Ha’aretz‘s Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff correctly note that the pro-Palestinian activists attempting to sail to Gaza are engaged mostly in “a battle of public relations that is meant to strike a blow at Israel.”

The flotilla is organized to a large extent by prominent members of the International Solidarity Movement, including ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf, who has described suicide bombings as “noble” and argued that Palestinian so-called resistance “must” include violence.

Despite this, the Wall Street Journal‘s Charles Levinson refers to the anti-Israel activist’s ships as a “flotilla of peace activists.” This language is not only prejudicial and subjective, but, in light of the above, is also grossly misleading to readers.

In fact, although Levinson, like Harel and Issacharoff, refers to the PR implications of the voyage, his reference to the group as “peace activists” is, in effect, an abandonment of impartiality in favor of participation in the very PR he describes in the article.

The Wall Street Journal notes that readers can comment about articles by emailing [email protected].

Dr. Jacques Gauthier, an expert in international law, has devoted twenty-five years of study to the subject of who holds primary rights to and ownership of Jerusalem. His conclusion, laid out in a 1,300 page PhD dissertation with 3000 footnotes?

The Jewish right to the city is foremost and has been ratified in international law.

An interview on Canada’s CTS network summarizes his argument and conclusion here.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The Schalit family on Thursday asked for assistance from international left-wing activists due to arrive in the Gaza Strip later in the day.

If the left-wing activists pressure Hamas to allow international organizations to bring letters and food packages to Gilad Schalit, the kidnapped soldier’s family has agreed to support the international expedition’s attempt to dock, Army Radio reported Thursday.

Lawyer Nick Kaufman presented the offer to the organization “Free Gaza,” one of the organizers of the flotilla headed for Gaza, which promptly refused the offer.

“We are disappointed that the organizers of the flotilla have refused to also provide basic humanitarian assistance to our son, who has been held in Gaza four years in contradiction of international law,” said the Schalit family.

Days after Ha’aretz‘s Amira Hass acknowledged that she printed misinformation supplied by her Palestinian source, her colleague Akiva Eldar admits that he was wrong on so-called Palestinian private land. He writes today:

In a column on June 6, 2009, I wrote that work in the vicinity of El Matan was being carried out on private land belonging to the village of Tulat. I want to clarify that the work is being done on state land that is under the jurisdiction of the settlement of Ma’aleh Shomron. It was not my intention to claim that the synagogue there was built on private land belonging to any particular resident of the village of Tulat, and it was certainly not my intention to harm the inhabitants of El Matan.

The term “state land” refers to approximately 1 million dunams that the state has expropriated in the West Bank under a law dating from Ottoman times. A large part of this land was earmarked for building settlements exclusively for Jews.

It is pretty safe to assume, given Ha’aretz‘s repeated refusals to correct factual errors, that this acknowledgment of error came as a result of legal action. (It is also worth nothing that besides the June 2009 article, Eldar had earlier written about allegedly private Palestinian land in the area of Tulat and El Matan back in September 2006.)
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“Zionists are not settlers. Zionists are not racists” is the online headline of an Op-Ed in Ha’aretz today by Israeli attorney Eldad Yaniv, author of the National Left Manifest, who unfortunately errs about Zionism and settlements.

In an effort to separate Zionism from a history of settlement, Yaniv fumbles:

[In an earlier Op-Ed Israel Harel] claims that Ofra is the equivalent of the prestate “tower and stockade” settlements, that today’s settlements in the territories are a continuation of the pioneering enterprise of that time.

But when David Ben-Gurion and the Jews in Palestine encouraged settlement under the nose of the British, they were building Jewish sovereignty and creating a Jewish majority in places that the world had designated for a Jewish state.

In fact, many Jewish settlements founded during the time of David Ben-Gurion were located in areas designated by the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan as part of a future Arab state. They include Nahariya, Matzuva, Hanita, Eilon, Yehiam, Kfar Hahoresh (in the Galilee), Nitzanim, Yad Mordechai, Kfar Darom, Nirim (in the Gaza Strip area), Ben Shemen, Hartuv, Kfar Menachem, Kedma, Galon, Gat, Revadim, and many, many more (in the central region).

Take a look at this map from Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, clearly depicting the Jewish settlements sitting within areas designated by the U.N. as part of a future Arab state:

Michael Scheuer’s years as a CIA officer seem to have gained him a pass from some members of the media who would otherwise shun him for the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry he openly espouses. Editors, bookers and producers should take a look at Scheuer’s own blog called non-intervention.com where he churns out hate-filled commentary like this, which attracts like-minded posts from readers:

Obama is completely owned by the Israelis, just as his predecessors were. U.S. taxpayers continue to see their money channeled to the war-wanting Israeli theocracy, even as the number of jobless and homeless increase domestically. Our soldier-children are still on the hook to die for Israel — without a declaration of war — if Netanyahu divines that his holy book tells him that Israel’s God-given deed for all of Palestine needs protecting by attacking Iran. (NB: Odd isn’t it, how Washington routinely uses the separation-of-church-and-state tenet to attack U.S. Christians, but believes it is inapplicable when the U.S. federal government financially supports or militarily defends overseas theocracies like Israel and Saudi Arabia?)

Earlier this year, Scheuer did get in hot water with an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washignton Journal that caught the attention not only of CAMERA but of commentator Jeffrey Goldberg who wrote: “Words fail. Scheuer is a Jew-hating crank.”

The blogosphere may be a ready platform for racists to spew and spread their message, but it’s also obviously a way for responsible outlets to check out who they’re considering as guest speakers.

In a May 21 article ironically entitled “Don’t confuse us with facts,” Ha’aretz‘s Akiva Eldar writes:

a new study about psychological obstacles to solving the conflict shows that the average Israeli doesn’t want to know the facts. . . .

If that’s the case, then Akiva Eldar, a veteran reporter for Ha’aretz, considered by some the New York Times of Israel, is no better than the average Israeli. In this very article, Eldar continues to cling to the fantasy that “a Muslim from Ramallah or a Christian from Bethlehem has no chance of getting a permit to pray at Al-Aqsa or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Eldar goes on to offer more details about the study:

People, [Professor] Bar-Tal explains, have a natural tendency to simplify the world and to insulate themselves from facts that confuse them: “Long-term ideological beliefs make many people close themselves — consciously or not — to information that threatens those beliefs.”

Indeed. How long will Eldar continue to believe — despite all evidence to the contrary — that all Muslims and Christians from the West Bank are prohibited from reaching Jerusalem’s holy sites?

A front-page article in the Guardian today claims to reveal how apartheid-era documents prove that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to the apartheid regime of South Africa. The office of President Peres, who was named by the Guardian as the leading Israeli official involved in the alleged affair, issued the following statement:

There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian that in 1975 Israel negotiated with South Africa the exchange of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, The Guardian elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts.

Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place.

The Office of the President regrets The Guardian’s decision to publish such an article without requesting comment from any Israeli officials.

The Office of the President intends to send a harsh letter to the editor of The Guardian and demands the publication of the true facts.

In 2006, Chris McGreal, the author of today’s Guardian report, published a series of distorted and erroneous articles accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of having had uniquely close ties to apartheid South Africa.

Palestinians Aya and Yasmin in Tel Aviv (photo by Ilana Hammerman)

Ilana Hammerman, writing in Ha’aretz, describes her illegal escapades with three young Palestinian woman from the West Bank whom she smuggles into Israel for a day of fun.

Hammerman portrays herself as especially knowledgeable about checkpoints and restrictions on movement for Palestinians in the West Bank. She describes her deliberations as to how best evade authorities and sneak the women in — “I checked the map and mentally reviewed the conditions at the checkpoints that I know in the Land of Judea.” She rules out the Tarqumiya and Bethlehem checkpoints, and eventually settles on Al Khader.

Yet her depiction of an exchange between the girls and a cop in Jaffa exposes a serious gap in her self-declared knowledge concerning freedom of movement issues. Consider the following:

The man heard the girls speaking Arabic and asked where they were from. I couldn’t say that they were from Jaffa, because when I tried to win his sympathy beforehand, I told him that I just wanted them to see and feel the sea for the first time in their lives. They’re from East Jerusalem and Israeli residents, I said. He showed his official police ID to me patiently and demanded that we show him our IDs and the girls’ entry permits. At that moment, Lin’s cell phone rang again: It was her fiance, calling for the umpteenth time to check in on her. I heard her mumble something and she hurriedly hung up. I picked up the word mashakil (“problems” ) despite all the stress – the Arabic word that I’m most familiar with.

Anyway, I somehow managed to get the policeman to let us go with a warning and admonition that this was “the last time” he would do so, as if we’d met this way many times before. (Emphasis added)

This account is distorted (at best) or fictitious (at worst). Either way, it’s highly implausible. Why? Because Arabs from eastern Jerusalem, residents of Israel, can travel freely throughout the state of Israel, including to the Jaffa port. They don’t need a permit.

The Palestinian Maan News Agency reports that an Olympic-sized swimming pool has opened in the Gaza Strip.

This development raises a key questions that reporters should keep in mind:

1) News reports constantly remind us about the cement shortages in the Gaza Strip. Given the reported shortage, which is allegedly delaying the building of critical infrastructure such as sewage projects, schools, and homes, how is cement available to build an Olympic-sized pool?

2) Given the reported shortages of water in the Gaza Strip, is an Olympic swimming pool really the best use of this precious resource?

3) This week a flotilla of aid ships from Greece and Cyprus, carrying some 10,000 tons of basic supplies, including construction material, is scheduled to reach the Gaza Strip this week. Will the hundreds of Freedom Flotilla passengers have a chance to take a dip in the pool after they deliver the desperately needed construction supplies? (BTW, in the last week, Israel reportedly delivered 14,000 tons of supplies into the Gaza Strip.)