A New York Times news story about this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast broad-brushes American Jews who back recognition of Israel’s capital in Jerusalem as hard-liners. In the article, White House correspondent Mark Lander asserts:

Mr. Trump’s remarks were most notable for what he did not say. He made no mention of his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a landmark shift in American policy that was extremely popular with evangelical voters and a segment of hard-line pro-Israel American Jews.

Evangelical support for the decision could conceivably be based on polling data. But unlike with evangelicals, there’s no defined subgroup of “hard-line” American Jews, and such a characterization wouldn’t appear in polling crosstabs. On what, then, does the reporter base his characterization?

On his opinion, it would seem – his feeling about who would support recognition of Israel’s capital, notwithstanding that this group includes overwhelming, bipartisan congressional majorities in 1995 and 2017, President Obama’s ambassador to Israel, and mainstream groups like AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah and the Jewish Federations of North America.

At any rate, opinions belong in the Opinion pages, not the news section.

The newspaper’s characterization of Jewish supporters of U.S. policy toward Jerusalem as “hard-line” is particularly striking coming days after one of its reporters yet again downplayed the radicalism of the so-called BDS Movement, a group of anti-Israel activists that calls for boycotting of the Jewish state and, sometimes, non-Israeli Jews.

BDS, the newspaper insisted last week, acts “primarily in protest against [Israel’s] settlement and security practices in the West Bank.” But BDS is clear that its central tenets go well beyond opposition to “settlement and security practices in the West Bank,” something its leaders have taken pains to note. BDS founder Omar Barghouti, for example, noted in a recent Times letter to the editor that “the goal of the global Palestinian-led B.D.S. movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) is not only to end the ‘occupation of the West Bank’.”

Even J Street and Americans for Peace Now, groups that normally reserve their criticism for Israel, have slammed BDS for being opposed to Israel’s very existence. But the New York Times doesn’t characterize BDS activists as hard-liners. It minimizes their extremism, and instead casts American Jews who support U.S. policy on Israel as hard-liners.

Why?

(For more on New York Times coverage of Jerusalem, see here, here, here, here, and here.)

Flat screen television sets at Kerem Shalom crossing on their way to Gaza from Israel, 2012 (photo by Adam Levick)

In their Los Angeles Times article yesterday (“Neither Israel nor Hamas wants another war in Gaza. . . “), Noga Tarnopolsky and Rushdi Abu Alouf err: “Egypt’s border with Gaza is closed and Israel allows only trucks carrying food or other humanitarian necessities in and out.”

Israel allows commercial goods in and out of the Gaza Strip — not just humanitarian goods. In fact, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Gaza Crossings’ Operation Status: Monthly Update (December 2017), in December, 10,327 truckloads of commercial goods entered the Gaza Strip from Israel. This compares to just 460 truckloads of what the United Nations terms humanitarian goods. In other words, the amount of commercial goods which entered the Gaza Strip was more than 22 times greater than the amount of humanitarian goods which entered that month. This ratio is pretty much consistent for all of 2017.

Since 2010, has allowed just about everything into Gaza without restrictions aside from weapons and goods that it considers dual-use items (ie military and civilian use).

Among the commercial items are appliances such as televisions and washing machines. As The Jerusalem Post reported Jan. 9, 2017 (“Shin Bet foils smuggling ring that sought to help Hamas in Gaza”):

According to the Shin Bet, the smuggled goods had been hidden inside of electronic goods, such as televisions, washing machines and refrigerators. During the investigation, the Shin Bet discovered that Massalma had assisted Abu Siriya in November in smuggling hundreds of cameras inside washing machines that had been imported from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

“The smuggling method that was discovered by the security forces underscores the efforts undertaken by Hamas, via its collaborators, in order to build up its strength and cynically exploit the commercial permits given by Israel for the benefit of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip,” the Shin Bet said.

CAMERA has contacted The Times to request a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

So maybe the image above is a bit of an overstatement. But for some reason, the New York Times can’t seem to get it right when explaining BDS activism to readers.

BDS stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, and the self-styled “BDS Movement” we tend to hear about today focuses squarely on Israel, aiming to batter the Jewish state with those tools until it ceases to exist.

But in an article yesterday, the Times referred to a “movement in the United States, Europe and elsewhere to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel primarily in protest against its settlement and security practices in the West Bank. The movement is known as B.D.S.”

These are hardly the “primary” motivations of BDS advocacy. The BDS Movement’s own website lists three central demands, which include an Israeli withdrawal, not only from the West Bank but also from the Golan Heights, along with the Jewish Quarter and other parts of Jerusalem. It calls for the “dismantling” of Israel’s security barrier, which was built to prevent suicide bombers from reaching Israeli towns and which for much of its rout lies in Israel and not the West Bank. It insists on a change to Israel’s alleged treatment of Arabs living withing Israel. And it calls for an influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, which is widely understood as a way to demographically eliminate the Jewish state.

Despite what the Times told its readers, not one of the three demands refers to settlements, and each of them focus focus on more than the West Bank, and on more than “settlement and security practices.”

The takeaway is clear. The AMCHA Initiative, a group that combats antisemitism on campus, states that BDS “aims to demonize, delegitimize, and destroy the Jewish nature of Israel, with the result of denying to Jews their right of national self-determination.”

J Street, a group largely devoted to criticism of Israeli policies, agrees that “the Global BDS Movement does not support the two-state solution, recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state, or distinguish between opposition to the existence of Israel itself and opposition to the occupation of the territory beyond the Green Line. Further, some of the Movement’s supporters and leaders have trafficked in unacceptable anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

And a vice chair of Americans for Peace Now has written that “BDS’s prime motivation, if their messaging is to be believed, is not to end the occupation at all; rather, it is to end Israel.”

Not that we need to take it from them. Omar Barghouti, whom the New York Times correctly describes as a founder of the BDS movement, has admitted that his goal is to replace Israel with “unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.”

Prior instances of the New York Times downplaying BDS goals — this is far from the first time — have been criticized by all sides: Tablet Magazine’s Yair Rosenberg has slammed the newspaper for having “dramatically misrepresented [BDS’s] stated aims and implicit goals, whitewashing the movement’s radicalism.” And Omar Barghouti has written to the Times to protest its softening of his movement’s aims, saying in a published letter that “the goal of the global Palestinian-led B.D.S. movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) is not only to end the ‘occupation of the West Bank.'”

Previously, the newspaper has asserted that BDS merely is “critical of Israel’s policies toward the West Bank,” that it simply “advocates Israel’s withdrawal from disputed territories where Palestinians live,” and that it called only for Israel “to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

New York Times readers don’t want to be misinformed. Those concerned with Israel’s security don’t want the country’s enemies to misrepresented. And even BDS leaders don’t want their extreme aims to be whitewashed. So why does the the newspaper repeatedly cast BDS goals as more moderate than they really are?

On Jan. 31, 2018 the United States State Department announced that top Hamas operative Ismail Haniyeh was now listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). Less than twenty-four hours later, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) chief “peace negotiator,” Saeb Erekat, decried the United States’ decision. Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip and calls for the destruction of Israel.

In a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) press statement, Erekat said that the “PLO rejects and condemns the U.S. finance department’s decision to add Islamic Hamas movement chief Ismail Haniyeh to the terrorist list.” Both the PLO and the PA, which rules the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), are dominated by the Fatah movement and led by Mahmoud Abbas. All three entities, as well as Abbas, are frequently labeled “moderate” by the press.

The State Department noted that Haniyeh “has been involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens” and “Hamas has been responsible for an estimated 17 American lives killed in terrorist attacks.” Haniyeh is the head of the terror group’s so-called “political bureau.” As Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department terror analyst, noted in his 2006 book Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, all factions of Hamas are closely intertwined; claims that the political branch does not coordinate with the so-called “military bureau” that carries out attacks are false.

As CAMERA has highlighted, Haniyeh has repeatedly called for a “holy war by the Palestinian people” against Israel. He has rejected claims—often pushed by the media and others—that “despair” is the motive for Palestinian anti-Jewish violence (“Hamas: ‘Despair’ Is Not the Reason for Palestinian Violence,” Jan. 26, 2016). More recently, following the United States’ Dec. 6, 2017 announcement that it would implement the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, Haniyeh called for a third intifada (violent uprising). The second intifada (2000-05) resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 Israelis.

Erekat and the PLO’s decision to defend Haniyeh is noteworthy. Hamas and Fatah have long-been rivals and have attempted reconciliation efforts on various occasions. Recent attempts have failed—and were chronically underreported by major U.S. news outlets (see, for example “The Washington Post Notes Growing Hamas-Fatah Tensions,” CAMERA, July 18, 2017).

Erekat himself is an oft-cited source by the Western media—in spite of his well-established track record for distortions (see, for example “Saeb Erekat: Highly Visible, Highly Unreliable,” CAMERA, March 4, 2015). In fact, in a Jan. 31, 2018 column, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius uncritically repeated Erekat’s claim that, thanks to President Donald Trump, “the two-state solution is dead (“The Road to an Israeli-Palestinian Peace Deal is Vanishing).” Ignatius did not inform readers of Erekat’s defense of Fatah’s policy of paying terrorists. The same day that The Post printed Erekat’s assertion, the Palestinian official defended Haniyeh.