Trashing Israel Daily:”Israel, on the other hand, is, alas, not yet beyond existential threats. And for those who wish its destruction, Haaretz has made itself a source not only of ready ammunition but also of encouragement and even justification.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/trashing-israel-daily/
On April 2, an Israeli court convicted a member of the Palestinian security forces of the murder of 25-year-old Asher Palmer and his one-year-old son, Yonatan. The assailant had thrown a large stone through the windshield of Asher’s car, causing a fatal crash. By chance, that same day the West Bank settlement Yakir honored an Arab medic who had saved the life of a two-year-old girl after her mother’s car crashed in a similar stoning incident. The following morning, an Israeli newspaper carried a column by one of its star journalists implying that of the two Arabs connected to the crimes, the killer was the one who had acted properly while the medic was a sell-out.
According to the column, “throwing stones [at Israelis] is the birthright and duty” of Palestinians. This right, although perhaps not the duty, belonged not only to Palestinians living “in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, but also within Israel’s recognized borders.” Fulfillment of the Palestinian “right and duty” was lagging, the columnist lamented, because it was insufficiently encouraged by Palestinian officials due to “inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and…personal gains.”
The newspaper that carried this column was Israel’s most prestigious: Haaretz. Like the New York Times or Le Monde or the prestige newspapers of many other Western countries, it is left-of-center. But Haaretz is more politically engaged than any of them. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, approvingly calls it “easily the most liberal newspaper in Israel and arguably the most important liberal institution in [the] country.”
That Haaretz is critical of the government is an old story: “Golda Meir once said that the only government that Haaretz ever supported was the British Mandate,” Remnick wrote. But since the early 1990s, when management of the paper was assumed by Amos Schocken, it has moved further to the left—so much so that it has made itself a liability to the ceaseless struggle for survival of “the land” that its name evokes.
The author of the column exhorting stone-throwing was Haaretz’s leading correspondent in the Palestinian territories, Amira Hass. Her writings, together with those of two other reporter-columnists, Gideon Levy and Akiva Eldar, constitute the paper’s signature. Hass has chosen to make her home among the Palestinians for the better part of two decades; three years in Gaza, the balance in Ramallah. In a profile in the Independent, the sharply anti-Israel Robert Fisk adulated: “Amira Hass is among the bravest of reporters, her daily column in Haaretz ablaze with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only when you meet her, however, do you realize the intensity—the passion—of her work.”
