The Most Nonsensical Attack on Israel (Yet)

The Most Nonsensical Attack on Israel (Yet)

Seth Mandel 


Twitter has been accused of helping to coarsen the culture, increase partisan rage, and further erode the line separating the personal and the political. But there is at least one advantage for writers: Twitter can be an outlet for a curious or ironic observation that has no shelf life and no coherence beyond 140 characters. Some thoughts are tweet-appropriate and nothing more.

Which means there is really no excuse for the New York Times’s decision to publish today’s installment of its ongoing Jodi Rudoren experiment. Rudoren has earned her share of corrections for false claims that editors really should have caught, but everyone makes mistakes, and being dropped into the middle of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the education beat perhaps deserves an adjustment period. But today’s story is not one that gets a few facts wrong or leans heavily toward the Palestinian side of the issue. It’s based on a nonsensical thesis that makes the paper look so desperate to attack Israel that it will throw everything it can find at the Jewish state.

Under the headline “Israelis See Ticking Clock, and Alternate Approaches, on Iran and Palestinians,” Rudoren discusses the supposed hypocrisy on the part of Israel’s government because it opposed the interim deal with Iran but supports interim deals with the Palestinians. (As a side note, this is a lesson the Israelis learned the hard way: they will be criticized for striking agreements and criticized for not striking agreements. It almost literally, as Joe Biden might say, doesn’t matter what Israel does in the opinion of the Western press.)

I’ll let the Times put forth this thesis in Rudoren’s own words:

Israeli leaders on Monday condemned the interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program as an exercise in appeasement by the Western powers and a delaying tactic by Iran. Yet many of them see the same strategy of interim confidence-building steps as the only realistic route to resolving their long-running conflict with the Palestinians.

Israel is outraged that, under the deal signed Sunday, Iran is not required to stop enriching uranium or to dismantle centrifuges while negotiating a final agreement with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany. At the same time, Israel continues to build West Bank settlements while negotiating with the Palestinians, prompting similar outrage from the international community.

Easing economic sanctions against Iran, Israel argues, will only remove the pressure that brought Tehran to the table in the first place. Yet Israel — as well as the United States — sees initiatives to improve the Palestinian economy as a critical companion to the political and security discussions.

Because so much gets written about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and because of the media’s blatant left-wing bias, consumers of news on the Middle East are often bombarded with exceptionally dimwitted thoughts. It’s more than just the Bibi Derangement Syndrome that makes even rational liberals lose their grip on reality when Benjamin Netanyahu is involved. It’s a propensity on the part of some news organizations to erase the line between the news and editorial pages and go on the attack any time Israeli officials have the temerity to speak up for their country’s interests.

And yet, today’s Times piece is something of a landmark achievement. It gets everything wrong: the history of the peace process, the Iran deal, international law. There is not a word that redeems the paper’s decision to publish this assault on reason.

The piece suggests Israel is opposed to the concept of an interim agreement with Iran, when that is false. Israel doesn’t like the terms of this agreement, so it opposes it. Rudoren’s attempt to shame Israel for trying to improve the Palestinian economy in the absence of a deal is more proof that for Israel, no good deed goes unpunished. It’s also difficult to know what Rudoren could have possibly been thinking when she compared Jewish settlements in the West Bank to a genocidal regime’s march toward attaining nuclear weapons.

Similarly, the piece suggests Israel is opposed to the concept of a final-status agreement with the Palestinians–also verifiably false. Israel has repeatedly offered comprehensive deals to the Palestinians. Ehud Barak’s offer was followed by a Palestinian intifada. Ehud Olmert’s offer was followed by Palestinian ceasefire violations and the Gaza war. The Palestinians are now in the habit of requiring minor agreements to even begin negotiations. Blaming Netanyahu for this is typical of the Times, and typically daft.

The Times piece also, in the third paragraph, compares the Palestinian drive for statehood to the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons–the latter being a means to destroy Israel. The Palestinians should be insulted by this, but later in the article Palestinian officials embrace the comparison. Perhaps they agree.

Each time the Western press publishes a delusional attack on Israel based on illogic and false equivalence, serious analysts of the Middle East wonder how it could possibly be topped. But the media, as today’s story shows, will always find a way.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/26/the-most-nonsensical-attack-on-israel-yet/