According to Reports: Regaining Some Perspective on Jerusalem
Posted on: April 7, 2010

In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, looks at a disturbing media trend to call Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem “settlements.”

Can Israel be covered journalistically with equanimity – that is, a sense of calmness and perspective?  Or is it the country’s fate to all too often to be the object of disproportionate and emotionally charged attention?

If the torrent of media criticism of Israel’s admittedly awful handling of the Ramot Shlomo affair was marked by anything, it was a general loss of perspective.   Once again, settlements have become not just one of the key, knotty final status-issues, but “the” impediment to peace.

Speaking from Ramallah on March 20, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned Israeli housing in east Jerusalem and said, “Let us be clear: all settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory, and this must stop.”

This occasioned the BBC to report that from an observation point on the outskirts of Ramallah, Ban looked towards “the Israeli West Bank settlement of Givat Zeev, home to 11,000 Israelis.”   

That’s right, the Israeli neighbourhood in northern Jerusalem, just over the Green Line, has now become a West Bank settlement.  While one might have come to expect such characterization from major elements of the British and European media, the same could not have been said of the U.S. media.

Yet, in a March 23 front page New York Times story on the continuing tension between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Helen Cooper and Mark Landler wrote that ties between the two leaders suffered “after [Netanyahu's] government’s decision this month to approve new Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem.”   

Let’s be clear: if Jewish housing in Jerusalem anywhere east of the Green Line (that is, the 1949 Armistice line with Jordan) is now to be termed a “settlement,” it follows that the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which is also over the Green Line, must also be considered a “settlement.”  

But would any fair-minded journalist write that?  If not, why not?

Raising these questions shows the extent to which a rising tide of disapproval in the West of the Israeli government is leading to the obscuring of basic facts and common sense.  

It’s important to note that while there’s a strong Israeli consensus against physically redividing Jerusalem – in its 3,000-year history it was only physically divided for 19 years of Jordanian rule, from 1949 to 1967 -  Israel has shown remarkable willingness to compromise with the Palestinians on the city – twice in fact:  once in 2000-01 at Camp David/Taba and again in 2007 under the Annapolis plan.  

In both cases, the Palestinian leadership rejected compromise.  The rejection had nothing to do with Jewish housing, which continued during both negotiations.  Rather it had to do with the Palestinian rejection of Jewish legitimacy in any part of the city.  Is it any wonder then that Israelis remain leery of the subject?  Or that there is a small majority that supports building in Jewish neighbourhoods in the eastern part of the city that under any (possible) future compromise will almost certainly remain part of Israel?

In an article in the March 21 Jerusalem Post, Avi Dichter, Kadima MK and former head of the Shin Bet, expressed a balanced Israeli view:  “[T]he world must clearly understand that Jerusalem will not return to the pre-1967 borders,” he wrote.  Still, “[w]hile this is a clear and important strategic policy in the heart of [the] consensus in Israel, the government needs to be more tactically sensitive in its building plans for Jerusalem.”

Even the influential Economist magazine (a publication not known for its sympathetic coverage of Israel) acknowledged the need for a sensible approach to the subject of the Green Line. In the midst of its criticism of Netanyahu in its March 18 editorial “Stop the bungling,” it managed to calmly find some reason for optimism.  

One basis for “cautious hope,” it wrote, “is that mainstream Israelis and Palestinians agree that an adjustment of the 1967 border, including equitable land swaps to compensate the Palestinians, is inevitable in any durable peace deal. If the border issue were resolved early in negotiations, much of the poison over the continuing building of Jewish settlements would be drawn, because the biggest of them would fall on the Israeli side of the new line, even along parts of east Jerusalem’s rim.”

If a British publication can recognize this possibility, perhaps not all reason has been lost.