New York Times Editorial, "Israel Sees Critics as Enemies": More Obsessive Israel Bashing

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In an April 28, 2017 editorial entitled "Israel Sees Critics as Enemies," The New York Times begins by observing:

"The refusal of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to receive the German foreign minister because of a meeting the German held with a veterans’ peace group is not in itself a major incident in Israeli-German relations. Germany’s history alone ensures it will remain Israel’s staunch supporter. What is troubling, rather, is Mr. Netanyahu’s increasingly illiberal pattern of treating critics of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands — domestic and foreign — as enemies.

The flash point in this case was a meeting Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, held with some nongovernmental groups while on a visit to Israel. One of these groups, called Breaking the Silence, is particularly reviled among right-wing Israelis because it gathers anonymous testimonies from Israeli soldiers about their service in occupied territories, often highlighting hardships imposed on the Palestinians. So Mr. Netanyahu canceled his meeting with Mr. Gabriel, proclaiming that he would not welcome diplomats who met with organizations that, he said, 'slander' Israeli soldiers."

Got it: Breaking the Silence is an Israeli "veterans' peace group." After all, according to the Times editorial, "Breaking the Silence has support from former high-ranking Israeli military officers." Unfortunately, it's not so simple...

As reported by Israel Hayom in a January 17, 2017 newsletter entitled "Breaking the Silence: Shooting soldiers is not terrorism":

"According to a Channel 20 report, [Breaking the Silence's] public relations coordinator, Nadav Weiman, told activists, 'If you shoot at soldiers, you are trying to kill soldiers. You are not a terrorist.'

Weiman made the statements to two activists for right-wing organization Ad Kan who were posing as radical leftists to penetrate Breaking the Silence.

'If there is another country that is conquering your country, the area where you live, you are allowed to use violent means to fight the conquering entity, only ... against soldiers and police officers, but if you stab a soldier at a checkpoint, that is not a terrorist attack,' Weiman said."

As reported by The Algemeiner in a June 15, 2016 article entitled "Newly Released Footage Reveals Controversial Whistle-Blower Breaking the Silence Telling Tourists That Israeli Settlers Poisoned Palestinian Wells":

"A newly released video reveals a co-founder of the NGO Breaking the Silence (BtS) telling tourists that Israeli settlers poisoned Palestinian wells, the Hebrew news site nrg reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, the clip was filmed by an undercover member of the right-wing 'Ad Kan' group, which seeks to expose activities of left-wing Israeli organizations which receive foreign funding.

In the video, which was filmed less than two years ago, Yehuda Shaul can be heard addressing a group of foreign visitors to the southern Hebron Hills in Judea (the West Bank). Speaking in English, he tells the visitors that residents of the Palestinian village of Susiya had only recently returned to their homes after being forced to leave several years earlier, when settlers poisoned their drinking water supply system."

Poisoned wells? Yeah, right.

And also as reported by The Algemeiner in a January 1, 2016 article entitled "How Breaking the Silence Lost Israel’s Trust":

"Breaking the Silence (BtS), which has been controversial for more than 10 years, gained real notoriety following the 2009 Gaza War. BtS — knowingly or unknowingly — questioned Israel’s inherent right to self-defense, and supported efforts to prosecute Israeli officials and soldiers (because allegations published by BtS resonated internationally and were used as ammunition by those siding against Israel). It also emerged at the time that several BtS funders conditioned their donations on obtaining minimum numbers of incriminating “testimonies” against the Israeli army from former soldiers. For instance, a document obtained by NGO Monitor from the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits shows similar demands from the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Dutch church-based aid organization ICCO (primarily funded by the Dutch government), and Oxfam Great Britain (funded by the British government).

Israelis quickly recognized that these so-called testimonies were serving a political objective, one that increasingly was seen as helping defame and demonize Israeli soldiers. In the left-wing daily Haaretz, Amos Harel wrote: “Breaking the Silence…has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classified as a ‘human rights organization.’”"

Claiming that Breaking the Silence is "is particularly reviled among right-wing Israelis," the Times editorial concludes:

"Israel’s vibrant democracy has always been one of its great strengths, and it is in open and democratic debate — and not in a threatening “with us or against us” posture — that issues as critical to Israel’s future as the occupation must be discussed."

However, as observed by Yair Lapid, chairman of the centrist Israeli political party Yesh Atid in December 2015:

"Criticism is constructive for our society, but there is a significant difference between criticism and defaming IDF officers and soldiers abroad. That is not criticism; that is undermining the foundations of the state. Organizations like Breaking the Silence have crossed the red line between criticism and subversion."

Bottom line: This is just one more obsessive attack upon Israel, lacking any objectivity, coming from The New York Times.

Thomas Friedman, "Israel: Bits, Bytes and Bombs": An Interminable Tide of Drivel

Would-be Middle East expert Thomas Friedman is back with yet another fatuous opinion piece demeaning Israel.

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Israel: Bits, Bytes and Bombs" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/friedman-israel-bits-bytes-and-bombs.html?_r=0), Friedman writes:

"Indeed, the crazy dream Israel is keeping alive is that it can permanently occupy the West Bank, with its 2.5 million Palestinians, to satisfy biblically inspired settlers, who now hold major cabinet positions, like the housing portfolio, in Israel’s new government."

But as well known to Friedman, Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert offered Arafat and Abbas independence along the 1967 lines. Olmert even offered to share Jerusalem, but Arafat and Abbas rejected these offers.

Moreover, a recent Smith Institute poll determined that 62% of Israeli's favor a two-state solution (see: http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Poll-Majority-of-Israelis-support-two-state-solution), but it's difficult to achieve peace when the other side refuses to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

Not surprisingly, as determined by Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann of Tel Aviv University: "Some 67% [of Israelis] agree with the assertion that no matter which parties prevail in the elections, the peace process with the Palestinians will remain at a standstill for reasons not connected to Israel, and there is no chance of progress in the foreseeable future" (http://en.idi.org.il/media/2050461/Peace%20Index-December%202012.pdf).

Also conveniently forgotten by Friedman is that fact that Yair Lapid, Minister of Finance and chairman of the Yesh Atid Party, which garnered the second highest tally of votes after Netanyahu's Likud Yisrael Beiteinu Party in Israel's most recent election, favors a two-state solution (see: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4224132,00.html).

Friedman states, "Amazingly, polls still show a majority on both sides for a two-state deal," but this is not the case. As reported by The Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=229493) in 2011, "Only one in three Palestinians (34 percent) accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg."

Failing to mention that Israeli built-up settlement area comprises less than two percent of the West Bank, Friedman concludes:

"The best way for Israel to deal with the chaos around it is not to put its head in the sand but to collaborate with Palestinians to build a West Bank state that is modern, secular and Westernizing; one where Muslims, Christians and Jews can work together and that stands in daily refutation of the failing Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood models elsewhere. If Israelis and Palestinians do not try everything — now — to make that happen, this will be remembered not as a lost opportunity but the lost opportunity, and no island will escape the storm that will follow."

Ah, yes, "a West Bank state that is modern, secular and Westernizing." But consider a December 2012 article entitled "Abbas aide: No plans to outlaw 'honor killing'" published by the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency (http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=550792), in which it is written:

"President Mahmoud Abbas has no plans to amend laws that reduce sentences for suspects who claim an 'honor' defense for murdering women, his legal adviser says.

'Why change it? This would cause serious problems,' Hassan al-Ouri told Ma'an, adding that such a reform would 'not benefit women.'

In May 2011, the president pledged to amend the law to guarantee maximum penalties for 'honor killing' in response to protests over the killing of university student Aya Baradiya in Hebron.

The decision was announced in a phone call to a primetime show on state TV, drawing tears among crowds of mourners shown in a live link-up from the Ramallah studio to Baradiya’s hometown.

Abbas suspended Article 340, which offers a pardon for murder if the perpetrator committed the crime on finding his wife in bed with another man.

The reform was cosmetic: Article 340 had never been used in Palestinian courts since it was legislated in 1960.

'So why did we change the law? To garner public opinion,' al-Ouri said in an interview in the presidential compound in Ramallah.

'I, personally, was against the amendment because the crimes that happen in the street have no relevance to Article 340,' the legal adviser added.

Al-Ouri says the president will not change the go-to clauses for lawyers seeking leniency for clients who claim they committed murder to defend family 'honor.'

Articles 97 to 100 of the Jordanian Penal Code, in force in the West Bank, still offer reduced sentences for any act of battery or murder committed in a 'state of rage.'"

A modern secular West Bank state in which women can be murdered upon a whim? Friedman is entirely detached from Muslim Middle East reality.

Roger Cohen, "Israel’s Mr. Normal": Junk Journalism

Roger ("Iran is not totalitarian") Cohen is a sordid journalist, and in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Israel’s Mr. Normal" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/cohen-yair-lapid-israels-mr-normal.html?_r=0), which is devoted to smearing Israeli television host-turned-politician Yair Lapid, Cohen again displays the full extent of his "artistry." Writing from Tel Aviv, Cohen informs us:

"Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, told me that voters who chose Lapid 'decided to vote for nothing, a TV image, a kind of anti-Orthodox Likud lite.'

A ballot cast for nothingness is a curious choice in a nation surrounded by turmoil. Israelis — like the French with François Hollande — went for a Mr. Normal, but a better-looking one. Lapid, a former TV talk-show host and now the second most powerful politician in Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is reasonable. He wants everyone to pull their weight, especially the welfare-supported ultra-Orthodox who avoid the draft. He thinks talking to Palestinians is a good idea.

He is also a secular nationalist who made his campaign speech about diplomacy in Ariel, a large West Bank settlement. He is a man who leans right, the darling of the jeep-driving tycoons of start-up-nation Israel who worry more about the country’s battered image than its squeezed youth and middle class, the likes of Yoraan and Anda [a young Jewish immigrant couple with whom Cohen met]. His moderation is more aura than anything."

Well, let's give this some thought. A vote for Lapid was a "vote for nothing," because Tom Segev, a historian and journalist who writes a column for Israel's leftist Haaretz newspaper, told him so?

Why didn't Cohen trouble himself to interview Lapid?

Why didn't Cohen trouble himself to interview any of the other leaders of Lapid's new party, "Yesh Atid" ("There Is a Future")?

Why didn't Cohen trouble himself to learn more about "Yesh Atid" by at least looking at their website? Oops, I forgot: Cohen doesn't read Hebrew.

But wait! Yesh Atid also has an English website (http://en.yeshatid.org.il/team), where details are provided concerning the impressive and diverse backgrounds of its new members of parliament, who include many women, two Ethiopian Jews, and a former head of Israel's General Security Service.

Lapid's "moderation is more aura than anything"? Peculiar how Cohen doesn't mention that Yair Lapid is the son of Tommy Lapid, who headed Israel's secular-liberal "Shinui" ("Change") party from 1999–2006.

Bottom line: This op-ed is junk journalism to which Cohen's New York Times readership is addicted.