UNSETTLING IGNORANCE: 7 THINGS NPR DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT ISRAEL’S HISTORY
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An article posted on the National Public Radio website on December 29 by International Editor Greg Myre and Middle East Editor Larry Kaplow titled “7 Things To Know About Israeli Settlements,” began as follows: “When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War, no Israeli citizens lived in the territory.”
The misleading nature of this one sentence is striking. The reason that no Jews – Israeli or otherwise – lived in the West Bank when Israel captured it in its defensive war against Jordan is that in 1947-48, Jordan killed or expelled all the Jews living there at the time.
The kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem, for instance, came under attack in late 1947, and the women and children were evacuated. Later, in 1948, the men who stayed behind to defend their communities were either slaughtered or taken prisoner by Jordanian forces. As CAMERA has detailed before, Jordan also expelled all the Jewish residents when it illegally seized eastern Jerusalem. Yet, the authors of this piece – editors at NPR – saw fit to omit this essential information and thereby deceive readers.
The next few sentences of the piece are similarly deceptive, stating:
The following year, a small group of religious Jews rented rooms at the Park Hotel in Hebron for Passover, saying they wanted to be near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites in Judaism (as well as Islam and Christianity).
The Israeli government reluctantly allowed them to stay “temporarily.” From that beginning, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews now reside in the West Bank, citing religion, history and Israel’s security among their reasons for being there.
NPR again neglects to mention that a centuries-old Jewish community in Hebron had been erased in a 1929 pogrom, its remnant expelled by the British in 1936.
Next, NPR notes that “the Palestinians, along with the rest of the world, see their presence [i.e., Jews who live in the West Bank] as one of the key obstacles to a peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state.”
NPR’s claim that “the rest of the world” views settlements as a “key” obstacle to peace is an absurd exaggeration and belied by such voices as British politician and commentator Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz recently said of the assertion that settlements are an obstacle to peace:
[W]hy is it that Israel is expected to integrate—and does a reasonable job of including—the 20 percent of its population that is Arab, yet a Jewish presence of 500,000 settlers in any future Palestinian state is deemed “an obstacle” to the two state solution? Are Palestinians assumed to be ethno-fascists? Are they not capable of building a multiethnic state just like Israelis? Is this how low the standard is to which Western leftists hold Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims?
Instead of presenting the reader with both points of view, NPR has concealed from its audience the full facts.
This bias continues as NPR goes on to describe the events of the past two weeks surrounding the recent vote at the UN Security Council:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily [to the UNSC vote on Resolution 2334], unleashing a stream of accusations against the Obama administration. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry defended the U.S. position Wednesday in a lengthy speech that repeatedly admonished Israel over settlements.
NPR presents Secretary Kerry as reasonable, despite the factual inaccuracies in his speech, and Prime Minister Netanyahu as unreasonable, “angrily … unleashing a stream of accusations,” without noting the evidentiary support for those accusations.
All of this is just in the introduction, before NPR even starts telling us the “7 Things To Know About Israeli Settlements.” Those seven things are discussed below.
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