Israel’s right to exist is now debatable, according to Op-ed page editors at The New York Times, where, it seems, no column excoriating Israel is too extreme or factually flawed to pass muster.
Michael Tarazi’s October 4 piece entitled “Two Peoples, One State,” calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state was particularly shrill and mendacious. Certainly as a legal adviser to the PLO, Tarazi’s argument in favor of terminating Israel is of interest. The problem is that the argument relies on patently false assertions. In a publication that claims to be committed to accuracy, not only in its news coverage but on its opinion pages as well, the falsehoods should never have gotten by editors – and would not normally do so.
Invoking the most odious comparison in the modern lexicon – to apartheid South Africa – Tarazi’s premise, stated and restated, is that Israel is a racist country that oppresses non-Jews, blocking them from citizenship rights, and as such is morally illegitimate and should be done away with and transformed into a bi-national state. There, presumably, all people would be treated equitably.
The South African smear is a standard trope among European Israel-bashers and radical campus agitators but has generally remained in the fever swamp fringes of American debate. Its recent emergence in opinion writing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and other mainstream publications is a matter of note.
So receptive are they to the Israel-as-South-Africa allusion that Times editors ignore such obvious refutations of the slur as the fact that 23 percent of the country is non-Jewish, mainly Arab Muslims and Christians, that they are the freest “non-Jews” of the Middle East, and that members of these communities serve in the Israeli parliament, the armed forces, and the Supreme Court.
In his indictment of Israel, Tarazi makes various false statements, including the following:
“More than 400,000 Israelis live illegally in more than 150 colonies, many of which are atop Palestinian water sources.”
“Israel is offering ‘independence’ on a reservation stripped of water and arable soil…”
“[West Bank and Gaza] Palestinians must drive on separate roads, in cars bearing distinctive license plates, and only to and from designated Palestinian areas. It is illegal for a Palestinian to drive a car with an Israeli license plate. These Palestinians, as non-Jews, neither qualify for Israeli citizenship nor have the right to vote in Israeli elections. In South Africa, such an allocation of rights and privileges based on ethnic or religious affiliation was called apartheid.”
All these statements (and others) should have raised alarms for Times fact-checkers, but none did.
Beginning with the first, “colony,” of course, is another modern curse word implying an alien community established in foreign territory by an imperial power. None of this applies historically, legally, or logically to the Israeli presence. Yet the Times apparently believes it does, and concurs that the Old City of Jerusalem – including the ancient Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, as well as the Mount of Olives, Hebrew University, and Hadassah hospital on Mt. Scopus – are part of illegal Israeli “colonies,” for all are in areas of eastern Jerusalem whose residents are encompassed in Tarazi’s reference to 400,000 Israelis living in illegal “colonies.”
Tarazi’s various references to water use are also factually erroneous, including his charges that Israeli communities in the West Bank and Gaza sit “atop Palestinian water sources” and that Israel is “strip[ping]” Palestinian areas of water.
Jewish settlements, which have been built almost without exception on uninhabited land, are not “atop” private or town wells belonging to Arabs. The PLO writer evidently refers here to a familiar propaganda charge that Israel is appropriating Arab water from aquifers under the West Bank.