Journalists have an obligation to examine the stories they report to ensure they’re not being manipulated by grains of truth into becoming outlets for propaganda.
When confronting those with whom they disagree, newspapers fill this role with gusto. Yet when it comes to Israel, the blinders go on, and few charges get the same scrutiny.
For instance, in the space of three days, readers of The New York Times were greeted with a pair of front-page stories, above the fold, set off by color photographs, about Israel and the Palestinians.
The first, “For West Bank, It’s a Highway to Frustration,” described problems Palestinians have in moving about the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, due to the web of checkpoints Israel established in response to the Palestinian terror war that began in 2000.
There is, of course, truth to Palestinian claims that these checkpoints are inconvenient and disruptive. Yet, in this 1,527-word story, only 237 words even begin to explain the need for checkpoints. There are no firsthand accounts by Israelis who “faced stones or worse” from a Palestinian population that actually names streets and schools after those who murder Jews — the more the better — and elected a Hamas government, an organization that pledged, both before and after the vote, never to accept Israel’s existence.
Three days later, Times readers opened their paper to a similarly placed story, “Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land.” Their source was a yet-to-be-released report from the Israeli group Peace Now. Palestinians claim all of Israel as their property, and land disputes have been present from long before the establishment of the Jewish state.
Though there were more Jews who fled Arab lands than Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, property claims remain a hot-button issue that a creditable journalist should give the most careful scrutiny to before reporting.
In this case, the Peace Now report and Times’ story were based on information compiled by the Israeli government in their own 2004 study of unauthorized outposts on the West Bank. Links to both reports can be found in an analysis prepared by Alex Safian at: www.CAMERA.org.
The Times writes, in referring to land ownership, “The definitions of private and state land are complicated.” That is an understatement. In the past 100 years, these territories have been under Ottoman, British, Jordanian and now Israeli rule, each with their own laws concerning land ownership. Much of the problem, the original report observes, is due not to Israeli malfeasance, but to “errors in marking state lands on maps.”
The author of the 2004 study goes on to write that “most of the lands in Judea, Samaria and Gaza were not regularized, and therefore it is difficult to show ownership. Proving possession is also problematic.” That’s hardly the basis for headline news.
Perhaps there is no bigger lie in the Middle East today than the belief that Israel is the source of the region’s problems. Even The Wall Street Journal has fallen into that trap, quoting uncritically in a recent Page 1 story an unnamed senior Arab diplomat stating the oft-repeated theme about the path to peace in the region: “The road to Baghdad runs through Jerusalem, and not the other way around.”
More than a million Muslims died in Iran’s war with Iraq, and Muslims have killed Muslims by the tens of thousands in Darfur, Syria and Saddam’s Iraq. More Muslims kill Muslims in a month in Iraq than Palestinian civilians have died in their current war to destroy Israel.
No effort was made to create a Palestinian state when Jordan and Egypt held Gaza and the territories.
Yet we are asked to believe that the key to all of the Middle East’s problems is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
This column was written for the Israel Advocacy Task Force of the Israel Center of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.