Al-Monitor Spins History

Al-Monitor ran a piece, (“How Palestinians plan to mark 50 years of occupation,” May 15, 2016) outlining “a major Palestinian and international political and public campaign” being planned for next year to mark five decades since the Six-Day War of 1967. The theme of the planned campaign will be “enough with the occupation.”
Author Uri Savir writes:
A senior PLO official in Ramallah told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that “50 years of military occupation spells to every single Palestinian that we, with whatever means we possess, have to end our humiliation and gain our independence. Strategically, June 2017 is an opportunity to place the Palestinian issue on the international agenda.”
[…]The PLO official said that one cannot rule out a “50-year occupation intifada,” but that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas prefers to avoid it: “In 2017, the rules of the game will change. We have come to the end of our patience.”
Savir does not acknowledge that these comments amount to endorsements by Palestinian officials of the murder Jews and Israelis in terrorist projects. Savir, founder of the Peres Center for Peace and the NGO’s current honorary president, parrots incendiary PLO talking points and ignores the incitement of Palestinian violence which the PLO officials themselves unabashedly glorify.
Furthermore, he not only ignores the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank prior to 1967, he also fails to mention numerous offers of statehood made to the Palestinians by successive Israeli governments since. Instead, he chastises Israel:
“Enough with the occupation” should be the Israeli slogan instead. Occupation is the biggest strategic danger to Israel’s identity, to its security and its international relations. It is turning Israel into a binational, immoral state, and it carries severe ramifications for Israel’s democracy.
With pithy historical blindness, Savir places the weight of the conflict entirely on Israel’s shoulders, giving the Palestinians a free pass even as they admit to turning to terrorism. Al-Monitor, the 2014 recipient of the International Press Institute’s (IPI) Free Media Pioneer Award, eliminates any semblance of contextualize reporting, offering a biased perspective of the last half-century of events in Middle East.
–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern
More from SNAPSHOTS
Professor John Quigley Falsely Condemns Israel and U.S. Support in His Syndicated Column
April 30, 2019
John B. Quigley In his widely distributed April syndicated opinion piece mainly about ISIS, the Islamist terrorist entity, John B. Quigley, an Ohio State University law professor, argues that claims of an imminent ISIS resurgence [...]
The New York Times’ Slow Reaction to Hamas Crackdown on Palestinian Protesters
April 4, 2019
The New York Times took a slight jab at Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip, in a recent story about Hamas's crackdown on Palestinian protesters who spoke out against its policies in [...]
CNN’s Zakaria Deals With U.S. Proclamation Recognizing Golan As Part Of Israel
April 3, 2019
Fareed Zakaria hosted an eight-minute discussion of the Golan matter at the end of his weekly (weekend) program, “Global Public Square “ (GPS) hour-long Cable News Network (CNN) broadcast. The broadcast, on both CNN and [...]
NY Times Reporter David Halbfinger Editorializes Israel as “Brutal”
March 6, 2019
New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger Israel, according to the New York Times, is a brute. A March 3 news analysis piece—not an opinion piece—by the newspaper's Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger uses [...]
Palestinian Malevolent Indoctrination Exposed; Mainstream Media Are Indifferent
February 26, 2019
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israel-based non-governmental organization, analyzes and presents in English to the world the ongoing inflammatory indoctrination of Palestinians in Arabic particularly via Palestinian Authority (PA) television (West Bank). PMW is a [...]
Did WCC Activists Attend A Birthday Party Promoted by Palestinian Extremist Organization?
February 4, 2019
The video is a bit fuzzy and grainy. But the footage of birthday party for Shadi Farar, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who spent three years in an Israeli jail on charges of intent to murder, [...]


