Lastly, the settlement story buries a crucial piece of information that undermines its caricature of Netanyahu. In 2009, the Likud leader broke all precedent and implemented a ten-month freeze on settlements at the behest of President Obama to entice the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. The PA’s Abbas returned to the table only in the final month of the freeze and then insisted it be continued as a condition for his participation in talks.
These important facts would have been more prominent in the story (the former is only noted in paragraph 39, the latter not at all) if its objective were to look honestly at the issues.
President Obama’s special envoy George Mitchell had praised Netanyahu, saying: “For the first time ever, an Israeli government will stop housing approvals and all new construction of housing units and related infrastructure in West Bank settlements. That’s a positive development.”
* * * * *
In contrast to the Times’s obsessive focus on settlements, deemed by editors to be the core cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel considers the primary obstacle to peace to be Palestinian opposition to coexistence, to living side by side with a Jewish state. The profound impact of decades of virulent anti-Jewish indoctrination by Palestinian officials, schools, media, mosques, and cultural institutions opposing and demonizing Jews and Jewish nationhood is seen by Israel as the greatest threat to reconciliation and normalcy.
Never, however, has the Times offered readers a massive story – like the 3,000-plus word March 13 settlement piece — exposing the history, chronology, visual record, and impact of hate-indoctrination. An occasional story appears tied to an Israeli government campaign seeking to expose incitement, typically with the Times framing the issue not as an actual phenomenon but as an accusation or complaint lodged by an Israeli official.
In January 2014, for instance, a story headlined “Israeli Official Points to ‘Incitement’ by Palestinians” reported on anti-Israel rhetoric, citing examples and presenting the issue as a matter being promoted – or pointed to – by Israel. The page 4 article was a positive addition to the coverage, but it was an exceedingly rare reference to the subject and, again, framed the issue not as an objectively serious matter with direct bearing on achievement of a lasting peace but as an Israeli government position, a talking point disputed, in fact, by Palestinians who are quoted blaming Israel for incitement.
The daily denigration of Jews that embeds hatred in the minds of Palestinians and drives them ever further from neighborly relations with Israel and toward ferocious acts of brutality is, in effect, unreported. Such disregard of the deplorable actions of the Palestinians is of a piece with the Times’s general treatment of Arabs as a population outside the expected norms of conduct, as mere backdrop to the main drama in the conflict.
Indeed, the Times deems the bigoted rants against Jews of so little importance that editors have on occasion concealed information about anti-Jewish rhetoric, as the paper did in the case of Secretary of State Kerry’s strong denunciation of incitement in the wake of the massacre of worshipers at the Har Nof synagogue in November 2014.
As CAMERA reported, Kerry said, in part, that the atrocity was “a pure result of incitement, of calls for days of rage, of just an irresponsibility.” He termed the incitement “unacceptable.”
He went on to say: “So the Palestinian leadership must condemn this and they must begin to take serious steps to restrain any kind of incitement that comes from their language, from other people’s language, and exhibit the kind of leadership that is necessary to put this region on a different path.”
