Harriet Sherwood: Faithful Camp-Follower at Al Arakib

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
01 March '11

With much of the Arab world currently in dramatic turmoil, news from Israel has taken something of a back seat on the pages of CiF lately, but Harriet Sherwood sought to remedy that on March 1st with her ‘report’ from Al Arakib. Like Bil’in, Al Arakib has been deliberately engineered by interested parties into becoming a focal point of pilgrimage for activists belonging to left-wing extremist organisations and their entourage of foreign correspondent camp-followers.

And what a faithful camp-follower Sherwood proves herself to be! Unquestioningly she parrots the party line, according to which Israel destroys time after time a Bedouin village inhabited by noble nomads for generations, uprooting trees and murdering chickens (again!) along the way. She does not even attempt to inject any sense of balance or objectivity into this article by offering the point of view of, say, the Israeli judicial system which has been dealing with the subject of Al Arakib for well over a decade. She does not even bother to point out that unproved Bedouin claims to the land have become a political issue which extends far beyond the Negev and has come to represent the entire conflict in one small micro-climate.

Instead, she backs up her emotionally-loaded polemics with quotations from Oren Yiftachel and one of the ‘residents’ of Al Arakib (more of that later), Aziz Sayah Abu Mdagen.

Oren Yiftachel holds a day job at Ben Gurion University, specialising in political geography. He is also the co-chair of B’Tselem and has created controversy by calling for international sanctions against Israel during Operation Cast Lead and supporting a Palestinian ‘right of return’. He calls the country which pays his salary a ‘jailer state’ and claims that ....

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