Palestine papers: Guardian acknowledges misconstruing Livni quote

Just Journalism
justjournalism.com
14 February '11

http://justjournalism.com/the-wire/palestine-papers-guardian-acknowledges-misconstruing-livni-quote/

Corrections and clarifications column acknowledges pull quote about settlement policy ‘cut in a way that may have given a misleading impression.’

On the first day of The Guardian’s Palestine papers expose, on Monday 24 January, when Palestinian negotiators were attacked as ‘weak’ and ‘craven’, a quote from then foreign minister Tzipi Livni appeared in a box, titled, ‘What they said…’. It read:

‘The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state.’ Tzipi Livni, then Israeli foreign minister

However, the newspaper on Saturday acknowledged that the full quote shows that Livni was characterising the Palestinian perception of Israeli policies, and not the policies themselves. What she actually said was:

‘I understand the sentiments of the Palestinians when they see the settlements being built. The meaning from the Palestinian perspective is that Israel takes more land, that the Palestinian state will be impossible, the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state.’

By cutting the quote to exclude the first part of Tzipi Livni’s sentence, The Guardian portrayed the Israeli politician as brazenly admitting a policy of making a Palestinian state impossible.

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