Funny how the BBC has lost interest in the Israeli election now that the Left has been crushed….oh..not quite lost interest…this is the story on the front page…
US concern over Israel poll rhetoric
The White House expresses “deep concern” over “divisive rhetoric” in Israel’s election, and reiterates US support for Palestinian statehood.
Those terrible ‘Nazi’ Israelis….and can’t go without a mention of the Palestinians.
And elsewhere…from before the election result was known…..Jeremy Bowen obviously doesn’t think that the BBC provides him with a suitably big enough audience for his talents…and so he peddles his genius at the New Statesman as well…
As Israel heads to the polls, peace in the region seems more distant than ever
The piece is as negative about Israel as you could be without doing a Mel Gibson and puts the blame for any and every breakdown in peace negotiations at Israel’s door.
Bowen paints Netanyahu as the nearest thing to a Nazi as you can get, relying on far right religious fanatics and racist Jews for his mandate….no doubt Bowen is kept up to date on the issues by his leftwing Israeli friends….
When I woke on the morning after the election [1996] everything had changed. The exit polls were wrong. Some of my leftist Israeli friends grumbled that they had gone to bed with Peres and woken up with Netanyahu.
Bowen’s leftist friends must have woken up with yet another grumble this morning.
Bowen’s article seems to be just one long attack on Israel trawling through history for any point, however small, that can be used to criticise Israel and portray them as the aggressors and Palestinians as the eternal victims.
Here is a map Bowen kindly provides us with…not bothering to mention why changes to areas of control have changed…such as a 70 year war against Israel by the Muslim countries that surround it resulting in Israel ‘winning’ those areas..whose fault is that?
Bowen uses a curious phrase…….
During the 1948 war that led to Israel’s independence…during Israel’s independence war (the Palestinians’ Naqba, or “catastrophe”)
Israel’s ‘war of independence’? That sounds like Israel launched a war doesn’t it? As I understand it, and I think the history books show, the Muslim countries surrounding Israel launched the war against Israel not the other way round….and then they did it again, and again, and again….and maintain support for the Palestinian war of terror against Israel.
Why would Bowen like to portray Israel as the war monger? And why mention the so-called ‘Naqba’, a Palestinian term that is designed to be highly loaded politically?
Bowen likes to think Israel is ‘merely shipping’…..that it will disappear back into the sands of the Middle East as it did once before…
In 1997, just before the state of Israel celebrated its 50th anniversary, I asked two elderly Palestinian men in Jerusalem for their view of the past half-century. They shrugged. Israel was strong. But look back at history, one of them said. The Crusaders were strong, too, and controlled Jerusalem for more than a century. But, he said, we got rid of them.
Shame the BBC doesn’t itself admit that that is the real aim of the Palestinians…the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Israel.
The maps Bowen provided are misleading to the point of deception. The 1947 Partition Plan was never applied, even for one day. So calling it an indication of control is simply false. All the Arab states in the Arab league refused to accept the plan and when the Israeli’s announced their state on the basis of the plan the Arabs invaded to destroy it.
The map of the sic Occupied Territories is also misleading. Most of the white lines are roads and would not show up on a map of this scale. About 95% of Arabs in the territories live with full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority.
“95% of Arabs in the territories live with full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority.”
How awful! They could’ve been having a holy totalitarian Islamic theocracy and those wicked racist Zionists try to deny them their rights./sarc
If you did a similar sort of comparison map of Germans in Pomerania, East Prussia, and Silesia or the Poles in eastern pre-war Poland you would see a similar change. There are many other such examples so why the concentration on Israel?
Several things are missing from this report. Surely the investigations into whether the American State Department and Obama himself had actively interfered with this election (albeit unsuccessfully) puts their complaints into perspective.
If the White House has condemned what it called “divisive rhetoric” in the Israeli election , won by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party shouldn’t a mention of other parties withdivisive rhetoric deserve a mention? Someone looking at the chart of seats won would never know that the Joint List is almost exclusively Arab and campaigned on the basis that Arabs should vote for Arabs.
The lie is in the first plan, 1947, which shows borders that never existed. It was an offer rejected by the Arabs and therefore never implemented. That offer was in itself a concession by the Jews with regard to the previous border, of 1922, which had been accepted de facto though not de jure, and which ran along the River Jordan as in the second map, today’s. The last plan to be accepted de jure had been the League of Nations resolution that gave the Jews what is now both Israel and Jordan.
The BBC uses maps as weapons. It weaponises geography.
Here’s a map it never shows. After the first World war the League of Nations asked Britain to govern Palestine in order to re-establish a Jewish homeland there.
Without the League’s permission, Britain gave two thirds of Palestine to the muslim arabs. Today this is Jordan.
The remaining third was then sliced up in a desperate attempt to deprive the Jews of anything at all.
The BBC’s reporting of Israel is saturated in left wing, pro-muslim ideology. BBC journalists commenting on Israel are better described as political activists. They’re on a mission, and it’s not to tell the truth.
The BBC and ‘not news’ is pointless as a complaint topic with them as they’ll simply shrug it off and say ‘prove it’, requiring data they claim they do not keep, or would refuse to provide.
But there is value in highlighting the deliberate process of propagandising what suits, and censoring what does not.
http://bbcwatch.org/2015/03/19/no-bbc-coverage-of-french-findings-regarding-arafats-death/
I remember very well the excitement of the speculative claims, which the BBC ran with heavily.
At least on twitter, their views are their own, apparently…
http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.fr/2015/03/stable-right-wing-coalition-w-no-intl.html?m=1
http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.fr/2015/03/jeremy-bowens-tweets-about-israeli.html?m=1
Maybe the BBC would like to digest why it is that a commentator such as Col Kemp had been moved to describe their ME Editor as either professionally inept or incapable of objectivity, or both (albeit more politely)?
Sadly all the above dialogue misses the real point. That the Palestians didnt give the land to the Jews .It was taken by a third party and given free of charge , Jewish ownership being about 5% .
Now, if the UN decided to give Sussex to the Pols(or better still Moslems) , I guess you people would be OK with that.
Its nice to chat about pretty pictures particularly when it obscures reality.
Parts of London and West Yorkshire have already been given to the Moslems. And even a Beeboid like you cannot deny that.
Plus the fact that the “Palestinians” were never in charge of the land. Many Arabs sold their land legitimately to the Jews, and don’t forget it was the Jews who had that land originally stolen from them.
Reality Manonclaphamomnibus? Your knowledge of real estate laws in the Levant is sadly lacking. Before 1918 the Ottoman Sultan owned about 80% of all the land in the area which became the British Mandate of Palestine. He was what in modern terms was a Turk — not an Arab. Arabs owned approximately 14% but that is also deceptive because about half of that was Bedouin grazing rights. The Bedouin were nomads and could not legally dispose of the land they roamed so they didn’t really own it as much as had residency rights. So the percentage legally owned by Jews and Arabs was approximately the same.
When following the San Remo Convention, Treaty of Sevres and the League of Nations resolution confirming both the British accepted the Ottoman situation and declared anything belonging to the Sultan to be Crown Land. At no time did either the British or the Ottoman for 500 years before even consider that Arabs had any land rights as a people and very little as individuals.
Few Arabs actually owned anything for a number of reasons.
1) Most were immigrants who crossed unpatrolled borders during the last half century of Ottoman rule and the British period,
2) The system was feudal, especially out of cities. Ownership. in the sense of being able to buy or sell was either in the lands of absentee landlords or the village Mukhtars. They could and did sell tenanted land freely.
3) During the Ottoman land reformation of the 19th century many did not register their claims to avoid taxation and military service knowing that their residency and farming rights would still be protected.
The situation and creation of Iraq, Jordan (initially part of the Mandate) and Syria was identical. The third party were the victors in World War One who divided the defeated Ottoman Empire. If you were to argue that Palestine is Turkish you might have a slight case but as Turkey dropped all claims we will stick with correct maps — Reality not Palestinian propaganda
BTW all the Ottoman land records are still available for inspection in Istanbul and occasionally lawyers from Israel and presumably other former Ottoman possessions visit to check disputed title.
Thank you, it is always a pleasure to learn from someone who knows their history.
I have often wondered when and if an independent Palestinian State is created how will they dispose of competing Arab claims. Will they recognise title from 1948 or will they socialise the land and somehow distribute it or will they accept the current status quo where Palestinian Authority thugs essentially steal what they can take by force and intimidation?
In the unlikely event of Israel returning abandoned property they most likely will accept those with actual title deeds. That will transform some ‘refugees’ into billionaires and leave most Arabs with nothing — exactly as it was in 1948.
to Manonclaphamomnibus at 9:17:
No, it is you that obscures reality. Jewish private ownership was around 5%, Arab private ownership was a little more, most of it absentee landlords from Lebanon. Everything else was government-owned empty land, which legally passed from the Turkish government to the British, and from the British to Israel and Jordan. This is the truth, and not what you imply above. And that the land was indeed largely empty, we now know for sure because of German air photography of the entire country in 1917, during WW1. The vast majority of all inhabitants, Arabs as well as Jews, came in under the British.
You’re wrong. You need to find out about the history and not look at it through the narrow, selective lens provided by the BBC, islam and the left.
The Jews lived in judea for thousands of years until their state was destroyed in the genocide of Roman rule. Many Jews remained, but were forced to live under oppressive moslem rule after the islamic conquests of the 7th century.
Many more were ethnically cleansed and forced to live in europe, or other parts of the middle east as a persecuted minority.
When India was created in 1947 millions of muslims left to live in the new moslem country of Pakistan. Millions of Hindus moved to live in India.
The British labour party published plans for a similar partition in Israel, with population exchanges in 1945, but quickly dropped the plan in the face of Arab opposition and cold war self interest.
You can’t defend your historical ignorance with a ridiculous and misleading analogy with sussex. Buy some proper history books and research it for youself.
The largest issue here is physical geography.
Were the ‘two state’ solution to be employed, that would remove the ability of Israel to protect its borders. This was the case previously, and the Israeli state had no real interest in extending its borders except to make those borders defensible due to topography.
I cannot see any way in which a two state solution can work because there is no guarantee that those new borders will be respected by the Arab world. Once the defensive line had been moved, then the Arab tanks would soon be on that new border. I don’t think Israel could survive an attack from those borders in the modern age from hostile states.
Could any Israeli leader now take that risk?
The real guilt lies with the government of Israel and its Foreign Ministry for not simply and forthightly expelling the bbc and all its stringers and assorted propagandists!
Jeremy Bowen @BowenBBC · Mar 18
Frustrated Israeli just told me he was disgusted Netanyahu appealed to lowest common demoninator. ‘And it worked.’
The BBC’s ‘Man Most Relied Upon To Leave His Politics At The Door’ cites one of those convenient one degree of separation ‘sources’ they find so helpfully to hand.
I wonder if he/she was by chance a relative of the fragrant Amy Rutland?
Bowen notoriously surrounds himself with Israelis for whom Meretz is too Zionistic. Notice the sense of moral superiority.
How likely is it that the frustrated Israeli is a BBC crew member?
Post-election coverage on Outside Source wasn’t too bad, except that it opened with the Bowen tweet claiming Netanyahu’s “scare tactics.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02lqqtv
That was followed by an interesting analysis by Times of Israel Editor David Horowitz.
Even Kevin Connolly, who had his say at 26:30 minutes in, managed, with an heroic effort, to present a balanced report – though the poor chap did sound disappointed, his previous mockery of Netanyahu, in an attempt to turn voters against him, having come to nought.
Horowitz and Connolly were sandwiched between Bowen’s tweet and Arab Affairs ‘Editor’ Sebastian Usher, whose brief was to report on the reactions of Israel’s neighbours to the election results and who could only come up with the standard hostility and whingeing from those quarters.
I guess he could have managed to find something a bit out of the ordinary if he’d tried – like an Arab journalist who doesn’t blame the Jews for everything. There are some around.
But that’s expecting a bit much.