Monday, June 15, 2020

‘Annexation’ and moral double standards at the Financial Times - by Adam Levick

...the editorial’s failure to hold Palestinians and their leaders responsible for behavior an decisions that are inimical to peace and co-existence, whilst focusing almost entirely on Israel, represents a pattern of bias and moral double standards that continues to compromise their coverage of the region.


Adam Levick..
CAMERA UK..
14 June '20..

An official Financial Times editorial (FT View: World should not be silent on Israeli annexation, June 11) begins thusly:

Nine years ago, Ehud Barak, then Israel’s defence minister, warned that the Jewish state faced a “diplomatic tsunami” if it did not come up with an initiative to move the Arab-Israeli peace process forward.

It’s telling that editors decided to start the peace clock nine years ago, in 2011, as it allowed them to omit Mahmoud Abbbas’s rejection three years earlier of Ehud Olmert’s peace offer – a plan which would have given them a state in nearly all the West Bank, all of Gaza and a capital in east Jerusalem.

Indeed, characteristically, in their 658 word editorial there were only eight words (part of a longer, unrelated sentence) critical of PA leaders, asserting vaguely that Palestinians are “poorly served by their leaders”.

The Financial Times editorial further argued that on “Benjamin Netanyahu’s 11-year watch”, he has “successfully buried mainstream Israeli debate about the concept of land for peace“, a grossly misleading – and confusing – claim. It’s confusing because it’s less than clear how, in their view, Israel’s prime minister “buried” debate about “land for peace”, a strategy, they argue, “that has all but destroyed Palestinian hopes of a two-state solution”.

But, even just taking the words at face value, editors clearly don’t understand Israeli society.

Though the importance of the two-states debate amongst most of Israelis has indeed ebbed significantly over the years, it has little to do with the government’s decisions – and in fact, the Israeli media remains as free and confrontational as ever.

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