by JIM NAURECKAS
“The Center for American Progress found [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s speech to the group to be lacking in the truth department. None of these falsehoods seemed to have been noticed by the New York Times.”
The invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democratic Party-oriented think tank, was controversial, coming amid charges that the group had dampened criticism of Israel to placate pro-Israeli funders (Intercept, 11/5/15).
To its credit, the think tank allowed staffers to post after the speech “10 Falsehoods That Netanyahu Told During His Appearance at CAP” (11/10/15), documenting deceptive claims made in the prime minister’s speech. The New York Times‘ Julie Hirschfeld Davis took a different approach, relaying the prime minister’s claims without question—even when Netanyahu himself urged listeners to check up on his assertions:
“It’s become an axiom that we are gobbling up land—we’re not,” Mr. Netanyahu said, asserting that no new settlements had been built in the past 20 years in Israel, and that the expansions had not “materially” altered the map. “Google this,” he implored the audience.
The New York Times has many more resources at its disposal than Google, but it’s someplace to start. The first thing that comes up when I searched for “no new settlements had been built in the past 20 years in Israel” is the Wikipedia article on “Israeli settlement,” which reported that after a “Road Map for Peace” was proposed international negotiators in 2002,
Israel’s settlement policy remained unchanged. Settlements in East Jerusalem and remaining West Bank were expanded. While according to official Israeli policy no new settlements were built, at least some hundred unauthorized outposts were established since 2002 with state funding in the 60 percent of the West Bank that was not under Palestinian administrative control and the population growth of settlers did not diminish.
The next item that Google produced was a factsheet from the hunger group Oxfam produced for the 20th anniversary of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. This detailed the expansion of settlements in the decades that followed:
Israel has rapidly expanded settlements across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem: The number of Israeli settlers has more than doubled from 262,500 settlers in 1993 to over 520,000 today, across the West Bank, including 200,000 in East Jerusalem….Expanding Israeli settlements now have control over more than 42 percent of the land in the West Bank.Today, there are more than 100 outposts…settlements established without official Israeli authorization.While demolition orders are sometimes issued by Israeli authorities they are seldom enforced, and outposts are often assisted by Israeli government ministries. They began to be established in 1996….
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