On Sunday, David M. Halbfinger and Rami Nazzal of The New York Times wrote an anti-Israel piece about the potential of Israel destroying illegal Bedouin communities in Judea and Samaria.
This paragraph shows not only the bias of the reporters but how poor their reporting is:
With the Trump administration providing diplomatic cover, right-wing ministers in Israel pressing to exploit that while it lasts and international support for the Palestinians focused for the moment on Gaza, a new ruling by a settler-majority panel of Israel’s Supreme Court appears to have freed the government to proceed with the removal of entire Bedouin communities on the West Bank. Advocates of the Bedouins say this would be a war crime: the forced transfer of a population under the protection of the military occupation.
In one paragraph, the NYT is claiming that Israel’s Supreme Court probably allows war crimes, and that its bias is because its panel members are mostly settlers.
First of all, what evidence does the NYT have that the panel members are “settlers?” My source tells me “I’m not sure where Anat Baron lives, but I think it’s Tel Aviv. As far as I know, Yael Vilner lives in Haifa, and Noam Solberg lives in Alon Shvut.” While one of them is indeed a “settler” in land that would be part of Israel in any deal, two of them are religious, which may have been what caused the reporters to assume that they were “settlers.”
But is the legal reasoning sound? That is the only issue that matters, and the NYT – instead of actually looking at the legal ruling and finding holes in it – instead takes unverified claims of “war crimes” and publishes them as if they have the same level of importance as a multi-page and detailed legal ruling. The reporters are impugning the integrity of Israel’s Supreme Court, which has issued many anti-settlement rulings over the decades, by claiming bias – with zero evidence.
This isn’t reporting. This is a smear.
(h/t Avi)
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