Friday, September 10, 2010
[The following, by Matt, is crossposted from Huffington Post Monitor.]
Last week, the HP published an interview of Anna Baltzer, the notoriously anti-Israel Jewish woman, by a guy named Christian Avard. While I knew who Baltzer was, I had never heard of this Avard guy, and his HP description states he is a staff reporter for the Deerfield Valley News, of Dover, Vermont. He seems to have written quite a bit about a variety of subjects, including US-Muslim relations, but this looked to be his first on Israel. However, according to his bio, his writings have appeared in Electronic Intifada, so that immediately got my attention.
So, here's the interview. Before we even get to Baltzer's series of misleading answers and downright lies, let's take a look at what kind of questions Avard, the "staff reporter", asked her.
"What made that episode a reality and did your appearance on The Daily Show indicate that the mainstream media is beginning to explore the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine?"
"How much of an impact did the atrocities of Operation Cast Lead and the Mavi Marmara flotilla have an effect in opening people's eyes to the Israeli occupation of Palestine?"
The rest of his questions are reasonable enough, but these two are shocking in how leading they are. Besides the obviousness of Avard's description of "Palestine" as a place that clearly exists and Israel's clearly occupying it, his second question in particular is an excellent example of begging the question. What if the Mavi Marmara raid wasn't in fact an atrocity, but is what the US and Israel considers it to be: a raid on a group of violent jihadist terror supporters? That is up for debate between us, but the fact is an objective reporter would not ask a question like that. But, of course, a truly objective reporter, who challenged Baltzer's assumptions, would not get published on the HP.
For Baltzer's responses, follow past the break.
So, what did Baltzer have to say to us impressionable HP readers in response to Avard's softball questions?
"The "Israel is innocent and virtuous" narrative is no longer sustainable given these types of crimes, so in its place has been a propaganda campaign to convey how "complex" the issue is. "Yes," the narrative goes, "Israel sometimes does bad things, but it's just a cycle of violence and it's very complicated. We are working on it and you mustn't pressure us." This in some ways is more insidious than the previous narrative because it gives the illusion of balance where there is none and removes Israel's responsibility as the occupier.... but the injustice of Palestinians being oppressed and denied their fundamental human rights simply because of their ethnicity and religion is not complicated. " [emphasis added]
Now, Baltzer describes herself as a "Palestinian human rights advocate", so that alone shows her intellectual honesty when it comes to this subject. But her whitewashing of Palestinian actions in this above paragraph is quite shocking. Claiming that what is being done to the Palestinians is "simply" because of ethnicity or religion is a blatant lie which is obvious to anyone paying attention to this conflict. Baltzer ignores the years of Palestinian fedayeen attacks, the suicide bombings, the First and Second Intifadas and the election of Hamas in her transparent attempt to reduce the Israel-Palestinian conflict into a simple ethnic conflict. Perhaps a month ago, fresh from the flotilla raid, she might have gotten away with this kind of revisionist history. But now, after the massacre in Hebron and the PA's recent refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, such lies are pretty clearly refuted. One would think that if the Palestinians "simply" want their human rights back, they wouldn't have a problem with Israel being a Jewish state.
Next we have Baltzer's "three myths" about the peace process. As you may or may not be surprised to hear, her truths are more fantasy than those she is addressing.
"Myth 1:"This is an age-old conflict based on religion and mutual hatred." This is a conflict about land and human rights, not about religion. Prior to the Zionist movement, Jews were better treated in the Arab world than they were in much of the Christian West. There is nothing inherently incompatible about Jewish, Muslims, and Christians, but with the introduction of the Zionist movement seeking to--and eventually succeeding to--annex annex Palestine for European Jews and one segment of the indigenous population while excluding and discriminating against the other segments of the population, you saw the emergence of violence. Israel was created and is maintained at the expense of Muslims and Christians in the area, who are denied their land and their human rights simply because they are not Jewish. This ongoing discriminatory system perpetuates the conflict today and until it is addressed we can expect no just or enduring peace"
Now, she starts off well. The conflict is about land and human rights. But then she starts to go off the rails by claiming that everything between the Jews and the Arabs was hunky dory back before mean old Zionism came along. It is true that Jews were treated better in Arab lands than in Europe, but that is entirely relative. Just because Jews were not being exterminated by the Arabs doesn't mean their lives there were any fun. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Jews (and Christians) had to pay a special tax, they couldn't mock or criticize the Koran, they couldn't hold public office or bear arms, they couldn't build houses or synagogues higher than Muslim houses, they had to yield the center of the road to Muslims, nor could they even pray loudly because that could offend Muslims. H.E.W. Young wrote in 1909:
"The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed"
As for the actual motives of Zionism, I see no reason to restate them. It's clearly Baltzer is lying about the goals of Zionism in order to make the Palestinians seem like the innocent victims, when in reality it is their own actions and their intolerance that has lead them to their situation.
Myth 2: "The occupation may be ugly, but it's for security" (note the switch from the previous narrative that "there is no occupation"). The majority of the institutions of Israel's occupation simply cannot be justified by security. Israel pays its citizens to move from Israel to the West Bank to live amidst the so-called "enemy"--does that make them safer? Israel has never declared its own borders, rather it expands them onto more and more of someone else's land--does that make Israel safer?...Cutting Palestinians off from their families, schools, hospitals, and livelihoods will never make Israelis safer. If Israel is serious about ending Palestinian violence, it must acknowledge the roots of that violence.
Now, the notion that the occupation is for security and is effective at achieving that goal is supported by the evidence of successful terror attacks over time. If you look at the list of terror attacks (something that, according to Anna Baltzer, does not exist), as the security fence and checkpoints go up, the amount of terror attacks go down. On the other hand, after the occupation of Gaza ended, the number of rocket attacks coming from that region went way up. Likewise, when the IDF partially withdrew from the West Bank after the signing of the Camp David accords, the Second Intifada claims hundreds of Israeli lives in part because the institutions were not there to stop the attacks. But, of course, I'm sure Baltzer's actually right when she claims the occupation is really about being mean to the Palestinians, because Israel loves spending lots of money, putting its soldiers in danger, and losing world opinion for no other reason than they enjoy messing with the Palestinians. That is a very realistic way of looking at the world. As for the settlements, the occupation existed long before the settlements, and the Palestinians have done nothing to indicate life would be any different if the clock was turned back to 1967.
"Myth 3: "Israel has no partner for peace." On the contrary, Palestinians have no partner for peace. No Israeli offer has ever come close to fulfilling Palestinian human rights. Camp David II in 2000, often referred to as [former prime minister ] Ehud Barak's "Generous Offer," would have annexed 10% of the West Bank into Israel, including some of most fertile and water rich areas, home to 80,000 Palestinians. The 10% was spread around the West Bank, separating the "future Palestinian state" into an entire nonviable archipelago of isolated cantons, separating Palestinians from their land and each other. Finally, the proposal maintained Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem (and some control by Palestinians under that sovereignty) and ignored the human rights of the Palestinian refugees, who represent the vast majority of the Palestinian population." and then Baltzer describes numerous "peace" offers Israel rejected.
You see here Baltzer falling into the classic propagandists' trap of what are the Palestinians fighting for?. She states that no Israeli offer has fulfilled Palestinian "human rights". But then what does she say the problems with the Israeli peace offers are? Land (10% of the WB) and sovereignty over Jerusalem (let's table the refugees for a second). Land and Jerusalem are not human rights. They just aren't. No human has the right to get all the land he or she wants, and to make any city the capitol of his or her state. Human rights are things like freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Human rights are not things like I get 10 acres of the Golan Heights and 6 acres of the Galilee. That's property rights.
Now, let's talk about the human rights of the Palestinian refugees. Other than the ex post facto ruling of the UN General Assembly, the Palestinian refugees do not have the right to "return" to Israel. The only ones that might have a case are those who left in 1948, but certainly not their descendants. Article 1 of the Convention as amended by the 1967 Protocol provides the definition of a refugee:
"A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.."
Aside from the fact that Israel is not the country of the nationality of the Palestinians (if it was, they would call themselves Israelis), the article says nothing about descendants of refugees. So Israel is not required to grant the right of return to Palestinian refugees.
Baltzer continues with these same points for a while, repeating the myth of "stolen Palestinian land", etc. She continues to go on at some length about Palestinian human rights, but as with all propagandists, she never states what human rights actually are. If she did, she would have to clarify this statement: "Israel cannot exist as a state only of the Jewish people (as opposed to Israel being the state of the Jewish people and the indigenous population) without the denial of Palestinian rights (because the minute you give Palestinians the same rights as Jews, Israel stands to lose its Jewish majority)". Now, why exactly should Israel give the Palestinians the same rights as Israeli citizens? Note that Baltzer tries to pretend that there are no Israeli Arabs, or if there are they don't have the same rights as Jews (which they do). To claim that Israel is impeding Palestinian human rights for not giving them equal rights as Israelis is like arguing the US is impeding Mexican human rights because Mexicans aren't allowed to vote in US elections. No kidding, Israel isn't giving the Palestinians the same rights as its own citizens, just like every other state in the world. I'm not sure why Baltzer seems to think that all the Palestinians need to be citizens of Israel, but it's odd that she's phrasing it in the language of human rights.
The rest of the blog post is just doubt when it comes to the peace process, which I'm not very interested in. But this blog post shows that the HP is more than willing to act as a mouthpiece for professional propagandists like Anna Baltzer who lie and spin without pause or restraint to advance their cause and biased reporters like Christian Avard who let them go to town without a single challenge. Such biased reporting has no place on a "non-partisan" site like the HP.
