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April 10, 2023 10:01 am
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The Real ‘Palestinian Territory’? New York Times-Land

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avatar by Ira Stoll

Opinion

A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

A New York Times article labeled “news analysis,” about tension between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu, reports, “Mr. Netanyahu made no particular effort to hide his backing for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election, making clear his preference for an incumbent who gave him everything he asked for, including moving the United States Embassy to Jerusalem and paying little attention to the Palestinians while siding with Israel on its claims over Palestinian territory in the West Bank.”

As is typical with Times articles about Israel, the article already carries one correction: “A correction was made on March 30, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated where evacuated settlers would be allowed to return under a law passed by Israel’s Parliament. They would be able to go to four areas of the West Bank, not the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

That correction, though, doesn’t do the full job of fixing the inaccuracies in the Times dispatch. To do that would require at least two additional corrections.

To start with, it’s not accurate that Trump gave Netanyahu “everything he asked for.” For example, as Jared Kushner disclosed in his book, the two leaders clashed over the timing of Israel annexing parts of the West Bank.

Most egregious of all, though, is the phrase “siding with Israel on its claims over Palestinian territory in the West Bank.” That makes it sound like the Times itself is taking sides in the territorial dispute, asserting that the land actually is “Palestinian territory.”

The Israeli view was that it is Israeli territory. This is especially so because the land Israel was considering annexing wasn’t the entire West Bank, but only selected portions of it that were either strategically crucial or that were already heavily populated by Jewish residents. For the Times to describe those lands as “Palestinian territory” rather than as disputed territory is to adopt the Palestine Liberation Organization negotiating position as New York Times news department editorial policy. These are lands to which the Jewish people has extensive religious and historical connections, lands that were controlled most recently by the Ottoman and British empires, then by the Kingdom of Jordan, and then, after the Six Day War of 1967, by Israel.

A newspaper editor I knew once banned the term “news analysis,” mockingly suggesting that instead the rest of the newspaper’s columns be uniformly labeled as “analysis free.” At the Times, even the “news analysis” columns seem, sadly, to be bereft of the genuinely analytical and independent thinking necessary to distinguish reality from Palestinian propaganda. For turf more genuinely described as “Palestinian territory,” look not to the Jerusalem suburbs, but rather, to the columns and newsrooms of the New York Times itself.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

 

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