Three Journalist Mistakes We Can Expect To Continue Unchallenged During The Biden Administration (Daled Amos)

Last Friday, during the White House Briefing led by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, we were treated to the following exchange:

Q Thank you, Jen. Two quick foreign and one domestic, if that’s okay. Can you confirm officially that Robert Malley has been appointed Special Envoy for Iran? Is that —

MS. PSAKI: I can. I believe it was announced this morning. Yes? Or I guess I can confirm it here too for you.

Q That would be great. And then the — as you know, settlements have been a major obstacle to getting the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. Would President Biden consider it — does he believes settlements are — should be halted in the West Bank so that the Palestinians will come back?

MS. PSAKI: I don’t have any new comments from President Biden on this or the current circumstance. He’s obviously spoken to this particular issue in the past and conveyed that he doesn’t believe security assistance should be tied. But I don’t have anything more for you on the path forward toward a two-state solution. [emphasis added]

The journalist's question contains 3 mistaken assumptions -- assumptions that at this point have also been accepted without question by the media as fact.

Assumption #1: Settlements are an obstacle to the Palestinian Authority coming to the negotiating table.

Just last month we noted that historically this claim is simply not true. Jackson Diehl -- the deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post -- made the point in 2010 that Abbas admitted that he demanded a settlement freeze before coming to the table because Obama did:

When Obama came to power, he is the one who announced that settlement activity must be stopped. If America says it and Europe says it and the whole world says it, you want me not to say it?

Going a step further, the settlements are part of the negotiations as per Oslo, not a sweetener to encourage the Palestinian Arabs to first come to the table:

Settlements are only one of the six issues to be negotiated by Israel and the Palestinians according to the original Oslo Accords from 1993. To single out the issue of settlements ahead of any negotiations while ignoring other bilateral issues constitutes a fundamental distortion of these signed agreements.

Yet this distortion has taken hold, including in the minds of the journalists who are supposed to be in command of the facts.

Assumption #2: Israel should make unilateral concessions

Why should the assumption be, as this journalist clearly believes, that unilateral concessions by Israel owes it to the Palestinian Arabs -- and the peace process itself -- to make immediate sacrifices?

Why does nobody suggest a freeze on Abbas's pay-to-slay policy that encourages terrorism and the murder of Israelis?

In fact, we have already seen Israel commit to a freeze in the settlements in 2009, in a sign of good faith that Abbas would come to the negotiating table.

Did it work?

To the contrary, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu implemented a 10-month security freeze in order to coax the Palestinians to the negotiating table, Abbas essentially responded with a 9-month negotiating freeze. And after the moratorium on Israeli building expired, he again refused to talk peace.

Those unilateral concessions to the Palestinian Arabs do not work.

Assumption #3: Settlements are being built

The building of Israeli settlements is supposed to be a a major obstacle -- and that is a claim that was made over and over by the Obama administration:

Back in 2014, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg about his Middle East policy, Obama claimed:

we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we've seen in a very long time.

Obama's deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes claimed, on December 23, 2016, that "thousands of new settlements are being constructed...you saw tens of thousands of settlements being constructed"

On December 28, 2016, following the US abstention that allowed the passing of UN Resolution 2334, then-Secretary of State Kerry claimed, "We’ve made countless public and private exhortations to the Israelis to stop the march of settlements."

In a speech Biden gave before J Street in April 2016, he copied that heated rhetoric, condemning "the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past several years – the steady and systematic expansion of settlements..."

In January 2017, I wrote a post debunking the claim of settlement expansion in detail -- and showed how even then the media parroted these fabrications. 

In point of fact:

o  There were 228 settlements -- not tens of thousands

o  What Kerry calls a march of settlements in 2016 is 3 settlements in 2012 -- with none from 1990 till then and none from the end of 2012 to 2016 when Kerry made his claim

o  If you look at what is actually going on, you see the issue is not the building of an expanding number of settlements, but of homes inside those settlements.

Even taking into account that the issue is the houses being built, according to Haaretz in 2015 -- the number of houses constructed was down under Netanyahu:

According to data from the Housing and Construction Ministry, an average of 1,554 houses a year were built in the settlements from 2009 to 2014 — fewer than under any of his recent predecessors.

By comparison, the annual average was 1,881 under Ariel Sharon and 1,774 under Ehud Olmert. As for Ehud Barak, during his single full year as prime minister, in 2000, he built a whopping 5,000 homes in the settlements.

So:

o  Israeli settlements are not the obstacle to negotiations, they are one of the issues to be discussed at the negotiations

o  There is no justification for Israel to concede on a negotiating point, while Abbas merely pockets those concessions

o  Settlements are not expanding. Houses within the settlements are being built to meet the need.

There was a time when journalists asked the kinds of questions that kept the administration on its toes --  attacking the points, not the people presenting them.

Of course, that would require a certain level of knowledge as well as a willingness to challenge the common perception.

My favorite example is a daily press briefing held on November 17, 2009, when the following exchange took place between the State Department Spokesperson Ian Kelly and Matt Lee, reporter for the Associated Press. The topic was what the Obama administration had accomplished till then in advancing peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs:

MR. KELLY: Well, I would say that we’ve gotten both sides to commit to this goal. They have – we have – we’ve had a intensive round or rounds of negotiations, the President brought the two leaders together in New York. Look --

QUESTION: But wait, hold on. You haven’t had any intense --

MR. KELLY: Obviously --

QUESTION: There haven’t been any negotiations.

MR. KELLY: Obviously, we’re not even in the red zone yet, okay.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. KELLY: I mean, we’re not – but it’s – we are less than a year into this Administration, and I think we’ve accomplished more over the last year than the previous administration [under President George Bush] did in eight years. [emphasis added]

QUESTION: Well, I – really, because the previous administration actually had them sitting down talking to each other. You guys can’t even get that far.

MR. KELLY: All right.

QUESTION: I’ll drop it.

The question is, who in the media is both willing and able to keep the Biden administration honest about its Middle East policy now.

Hat tip: IM

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