The Israeli government, through its military and its armed colonists, has been using the distraction of the Gaza invasion to crack down and land grab in occupied West Bank Palestine. In a somewhat pleasant surprise, some U.S. media is actually paying attention — not enough, but better than nothing. Except, unsurprisingly, for the New York Times.
The mainstream still has a long way to go to make up for its years of whitewashing and poor reporting about life in the West Bank, where 3 million Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for nearly 57 years. The U.S. media’s chronic malpractice is partly to blame for the continuing confusion among the American people.
But let’s start with the mild good news. The Washington Post on March 11 did run a report from occupied Nablus headlined: “Israeli pressure on Palestinian economy pushes West Bank to the brink.” And 11 days later, the paper added, in another complete article:
“Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit.”
(Keep that word “seizure” in mind.) National Public Radio, whose dispatches from occupied Palestine usually follow the Israeli government line, actually aired a 6-minute report by Eleanor Beardsley from the West Bank that also documented Israel’s crackdown at length; an even longer version ran online in print. The NPR headline: “Israeli settlers step up attacks on Palestinian farms, expanding West Bank outposts.”
Even CNN, whose staffers revealed recently to the Guardian that pro-Israel bias at the network starts at the very top, actually ran a long (7:27) report by Clarissa Ward, in which she called the settlements “illegal” and told notorious colonist leader Daniella Weiss that her plans to re-establish colonies in Gaza “sounded like ethnic cleansing.”
But now over to the New York Times. It also reported Israel’s March 21 massive land “seizure” but didn’t give it the full-length treatment it deserved. Instead, Aaron Boxerman’s 9-paragraph news brief, which was buried online, was headlined, hilariously and euphemistically: “Israel designates more West Bank land for possible settlement use.” You could mistake it for a rezoning decision in a suburban American township instead of the settler colonialism that it actually is.
The longest recent actual news article in the Times on the West Bank crackdown was by reporter Raja Abdulrahim back on March 11, and it only covered Israel’s increasing restrictions on Palestinian worshippers who visit Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to pray during the month of Ramadan. Abdulrahim apparently tried to slip larger truths into her report, but she must have been reined in by the editors in New York.
Here’s one example: she explains that extremist Jews “seek to build a third Jewish temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock,” which is part of the Al-Aqsa compound. That “seeks to build” is darkly comical if you know the full truth. Those extremist Jews actually want to blow up the Muslim holy site and put their third temple on top of the ruins. Over the years, Israeli authorities have actually caught plotters who planned to attack the mosque and the Dome.
(Spokesmen for Hamas said right after October 7 that the Jewish extremist threat to Al-Aqsa is partly what motivated them to launch their attack.)
The Times has no excuse for its ongoing malpractice. The paper might defend itself by arguing that it can’t get its staff reporters into Gaza due to the Israeli restrictions and to the danger. But Times journalists inside pre-1967 Israel should be able to cross the green line without any problem, just as their counterparts at NPR and CNN did.
The Times’s latest — and characteristic — failure helps to explain some of the consternation and dismay after October 7 among Americans who didn’t or couldn’t track down alternative news outlets. For instance, Americans blanched at the characterization of Israel as a system of “apartheid” — in part because the Times had failed to report in any detail that major human rights organizations had already made that determination. Put a map of Israel/Palestine in front of your average American, and they would have no idea that the cartographic reality there actually looks like Swiss cheese. The word “occupation” still would make little sense to them.
The NYT has a column today, “The Two-State Solution Is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/two-state-solution-israel-palestine.html
The open anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism of hundreds of the comments on it is shocking. (And there’s no option to report a comment for racism.)
Already for a very long time israel’s government(s) have totally ignored the nefarious actions of the settlers. It suited them – let the settlers do the dirty work in the West Bank while Tel Aviv looks the other way.
I think the New York Times is schizophrenic about its coverage of Israel. The regular reporting has all the problems outlined in the piece above, and yet they will run editorials that are pretty radical by the standards of the mainstream press. Today they ran an editorial by Tareq Baconi that makes it as clear as possible that all the ‘two-states’ talk is bullshit – give the NYT a little credit for that:
The Two-State Solution is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy…the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has in and of itself normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid….Seen in this light, the failed attempts at a two-state solution are not a failure for Israel at all but a resounding success, as they have fortified Israel’s grip over this territory while peace negotiations ebbed and flowed but never concluded. In recent years, international and Israeli human rights organizations have acknowledged what many Palestinians have long argued: that Israel is a perpetrator of apartheid. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, concluded that Israel is a singular regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea….A singular state from the river to the sea might appear unrealistic or fantastical or a recipe for further bloodshed. But it is the only state that exists in the real world — not in the fantasies of policymakers. The question, then, is: How can it be transformed into one that is just?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/two-state-solution-israel-palestine.html
Malpractice indeed. The Times wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Washington D.C. to cover the 400,000 people marching for Gaza. The paper of record?????
Years ago, when I was just ceasing to ignore the issue, I told a friend, a Jewish friend, that there were settlements in the Gaza strip, and they could only have been built on stolen land. She said, “It isn’t stolen. It’s conquered!” I didn’t have the sense to say that if the conquerees tried to conquer it back, she wouldn’t have a moral leg to stand on to object.