As we point out in our recent article about the leaked Palestinian Authority documents, the Guardian — one of the two media organizations that publicized the documents — falsely claims that the documents “reveal” Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. A Guardian headline reads: “Palestinian negotiators accept Jewish state, papers reveal.”

But the article itself says no such thing. Rather, it quotes a Palestinian negotiator telling his Israeli counterpart, “If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want.”

Far from being a revelation, this echoes a formula that has been publicly and repeatedly invoked by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. (For example, Abbas has said: “You can call yourselves as you like, but I don’t accept it and I say so publicly.”) And the very document cited by the Guardian actually shows the Palestinians repeatedly refusing to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, rejecting “two states for two peoples,” and even seeming to reject the very idea of a Jewish people. Lest there be any doubt, in the following meeting between the negotiators the argument about recognition of Israel as the Jewish state continued, with the Palestinians continuing to adamantly insist they will not offer such recognition.

Plus ça change…. The newspaper, in fact, has a history of falsifying Palestinian positions regarding Israel.
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In the New York Times’ feature this week on Turkey’s Foreign Minister (“Turkey’s Role in Middle East is Bolstered by Vision of Foreign Minister”), Ahmet Davutoglu insists that he did all he could to convince the IHH to cancel the departure of the Mavi Marmara, and reporter James Traub doesn’t contradict him:

In the spring of 2010, a Turkish charitable organization, I.H.H., chartered the flotilla designed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Davutoglu says that he tried to persuade the group not to sail and then asked the organizer of the flotilla to turn aside if Israel stopped the ships, as it was certain to do, and to offload the cargo at a port outside Gaza if necessary.

Taub describes Ankara’s apparent orchestration of the Mavi Marmara‘s confrontation with Israeli forces as merely an Israeli “view.” A report released today by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) details the close ties between IHH (described by Traub only as a Turkish charitable organization) and “the upper echelons of the Turkish regime,” including the government’s “logistical support” and “political-propaganda protection.”

The JCPA has published an interesting analysis by Pinhas Inbari examining the motives for Al Jazeera’s release of the so-called Palestine Papers. He writes:

To sum up, al-Jazeera is serving Qatari policy to deepen unrest in the Arab world and link the current local upheavals to the Palestinian problem. In its presentation of the Palestine Papers, al-Jazeera distorted the contents in order to delegitimize the PLO and present Israel as a hard-line non-partner. There is also reason to suspect forgery in the documents referring to refugees since the person suspected of the leaks is the same person who wrote them.

Palestinians may not have described this Israeli move as “earth shattering,” but the Palestinian leaked documents show what is still an Israeli concession: A promised construction freeze in the highly strategic E-1 region between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim.

News organizations parroting the al Jazeera/Guardian narrative on the leaks, which hold that the leaks show major Palestinian concessions ignored by Israel, missed the wider story.

In one of the documents publicized by the al Jazeera and the Guardian, a Palestinian official describes Binyamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of two states as “earth shattering.”

Predictably, this was ignored in the many articles by the two media organizations that released the documents, as they appear intent on casting the documents as evidence of Palestinian capitulation to Israel, and of Israeli intransigence. But it was also overlooked by the news organizations that reported on the papers more responsibly.

According to one of the documents, Bader Rock, a legal adviser for the Palestinian Negotiations Support Unit, said in response to a question about how Israelis were reacting to a major Netanyahu speech that

It’s too early to tell, but it’s welcoming. Likud accepting two states is earth shattering. Sharon left Likud because he wouldn’t have survived there.

Prompted by Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, Rock went on to say that Netanyahu’s acceptance was rhetorical. Nonetheless, use of the term “earth shattering” in an internal Palestinian discussion would certainly suggest that the Palestinians, at least, recognize Israeli steps as truly being “far reaching.”

You can see the exchange on page 7 here.

Benjamin Kerstein picks apart Time Magazine’s latest anti-Israel thesis (“Israel’s Lurch to the Right Scares Some Conservatives”) which suggests that democracy in Israel is in danger, a view shared by many at Ha’aretz. He observes:

It is no exaggeration to say that the accusation of actual or incipient fascism has become an involuntary reflex on the Haaretz Left. To the historian Daniel Blatman, for example, any survivor of Hitler who saw Israel today “would certainly recall those hard days in his [German] homeland.” To Niva Lanir, one of Haaretz’s regular opinion writers, the Nazi analogy is no mere analogy. “There are those,” she writes in a nod to her fellows, “who have long claimed that . . . it is fair to compare Germany on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power and our situation here and now. But,” she goes on, “why should we compare? After all, there’s room for everyone here and for variations as well.” Her colleague, Merav Michaeli, delves into the past to go farther still. Not only, she informs us, does Israel today boast a “white and racist prime minister,” but “in its early days, when Israel’s character was taking shape,” the country’s founders had already “determined that the white race was superior.” Yossi Sarid, a longtime icon of the Israeli left, has put it even more bluntly: “Israeli democracy is mainly for decoration, like a tree grown for its beauty, not to bear fruit.” To Sarid, it appears “as if fascism has already arrived here and is waiting just behind the wall.” . . .

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And it flows straight through Al Azhar University in Cairo.

Details here.

In terms of the quality and objectivity of its Israel coverage, Time keeps on slipping.

On its Sept. 13, 2010 cover, a Jewish star made of daisies was meant to signify the superficial thesis, laid out in the cover story, that Israelis don’t care about peace because they’re too wrapped up in their economic success. Shortly thereafter, it published another attack on the Jewish state that not only adopted the language of anti-Israel activists (the security fence is described throughout as a “wall”), but also introduces language that’s even more inflammatory and deceptive (the fence, to Time, is an “iron curtain”). Most recently, the same author, apparently having abandoned all attempts to disguise his hostile editorializing, announced that “self-righteous indignation is a staple position for an Israeli public….”

This last article prompted the Office of Israel’s Prime Minister to send a response, which was published on Time‘s website:

Dear Mr. Stengel,

I wanted to bring to your attention a recent article in Time entitled “Israel’s Rightward Lurch Scares Some Conservatives.” I hope that you will agree that the article’s obvious bias and numerous distortions are not worthy of the standards of your prestigious magazine.

Israel is depicted in the article as essentially sliding towards fascism. Your correspondent refers to Israel’s Shin Bet (the equivalent of the FBI) as a “secret police,” claims that the Israeli government “increasingly equates dissent with disloyalty,” and accuses the Prime Minister of “taking a page from neighboring authoritarian states.”

Read the whole thing here.