Newsday on Israel

I'll give this blog a kick start by posting columns I wrote a while back on Facebook. Here is my response to an unintentionally funny Newsday editorial on the so-called Peace Process.

Every now and then, the Newsday editorial staff writes a piece on Israel and all of the obstacles to the heralded so-called "Peace Process." Usually, they come off as comically uninformed, and this six-paragraph gem was no exception.

Putting the substance aside for the moment, Newsday's ridiculous use of metaphors to describe the state of the peace process is comedy gold in and of itself. In the first sentence, we learn that the peace process has been "resurrected", but apparently, at the same time, it "may be heading for the grave." Before it reaches the grave, however, Newsday laments that "another nail was driven into the coffin." How that's possible is a mystery to me. Mind you, this "nail" was driven not by Hamas's rocket attacks on Israel, but when, in Newsday's words, "Israel RESPONDED to Hamas rocket attacks by imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip." (emphasis mine).

Newsday then refers to "feeble efforts at restarting the peace process, already weakened by an Israeli plan to add more settlements to East Jerusalem." So apparently now our peace process, while "weakened", has been "resurrected", but not yet fully "restarted," albeit while nails are being driven into its coffin. Again, just awesome.

As to the substantive component of that sentence, claiming that Israel is adding "new settlements to East Jerusalem" makes about as much sense as claiming that New York state is adding a new city to Buffalo. Israel has not built any new settlements since before the Oslo Accords. What Newsday is likely referring to is the building of additional housing units in eastern Jerusalem (the very term "East Jerusalem" is itself a total fraud, but that's a whole other topic), NOT the building of new whole settlements.

There's a lot of other fun stuff in here I could eat up bandwidth discussing, like Newsday's hilarious description of "[h]ard-liners in Israel's right-wing Likud party" and Hamas as "rejectionist political forces on both sides determined to sink [our beloved Peace Process]," but I think I've covered the gist of it. Note to any prospective journalists out there -- whenever you report on Israel, you must refer to bad people on "both sides," lest you be accused of having some infinitesimal appreciation for the difference between right and wrong.