Last week, the New York Times quietly made two corrections to Jodi Rudoren’s December 2, 2012 news article headlined “Dividing the West Bank, and Deepening a Rift.” In a December 7 “Correction” appended to the article, the Times acknowledged that Israeli development in the E1 area “would not divide the West Bank in two” (emphasis added); and it “would not, technically, make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible” (emphasis added). So technically–not to put too fine a point on it–the central premise of the article was flat-out wrong.
The E1 area, which connects Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem in a stretch of desert less than two miles long, is retained by Israel in the “Everyone Knows” peace plan–as everyone knows who has bothered to look at a map of the Clinton parameters, or maps of various similar plans. But in a December 6 post at the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier called the plan for Jewish housing in E1 “an outrageous proposal …. which would scuttle any cartographically meaningful state for the Palestinians.” Since the proposal would not divide the West Bank, nor prevent a contiguous Palestinian state, nor preclude it on about 95 percent of the West Bank, Wieseltier appears to be cartographically challenged. Either that, or he relies on the New York Times.
The executive summary of a new monograph from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), reflecting a six-month study of the Times’s coverage of Israel in 2011, documents “a disproportionate, continuous, embedded indictment of Israel that dominates both news and commentary sections.” CAMERA notes that Arthur Brisbane, in his final column this year as the Times’s public editor, described a worldview at the paper reflecting (in his words) “political and cultural progressivism” that “virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times,” treating certain developments “more like causes than news subjects,” making “thousands of errors” every year. Rudoren’s article was another one.
In contrast to his ill-informed opinion regarding E1, Wieseltier was relatively restrained in describing Mahmoud Abbas’s UN speech, which accused Israel of “one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history;” of unprovoked “aggression” in Gaza; and of “an apartheid system of colonial occupation, which institutionalizes the plague of racism.” Wieseltier thought the speech was “mean and small.”
Since the occasion for Abbas’s slander was the Palestinian rejection of the fundamental commitment of the “peace process” (not to take “any step” to change the legal status of the West Bank outside negotiations), a better informed, more morally precise description of the speech would have used the word “outrageous.”
