next-intifada/
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“He boasts of his record as editor of a publication aptly named Hayarden (The Jordan), & as a leading voice in the militant revisionist movement which insisted upon the Jewish right to sovereignty over the whole of historic Palestine. Revisionist fighters, who eventually founded Likud’s predecessor Herut, were infamous for their terrorist operations before & during the 1948 war of independence.
“That year, a number of leading Jewish voices, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt & others, described the Herut Party in a public statement published in the New York Times newspaper as a ‘political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy & social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties’.
“Like father like son. As preached by his father’s revisionist guru Vladimir Jabotinsky in his infamous 1923 essay, The Iron Wall, Netanyahu also believes that Zionism must use military force to persuade the Palestinian Arabs to give up their rights to their homeland.
“Netanyahu entered into politics with this conviction & slowly built himself up as the father of modern Israeli fascism. He started by demonising then-Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin for signing the Oslo Peace Accords & helping pave the way for his assassination by a Jewish fanatic. Once he became prime minister in 1996, he started grooming a new generation of fascist & racist leaders. The likes of Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, & Ayelet Shaked all matured under his wing in the Likud party & went on to form & lead their own far-right parties.
“Ahead of the last election, Netanyahu also godfathered a new relationship between fascist-religious parties Otzma Yehudit & Religious Zionism, inviting their leaders, Itamar Ben Gvir & Bezalel Smotrich, to his family home to personally help bridge their differences. Netanyahu wanted to unite them into one electoral list so that they can enter the parliament & help carry him back into the prime minister’s office. And he succeeded. Spectacularly.
“While polls had predicted the two parties would fall short of the threshold necessary to enter the Knesset individually, united they went on to win 11 percent of the vote & 14 parliamentary seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Worse, Ben Gvir, who is like a Netanyahu on steroids, has fared particularly well among Israeli youth….”
“We can only wonder what Palestinians think and fear about this government. NPR erases them. It’s about to be 2023. This kind of racism ought to be embarrassing for a mainstream media outlet.”
But it’s not racism since Palestinians are not human.
Unlike “us”, they are not civilized.
Unlike “us”, they don’t value human life.
So why should “we” good civilized Zionists in the west view them through a lens of equality? Besides, Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, so who cares what those indigenous Palestinians on the periphery — and in the margins of a history WE created — think?
THESE are the rationales and thought processes. If figures like Estrin considered, especially on a subconscious level, Palestinians to be equal human beings, he would have paused for a moment to ponder whether and how their lives have been turned upside down and destroyed by Israel’s actions – especially by the support of his network’s audience.
NPR is just the tip of the iceberg. The collective West’s corporate media are a sad joke to those who follow events through the independent media (e.g. Mondoweiss). A major topic of discussion among highly experienced (including prize winning) reporters is the exceptional, extreme level of essentially deceptive reporting by today’s corporate media. Here’s an excellent discussion on today’s media featuring Max Blumenthal.
The EMPIRE strikes back after The Grayzone exposes their corruption | Redacted Conversation
https://rumble.com/v22d15j-the-empire-strikes-back-after-the-grayzone-exposes-their-corruption-redacte.html