As of January 31^st the same short article also appeared on the website’s ‘Middle East’ page.

The report gives an initial account of the incident itself which has not been updated to include later developments such as the discovery of a letter.

“Indian media reports said investigators had found an envelope with a letter addressed to the Israeli ambassador in the street describing the low-intensity explosion as a “trailer” and making references to “Iranian martyrs” Qassem Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. “We can end your life, anytime, anywhere,” the letter read.”

The article also promotes two links to BBC reports dating from February 2012:

“An Israeli diplomat’s wife was wounded when a bomb was planted under her car in New Delhi nine years ago.

On the same day, 13 February 2012, a bomb was also planted under an Israeli diplomatic car in the Georgian capital Tbilisi but it failed to detonate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of being behind both the incidents in 2012 – allegations denied by Tehran.

Who was behind 2012 Israel embassy attacks?”

Not for the first time (see ‘related articles’ below) the BBC erases from audience view the fact that that the investigation into the 2012 attack in New Delhi resulted in India’s police concluding that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were behind the attack. The BBC also omits any mention of the related Red Notice put out by Interpol in March 2012 or the findings of additional investigations.

If – as is apparently the case – the BBC considers the February 2012 attack to be relevant background to this latest event at the Israeli embassy in Delhi, it should obviously include the full story rather than what amounts to little more than amplification of Iranian denials of involvement.

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The post The BBC News website’s partial bomb story background appeared first on CAMERA UK.

The first attempt by the Palestinian writer to sell credulous Guardian readers on this premise is found in this early paragraph:

On 6 January, Issa Amro, a UN-recognised human rights defender, and the founder and coordinator of Youth Against Settlements, a Hebron-based group, was convicted in an Israeli military court near Ramallah on six counts. He was first put on trial in 2016 on 18 charges dating back to 2010, including incitement, insulting a soldier and participating in a march without a permit.

However, as the Reuters article he uses as his source makes clear, Amro, an ‘activist’ from Hebron, wasn’t found guilty of merely “insulting a soldier”.  Rather, the charge was for “assaulting” an Israeli.

Here’s the relevant sentence from the Reuters article:

Amro denied the charges, which included protesting without a permit, obstructing Israeli soldiers’ activities in the flashpoint city of Hebron and assaulting a Jewish settler.

Whether Shehadeh’s error was intentional or not is impossible for us to know.  However, it’s telling that the same Reuters article also adds the following, on additional charges by the Palestinian Authority against Amro:

Amnesty said the PA has accused [Amro] of “disturbing public order” and “insulting higher authorities” over Facebook posts in 2017 critical of Palestinian leaders.

So, the Guardian contributor somehow managed to conflate the charges, obfuscating from readers that it was the Palestinian Authority that charged Amro with “insulting” authorities, not the Israelis.

The op-ed’s framing continues:

Following the violent period of the second intifada (2000-2004), Israel restricted Palestinian movement by placing more than 500 roadblocks throughout the West Bank. Now that the country is living through one of the least violent periods in its history, what justification remains for keeping most of these restrictions in place?

This is misleading in two respects.

First, CAMERA UK has continually documented that, whilst the number of casualties resulting from terror attacks has been relatively low, the number of actual terror attacks (the goal of which of course is to kill Israelis) remain high. In 2020, there were over 1500 terror attacks – based on reports from Israel’s Security Agency.

Also, it’s likely that the reason why the number of Israeli fatalities is so low – despite the high number of attacks – is directly related to the security measures (including roadblocks) Shehadeh complains about.

The op-ed continues:

The most extreme example of these obstacles to movement is in the Old City of Hebron, a once vibrant centre for trade and commerce serving a population of 220,000 Palestinians from the city and its surrounding villages. This historic area is now termed H2, home to several hundred Jewish settlers – in violation of international law – where in one square kilometre there are 21 permanently staffed checkpoints.

However, the Israeli presence in the historic Jewish city was agreed to by the Palestinian Authority under the terms of Oslo II, which involved an IDF withdrawal, in the late 90s, from 80% of the city.  The agreement divided Hebron into two sectors, H1 (Palestinian control) and H2 (Israeli control).  As H2 only represents 20% of the total territory of the Hebron, it means that Jews are barred from 80% of the city.

Shehadeh then argues that there is no legitimate “security rationale” for “extreme restrictions in the Old City of Hebron, which ignores that the city has long been a hub of terror.  During what’s known as the Stabbing Intifada, in 2015-16, dozens of attacks occurred in Hebron. And, as recently as 2018, Israel’s Shin Bet uncovered an extensive Hamas network in the city, which was planning attacks, raising funds and facilitating the group’s infiltration into the city’s charitable and municipal institutions.

The op-ed continues:

It takes strong conviction to face such injustice and respond to it with nonviolence. This kind of resistance marked the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993).

The claim that the First Intifada was “non-violent” has been refuted on these pages previously. In fact, roughly 160 Israelis were killed and thousands more wounded during that period of “non-violent resistance”, in addition to the thousands of Palestinians murdered by Palestinian vigilantes accusing them of being ‘collaborators’.

Shehadeh then adds:

After 2000, many have tried shooting and stabbing soldiers and settlers. 

The suggestion that ‘only’ soldiers and settlers were targeted by Palestinian terrorists during the Second Intifada is of course a lie, as most attacks targeted civilians (roughly 70% of the total fatalities), and most were within the Green Line.

Finally, let’s address Shehadeh characterisation of Amro, the protagonist in his tale, as some sort of progressive ‘human rights activist’.   First, as the late Petra Marquardt-Bigman documented, Amro tweeted explicitly antisemitic content.

Amro, who’s been framed as the “Palestinian Ghandi” by other media outlets has also rooted for a Third Intifada on social media repeatedly.  His group ‘Youth Against the Settlements’ referred to Palestinian terrorists killed by Israeli forces while they were in the act of carrying out an attack as “martyrs“, and has engaged in incitement with the libel that thousands of settlers were “storming the Ibrahimi Mosque” in Hebron.

Of course, the mosque is known by Jews as the Cave of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs), and it is considered Judaism’s second holiest site.  So, even if those Jews shown in the photo entered the building, they were simply visiting a site that’s extremely holy to Jews.  The “storming the mosque” libel has been used for generations – usually in connection to Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – to incite violence against Jews.

As such, it’s not difficult to understand why Amro would be charged with incitement, and why the Guardian op-ed’s claim that he’s a “peace activist” is absurd.

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The post Guardian op-ed shills for faux progressive “human rights defender” Issa Amro appeared first on CAMERA UK.

) as follows: [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Franks: “Joe Biden’s number one priority, he’s consistently said, is trying to control the awful damage of the Coronavirus. But it’s in the nature of being the most powerful man in the world that he will not be able to stop foreign policy disputes crowding in. We’re spending a bit of time looking at those challenges abroad and today we’ll return to one of those which has longest eluded resolution: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So what effect can a Biden presidency have? Let’s begin with the Palestinian view. Their representative in London is Husam Zomlot.”

Those familiar with the frequent appearances of Husam Zomlot in BBC content would not be surprised by his often less than diplomatic tone, his frequently cavalier relationship with facts and his dogmatic interpretations of ‘international law’. Nevertheless – despite the BBC being obliged to provide “duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding” – Franks’ refrained from challenging Zomlot’s inaccuracies and talking points. 

Zomlot: “Number one we hope he would clear the floor completely clean from the aberration of Mr Trump. As he started doing day one, reversing all the illegal acts by Mr Trump internally in the US, we need the same to happen vis-à-vis Palestine and the political settlement process.”

Franks: “You’re not surely talking about him having to move the US embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv?”

Zomlot: “I am, definitely, because the issue of Jerusalem is very well defined in international law. This is not just…”

Franks [interrupts]: “I understand the argument but I mean it’s…it’s…he’s hardly going to do that, is he?”

Zomlot: “That’s up to him but that will not be really a cleaning up and starting afresh. That will leave mess behind. It’s an international city and its fate can only be decided by final negotiations. These are the US long-held position and policies and reverting back to them would be highly recommended to move us forward. But it’s not just Jerusalem that Trump has ransacked. It’s every issue. The issue of refugees, settlements were declared by his State Department to be not contrary to international law; name it! Annexation was endorsed and supported by the administration. So there is a lot to be reversed, to be corrected and we truly, truly look forward to that. This is not correcting it for the sake of Palestine. This is correcting all the bogus [unintelligible] international [unintelligible].”

Zomlot’s portrayal of Jerusalem is “an international city” is taken from from the 1947 UNGA Partition Plan proposal which was of course rejected by the Arabs, including Palestinians, at the time and hence became irrelevant. So why did Franks not challenge that claim? The answer to that question is found in a 2013 decision published by the now defunct BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee which shows just how close the BBC’s approach on the topic of Jerusalem is to that of the PLO.

“The [BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards] Committee noted that while there is no expectation that in a two-state solution West Jerusalem would become Palestinian territory, a UN resolution passed in 1947 has not been rescinded. It calls for the whole of Jerusalem to be an international city, a corpus separatum (similar to the Vatican City), and in that context, technically, West Jerusalem is not Israeli sovereign territory. “

Franks’ failure to challenge Zomlot’s claim that “[t]hese are the US long-held position and policies” is – sadly – not surprising either. Ever since the topic of the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem first arose, a recurrent theme in BBC reporting has been promotion of the claim that President Trump “reversed decades of American foreign policy by recognising the ancient city as Israel’s capital”.  That inaccurate claim erases from audience view several resolutions on the topic passed by the US Congress and Senate over the last 30 years, including the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act.

Franks: “However far you are keen for there to be movement, I mean the Secretary of State – his nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken – has said that he wants to move forward on the two-state solution, do you accept that the priority inevitably for Joe Biden when it comes to the Middle East won’t be the Palestinians and it will be Iran, for the time being?”

Neither did Franks’ failure to challenge Zomlot’s anachronistic claim concerning the ‘centrality’ of “the Palestinian issue” come as much of a surprise given the approach taken by the BBC in its coverage of the Abraham Accords.

Zomlot: “It will be a gravely missed opportunity and like Mr Biden has learned himself over the years of being a US official, the Palestinian issue is the central issue in the region and all issues are interconnected. So we are hoping that the issue of Palestine is a priority and I believe the base that has brought President Biden to the White House want to see peace prevailing there and therefore we hope that the administration will pick on this issue early on.”

Listeners to this item did however discover that – despite its silence on the topic to date – the BBC is in fact aware of the supposedly upcoming Palestinian elections.

Franks: “Do you accept that they’re unlikely to make any real move until after…I mean we’ve got the Israeli elections in the next couple of months but also much delayed elections for both the Palestinian National Assembly but also the presidency. And again the administration isn’t really likely to make a big move until they know the outcome of that.”

Zomlot: “Yeah and that give us time to reset the Palestinian-American bilateral relations. We need to re-open the consulate general in Jerusalem – occupied East Jerusalem. We need to reopen our mission in Washington, we need to resume funding and we need to make sure that the relationship is grounded on mutual interests and values not subjected to the Congress or the Israeli veto for that matter. We need to make sure that the political process starts on the right foot. First, it needs to be around international resolutions and second it has to be multi-lateral mediations not excluding other players. Elections in Palestine is very important. We will wait for elections in Israel but in the meantime we have a huge homework to do that once the US starts investing in the political process it will be the absolute right investment.”

Franks made no effort to inform listeners of potential legal barriers to some of Zomlot’s wish-list – including those presented by the Palestinian Authority’s policy of paying convicted terrorists. He even failed to remind audiences that the ‘exclusion’ of the Palestinians since December 2017 came entirely at their initiative.

Franks: “Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission in London.”

The item continued with an interview with Uzi Arad which raised some interesting points in itself but did not relieve listeners of any of the inaccurate impressions promoted by Zomlot.

Throughout the four years of the Trump administration the BBC conducted numerous interviews with – and received at least one briefing from – Husam Zomlot. Its journalists should therefore by this time be capable of challenging his somewhat limited repertoire of talking points. Nevertheless, even experienced BBC presenters such as Tim Franks continue to refrain from asking the challenging questions which would actually help BBC audiences understand why the Israel-Palestinian conflict is still – as Franks put it – “one of those which has longest eluded resolution”.

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The post Jerusalem: where BBC and PLO approaches meet appeared first on CAMERA UK.

If you’re looking for examples of spin in B’tselem’s latest anti-Israel document, in which the organization slings around the inflammatory terms “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy,” there are plenty.

Consider, as one small example, the report’s charge that Israel has built “hundreds of communities for Jewish citizens – yet not a single one for Palestinian citizens.” The sentence was written to sound as damning as possible, which increases its shock value, but also left the authors in the uncomfortable position of having to immediately rebut their own falsehood. “The exception,” B’tselem admits in the very next sentence, “is a handful of towns and villages built to concentrate the Bedouin population.”

Which is to say, Israel built “not a single” community for Palestinians, except for all the ones it did build: Rahat, Kuseife, Shaqib al-Salam, Ar’arat an-Naqab, Lakiya, Tel as-Sabi, Hura, Tirabin al-Sana, Mulada, Abu Krinat, Bir Hadaj, Qasr al-Sir, Makhul, Umm Batin. It’s Orwellian newspeak: None, but many. A lie, but with the truth appended as a throwaway-line.

This is far from the worst distortion in the document. The big lie is conveyed in the report’s title, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” But the semantic gamesmanship here is revealing. What should be straightforward, B’tselem makes a point of muddling. And so it goes throughout the report, with the result being a mess of factoids, fibs, and fraudulence meant to inflame and misinform, and which tells us more about the organization than about Israel.

The other side of the ledger – B’tselem’s comment about communities for Jews —is hardly better. It’s true that Israel has established hundreds of Jewish communities. But the reason for that isn’t nefarious, as B’tselem suggests. These towns and cities were needed to house immigrants numbering in the millions — Holocaust survivors, Middle Eastern Jews escaping persecution in Arab countries, Jews who wanted to live near their holy sites — absorbed by a country serving as a haven for Jews everywhere. It isn’t supremacy. It’s sanctuary.

B’tselem’s Anti-Zionism

This takes us to the report’s most brazen spin. B’tselem casts the very existence of a Jewish state open for Jewish immigration as evidence of “Jewish supremacy.” Israel’s mission of facilitating the entry of Jews, which is described in the country’s Declaration of Independence in the same sentence that promises equal social and political rights to all religions and races, is according to B’tselem one of the “methods the Israeli regime uses to advance Jewish supremacy.”

It reads like a bad joke. After the Holocaust, the tattered remains of the world’s Jewish population, reminded yet again of the awful repercussions of their powerlessness, and conscious of the fact that the world’s doors were closed to them (or worse) as genocide loomed, coalesced around the idea of a sovereign state where they could exist without persecution, and where Jews scattered across the world would be able to take refuge. For this — and here is the sad punchline — they’re accused of being Jewish supremacists. It would be no less absurd to insist that historically black colleges and universities, meant to provide what an oppressed community had been denied, were founded in the service of “black supremacy.”

The idea that Jews see themselves as superior, though, is an old antisemitic trope. It was recently repackaged by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who wrote a book on Jewish Supremacism and a PhD thesis on “Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism,” and now again it’s invoked by B’tselem.

To be fair to B’tselem, the organization isn’t likely to be influenced by the likes of David Duke (even if it did once employ a Holocaust denier). Rather, its talk of “supremacy” seems meant, in part, to appropriate language from the American conversation about race, with the aim of attracting American progressives. If you hate white supremacy, B’tselem is trying to telegraph, you should hate Israel, too. It would be a vile and ahistorical charge even if it didn’t evoke an antisemitic canard.

But the repetition of “supremacy” isn’t only meant to appeal to American activists. The more important role it plays in the report is as a basis for B’tselem’s other accusation: the slur that Israel is an apartheid state. A complex geopolitical situation does not, of course, equate to apartheid. But a complex geopolitical based on racial “supremacy”? That sounds closer. B’tselem makes the link between its twin accusations explicit it its report, stating that “a regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime.”

Citizenship Discriminates

If you look closely at the report, though, it becomes clear that most of it focuses on the mundane reality that non-citizens don’t have the same rights as citizens, just as non-citizens of any other country don’t have the same rights as citizens. Citizenship, by definition, discriminates.

In Israel, Jewish and Arab citizens can vote in national elections. Non-citizens can’t. Jewish and Arab citizens can freely enter their country. Non-citizens are regulated. Jewish and Arab citizens have Israeli passports. Non-citizens don’t. Not exactly foundations of apartheid, although B’tselem holds them up as such.

For a visualization of just how much of the report focuses on differences between citizens and non-citizens, consider the image below. The text in blue — a majority of the report — discusses non-citizens. (The image excludes the report’s introduction and conclusion, which reiterate and frame its arguments.)

As importantly, both the portion focusing on citizens and that focusing on non-citizens are marred by egregious distortions meant to support the document’s charges.

Before examining those, though, it may be helpful to understand who, exactly, are the citizens and non-citizens mentioned in the report. After all, in apartheid South Africa, a distinction between citizens and non-citizens was conjured from thin air, based entirely on race and a doctrine of oppression. Citizenship was categorically stripped from the Black majority by the white minority, an act of disenfranchisement meant to segregate and solidify the existing system of white supremacy.

The context in Israel is vastly different, and while unique, resembles the founding of India and Pakistan, where the land was partitioned to carve out a Muslim-majority state from the Hindu-majority one. There are also similarities to Yugoslavia, which split into several states, allowing different ethnic and religious groups to steer their own course. In today’s Slovenia, for example, ethnic Slovenes make up a majority of the population. The Serb minority there has the same rights as the majority. Serbs abroad who aren’t citizens of Slovenia, though, obviously do not share the rights that come with citizenship.

Similarly, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not citizens of Israel.

This isn’t a profound observation. They don’t live in Israel. They weren’t meant to become part of Israel in 1947 under a United Nations plan to partition British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. They didn’t become part of Israel in 1948, when Egypt and Jordan conquered the two territories. And they didn’t become citizens in 1967, when Israel pushed out the Egyptian and Jordanian armies but didn’t annex the territories.

In the years after 1967, as Palestinian leaders refused to negotiate with Israel and instead vowed to destroy it, they didn’t become citizens. Nor did they become Israeli citizens in the 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed agreements designed to give Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza self-government and move the parties toward a resolution of their conflict.

Finally, they didn’t become citizens in the decades that followed, when Palestinian leaders engaged in negotiations with Israel but turned their back on multiple peace plans that would have created an independent Palestinian state in which West Bank and Gaza Palestinians would become citizens.

Israel never annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The international community doesn’t want Israel to annex the territories. And the Palestinians don’t want Israel to annex them. Indeed, the prevailing idea in the international community today is similar to that drawn up by the United Nations 70 years ago: That the two national movements between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea would be best served by having two states: a Jewish state with a Jewish majority alongside a Palestinian state with an Arab majority. It wasn’t apartheid then. And although B’tselem casts the division between Israel and the territories as evidence of Jewish supremacy, it isn’t apartheid now.

B’tselem omits this background information from the report. “We do not provide a historical review or an evaluation of the Palestinian and Jewish national movements,” they say. This might seem surprising, since B’tselem does cover relevant history in other, less-consequential reports, and since the historical context would clearly help readers weigh the group’s indictment.

But it is a convenient omission. To fully inform readers, after all, would help them understand that the political situation in the Holy Land is a result of war, peace, and comprise, and not, as B’tselem insists, Israeli “designs” and “engineering” in the service of “supremacy.”

Falsehoods and Distortions

Again, much of B’tselem’s report simply repeats that, as non-citizens, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians don’t have citizenship rights in Israel while Israelis of all ethnicities and religions — any combination of Jew, Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, Samaritan, Assyrian, and so on — do.

To support its accusation of apartheid, for example, B’tselem states that “the Gaza Strip is home to about two million Palestinians, also denied political rights” (emphasis added), as if Gazans — who live outside of Israel, who are not citizens of Israel, who had elections of their own in 2005, and who voted for the antisemitic terror organization Hamas — would somehow be expected to vote in Israel’s elections. They are “denied political rights” in the same way Israelis are denied political rights in the Kingdom of Jordan, or Canadians are denied political rights in the United States. Non-citizens aren’t citizens.

And what of the portion of the report that does focus on Israel’s Arab citizens (or as B’tselem chooses to call them, “Palestinian citizens of Israel”)? The organization charges that members of this population “do not enjoy the same rights as Jewish citizens by either law or practice – as detailed further in this paper.”

But it’s not detailed in the paper. Incredibly, B’tselem does not point to a single provision of any law that, apartheid-like, denies individual rights to Israel’s Arab citizens.

What they do instead, as they purport to describe “four major methods the Israeli regime uses to advance Jewish supremacy” is spin, distort, and manipulate readers.

Immigration

The first “method” B’tselem names is immigration. Jews “are entitled to immigrate to Israel at any time and receive Israeli citizenship,” the report laments, while “non-Jews have no right to legal status in Israeli-controlled areas. Granting status is at the almost complete discretion of officials.”

But this isn’t supremacy or apartheid. It doesn’t reflect any legal differentiation between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. Immigration policy, after all, doesn’t deal with the rights of citizens but instead focuses on non-citizens abroad.

While the organization clearly wants readers to believe otherwise, preferential immigration policies are actually not uncommon in the world. As Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein have explained, “It is a recognized European norm that a nation-state can maintain official ties with its ‘kin’ outside its borders and treat them preferentially in certain areas, including immigration and naturalization.” The authors name Ireland, Finland, Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia as other examples of countries that offer “privileged access to rights of residence and immigration for ethno-cultural kin groups.”

A notable difference between those countries and Israel is that none of their kin groups had recently endured the worst genocide in history, as the Jews did prior to Israeli independence, or mass expulsion from countries in which they had lived for centuries, as Jews did shortly afterward. And yet, with its comments on immigration, B’tselem wants to show us that Israel is guilty of “Jewish supremacy.” What it actually shows us is that B’tselem effectively denies Israel’s right to exist as a haven for Jews.

This is the grand distortion in B’tselem’s section on immigration. But as is the case throughout the report, the organization plays other linguistic games, too.

Conflating Citizens and Non-Citizens

The report claims that “Palestinian citizens of Israel or residents of East Jerusalem can easily relocate to the West Bank” but that “they risk their rights and status in doing so.”

This is false. With a sleight of hand meant to mislead, B’tselem lumps “residents of East Jerusalem” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” two distinct groups with two distinct sets of rights. The latter and larger group, as citizens of Israel, do not risk their “rights and status” if they relocate to the West Bank. Indeed, plenty of Arab Israelis live in predominantly Jewish parts of east Jerusalem, territory described in the report as being part of the West Bank, with no loss of rights of status.

And within this manipulation is another one. B’tselem tells readers that Arabs in east Jerusalem universally risk their rights by moving away; and elsewhere that they “do not hold Israeli passports”; and elsewhere that “they can vote in municipal elections but not for parliament”; and elsewhere that they “are defined not as citizens but as permanent residents of Israel” whose status “may be revoked at any time.” But this isn’t entirely true.

Arab residents of East Jerusalem, who held Jordanian citizenship when Israel reunified the city in 1967, were formally given the option to apply for Israeli citizenship. And despite pressure from within Arab society not to apply, a small but growing number, over 20,000, have indeed become citizens. They hold Israeli passports, they vote for parliament, and their status cannot be revoked.

In other words, B’tselem falsifies the situation of nearly two million Arab Israelis, mischaracterizes the status of tens of thousands of Jerusalemites, and neglects to tell readers about the path to citizenship for the Arab residents of Jerusalem. Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of accusations about Jewish supremacy and apartheid?

Jews, Arabs, and “Crowded Enclaves”

B’tselem also argues, in another of its four sections meant to prove Jewish supremacy, that Arab citizens of Israel are “corralled into small, crowded enclaves.” Here again, the organization dramatically misrepresents the status of Israel’s Arab citizens.

In Israel, the towns and cities with the highest population density are Jewish. Seven Israeli cities, for example, have a population density of over 10,000/km². Not one is Arab.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are 16 towns with over 5000 residents that have a population density of less than 1000/km². Five of them are Arab. Even more striking is the distribution of the next group of low-density communities – those with a population density above 1000/km² but below 2000/km². Of these 41 locales, a vast majority, 29, are Arab. Overall, according to a recent study, the average population density of Jewish towns and cities in Israel is double that of Arab communities.

There are, of course, Arabs who live in densely packed areas. But B’tselem tells its audience something entirely different: that Israel’s Arabs, in general, are “corralled” into crowded enclaves. It is a lie. Because, again, the truth doesn’t do much to support the organization’s inflammatory thesis.

Admissions Committees

The section about “crowded enclaves” again misrepresents when claiming that an Israeli law allows small towns to “reject Palestinian applicants on grounds of ‘cultural incompatibility,’” which “effectively prevents Palestinian citizens from living in communities designated for Jews.”

Contrary to B’tselem’s insinuation, the admissions committee law, which applies only to communities on Israel’s periphery with 400 or fewer residents, does not allow towns to reject Arab applicants as Palestinian and ergo “culturally incompatible.” On the contrary, it explicitly forbids committees from considering “race, religion, gender, nationality, disability, personal status, age, parenthood, sexual orientation, country of origin, political-party opinion or affiliation.” B’tselem unsurprisingly conceals this fact.

The law is nonetheless controversial. What’s to stop an admissions committee from rejecting a Palestinian — or a Mizrahi Jew, homosexual, or Likud supporter — on the basis of a protected characteristic while claiming some other reason for the rejection?

The law may indeed be subject to abuse. As in other countries, discrimination does exist in Israel. But there is legal precedent on the side of Arabs and others who might be wrongfully rejected. Israel’s Supreme Court in 2011 ruled in favor of an Arab family whose application for residency was rejected by the town of Rakefet’s admissions committee, and required the town to accommodate the family. B’tselem unsurprisingly conceals this fact, too.

Controversial or not, a law that explicitly bars discrimination based on race, ethnicity and religion, and whose anti-discrimination provisions are enforced by the Supreme Court, is not proof of “apartheid.” And it does not, as B’tselem claims, “effectively prevent” Palestinians from living in small towns. As the case of Rakefet underscores, discrimination might exist, but it is also illegal, and the prohibition is enforced by Israeli courts.

And More…

The report is peppered with other distortions.

* B’tselem insists, for example, that “the West bank has been annexed in practice.” The phrase is legally meaningless and, worse yet, absurd. Israel has not claimed sovereignty over the West Bank. On the contrary, has attempted in multiple rounds of peace talks since 2000 to facilitate an Israeli withdrawal from, and Palestinian sovereignty over, most of the territory. The peace and statehood offers are another inconvenient fact concealed by B’tselem.

* Speaking about Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, B’tselem states that Israel’s “regime” governs “the entire area and the people living in it” — a particularly strange thing to say about the Gaza Strip, which in actuality is governed by Hamas, an internationally designated terror group sworn to Israel’s destruction.

* B’tselem persists, claiming that Israel continues to control “nearly every aspect of life in Gaza” from outside. Again, it does not.  As two legal experts noted in a 2010 paper,

Israel does not and cannot appoint or dismiss local Gazan governing officials. Indeed, Israel strongly opposes the current Hamas regime in Gaza. Israel does not administer government services in Gaza. It does not have police in Gaza. It does not levy taxes in Gaza. It does not provide social services in Gaza. It has no courts in Gaza. It operates no schools in Gaza. It establishes no governing structures in Gaza and appoints no officials. Were Israel to issue orders to the government or population of Gaza, one can safely assume such orders would be ignored.

By contrast, the Palestinian Authority, first under Fatah, and then under Hamas, is fully able to exercise its authority in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has police forces, courts, and jails. It operates schools, electronic media and social services. It regulates business activities and establishes banks and maintains land registries. It levies taxes. It controls its own borders. It even imposes a dress code. In sum, it has a functioning and fully independent local civil government, buttressed by armed forces.

* Elsewhere, B’tselem excludes Gaza from its claim of Israeli control, stating that “Jewish citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding the Gaza Strip).” And yet this, too, is false. Jewish Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian-ruled sections of the West Bank, let alone buying a home in West Bank cities like Jenin, Ramallah, or Nablus.

* B’tselem states that “all settlements are closed military zones that Palestinians are forbidden from entering without a permit,” and in its next sentence, that “Israel has established more than 280 settlements in the West Bank (East Jerusalem included).” But per B’tselem’s own definitions in the report, this is doubly false. What B’tselem describes as settlements in east Jerusalem are not, in fact, closed military zones. And settlements in general are not closed to those B’tselem describes as Palestinians citizens of Israel.

* B’tselem insists that “Israel denies Palestinians political rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.” It also states that “Palestinians in the Occupied Territories … are not allowed to demonstrate.” In fact, Israeli Jews and Arabs alike share the same rights to free speech and free association. And Israel neither grants nor denies such rights to the vast majority of Palestinians in the territories, who answer to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Redefining Apartheid to Remove the Jewish State

Apartheid is clearly defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as meaning inhumane acts — atrocities like murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, illegal imprisonment, torture, and rape — that are committed in order to maintain a regime of systematic oppression and domination “by one racial group over any other racial group.”

The B’tselem report does not, and cannot, document any such thing. Instead, the organization points to Israel’s role as a refuge for Jews, its immigration policy, the large number of towns built to house Jewish immigrants, the (generally low) population density of Arab towns, the fact that Israel hasn’t annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the fact that the residents of these territories aren’t treated as citizens, the provisions of an interim peace agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinians, and a basket of distortions and outright falsehoods, pretending that these amount to supremacy and apartheid. (B’tselem goes so far as to protest that the separation between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza “thwarts … resistance” — a term that in practice has meant suicide bombing targeting Jewish civilians.)

It is absurd and libelous.

Even B’tselem inadvertently admits that its report fails to meet the definition of apartheid. While the Rome Statute refers to crimes to further oppression “by one racial group over any other racial group,” B’tselem, in a passage admitting fundamental differences between apartheid South Africa and the Jewish state, says race isn’t involved: “The division in South Africa was based on race and skin color, while in Israel it is based on nationality and ethnicity,” the organization states.

As noted above, most of the B’tselem report indeed refers to divisions based on nationality. This isn’t apartheid. It is the nature of citizenship.

And as also noted above, Israel doesn’t divide based on ethnicity. It is, rather, a multi-ethnic country in which all citizens have the same individual rights. Arabs vote in Israel’s election. They are represented in its parliament, have been government ministers, represent the country as diplomats. They are Supreme Court justices. They serve in the Israeli army and hold senior positions. They work as doctors side-by-side with Jews, earn college degrees alongside Jews, recreate alongside Jews, and live alongside Jews.

Israel can be a messy place geopolitically. Due to a history of rejection by its neighbors and wars driven by that rejection, the country’s borders haven’t been finalized. And in the absence of finalized borders, it has built settlements in the West Bank. But it has also repeatedly offered to dismantle settlements, withdraw from almost all of the West Bank, and draw borders that separate it and a Palestinian state.

Not that B’tselem seems particularly concerned with a Palestinian state. As underscored by its protest over Israel’s immigration policy and its suggestion that this reflects “Jewish supremacy,” the organization has effectively come out as an opponent of a Jewish state. The report’s title might echo David Duke’s far-right rhetoric about “Jewish supremacism,” but the content is more a revival of a propaganda campaign from the other political extreme — the Soviet campaign to cast Zionism as racism.

The problem with B’tselem’s report, then, isn’t only the flagrant misinformation. (Unfortunately, that’s not a new phenomenon. To skew public opinion, the organization has staged footage, and has repeatedly mischaracterized Palestinians killed while attacking Israel, or killed by other Palestinians, as noncombatants killed by Israel.) It is also the immorality of the organization’s cause, which has shifted from advocating for human rights to undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state by treating Zionism as racism.

American civil rights hero Bayard Rustin has explained that “Zionism is not racism, but the legitimate expression of the Jewish people’s self determination.” Those who want to protect that self-determination must forcefully reject B’tselem’s new focus.

The post Understanding B’Tselem’s “Apartheid” Libel appeared first on CAMERA UK.

Last week a member of the public alerted us to an edition of a programme called “Dooda Jimcaha” which was aired on the BBC Somali Service radio on December 18^th 2020.

Among the contributors to that programme was the Somali MP Mohamed Omer Dalha who stated (48:00 to 48:20 here) that there is a conspiracy against Somalia by foreign countries that are interfering in the “Islamic world” propelled by “Jews running these affairs both in the West and the East”. His remarks went unchallenged by the BBC presenter.

A translation of that segment (which has been confirmed for CAMERA UK by Dr. Moshe Terdiman, Founder and director of Research on Islam and Muslims in Africa and co-founder and director of the Institute for Environmental Security and Well-being Studies) can be found here.

Clearly such antisemitic statements should have no place in BBC content, including on foreign language stations and this case once again raises questions concerning the BBC World Service’s ability to oversee the foreign language content put out in its name and ensure that it meets BBC editorial guidelines.   

The post Antisemitism goes unchallenged on BBC Somali Service radio appeared first on CAMERA UK.

“On January 15, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree calling for two sets of elections this year: legislative on May 22 and presidential on July 31. He also asked that the Palestinian National Council be reconstituted on August 31. If the elections are held, they would be the PA’s first since 2006. This is not the first time that such calls have been floated, but the new decree goes further than previous announcements.

Even so, current political dynamics raise serious doubt about whether the elections will actually be held. The PA and Hamas have offered no guarantees that the conduct of voting would be free and fair or that the outcome would be respected.”

2) Writing at the Atlantic, Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi discuss ‘The Case Against the Iran Deal’.

“Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement are sounding the alarm. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and since then, Iran has increased the quality and quantity of its uranium enrichment well beyond what the deal allows. Recently, it has even begun enriching uranium to 20 percent, a short distance away from weapons-grade. Iran, JCPOA advocates say, is closer today to producing a bomb than it was in 2015, when the deal was concluded. Only the deal’s renewal, they insist, can prevent the nightmare of a nuclear Iran. […]

Why, then, aren’t Israelis and Arabs—those with the most to lose from Iranian nuclearization—also demanding a return to the JCPOA? Why aren’t they panicking over its dissolution? The answer is simple: The JCPOA didn’t diminish the Iranian nuclear threat; it magnified it.”

3) Dr Jonathan Spyer and Dr Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak present a study of ‘Turkish Militias and Proxies’ at the JISS.

“Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, Turkey seeks to be the dominant regional force, projecting power over neighboring countries and across seas. In cooperation with a variety of bodies, most significantly the SADAT military contracting company and the Syrian National Army, Turkey has developed over the last decade a large pool of well-trained, easily deployed, and effortlessly disposable proxy forces as a tool of power projection, with a convenient degree of plausible deniability.

When combined with Turkish non-official, but governmentally directed and well-established groups such as the Gray Wolves, it becomes clear that Erdoğan now has a private military and paramilitary system at his disposal.”

4) At the Fathom Journal, ‘David Hirsh responds to a recent ‘call to reject’ the IHRA’.

“The 40 writers of the ‘call to reject’ the IHRA definition of antisemitism parade and mobilise their Israeli identities in an effort to give their position greater moral weight. Their message is aimed at licensing and encouraging their non-Jewish and non-Israeli colleagues to support a controversial position on antisemitism which the overwhelming majority of Jews and Israelis oppose.

They write not only ‘asaJew’ but also as Israelis. And not only as Jews and Israelis, but as antiracist Jews and Israelis, as though this is a special and rare subcategory. The truth is that the ‘call to reject’ position on antisemitism is opposed by the overwhelming majority of antiracist Jews and Israelis. And most Jews and Israelis, just like anybody else, are against racism. And the ‘call to reject’ position is opposed by Jews who are against racism because they’re against racism, not in spite of it. To campaign specifically against the racism that targets you yourself is not disgraceful and nor does it signify a softness on racism that targets other people.”

The post Weekend long read appeared first on CAMERA UK.

Last October CAMERA UK documented the amendment of a BBC News English language report which originally promoted inaccurate information put out by the PLO on Twitter. The PLO’s statement claimed that its then chief negotiator, the late Sae’b Erekat, had been taken to hospital in Tel Aviv – rather than to a hospital in Jerusalem as was actually the case. As noted at the time, the PLO-NAD subsequently put out another Tweet clarifying the matter.

However, it took the BBC Arabic website over three months to make the same amendment. Only after several communications from CAMERA Arabic did it correct the two reports – dating from October 18^th and November 10^th – in which the hospital’s location was inaccurately reported.

Notably, the second report replaced “Tel Aviv” with “Jerusalem” in its direct quote of the PLO’s original statement, thereby ‘correcting’ the inaccuracy in the one place it would have been legitimate to leave it standing. CAMERA Arabic takes the view that in this case it would have been best practice to report both the PLO’s inaccurate statement concerning the location of the hospital and its subsequent correction.

The post After three months BBC Arabic corrects Sae’b Erekat reports appeared first on CAMERA UK.

Despite the fact that the PA has their own Health Ministry, and has been carrying out their Oslo-mandated responsibility to provide health services, including vaccines, to their population for decades, some have argued, unpersuasively in our view, that, Article 56 of the 4th Geneva Convention nonetheless requires Jerusalem to vaccinate millions of Palestinians who aren’t citizens of the state, even, presumably, at the expense of Israeli citizens.

Though we’ve commented on this row repeatedly, particularly in response to the Guardian and BBC’s amplification of the accusation, this specific debate is now part of a larger narrative being pushed by media outlets.  Many outlets, including BBC and the Guardian, and international bodies like WHO and the UN, have argued that unequal access to the COVID vaccine is a global problem, which they’ve framed as the “threat” posed by “vaccine nationalism”.

The BBC has defined “vaccine nationalism” as a country prioritising its own citizens’ access to a vaccine above access to other countries’ citizens.  As the BBC presenter implicitly acknowledged, this includes every country in the world, as a government’s priortisation of its own citizens’ needs over citizens of other countries is one of the fundamental expectations of nationhood.

This isn’t to say that wealthier countries shouldn’t contribute aid to international efforts to fund vaccines for poorer countries, as many have already done by donating funds to the World Health Organisation’s COVAX program, or that governments shouldn’t donate any surplus vaccines to other countries. President Biden recently announced that, once there is sufficient supply in the United States, the US will be donating vaccines to countries in need.

The point is that the expectation that these governments should divert vaccines, purchased of course for their own citizens, to foreign citizens is not a sober-minded policy consideration, but an idea born of platitudes about universal brotherhood that most would likely find emotionally evocative whilst simultaneously rejecting its real world implications.

Far from representing something atavistic or sinister, what media outlets are pejoratively referring to as “vaccine nationalism” is, in reality, merely the rational expectation of citizens – especially those living in democratically-elected governments – that political leaders will fulfill one of their most basic duties: to promote the general health and welfare of their country.

Related Posts

• Yolande Knell’s contribution to the BBC’s vaccine campaign (CAMERA UK)
• Telegraph article on Abraham Accords conflates fact with (Palestinian) opinion (CAMERA UK)

The post British media find a new villain: “Vaccine Nationalism” appeared first on CAMERA UK.

’ on January 24^th was described as follows in its synopsis:

“Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein has rebuffed calls from the United Nations to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to the Palestinians. He said Israel was not under any legal obligation to vaccinate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch tells us why he disagrees.”

Presenter James Menendez introduced the item (from 00:11 here): [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Menendez: “And we’re going to start today in the Middle East and the argument over whether Israel is doing enough to ensure Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have access to Coronavirus vaccines. Last week two UN human rights experts called on Israel to provide – quote – swift and equitable access to the jabs.”

Menendez failed to name the two “experts” – both UN special rapporteurs for the notoriously anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council – Tlaleng Mofokeng and Michael Lynk. As the UN’s own material clarifies:

“Special Rapporteurs are not United Nations staff members; they do not receive a salary from the United Nations…”

As had already been the case in two previous BBC reports, Menendez made no effort to inform listeners of the obviously relevant anti-Israel record of one of the authors of that ‘call’ before continuing:

Menendez: “Israel is leading the world when it comes to the pace of its vaccination programme. The Palestinians have ordered a supply of injections but these aren’t expected to arrive for weeks. Well today the Israeli health minister Yuli Edelstein told the BBC that Israel wasn’t legally obliged to provide the vaccines for Palestinians. Here he is talking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr.”

Listeners then heard a recording of the interview previously discussed here:

THE PARTIAL SOURCES BEHIND ANDREW MARR’S BBC ONE TALKING POINTS

At 02:59 Menendez brought in his sole interviewee – Omar Shakir of ‘Human Rights Watch’ – but in breach of BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality he failed to provide listeners with any information concerning that political NGO’s “affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints” and Shakir’s own record as a supporter of the anti-Israel BDS campaign.

Menendez: “Well Omar Shakir is Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch. Does the Israeli health minister have a point when he says Israel doesn’t have to provide vaccines to the Palestinians?”

Shakir: “Yuli Epstein [sic] is absolutely wrong on the law. International humanitarian law is quite clear that Israel, as the occupying power, is responsible to ensure medical supplies, including those needed to combat pandemics, to the occupied population. Israel remains the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in fact after more than five decades of maintaining near full control over millions of Palestinians, they’ve had more time and [unintelligible] to assume responsibility for the provision of these rights. International human rights law makes quite clear that the non-discrimination and provision of the right to health should underlie Israeli policy towards Palestinians. The Oslo Accords do not erase Israel’s duty as an occupying power.”

Failing to question the claim that Israel has “near full control” over territories from which terror attacks are frequently launched against its own citizens, Menedez gave Shakir his next cue.

Menendez: “I guess there will be Israeli politicians who say they’re not occupying those areas.”

Shakir: “Look the reality is Israel maintains control over the movement of people and goods, control over the border. It controls primarily security. It controls taxation collection. It’s convenient for Israel that while it maintains all these leverages and control, side-lining the Palestinian Authority, it can’t just suddenly assign sole responsibility to the Palestinian Authority when it wants to offload its own responsibilities for the health of people under occupation.”

Menendez made no effort to point out that the Gaza Strip also has a border with Egypt or that the collection of specific taxes by Israel on behalf of the PA is in accord with agreements signed by the Palestinians. Neither did he bother to ask Shakir why, if the legal situation is as he claims, his organisation and like-minded others have not demanded that Israel supply vaccines against other illnesses throughout the past quarter century since the Oslo Accords were signed. 

Menendez: “Nevertheless, I mean he is right to say that the Palestinian Authority does need to look after its citizens and look after the health of its citizens. I mean, that’s fair isn’t it?”

Shakir: “Absolutely. Palestinian authorities do have that duty but that does not absolve Israel of its obligations. The reality here is both authorities should cooperate together to ensure that everyone receives vaccines without discrimination.”

The BBC of course knows full well that it is the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority to provide healthcare to the Gaza Strip but nevertheless Menendez provided Shakir with another cue for his baseless ‘occupation’ talking points:

Menendez: “I was talking about the Palestinian Authority; of course they govern the West Bank. But what about Gaza? Is that different because there’s no Israeli presence in Gaza? Is it up to Hamas solely to provide the vaccine there?”

Shakir: “Absolutely not. The United Nations, the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, many…ah…states consider Israel to retain the duties of an occupying power in Gaza by virtue of its control over air space, water space, border movement of peoples and goods. So it retains responsibility. That doesn’t mean that Israel has to go in and vaccinate but it does mean that it must provide vaccines, whether it be through international humanitarian organisations, whether it be providing those to the Palestinian Authority. But its obligations remain in place by virtue of its control over many aspects of everyday life.”

Menendez: “Time, of course, is pressing as regards vaccination. How can the Palestinians ensure that they get access to the vaccines they need? I mean they can’t really pursue a legal case on the basis of all that you’ve outlined. I mean that would just take far too long, wouldn’t it?”

Shakir: “Absolutely. Look I think it’s incumbent on the international community to place pressure on Israel to live up to its responsibilities under the law of occupation. The reality is Israel’s vaccinated 3.5 million of its own citizens – 40% of its population – including Israeli settlers in the West Bank but continues to leave 4.5 million Palestinians out in the cold.”

By January 24^th – the day this programme was aired – Israel had in fact vaccinated 2.6 million people (28.19%) with the first dose – not 3.5 million and 40% as inaccurately claimed by Shakir.

Menendez: “Have the Palestinian Authority – and indeed Hamas – have they bought a substantial quantity of vaccines yet?”

Shakir: “Yeah, the Palestinian Authority has said it’s reached agreements with the WHO as well as with a range of companies to supply vaccines but the Palestinian Authority health minister said that she’s not sure when the first doses will arrive.”

Menendez: “And how pressing is the need? Are cases rising?”

Shakir: “Absolutely. I mean look we have about 5,000 active cases in the Gaza Strip. You’re talking about 2 million people in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Five thousand active cases. In the West Bank – not including East Jerusalem – we’re talking about around 3,500 active cases, over 100,000 since the beginning of the crisis. We’re talking about a deadly virus and healthcare systems that have been decimated by decades of abuse of occupation.”

Listeners were not given any information which would enable them to put Shakir’s claim of 8,500 active cases among a population of 4.5 million into perspective and hence make up their own minds with regard to “how pressing” the situation is. On the day of broadcast, Israel – with a population of 9.2 million – had 69,973 active cases. Neither were listeners told that while, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, population density in the Gaza Strip was 5,453 persons/km2 in mid 2019, the population density in Bnei Brak – one of the locations in Israel most seriously affected by Covid 19 – was 26,368 persons/km2 at the end of 2017.

Menendez closed the item with another laconic and inadequate presentation of his interviewee.

Menendez: “Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch.”

Clearly the aim of this item was nothing more than to provide a platform for a representative of one of the BBC’s most quoted and promoted political NGOs to advance his talking points concerning the political campaign it joined earlier in the month. Listeners heard no alternative views to Shakir’s partisan interpretations of Israel’s supposed obligations under ‘international law’ and his many inaccurate claims went unquestioned and unchallenged.

Nevertheless, the following day the BBC chose to separately promote a clip of Shakir’s talking points on social media, further indicating that this item joins the numerous others which are evidence of the corporation’s self-conscription to one-sided promotion of a blatantly political campaign.  

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