EDITOR: Netanyahu is target of criticism
It is clear from the following items that PM Netanyahu is facing some problems, both at home and abroad. What is interesting, however, is the source of this critique in Israel. While LIvni is quite accurate about Netanyahu’s standing abroad, she conveniently forgets, or prefers to deny the facts about her own government headed by Olmert – the government responsible for mass murder of civilians both in Lebanon (2006) and in Gaza (2008/9). Now if she is to be considered a liberal, then we surely have lost all yardsticks! A case of avoiding criminal responsibility by pointing at other criminals.
Livni to Netanyahu: With you in power, Israel is a pariah state: Haaretz
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday in a speech made during a Knesset session marking the one-year anniversary of Netanyahu’s ascension to power.
“You worked hard to get to that seat, you waited, you sat in the opposition, you made crafty plans,” Livni said, addressing the premier. “Surely you had an idea of where you wanted to lead the country. But nothing.”
Livni, the head of the Kadima party, also lamented the lack of negotiations with the Palestinians as well as Netanyahu’s economic policies and the biannual budget.
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“Since you took control, Israel has become a pariah country in the world,” she said.
Livni’s speech was part of a Knesset session entitled “Israel under the leadership of Netanyahu. To where?”
Livni called on Netanyahu to support Police Commissioner Dudi Cohen in the face of criticism leveled by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is under investigation by police for corruption.
“I asked myself, who is supposed to defend law enforcement officials in Israel? I am giving all the needed support but Mr. Prime Minister you need to do this also, because this is happening in your yard and you have responsibility for all that is happening.
“You are responsible for this disrespect, the crime in the streets and the inability to cope with it. You are the Prime Minister, it is time to act as a Prime Minister, do what is right and give support to who needs it.”
Livni, who earlier in the day met with Supreme Court president Dorit Beinish, also attacked Netanyahu for inaction on the issue of incitement against judges.
“I have differences with the Supreme Court but I will do everything to protect the institution. It is not enough just to talk when shoes are thrown at the Supreme Court president. One needs to act.”
Dubai seeks Netanyahu’s arrest over killing of Hamas man: Haaretz
Dubai’s police chief plans to seek the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad over the killing of a Hamas leader in the emirate, Al Jazeera television reported on Wednesday.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim “said he would ask the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for … Netanyahu and the head of Mossad,” the television said. It did not give details.
Tamim has said he is “almost certain” Israeli agents were involved in the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel in January, calling for Mossad’s boss, Meir Dagan, to be arrested if it is proved responsible. Tamim said on Monday Mossad had “insulted” Dubai and Western countries whose fraudulent passports were used by suspects in the assassination.
Dubai has asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into prepaid cards issued by the Meta Financial Group’s MetaBank which the suspects used, a United Arab Emirates newspaper said.
Citing an FBI source, The National newspaper said the investigation would look into any Israeli involvement in the killing.
“Thirteen of the 27 suspects used prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank, a regional American bank, to purchase plane tickets and book hotel rooms,” the newspaper said, quoting Dubai police.
MetaBank said it followed proper procedures when it issued the cards.
Authorities told the bank that the suspects appeared to have used stolen passports to get employment with U.S. companies, MetaBank said in a statement on Tuesday. The companies paid the employees with prepaid cards issued by MetaBank and other banks.
MetaBank said it had launched its own review of the matter, and had so far found that it followed all bank and regulatory requirements.
The suspects authorities had identified were not on any list that would indicate their identities were fraudulent, it said.
The UAE, a U.S.-allied Arab state that backs the Palestinian drive for an independent state and an end to Israeli occupation, has no diplomatic relations with Israel.
But it has established low-level political and trade links in recent years, with some Israeli officials attending events in the Gulf Arab state. Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer competed in the Dubai Championships last month.
Members of the hit squad used fraudulent passports from Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Australia. Residents of Israel with the same names as the suspects, holding dual nationalities, have said their identities appear to have been stolen.
The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest.
EDITOR: Another repeat broadcast of the well-loved soap opera “Peace in the Middle East”
So here they come again… Abbas receives new instructions from the boss in Washington! How many times have we read those infuriating lines, and yet, journalists and editors continue to spew type as if, despite all they have seen, heard and know, this is the ‘real time’! Every new ‘time’ is the first time for them, as well as for the purveyors of the lie in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Mahmoud Abbas given four months to try indirect peace talks with Israel: The Guardian
Arab governments back talks between Palestinian president and Israel, brokered by the US
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been granted four months to try indirect peace talks with Israel through US diplomats. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been given four months by Arab governments to try indirect peace negotiations with Israel, brokered by the US.
Arab League ambassadors meeting in Cairo today gave their backing to so-called “proximity talks” in which American diplomats will shuttle between the two sides to find common ground and bridge gaps. Israel swiftly welcomed the decision.
Abbas’s Fatah movement is expected to endorse the idea this weekend, paving the way for the first negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis after an impasse of more than a year.
New talks will also be a second chance for Barack Obama, who has so far disappointed Arabs and others by failing to make good on his commitment to give a high priority to the Middle East peace process and by declining to press Israel to make prior concessions.
But there is widespread scepticism about the prospects for success. Israel has the most rightwing government in its history, while Palestinians are divided between Fatah, based in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, which is under siege and controlled by the Islamist movement Hamas, which opposes negotiations with Israel.
Arab officials were not “convinced by Israeli intentions,” said the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, but “they decided to give an opportunity of four months to the American proposal”.
Diplomats say Abbas had been in two minds over whether to resume talks but wanted to avoid being painted as the side refusing to negotiate – despite having failed to secure his demand for a full settlement freeze from Israel’s Likud prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
“Israel does not want to return to the negotiating table. But it wishes to blame the Palestinian side, saying that the Palestinians do not want to enter into negotiations,” said Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina. “So we must put a stop to this pretext and reveal Israel’s true position before the international community and the American administration.”
Abbas broke off negotiations with Israel in protest at its Cast Lead offensive in the Gaza Strip launched in December 2008.
The effort will be overseen by George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, who will need to establish the starting point for talks. Palestinians will want to go back to proposals submitted to Abbas by Ehud Olmert, the previous Israeli prime minister. Those included land swaps that would involve leaving most Israeli settlements in the West Bank, arrangements on Jerusalem and the symbolic return of some refugees. The Netanyahu government has refused to accept what had been agreed as a basis for further negotiation.
The Palestinian president has been under intense US pressure to open peace negotiations with Netanyahu but until now had refused to do so unless Israel freezes all settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, originally demanded by Obama. Israel has only accepted a partial halt on construction for 10 months and has excluded East Jerusalem. The Arab position is that the Palestinians should try proximity talks for four months and then go back to the UN.
In a further sign of the quickening pace of peace process activity, the UN announced that the quartet of Middle East negotiators – the US, UN, EU and Russia – is to convene at ministerial level in Moscow later this month.
EDITOR: MOSSAD running credit card firms?
If you thought you already seen and read everything, think again. The Dubai murder does not stop supplying more and more amazing information about the widespread reach of the Mossad, and Israeli firms supporting it. So, apart from being tied to arms munufaturers, hired assasins, security firms, diamond and gold mines, now it seems they cut the middleman and deal with your pocket directly…
Did they know? Israel-U.S. startup linked to Dubai hit: Haaretz
Police claim 13 suspects in the assassination of Hamas use cards issued by Tel Aviv-based firm.
Employees at the Payoneer are still trying to understand what hit them: the Israeli startup company has faced a wave of unwanted publicity after Dubai police claimed that suspects in the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh used its credit card technology.
Payoneer provides prepaid credit cards, which means holders can fill them with money and use them, without the card being tied to a standard bank account. Thirteen of the 27 suspects used prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank, a regional American bank, in order to purchase plane tickets and book hotel rooms, said the Dubai police. The police then tied MetaBank to Payoneer.
It is still not clear how bad the publicity is. One source close to Payoneer said: “All such publicity hurts,” but added that customers were unlikely to be deterred from buying the company’s products.
Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether Payoneer knew, or even helped. Most people think there is no chance the company had anything to do with the affair, since the Mossad – if the Mossad was indeed responsible for Mabhouh’s assassination – does not tend to reveal the details of its secret operations to Israeli startups.
If the hit team actually did use Payoneer technology, as the Dubai police claim, then the suspects bought the credit cards like any other customer would have.
Payoneer is a privately held New York-based company, with a research and development center in Tel Aviv. It has received funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Crossbar Capital, and has raised about $14 million so far. Its last fund-raising round was in July 2008, and the company is considered to be in good financial shape.
American authorities, and the banks named by Dubai, are reported to be cooperating with the Dubai police, including regarding the credit cards.
Complicating matters even more is the fact that Payoneer CEO Yuval Tal was a commentator for Fox News during the Second Lebanon War, and described himself as a former Israeli special operations soldier.
Tal told the Wall Street Journal last week that the company was very surprised by the news, but refused to comment on his service in the IDF.
“We are aware of the news reports,” said Mary Kae Marinac, a spokeswoman for Payoneer. “We are cooperating with the bank and the authorities to explore the matter,” she added.
Israel’s apartheid doesn’t stop at the West Bank: Haaretz
By Salman Masalha
Here is a civics lesson about the Zionist heritage, which has recently basked in the limelight of another government decision.
It has often been observed that poetry and lies have much in common, and this also applies to the state of Israel’s founding document – the Declaration of Independence. It will “foster,” it told me, “the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants… it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants.” The document also calls upon “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” – not the “members of minorities,” so beloved by the Zionist media – “to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
However, since its establishment the state has not kept its promise. It continues to conduct itself like a Zionist occupation regime on every inch of the land. True, the military government has been lifted and “the Arab inhabitants” are usually free to move around in their homeland and even send representatives to the Knesset – but this is the sum total of the equality that was formulated and promised.
The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.
The Israel Police, which is responsible for maintaining public law and order, provides the most blatant evidence that the Israeli regime behaves as if it is a foreign regime. It abandons the Arab localities to the rule of criminal gangs, intervening only when concern arises that the crime might spill over into Jewish locales. The Arab alienation from the police – a symbol of the regime – is apparent, among other things, in the absence of Arabic writing on police vehicles. How does an Arab citizen feel about a police force that appears in his community, but does not include any writing in his language? Does this not symbolize, more than anything else, that the police represent an occupation regime, a foreign regime? How would the inhabitant of some Jewish locale feel if there were no writing in Hebrew on police vehicles, but only a foreign language?
The alienation is also evident with regard to the central government. This is the only democratic country in the world where one-fifth of the citizens – who are declared to have equal rights, at least on paper – have no representation in the government or in “provisional and permanent institutions.” And this is the case even before we start talking about budgetary allocations, master plans, the building of cities and communities, education, culture, industrialization and more.
This national alienation is evident in the apartheid reflected throughout the media. Anyone watching talk shows on television will immediately notice a balance in terms of the guests in the studio: There is a religious person and a secular person, a settler and someone from Peace Now. Only the Arab citizen is absent from every discourse.
Were the Arab Knesset members blessed with any imagination, they would pull the words “on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions” out of the Declaration of Independence and formulate them into a bill. After all, what makes a malicious Jewish populist any better than a malicious Arab populist? There is no dearth of Arab populists who would feel right at home with the Jewish populists in the studios or on ministerial committees. If the proposal is accepted, we will advance the principle of equality. If it is rejected, we will have exposed the lies and deceit of those who take the name of the Declaration of Independence in vain.
The author is a researcher of Arab culture, a poet and a translator.
Amira Hass: How will the next Palestinian uprising look?: Haaretz
Judging from articles written by both Israelis and Palestinians, the next intifada is already in the air. They are predicting it is on the way and the most punctilious know it will be “popular.” Bil’in and Na’alin are perceived as its models.
Some Palestinians are guessing it will first erupt in Jerusalem. There, the constant clash between a dispossessing first world and a misery-stricken world is palpable, and the presence of the discriminatory regime is particularly violent because of the daily mingling of the two worlds. In Jerusalem, as opposed to the Ramallah enclave, it is impossible to fake normalcy.
Jerusalem or Bil’in, the supreme challenge facing the initiators of the next uprising – if it indeed erupts – is to prevent its descent into a so-called armed struggle, which inevitably will expropriate the street and the struggle from the public. The militarization of the second intifada led to grave disasters – personal, collective and geo-political. Off the record, many admit this but a number of factors are still preventing frank, public debate.
For years the theory of armed struggle, until liberation and independence are achieved, has been held sacred. Many people feel ill at ease to criticize the militarization publicly, as though they would thereby dishonor the dead, the wounded, the prisoners and their families.
The Hamas movement has not only claimed the word “resistance” – muqawama – it has also succeeded in imposing a narrative claiming its armed resistance has borne fruit. According to this narrative, this resistance prevented the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization from surrendering to Israeli dictates in the 1990s, forced the Israeli occupation out of the Gaza Strip (and soon Jerusalem’s and Ashkelon’s turn will come), and prevented the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2009.
The truth is that the suicide attacks on civilians gave Israel a golden opportunity to implement plans, which had always existed, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, using the excuse of “security.” The use of weapons did not stop the colonialist expansion of the Jewish settlements. On the contrary. And the use of weapons only accelerated a process Israel began in 1991: disconnecting the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
At an academic conference on Hamas’s political agenda, which took place in Ramallah two weeks ago, a senior member of the movement took pride at what he termed the resistance’s success in upsetting the normal course of life in Israel. Along similar veins of propaganda, Hamas succeeded in the past in “selling” to its public the “efficacy” of suicide attacks and the firing of Qassam rockets.
But Israel has proved it knows very well how to exploit the Palestinians’ primitive weapons in order to develop and upgrade its sophisticated security industry, an important export expertise and an asset in world politics. This connection is absent from the permitted public discourse on “the armed struggle.”
Free discussion will open a Pandora’s box in the Fatah movement, because it will be asked why its leaders encouraged the use of weapons (“Shooting at the sky,” as one opponent with a military background in Fatah described it). One explanation – but not the only one – is that in the first popular demonstrations in September and October of 2000, Yasser Arafat and his people heard the clear criticism directed at the PA government and Fatah. To silence this criticism and divert it they let the young men play before them – like King David and his people in the Second Book of Samuel (2:14). And many of the young men played with weapons in order to obtain social and economic status in the movement and the PA. When Fatah people dare today to renounce the sanctity of the armed struggle, their collective reputation as corrupt automatically detracts from peoples’ faith in their arguments, even if those arguments are logical.
Another challenge facing the initiators of the popular uprising, if it indeed erupts in the near future, is actually a challenge that Israeli society must face. Will it once again adopt the deceptive narrative of the IDF and the politicians (“the Palestinians attacked us,” “terror”) and allow them, as in the two previous intifadas, to suppress the uprising using disproportionate and deadly means? These are the deadly means that, in the Palestinians’ eyes, make Israeli rule look like a series of bloody acts from 1948 to this day.
Will Israel once again invent oppressive logistical and bureaucratic means instead of listening to the political message: Normalcy will not be possible for Israel as long as it perpetuates the sequence of dispossessions that began in 1948.
EDITOR: NY Times – the publication beyond all doubts!
You may remember that the NY Times main journalist in Jerusalem, and its Chief of the Jerusalem Bureau, Is none other than Mr. Bronner, whose son’s service in the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) never causes him any problem of objectivity, neither does it bother the NY Times… Well, it is now clear that this objcetivity goes much deeper... No onder Mr. Bronner never misses a good news story from Jerusalem, why the real news await a new Bureau Chief.
NY Times’ Jerusalem property makes it protagonist in Palestine conflict: The Electronic Intifada
Ali Abunimah, 2 March 2010
A photo from an Israeli mapping website shows the Qatamon house where Ghada Karmi grew up. The original house was only the ground floor. The two upper levels, bought by The New York Times in 1984, were built around the late 1970s.
During an appearance at Vassar College in early February, controversial New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was asked about the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families from homes in East Jerusalem which Israel occupied in 1967. Israeli courts have ruled that Jewish settlers could take over some Palestinian homes on the grounds that Jews held title to the properties before Israel was established in 1948.
Bronner was concerned, but not only about Palestinians being made homeless in Israel’s relentless drive to Judaize their city; he was also worried about properties in his West Jerusalem neighborhood, including the building he lives in, partially owned by The New York Times, that was the home of Palestinians made refugees in 1948. Facts about The New York Times’ acquisition of this property are revealed for the first time in this article.
“One of the things that is most worrying not just the Left but a lot of people in Israel about this decision is if the courts in Israel are going to start recognizing property ownership from before the State [of Israel was founded],” Bronner said according to a transcript made by independent reporter Philip Weiss who maintains the blog Mondoweiss.net.
Bronner added, “I think the Palestinians are going to have a fairly big case. I for example live in West Jerusalem. My entire neighborhood was Palestinian before 1948.”
The New York Times-owned property Bronner occupies in the prestigious Qatamon neighborhood, was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar (1905-2007). Karmi was forced to flee with his family in 1948 as Zionist militias occupied western Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. His was one of an estimated 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem that Jews took over that year.
The New York Times bought the property in 1984 in a transaction overseen by columnist Thomas Friedman who was then just beginning his four-year term as Jerusalem bureau chief.
Hasan Karmi’s daughter, Ghada, a physician and well-known author who lives in the United Kingdom, discovered that The New York Times was in — or rather on top of — her childhood home in 2005, when she was working temporarily in Ramallah. One day Karmi received a call from Steven Erlanger, then The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, who had just read her 2002 memoir In Search of Fatima.
Karmi recalled in a 15 May 2008 interview on Democracy Now! that Erlanger told her, “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house … From the description in your book it must be the same place” (“Conversation with Palestinian Writer and Doctor Ghada Karmi”).
At Erlanger’s invitation, Karmi visited, but did not find the elegant one-story stone house her family had moved into in 1938, that was typical of the homes middle- and upper-class Arabs began to build in Jerusalem suburbs like Qatamon, Talbiya, Baqa, Romema or Lifta toward the end of the 19th century. The original house was still there, but at some point after 1948 two upper stories had been built.
Erlanger, responding to questions posed by The Electronic Intifada via email, described the residence as “built over the Karmi family house — on its air rights, if you like. The [New York Times] is not in [the Karmi] house.” Erlanger described the building as having an “unbroken” facade but that it consisted of “two residences, two ownerships, two heating systems,” and a separate entrance for the upper levels reached via an external staircase on the side.
Questions The Electronic Intifada sent to Thomas Friedman about the purchase of the property were answered by David E. McCraw, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the newspaper, who wrote that the original Karmi house itself “was never owned even partly by The Times. The Times purchased in the 1980s a portion of the building that had been constructed above it in the late 1970s.” The purchase was made from “a Canadian family that had bought them from the original builders of the apartment.”
McCraw acknowledged in a follow-up conversation that as a general principle of property law, the “air rights” of a property — the right to build on top of it or use (and access) the space above it — belong to the owner of the ground.
In 1938, he moved his family to Jerusalem to take up a job in the education department of the British-run Palestine Mandate government. Ghada — born around November 1939 (the exact date is unknown because her birth certificate along with all the family’s records, photographs, furniture, personal possessions and an extensive library were lost with the house) — has vivid memories of a happy childhood in what was a well-to-do mixed neighborhood of Arab Christians and Muslims, foreigners and a few Jewish families. The neighbors with whom her parents socialized and with whose children the young Ghada and her siblings played included the Tubbeh, Jouzeh, Wahbeh and Khayyat families. There was also a Jewish family called Kramer, whose father belonged to the Haganah, the Zionist militia that became the Israeli army after May 1948.
Karmi describes the house at length in her memoir — but she told The Electronic Intifada her fondest memories were of the tree-filled garden where she spent much time playing with her brother and sister and the family dog Rex. The lemon and olive trees she remembers are still there, Erlanger noted to The Electronic Intifada.
In the mid-1940s, the lively Qatamon social life gave way to terror as the dark clouds of what would come to be known as the Nakba approached. Violence broke out all over Jerusalem after the UN’s devastating recommendation to partition Palestine without giving its people any say in the matter. Spontaneous riots by Arabs were followed by organized violence from Zionist groups and mutual retaliatory attacks that claimed lives from both communities. This climate provided the pretext for the Haganah’s premeditated campaign to seize Jerusalem.
Poorly armed and disorganized Arab irregulars, who had nevertheless succeeded in disrupting Zionist supply convoys to Jerusalem, proved no match for highly-trained and well-armed Zionist militias which, on the orders of David Ben-Gurion, began a well-planned campaign to conquer the western parts of the city. The occupation of western Jerusalem and some 40 villages in its vicinity was executed as part of the Haganah’s “Plan Dalet.” These events are well documented in books including Benny Morris’ The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Walid Khalidi’s (ed.) All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992), Salim Tamari’s (ed.) Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War (1999) and Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Zionist militias used frequent bombings of Arab civilians to terrorize residents into fleeing. These attacks were amplified by posters and warnings broadcast over loudspeakers that those choosing to remain behind would share the fate of those killed in atrocities.
Karmi wrote that one night in November 1947, their neighbor Kramer came to see her father and said, “I have come to tell you at some risk to myself to take your family and leave Jerusalem as soon as possible …. Please believe me, it is not safe here.” Many Qatamon families left after the Zionist bombing of the nearby Semiramis Hotel, which killed 26 civilians including the Spanish consul-general, on the night of 4-5 January 1948.
The Karmis however held on, and Ghada records in her memoir her mother steadfastly saying, “The Jews are not going to drive me out of my house … Others may go if they like, but we’re not giving in.”
Toward the end of April, bombardment by Zionist militias against virtually undefended Arab areas became so heavy, and the terror generated by the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that month so intense, that the Karmis relented and departed by taxi for Damascus, via Amman, with nothing but a few clothes. Their intention was to bring the children to safety at their maternal grandparents’ house while the adults would return home to Jerusalem. A few days after reaching Damascus the elder Karmis tried to return to Jerusalem but were unable to do so. So began the family’s exile that continues to this day.
As Arabs left their homes, Jews were moved in by the Haganah. “While the cleansing of Qatamon went on,” Itzhak Levy, the head of Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem recalled, “pillage and robbery began. Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food” (quoted in Pappe, p.99). Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli scholar and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, wrote in his book Sacred Landscape of personally witnessing the “looting of Arab homes in Qatamon” as a boy. Palestinians also lost art work, financial instruments and — like the Karmis — irreplaceable family records, as the fabric of a society and a way of life were destroyed.
Jerusalem return denied
The Karmis’ story is a variation of what happened to tens of thousands of Jerusalem-area Palestinians during the Nakba, in which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes all over the country and never allowed to return. (In my book One Country I describe the departure under similar circumstances of my mother’s family from Lifta-Romema.)
As of 1997, there were 84,000 living West Jerusalem refugees (23,000 born before 1948), according to Tamari. Half lived in the West Bank, many just miles from their original homes, but thousands of others were spread across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip.
Arab property is well-documented through administrative and UN records, but tracing the fate of an individual house or proving title is extremely difficult if not impossible for Palestinians scattered, exiled and forbidden from returning home. Some, who have foreign passports that allowed them to make brief visits, have attempted to locate their family properties. In recent years a small Israeli group called Zochrot (Remembering) has even joined in — taking some displaced Palestinians back to their original villages and homes, whose traces Israel often made deliberate efforts to conceal or destroy. But such activities are not welcomed by most Israeli Jews still in denial about their state’s genesis.
Ghada Karmi recalls an earlier attempt to revisit her family home in 1998. The residents were unwelcoming and would not give her the phone number of the landlord, though a plaque outside bore the name “Ben-Porat.”
The owner of the original, lower-level house at the time The New York Times bought the upper levels was Yoram Ben-Porat, an economics professor who became president of the Hebrew University and was killed with his wife and young son in a road accident in October 1992. According to Erlanger, the house remained with heirs from the Ben-Porat family who rented it out until it was sold in 2005 to an Israeli couple who did some remodeling. It is unknown when the Ben-Porats acquired the house or if they were the ones who had the upper levels built.
During Karmi’s 2005 visit, Erlanger invited her to see his part of the house and introduced her to the Israeli tenants in the lower level who gave her free access while Erlanger took photographs. For Karmi, revisiting the house was disconcerting. She described to The Electronic Intifada its occupants as “Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis, liberals, nice people who wanted to be nice.” She felt like asking them, “how can you live here knowing this is an Arab house, knowing this was once owned by Arabs, what goes through your mind?” But, she explained, “in the way people have of not wanting to upset people who appear to be nice, I didn’t say anything.”
The New York Times
In the early years after their original residents left, many of the former Arab neighborhoods were run down. But in the 1970s, wealthier Israeli Jews began to gentrify them and acquiring an old Arab house became a status symbol. Today, Israeli real estate agencies list even small apartments in Qatamon for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and house prices can run into the millions. In Jerusalem, such homes have become popular especially with wealthy American Jews, according to Pappe. The New York Times did not disclose what it paid for the Qatamon property.
It was a curious decision for The New York Times to have purchased part of what must obviously have been property with — at the very least — a political, moral and legal cloud over its title. Asked whether The New York Times or Friedman had made any effort to learn the history of the property, the newspaper responded, “Neither The Times nor Mr. Friedman knew who owned the original ground floor prior to 1948.”
As Friedman prepared to make the move to Jerusalem from Beirut where he was covering the Lebanon war in the early 1980s, The Times hired an Israeli real estate agent to help him locate a home. According to McCraw, Friedman’s wife Ann went ahead to Jerusalem and looked at properties “and she, working with the agent, made the selection for The Times.” During the process Friedman visited Jerusalem and looked at properties as well, a fact he mentions in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem. By the time the property was selected, Friedman had moved permanently to Jerusalem and oversaw the closing.
The choice of the Qatamon property — over several modern apartments that the real estate agent also showed — makes The New York Times a protagonist and interested party in one of the most difficult aspects of the Palestine conflict: the property and refugee rights of Palestinians that Israel has adamantly denied. It also raises interesting questions about what such choices have on news coverage — with which the newspaper itself has had to grapple.
In 2002, an Electronic Intifada article partly attributed the pervasive underreporting of Israeli violence against Palestinians to “a structural geographic bias” — the fact that “most US news organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are being killed and bombarded on a daily basis” ( Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah, “Killings of dozens once again called ‘period of calm’ by US media, 20 September 2002).
In 2005, The New York Times’ then Public Editor Daniel Okrent echoed this criticism, writing:
“The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this ‘structural geographic bias.'” (“The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine,” 24 April 2005).
Okrent recommended that in order to broaden the view of the newspaper’s reporters, it should locate a correspondent in Ramallah or Gaza — where she or he would share the daily experiences, concerns and risks of Palestinians. This advice went unheeded, just as Executive Editor Bill Keller recently publicly rejected the advice of the current public editor that current Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner should be reassigned because of the conflict of interest created by Bronner’s son’s voluntary enlistment in the Israeli army.
Thus, in a sense, Bronner’s structural and personal identification with Israel has become complete: when the younger Bronner joins army attacks in Gaza, fires tear gas canisters or live bullets at nonviolent demonstrators trying to save their land from confiscation in West Bank villages, or conducts night arrest raids in Ramallah or Nablus — as he may well be ordered to do — his father will root for him, worry about him, perhaps hope that his enemies will fall in place of his son, as any Israeli parent would. And on weekends, the elder Bronner will await his soldier-son’s homecoming to a property whose true heirs live every day, like millions of Palestinians, with the unacknowledged trauma, and enduring injustice of dispossession and exile.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.