The 75th anniversary of the Nakba brought unprecedented coverage in American media of the Palestinian experience.
Steve Inskeep of NPR today described Neve Yaakov, the scene of an attack last week, as being in Israel. While Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street called it a Jerusalem “neighborhood.” It is in fact an exclusively Jewish settlement in occupied Jerusalem, built on confiscated Palestinian lands, and a source of affliction for Palestinians.
Expect Biden to parrot conservative pro-Israel writers in the New York Times who hail the lately-fallen Israeli government as a model for the United States in its inclusion of an Arab party. Shmuel Rosner calls it “thrilling.” Too bad that NPR also salutes the “hell of an experiment.” All these positive reviews leave out Israeli apartheid.
An NPR report on Israel’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist, makes clear that Israel is withholding information from the public 6 weeks later. “The army declined to answer NPR’s questions about what the suspected soldier told investigators, what orders soldiers were given, and what footage the army has of the incident.”
National Public Radio aired a long story yesterday featuring a demand by the brother of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh that the United States investigate her killing in Jenin on May 11 and keep Israel out of the case. So some American media continue to seek to undermine Israel’s impunity– and push Joe Biden not to dodge the matter, as he surely wants to.
“You were washing the floors just like any other prisoner,” NPR reporter Daniel Estrin says to former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert in a long and respectful interview. But more than 4,000 Palestinian political prisoners are held on different terms by Israel, conditions cited by human rights reports charging apartheid– a charge that was unmentioned by the radio reporter.