Soccer Dad

Times zero

Today the New York Times treated us to an editorial A Viable Palestinian State. Briefly Barry Rubin describes this editorial

The bottom line is that the Times does not understand Israel's new strategy, does not understand Hamas, has a poor grasp of the facts, and will never actually praise Israel and its efforts--neutral and anti are the only two positions in the Times editorial gear box. What a pitiful performance.

( I believe that Mediacrity would describe this as the Sulzburger Indifference Template.)

Backspin wonders what's bothering the editors of the Times. Did they just discover that Gaza and Judea and Samaria are not contiguous?

Israel Matzav argues that because they aren't contiguous

That's it folks. The elephant in the room is that even if the 'Palestinians' get all of the 'West Bank' and Gaza, they still won't have a contiguous 'state'. Judea and Samaria (the 'West Bank') are landlocked. How are they going to develop an economy (assuming that they have any interest in doing so)? . . .

The truth is that there cannot be a 'viable Palestinian state' in the 'West Bank' and Gaza. The territory is not suitable for it.

AbbaGav nicely reduces the editorial to the point of absurdity

But it takes a naive sophistication indeed to criticize Israel even for unilaterally withdrawing from territories from which the Palestinians themselves have long demanded withdrawal. At the rate this is going, the next Israeli government could suggest all Jews be forcibly removed from the region, and the Times editorialists would lament the unilateral Israeli assumption of docking rights for evacuation boats rather than the mass swimming exhibition some in the region would have prefered.

The editorial makes Elder of Ziyon wonder about the assumptions of the media

The pre-conceived notion that has attained Biblical status among the left is that Palestinian Arabs somehow "deserve" a state.

I am not quite sure what criteria are used to make this assumption. Why, for example, do the Kurds not "deserve" a state but Palestinian Arabs do? Exactly how does a people attain the status of "deserving" a state?

Simply Jews envies the editors at the Times and clarifies one of their assertions

Times>The key word here is unilaterally, because the Israelis are prepared to do this without any input from the Palestinians.
SJ>But we do get lots of input, dear Anonymous: more than 600 Qassams since the disengagement. How is that for a model of the future neighborhood relations?

In Context agrees with the Times that PM Olmert's plan is a disaster, but for vastly different reasons. And she provides an important historical observation.

The NY Times is aghast because Israel is actually proposing to leave established communities of "settlers" intact, one of them home to over 30,000 people. Israel is actually declining to uproot some 150,000 - 200,000 of its citizens who, in the years that the Arabs have been refusing to even acknowledge their right to live, have built roads and towns and schools and hospitals and synagogues, have planted trees and gardens, laid water and sewer pipes, run electric and phone lines, all those things that people who have an attachment to their land do and which have never been done in these places by anyone else other than Jews -- ever.

Daled Amos notices many oddities with the NY Times editorial such as

Finally, how odd that despite an entire editorial about creating a Palestinian state and its importance, it is not until the very last sentence that—except for a quote from Prime Minister Olmert—the New York Times once, and only once mentions the word ‘peace’.

Barry Rubin takes aim at the editorial's central conceit: that the Palestinians will be reduced to living in two separate sections of Manhattan

The idea of Palestine being reduced to "Battery Park City" is particularly odious. After all, the land being left for Palestine at present has 2.1 million people, 650 villages, and about 10 towns, along with a lot of empty space. Even if Israel were to retain the main settlement blocs, it would not have the slightest effect on the economic or political viability of a future Palestine. Only one such town, Ariel, is "deep" inside "Palestinian" territory, the others are all walking distance from the border.

My take? I guess what bugged me the most was this paragraph

To a significant degree, the Palestinians put themselves in this spot by electing Hamas to run their government, and the Bush administration is right to refuse to legitimize a government dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But Mr. Bush should not punish the Palestinian people by endorsing any unilateral proposal — doing that would punish them for exercising their democratic right to vote.

By acknowledging that the Palestinians voted to put a terrorist organization in power, the Times' editors undermine their argument that "Mr. Bush should not punish the Palestinian people." After all it was the Palestinian people who made that choice.

And to call it a democratic choice is absurd. According to previous treaties Hamas is a terrorist organization and should have been treated as such - its members jailed and barred from political activity. The victory of Hamas was a triumph of terror not of democracy.

My final point is similar to that of Elder of Ziyon. In March of last year the NY Times ran an editorial Kosovo's New Chance in which the editors of the Times asserted

An international review this summer is supposed to determine whether Kosovo has met the standards of governance and interethnic harmony that would justify granting it independence under a timetable set by the Security Council.

The Times believed that Kosovar Albanians needed to show that they were worthy of independence. (I doctored the editorial back then to make a similar point.) And despite 13 years of perfidy the Times simply believes that Palestinian independence should be a given and is a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. Why doesn't it apply the same standard to the Palestinians that it does to the Kosovar Albanians?

UPDATE: Mediacrity takes issue the Times's comparison of the nascent Palestinian state and Manhattan.

Something missing from this neat little imagery, wouldn't you say? Such as the people on the East Side and Battery Park City vowing to obliterate the rest of Manhattan.

Technorati tags: Media Bias, New York Times, Israel.

Posted by SoccerDad at May 26, 2006 4:41 AM