What Is It About "Israeli Settlements Are Not An Impedimet To Peace" That The Media Can't Understand?

It did seem like a straightforward statement by Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Israeli settlements:

“The American desire for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians has remained unchanged for 50 years. While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal. As the President has expressed many times, he hopes to achieve peace throughout the Middle East region. The Trump administration has not taken an official position on settlement activity and looks forward to continuing discussions, including with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visits with President Trump later this month.”

If Israel Has Not Been Building Settlements, Why Are the White House and Media Claiming It Is?

"[T]housands of new settlements are being constructed...you saw tens of thousands of settlements being constructed"
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, December 23, 2016

On December 23rd, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2344 was passed 14-0 with one abstension --  the United States. One of the key points of that resolution was the clear declaration that Israeli settlements are illegal. Not "illegitimate", as per US policy in the past, but "illegal". The settlements were described as an impediment to peace that must be removed.

Are There Tens of Thousands of Israeli Settlements... Or 228?

That same day, Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy security advisor, gave an interview to Judy Woodruff.

Recall that Rhodes is noted for having bragged about his manipulation of the media in creating the narrative that made the Iran deal possible, despite both popular and congressional opposition. He boasted at the time about the media's lack of knowledge of world events:

Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing...We created an echo chamber...They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.

8 Reasons Why Friday's UN Resolution 2334 Is Counterproductive and Just Plain Wrong

In the aftermath of Obama's support for UN Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli, reactions have not been short in coming -- and there are cogent arguments against the resolution.

Beyond what is being said about Obama and his motives or against the United Nations itself and the way the resolution was carried out, the fact remains there are reasons why the UN resolution may have many results -- but none of the ones it claims to support.

Here are some of those arguments being made:

Mideast Media Sampler 12/18/13: Sloppy Media Ignores Fact Israeli "Occupation" Is Over

by David Gerstman, contributing blogger at Legal Insurrection

Why Israel’s Democracy is not Endangered by the Lack of Peace

Eugene Kontorovich, professor of international law.
Credit: Legal Insurrection, Photo: mos225 / YouTube

Eugene Kontorovich wrote an important essay for Commentary, Israel, Palestine, and Democracy. Here are three critical paragraphs from the middle of the essay:

David P. Goldman on Israeli Settlements -- Ireland's Lesson and A Message To Liberal Jews

The following by David P. Goldman is resposted here with permission of the Middle East Forum:

It's About the Settlements, Stupid

by David P. Goldman
PJ Media
December 17, 2013
http://www.meforum.org/3698/settlements

David P. Goldman

Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy. Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA. Leave aside also Israel's requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements.

Accepting the settlements is the sine qua non of any viable peace agreement. It does Israel no good to defend Israel's right to exist but to condemn the settlers, as does Alan Dershowitz, not to mention the leaders of liberal Jewish denominations.

I believe in land for peace. That is a tautology:

Arlene Kushner: Political Issues Obscure Legal Issues of the Israeli Settlements

From Arlene Kushner:
November 13, 2013

We Have Legal Rights!

It never ends: one crisis, one issue after another.  Perhaps you are familiar with the curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Yesterday, Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi) announced plans for "evaluating potential" for 24,000 housing units in Judea and Samaria.  Please be clear on this: it was not, as some news sources had it, announcement of concrete plans for those 24,000 units.  It was initiation of a process to look into building in several places in Judea and Samaria. (Most controversial: 1.200 projected units in E1, an area between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem.) Some might have materialized, some might not have.  But even in cases where potential was positively assessed, it would have been a long time (years) until anything was built.  This sort of process goes on all the time.

Mideast Media Sampler 11/3/13: Media Perpetuates Myth of Israeli Settlements Blocking Peace

by David Gerstman, contributing blogger at Legal Insurrection

 – The focus on settlements as obstacles to peace is a recent invention

Israel sign for entry to Area A in Palestinian control. Credit: Legal Insurrection

To read through recent news reports one could assume that the biggest obstacle to Palestinian Israeli peace are “settlements.”

To cement that impression the New York Times published an article, 1,500 Units to Be Added in Settlement, Israel Says. The caption of a photograph directly beneath the headline reads:

A Palestinian construction worker at a building site on Wednesday in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in East Jerusalem.

If there is an official “East Jerusalem,” I am unaware of it, but perhaps the paper meant “east Jerusalem.” However if you read down a few paragraphs you learn:

Arlene Kushner: Israel Should Have Rebuffed Obama Pressure To Release Palestinian Terrorists

From Arlene Kushner:
October 31, 2013

Not Remotely Acceptable

It's infuriating when agents outside of Israel act against Israel.  But there is something uniquely distressing about damage we do to ourselves.  This is what I'm seeing now -- and feel compelled to write about.  The current situation is not only unacceptable, it's intolerable.

First, there is the prisoner release that took place this week.  Ostensibly, because we "promised" at the beginning of the negotiations.  It was the lure to bring the PA to the table. 

No one in Israeli officialdom, it seems, ever confronts the question of why the PA would need an enticement to come negotiate in order to secure the state they keep claiming they want. They should be running to talk.

~~~~~~~~~~

New York Times Corrects Error In Rudoren's Article On Israel (But She's Not Alone)

Can't anyone here report on Israel without twisting the facts?

The most well known of the recent distortions in the news about Israel are Jodi Rudoren's articles in the New York Times.

WFB's Adam Kredo eviscerated Rudoren today in All the Anti-Israel News That’s Fit to Print:

The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren is under renewed criticism from the pro-Israel community for articles critics say slant toward the Palestinian Authority and misrepresent U.S. policy towards Israel.

Pro-Israel officials have once again questioned Rudoren’s journalistic objectivity following two recent articles that they say favorably portrayed Palestinian stone throwers and falsely claimed that the United States considers Israeli settlements illegal.

Rudoren has displayed a pro-Palestinian bias since her appointment last year and may have been influenced by one of Israel’s top opponents, these critics say.

Jodi Rudoren -- Not alone in getting facts on Israel wrong.
Credit: Twitter Account

In one article, Rudoren's one-sided sympathetic piece on Palestinian rock attacks on Israelis referred to those attacks as "hobbies" and "rites of passage," while omitting the names of the victims, and neglecting to mention that those responsible for deaths were guilty of murder

However, it was the other article -- Israeli Decree on West Bank Settlements Will Harm Peace Talks, Palestinians Say -- that resulted in a correction by the New York Times.

Rudoren originally wrote:

The United States, along with most of the world, considers these settlements illegal, and some of them sit in the heart of the area imagined as a future Palestinian state.

Kredo noted that Rudoren was flat out wrong in going out on a limb like that:

However, this statement is factually inaccurate, according to Middle East experts and an analysis of official U.S. policy on Israeli settlements since 1949.

“This is not the declared policy of the United States,” Steven Rosen, a former top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), wrote in a 2012 analysis of U.S. policy.

“Successive U.S. administrations have deplored settlement activity as an obstacle to peace, but no American president—except Jimmy Carter—has taken the view that building Jewish homes in Jerusalem constitutes a violation of the Geneva conventions,” wrote Rosen, currently director of the Washington Project of the Middle East Forum.

While Carter stated in 1980 that he considered the settlements illegal, every presidential administration of the last 30 years—as well as those before Carter’s—has refused to state this as U.S. policy.

The New York Times has now corrected Rudoren's mistake, now noting at the end of the article:

An earlier version of this article misstated the United States’ view of the West Bank settlements seized by Israel in the 1967 war. While much of the rest of the world considers them illegal, for several decades the United States has not taken a position on the settlements’ legality; In a statement on Tuesday, the State Department said, “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity.”

As it so happens, when it comes to erroneous reporting on Israel, Rudoren has company.

Today, Lenny Ben David noted an error Thomas Friedman made in his column:

Oops again: NYT Tom Friedman wrote #Israels "crazy" settlers killed Rabin. Killer was from Herzliya, not a settlement http://t.co/tc4Fqpv7Sz
— Lenny Ben-David (@lennybendavid) August 7, 2013

No word yet on a correction.

However CNN has made a correction to an error they made. CAMERA notes on their site: CAMERA Prompts CNN Correction on Jerusalem:

CAMERA staff has elicited correction of a July 21 article on CNN International's Web site, which had incorrectly reported that Israel annexed eastern Jerusalem from "the Palestinian territories." We first addressed the error on our Snapshots blog, and noted also that an earlier version of the CNN article had wrongly referred to Tel Aviv as Israel's capital. The error concerning Jerusalem and the updated, corrected text follow:

As the CNN correction admits:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated who controlled East Jerusalem in the years immediately prior to the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. East Jerusalem was under Jordan's control when it was taken over by Israel in the 1967 war.

Rudoren.
Thomas Friedman
CNN

Can't anyone get the facts on Israel right?

-----

If you found this post interesting or informative, please it below. Thanks!

Technorati Tag: Israel and Gaza and Hamas and Operation Pillar of Defense.

Video: Eugene Kontorovich on Israeli Settlements -- Real International Law and Double Standards

Eugene Kontorovich is a Professor of Law at Northwestern and a contributor at The Volokh Conspiracy blog

In this video, Professor Kontorovich examines the actual issues of International Law as they apply to Israeli settlements and the double standards applied to them.

Also see his video on The Legal Case for Israel

Here is the video of his appearance on Shalom TV:

Mideast Media Sampler 5/02/13: Confirmed: Omar Masharawi Was Another Palestinian Killed By Hamas Rocket

by David Gerstman, contributing blogger at Legal Insurrection


1) Might? May?

In March, a report from the UN suggested very strongly that Omar Masharawi (or Mishrawi) was killed by a Hamas rocket.

Omar Masharawi, another Palestinian that was killed by
 a rocket launched by Hamas. 

EU Afraid To Blacklist Hezbollah Terrorists, But Will Leak Sanctions On Israeli Homes

PRESS RELEASE February 28, 2013  Contact: Ariella Kimmel NGO Monitor +972-53-522-3966 ariella.kimmel@ngo-monitor.org Disgraceful Diplomacy: EU Leaks and Secret NGO Processes Jerusalem - According to a news story in the Jerusalem Post (February 27, 2013), the Israeli political advocacy NGO Breaking the Silence was responsible for leaking the latest internal EU document condemning Israeli policy. The "EU Heads of Mission Jerusalem Report 2012," which recommends various sanctions against Israel, was not shared with the Israeli government. Many of the claims and conclusions in it are based on non-verified statements and prejudicial opinions of NGOs, which themselves receive funding from the EU and European governments.

Arlene Kushner Debunks UN Findings On Israeli Settlements

From Arlene Kushner:
Motzei Shabbat (After Shabbat)

February 2, 2013: Oom Shmoom

I believe I've explained this term before: Oom refers to the UN, in Hebrew.  "Oom Shmoom" was the contemptuous way that David Ben Gurion referred to the UN. 

But the United Nations was benign then, compared to what it has become today.  What would he call it now?

~~~~~~~~~~

In my last posting, I alluded to a ridiculous statement made by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and said I'd be dealing further with the UN next time I wrote.

Well, no sooner had that posting gone out, then I saw news about another Ban statement. This one was not simply ridiculous, it angered me. 

Ban said that he was "greatly concerned" about the fact that Israel allegedly breached Syrian air space,  He was referring to the sorties by Israel late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, in which a convoy carrying weapons to Hezbollah and a Syrian chemical factory were apparently hit (I'll come back to this).

Please understand.  Assad has murdered more than 60,000 of his own people. He has a huge cache of weapons of mass destruction that are a threat to the world and continues to manufacture them, and he supplies weapons to the terrorist Hezbollah.  But what is Ban "concerned" about?  An Israel action that was pre-emptive, and thus defensive.  Because we violated Syrian air space.

Such is the insanity of the world today.

~~~~~~~~~~

And this is merely preface to what I wanted to write:

The Middle East Media Sampler 1/8/2013: Defense Of Hagel Begins Counter-Attack

From +David Gerstman

1) Friends don't let friends drive Chuck

What's driving the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? According to Roger Cohen of the New York Times, it shows Israel's True Friends? (Are the people in the accompanying picture an example of Israel's True Friends according to Cohen?) The article is mostly incoherent ignorance. For an example of Cohen's argument there's this paragraph:

The Middle East Media Sampler 1/7/2012: Washington Post's Changing View Of Netanayahu

From +David Gerstman

1) An intellectually honest editorial

Daled Amos and Israel Matzav linked to a Washington Post editorial, Overheated rhetoric on Israeli settlements:

Overall, the vast majority of the nearly 500,000 settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank live in areas close to Israel’s 1967 borders. Data compiled by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace show that more than 80 percent of them could be included in Israel if the country annexed just more than 4 percent of the West Bank — less than the 5 percent proposed by President Bill Clinton 12 years ago. Diplomats were most concerned by Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to allow planning and zoning — but not yet construction — in a four-mile strip of territory known as E-1 that lies between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim, a settlement with a population of more than 40,000. Palestinians claim that Israeli annexation of the land would cut off their would-be capital in East Jerusalem from the West Bank and block a key north-south route between West Bank towns. Israel wants the land for similar reasons, to prevent Ma’ale Adumim — which will almost certainly be annexed to Israel in any peace deal — from being isolated. Both sides insist that the other can make do with a road corridor. This is a difficult issue that should be settled at the negotiating table, not by fiat. But Mr. Netanyahu’s zoning approval is hardly the “almost fatal blow” to a two-state solution that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described. 

I won't pretend to agree with some of the criticism of Israel in the editorial, but this is a very important point. Nothing Israel is doing endangers the peace process.

In praising this editorial, Barry Rubin explains two ways in which the settlement blame game is wrong:

EU Condemns Israeli Settlements, While Europeans Build Settlements In Turkish Occupied Cyprus

[I]t appeared that the international community should have judged the dispute over Northern Cyprus far more severely than the way it viewed the dispute over the West Bank, where Israel had multiple rights that it could exercise if it decided to do so.
Dore Gold

Writing about European settlements and double standards, Dore Gold notes that Europeans flocking to buy a villa in Northern Cyprus are creating a legal problem:

It should be recalled that in 1974 the Turkish army invaded Cyprus, which had been an independent state since 1960 and took over 37 percent of the island. Tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots were expelled in this period in what they viewed was a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing by the Turkish army. In the aftermath of the invasion, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 353 which demanded "an immediate end to foreign military intervention" and called for "the withdrawal without delay from the Republic of Cyprus of foreign military personnel."

Two Arguments That Demonstrate Israeli Settlements Are Not The Problem Holding Up Peace Talks

Barry Rubin writes about The Ultimate `Settlements are not the Problem’ Article. The article in this case is the Washington Post article that came out 3 days ago: Overheated rhetoric on Israeli settlements, noting that the criticism of Israeli settlements is counterproductive:

because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible.

I wrote about the Washington Post editorial argument that Condemnation of Israeli Settlements Goes Too Far.

Rubin notes the difficulty in proving that Israeli settlements are not the problem holding up peace, boiling the proof down to 2 arguments:

Washington Post: Condemnation of Israeli Settlements Goes Too Far

Surprisingly, the editorial board of the Washington Post decries the Overheated Rhetoric on Israeli Settlements:

Facing an election in which his most dangerous competition is from the far right, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted a familiar tactic: a flurry of announcements of new construction in Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The predictable result has been a storm of denunciations by the United States and every other member of the U.N. Security Council, along with dire predictions that the new building would “make a negotiated two-state solution . . . very difficult to achieve,” as British Foreign Secretary William Hague put it.

The criticism is appropriate, in the sense that such unilateral action by Israel, like the unilateral Palestinian initiative to seek statehood recognition in November from the U.N. General Assembly, serves to complicate the negotiations that are the only realistic route to a Middle East peace. But the reaction is also counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible.

Arlene Kushner on Israel's Commitment To Build Houses

From Arlene Kushner:
December 20, 2012

No Let Up

I have to give credit where credit is due:

Yesterday 14 of the 15 members of the Security Council moved to pass a resolution condemning Israel for "settlement" construction. The US vetoed it. Whatever Obama's reason -- and it likely has to do with a fear that such a resolution would stiffen the backs of the Israeli government and make "negotiations for peace" even more difficult, he did it.

Individual members of the Council then moved to issue condemnations. France, Britain, Germany and Portugal issued a joint statement saying that building in E1 would jeopardize "the possibility of a continuous, sovereign, independent and viable Palestinian state, and of Jerusalem as a future capital of both Israel and Jerusalem.

"...the viability of a two-state solution is threatened by systematic expansion of settlements...all settlement activity including in east Jerusalem, must cease immediately."

~~~~~~~~~~

They don't get it, and they are not going to get it, because they don't want to.

Arlene Kushner On Palestinian Condemnation Of Minute Of Silence

From Arlene Kushner

July 26, 2012

Ludicrous

Sometimes the PA comes out with a statement that is so ludicrous that the impulse is to simply laugh at it.  This is the case with the statement made by Jibril Rajoub, President of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, in a letter sent to President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, thanking him for his stand in refusing a moment of silence for the Israeli Olympic athletes massacred 40 years ago in Munich:

"Sports are a bridge to love, interconnection, and spreading of peace among nations; it must not be a cause of division and spreading of racism between them."

Read: PA: Moment of silence at Olympics would be racism