[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]

6. El País (ii)

Juan Miguel Muñoz is the Jerusalem correspondent for El País and nobody who has followed his coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in recent years can have been left in any doubt as to his views on it. There's a brio and a frank partisanship in his writing that's absent from that of his British colleague, Rory McCarthy of The Guardian. Between the 9th and 22nd of March El País ran a story almost every day from Muñoz, devoted either wholly or in part to the developing crisis.

In his article published on March 9th, shortly before Biden's arrival in Israel, he pronounced the proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians to be a waste of time,

What's noteworthy here is that the negotiations are seen as doomed to failure because of the nature of the initial Israeli negotiating position. The position of the Palestinians is not mentioned. There could be at least two reasons for this: the first is that Muñoz deems it so self-evidently reasonable and just as to not require comment or analysis. The second may be not so much a reason but a trope that is widespread in commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflicts and that sees the Israel as being the side with full political subjectivity and the Palestinians as passive recipients of Israel policy, at best driven, provoked or obliged by Israel into some or other course of action but devoid of a positive strategy of their own. It might here be argued that this has something to do with the disparity in power between the two sides. I doubt it. Anyone who took the Palestinians to be fully equal to the Israelis in terms of human and political rights would give them greater credit for what they say and do and subject their words and actions to a similar level of scrutiny as that which is rightly applied to Israel. Muñoz also sees November's mid-term elections as an obstacle to the progress of peace talks. It's hard to see why, unless you imagine that successful talks might be repugnant to a considerable number of American voters.

The following day, with the new building in Jerusalem announced by Israel and condemned by the United States Muñoz said,

Why would the idea that a change in the policy of the United States lead to a change in Israeli policy be "unthinkable"? To believe that, one would need to be ignorant of the history of Israeli-American relations and a firm believer in the Mearsheimer and Walt thesis about who really runs American foreign policy.

However, by March 17th, Muñoz had recovered a sense of the relationship between the US being one governed by politics rather than a conspiracy,

A final example of Muñoz's coverage of the crisis; in a more general piece, also published on March 17th, he reviews the history of Israel's colonization of the West Bank. It includes what he claims is a quote from Ben Gurion encouraging the reoccupation of East Jerusalem and Hebron by Jews, roundly condemns successive Israeli governments and while the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are its lynchpin, it never actually mentions from whom they were conquered. The piece concludes like this,

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This is the fourth post in a series of five. The first is here, the second here and the third here.