Obama to Impose a Peace Plan On Israel?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
08 November '12..

President Obama started his first term seeking to distance the United States from Israel in an effort to jump-start Middle East peace talks. As it turned out, the fights he picked with Israel over settlements, borders and Jerusalem not only failed to entice the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, but also actually caused them to be more intransigent on issues that required compromise if peace is ever to be made. But that hasn’t stopped some on the left from dreaming about the president starting off his second term with one of their favorite fantasies: an American peace plan that would be imposed on Israel’s government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

That’s the rumor floated by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz yesterday. The veteran journalist is a virulent critic of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and, like others on the Israeli left, has long since despaired of being able to convince their fellow Israelis to follow their advice. Since Israeli democracy has consistently failed to produce a government that will do as he thinks best, he is hoping the re-elected American president will issue a dictat that will effectively nullify the results of the planned January vote for a new parliament that is likely to return Netanyahu’s existing center-right coalition to power. But though Eldar is right to think that Obama would probably like nothing better than to hammer the Israelis again, he’s making the same mistakes Israeli leftists have made for the last 20 years of peace processing: ignoring the Palestinians. They can always be counted on to spike any deal no matter how favorable it might be to their cause.

Haaretz takes manipulation of facts and figures to new heights

Akiva Eldar

Yishai Goldflam..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
17 October '12..

Ha'aretz's Akiva Eldar takes manipulation of facts and figures to new heights in order to deceive his readers that the Government of Israel has acknowledged that Jews have become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While the government has, in fact, done no such thing, Ha'aretz has yet again given Israel's haters cause for celebration.

In his article yesterday ("The Jewish majority is history"), Eldar manipulates selective and distorted figures to promote his worldview. Not only did he deceive Ha'aretz's readers, but his irresponsible article has spread like wildfire across the Internet, fueling the war of lies against Israel. The subheadline on the English print edition of the article underscores that the government's admission (which never was) boosts Eldar's agenda:

The online subheadline is particularly shocking:

Let's try to lay out Eldar's false claim, which is based on an item which appeared several days earlier in The Marker, a financial newspaper published by Ha'aretz, regarding the Export Promotion Law. According to this law, a factory is eligible for tax benefits intended to promote exports if at least 25 percent of its income stemmed from sales in markets of at least 12 million residents. Approximately one week ago, the Ministry of Finance sought to revise the law and increase the threshold to 14 milllion residents. Why? Because, wrote Eldar, the population of Israel together with the Palestinian Authority already reaches 12 million people, and therefore even those manufacturers who sell only to the local market are eligible for the aforementioned tax benefit even though it was not intended for them.

At this point, Eldar cites a figure from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), that there are 5.9 million Jews living under Israeli rule. Using basic math, Eldar calculates that the rest of the population totals 6.1 million. In conclusion, given that the CBS is subordinate to the Prime Minister's Office, the government acknowledges that Jews are the minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The Falsehood

Apparently, Eldar did not at all read the Ministry of Finance's memorandum upon which he relied. He wrote:

Daphne Anson - Ha'aretz's Blunder Draws Thunder From Down Under

Daphne Anson..
24 January '12..

The leftwing Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz recently carried this highly tendentious article by Akiva Eldar about Australian Jewry and Israel. Its headline? "Israel is shaming Australian Jews"

I know for a fact that online ripostes, even by well-informed and well-respected Middle East analysts, failed to find their way onto the Comments section. Deliberate suppression on the part of a newspaper which prides itself on its own gift of free speech, no matter how critical it is of the policies of its beleagured nation? It would seem so.

But unfortunately for the newspaper, and for Eldar, the leadership of Australian Jewry is made of sterner stuff than its lily-livered counterparts in the Mother Country. There are comparatively few "trembling Israelites" in Australian Jewish circles, perhaps because such a large proportion of the Jewish community Down Under is derived from Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

Fresnozionism - On murderers and car thieves

Akiva Eldar. Apparently
he prefers murderers to
car thieves

Fresnozionism.org
07 December '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/12/on-murderers-and-car-theives/





Ha’aretz writer Akiva Eldar described himself thus in a 2008 article:

The prominent Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that “there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the ‘lynch test.’” These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea, who last year was awarded the Israel Prize for journalism, went on to argue that our support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, “They have a mission.” I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

What he wrote yesterday was even more revealing. In an article entitled “Abbas should change his locks before next wave of Palestinian prisoners freed,” Eldar tells us that many of the Arab prisoners to be released in the second phase of the exchange for Gilad Shalit will be “car thieves and petty criminals.”

Now get ready … here is Eldar’s unique take on this:

After being compelled to give Hamas a healthy offering of security prisoners, including “heavy” terrorists, Netanyahu is determined this time to release a low-fat fare.

This isn’t the first time that Netanyahu is converting an agreement to release Palestinian prisoners into either a bonanza or boondoggle for the Palestinian leadership. Twelve years ago, during his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu sent Yasser Arafat mainly prisoners who were incarcerated for criminal – not security – offenses…

Abbas now claims that then prime minister Ehud Olmert promised him he would release two Fatah prisoners for every one prisoner returned to Hamas. Netanyahu suggests that Abbas go to Olmert and ask him for these prisoners.

Eldar is actually criticizing Netanyahu for cheating the PLO by not releasing more murderers! He seems to suggest that Netanyahu is behaving dishonorably toward Abbas by violating some kind of understanding.

CAMERA - Ha'aretz Leads and AP Follows in Defaming Israel

RH
CAMERA/Snapshots
21 November '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/11/haaretz_leads_and_ap_follows_i_1.html

Ha'aretz journalists -- with Akiva Eldar frequently leading the pack -- are so eager to publicize controversial stories about Israel that they often rush to press without thoroughly checking out the facts or bothering to get the full story. The mainstream media could not be happier to let the Israeli daily do its dirty work for them. After all, what can be better than using an Israeli source to dig up dirt on Israelis?

Last Friday, Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz's chief political correspondent, wrote an article alleging that, for the first time, Palestinian land was absorbed by Kibbutz Meirav, an Israeli kibbutz within the country's 1967 borders. The message was clear: Palestinian land was being grabbed not only by so-called "settlers" but by Israelis within the 1949 armistice boundaries.

AP's Diaa Hadid eagerly jumped on Eldar's story, and enhanced it with quotations by anti-settlement activists and Palestinians with an axe to grind against their Israeli neighbors. No one from the Kibbutz was interviewed or cited, because they "weren't immediately available for comment because of the Jewish Sabbath." And obviously Hadid couldn't let a juicy anti-Israel story possibly elude her by taking the time to hear both sides of the controversy or take the risk that the story might be debunked. So she ran with the unsubstantiated claims. And many mainstream media outlets ran her story.

Had she actually bothered to adhere to journalistic norms and get the other side of the story, AP's Hadid would have been told that "the land in question has a long-term lease and actually belonged to neighboring Kibbutz Maaleh Gilboa (not Palestinians)for 25 years." But of course, presenting two sides of a controversy would weaken Hadid and Eldar's defamation of Israel.

To those who are curious about the other side's point of view, see here.

Is it any wonder, with so many journalists more concerned about being the first to expose dirt than about doing their job, that the public is increasingly distrustful of what they read in the mainstream press?

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Goldflam - Akiva Eldar, Who Is Lying?

Yishai Goldflam
CAMERA Media Analysis
02 October '11

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=55&x_article=2122

Following last month's anti-climactic events in the United Nations, Ha'aretz journalist Akiva Eldar took it upon himself to serve as defense attorney for Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. While Eldar, like all opinion writers, has the right to voice his views on any subject, he does not have a license to misrepresent facts. Yet, last week (Sept. 26), in an Op-Ed bombastically titled "Netanyahu's speech of lies," Eldar charges the prime minister of lying, an accusation that rests in the realm of facts, not opinion. Either Netanyahu was lying or he was not. Either way, Eldar's allegations warrant a fact-check.

1. The Camp David Summit

In his column, Eldar sarcastically responds to the prime minister's statement in his speech that he intends to speak the truth. Eldar selects some of these "truths" and attempts to expose them as lies. The first example concerns the Camp David summit in 2000. Eldar is a big proponent of the theory that Camp David failed not because of Palestinian rejectionism, but rather due to some other amorphous reason. Thus he writes:

As a sage providing support for his own truth, Netanyahu claimed that in 2000 Israel "made a sweeping peace offer that met virtually all of the Palestinian demands." It would be interesting to hear the opinion of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak on this "truth," for example on the Palestinian demands regarding the Temple Mount and the Palestinian refugee issue.

Elar's point is not entirely clear. Barak's offer was unprecedented in its willingness to meet Palestinian demands. Barak accepted the Clinton Parameters as a basis for negotiation in which the Muslim and Christian quarters would be entirely under Palestinian rule and accepted the division of Jerusalem including the transfer of sovereignty of Arab neighborhoods to the Palestinians. Regarding refugees, Barak proposed to permit some of them to come to Israel under the "family reunification" framework. Barak was also the first prime minister to agree to the exchange of territories and to withdrawal from parts of the Jordan Valley. As for the Temple Mount, Barak demanded maintaining Israeli sovereignty, but was was willing to consider Palestinian "custodianship," which the Palestinians understood to mean Palestinian sovereignty above ground, and Israeli sovereignty below ground (Al Quds, Aug. 18, 2000, translated by MEMRI).

Was this a "sweeping" offer? It appears to be. Does it meet all of the Palestinian demands? Apparently not. Does it meet almost all of their demands, as Netanyahu said? Definitely yes. Then how did Netanyahu lie? It seems he didn't.

Eldar on Who Started the War

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
31 March '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/03/eldar_on_who_started_the_war.html

In his column Monday berating the Israeli leadership for not having accepted the Arab League initiative, veteran Ha'aretz journalist Akiva Eldar provides another example of his selective vision ("Arab peace initiative is another missed opportunity for Israel"). He writes:

Instead of making peace with all the Arab states, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a war against the Palestinians the day after the March 2002 Arab League summit: In response to the murder of 30 Israelis in the Hamas suicide attack at a Passover seder in Netanya's Park Hotel, he ordered the army to reoccupy the territories (Operation Defensive Shield ).

That is an interesting take on reality. If Eldar considers Operation "Defensive Shield" the launching of a war against the Palestinians, how does he describe the year and a half-long terror offensive directed against Israel which preceded the operation? In Eldar's mind, was the murder and carnage of Israelis on buses, cafes, and pizzerias, and the firing of rockets at Israeli towns -- which first began in the beginning of 2001 -- simply the normal course of affairs?

Eldar's sentence reflects his worldview in which methodical and institutionalized Palestinian violence against Israelis is natural and acceptable. Yet, when Israel responds (after 135 Israelis were murdered in one month alone), and attacks in return in order to defend its citizens, and not to murder innocent civilians indiscriminately, Eldar accuses Israel of "launch[ing] a war."

-- By Yishai Goldflam

For the Hebrew version of this blog post, visit CAMERA's Israeli site, Presspectiva.

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No Shortage of ‘Barbarians’ to Oppose Peace

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Comentary
30 June '10

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman closes his column today by quoting Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar, who believes Israel’s right-wingers hold on to the “no’s” of their Arab antagonists for dear life. To bolster this argument, Eldar quotes Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which a Byzantine narrator asks, “What’s going to happen to us without barbarians?”

While Friedman devotes his space on the op-ed page to a 700-word mash note to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the Eldar column he quotes is devoted to resurrecting one of Friedman’s own publicity stunts — the so-called Saudi peace proposal of 2002 — and representing it as an example of how Israel has turned down a chance to end the conflict. That bit of nonsense, which was first broached in a Friedman column, supposedly offered Israel the recognition of the entire Arab world as long as it surrendered every inch of land it won in the 1967 Six-Day War. That this so-called peace proposal also included the demand that Israel allow millions of the descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees to “return” — which would mean an end to the Jewish state — is a mere detail that can be ignored as far as Eldar is concerned. In other words, rather than a peace proposal, it was merely a demand for a unilateral Israeli surrender.

Even Friedman doesn’t talk much about the Saudi initiative anymore, but that doesn’t stop Eldar from pretending that it was a genuine opportunity for peace.

As for Friedman, his enthusiasm for Fayyad and his new Palestinian bureaucracy and security force is unbridled. But contrary to the implication of his column, Israel is not only willing to talk to Fayyad; it is his greatest booster, as the “hard-line” Netanyahu government has closed checkpoints and done all in its power to keep the PA government going.

But the problem for Fayyad as well as for Israel is those barbarians who Eldar pretends don’t exist anymore.

(Read full post)

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[Fear of failing?] Akiva Eldar carefully avoids hard questions in interview with PA PM

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
02 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

If Akiva Eldar was certain that Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad really had answers to the hard questions he would ask them. And he would follow up on PA PM Fayyad's soft answers.

But Akiva Eldar doesn't do this.

Now if Akiva Eldar genuinely believes that Fayyad can handle the hard questions he does him a disservice.

And if he avoids hard questions because he doesn't want to hurt the Palestinian cause he is doing a disservice to his readers.

Here are some questions:

(1) Throwing rocks and firebombs is a form of "peaceful protest"?

(2) You demand that all Palestinians held by Israel be released now. Israel is holding Palestinian cop Mahmoud al-Khatib who recently murdered an Israeli soldier. Are you saying that al-Khatib should also be freed?

(3) What is your position on the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel and become citizens while the same right is not provided for Arabs with family ties to locations within Israel?

And there's more.

=============================================

Palestinian PM to Haaretz: We will have a state next year
By Akiva Eldar Haaretz Last update - 11:44 02/04/2010
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160513.html

RAMALLAH - Next year, "the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations," says Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an exclusive interview to Haaretz.

Relaying Passover greetings to the Jewish community, Fayyad hopes Israelis will also participate in the celebrations for the birth of a new state.

"The time for this baby to be born will come," he says, "and we estimate it will come around 2011. That is our vision, and a reflection of our will to exercise our right to live in freedom and dignity in the country [where] we are born, alongside the State of Israel in complete harmony," says Fayyad, 58.

He also welcomed the Quartet's announcement of two weeks ago in Moscow, which supports the PA's August 2009 plan to establish a state within 24 months.

(Read full article)
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Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA Media Analysis
23 March '10

"It's clear these leaders have no clue what's happening in Israel's largest city," veteran Ha'aretz writer Akiva Eldar charges in his March 22 Op-Ed, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. But one wonders whether it's not Eldar himself who hasn't got a clue when he writes in the very same paragraph:

For 17 years, since the days of the Peres-Yitzhak Rabin administration, holy places in the Old City have been closed to Muslim and Christian believers from the occupied territories. The only East Jerusalem residents allowed to enter the Temple Mount compound are women and the elderly.

In general, the thousands of West Bank Palestinians with permits to enter Israel (for work, study and other purposes) and all east Jerusalem Arabs, including men, have had free access to the Temple Mount over the last 17 years. There have been periods of heightened violence which prove to be the exception; at those times, access is usually limited to men over the age of 45 or 50 and women of all ages. An example of this restricted period fell earlier this month, as Hamas called a "day of rage," inciting violence on the Temple Mount and beyond. The fact that intermittent closures and restrictions are the exception, as opposed to the rule, is apparent from the media reports which note the beginning or the end of a more restrictive period. Thus, Akiva Eldar's own newspaper reported March 17, 2010:

Earlier Wednesday, Israel lifted its closure on the West Bank and granted open access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, with police saying that thousands of troops will remain on high alert but reported no disturbances. Israel originally sealed off the territory last week.

There are also periods of complete closure on the West Bank, such as during Jewish holidays, in which West Bank Arabs may not enter Israel aside from humanitarian cases. Yet even during a period of closure during the Jewish new year (Rosh Hashanah) which fell on September 2009, nearly 60 percent of the West Bank Palestinian population still had access to Jerusalem, according to the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Sept. 16-29 "Protection of Civilians Report" by OCHA details:

(Read full report)
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Ha’aretz Writers are Subversive

FresnoZionism.com
09 October 09

The Ha’aretz newspaper is… something else.

Called the “NY Times of Israel”, Ha’aretz writers are often far more anti-Israel than those of the NY Times, which is no slouch in that department.

The previous editor, David Landau, famously toldformer US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a ‘failed state’ which needed to be ‘raped’ into a settlement with the Arabs by the US (I originally thought that Landau must have been thinking of the Hebrew word “לאנוס” which means both ‘to force’ and ‘to rape’, but then I discovered that he had come to Israel from the UK at the age of 23). He also said that this would be a “wet dream” for him.

One writer, Gideon Levy,accused Israel of committing ‘war crimes’ on the first day of the Gaza war. And Amira Hass, here validating the libelsof the Goldstone report, is as eloquent a spokesperson for the Palestinian cause as you will find anywhere.

Today it’s Akiva Eldar doing the devil’s work:

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.

The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.

The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction.

This appears in the ‘diplomatic news’ section of Haaretz.com (English).

So an unnamed source is ’stunned’ by unnamed congressmen who are ‘furious’. One of the most basic principles that an intelligent person applies when making judgments about accusations like this is to ‘consider the source’, but Eldar — in a newsarticle — doesn’t tell us. This is more ‘National Enquirer’ material than responsible journalism.

I haven’t heard Netanyahu say anything like “Obama is an enemy of Israel”, have you? And if Obama is “furious” at Netanyahu, I haven’t heard him say that either. So why present an unsourced slander against the PM in a news article?

There can be only one reason, which is to strike a political blow against him in Israel and to discredit him in the US.

This is not a bit surprising, when you consider Eldar’s degree of left-wing extremism. Recently, he argued that the concessions Olmert offered in negotiations with the Palestinians wereinsufficient to compensate them for years of ’struggle’! Struggle indeed.