Karl Vick's revisionist history of Oslo (updated)

Karl Vick in Time does what he always does:

Two decades ago, the word Oslo evoked everything the Middle East normally refuses to provide: hope, trust and compromise. Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples claiming the same biblical lands, had rarely talked peace with each other before in a serious way. Then, in the space of four months, their leaders secretly agreed upon a set of plans — the Oslo accords — that promised an end, once and for all, to the violent conflict between them. The diplomatic achievement was sealed on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, with a signing ceremony and a handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The reality came home nine months later, in July 1994, when Palestinian guerrillas led by Arafat ended 27 years of exile by rolling into the Gaza Strip escorted by Israeli soldiers. "From the moment we entered Gaza, it looked like, my God, really peace has come," says Nabil Shaath, one of Arafat's lieutenants. "We were doing things fast."

The momentum ended on Nov. 4, 1995, when a radical right-wing Jewish settler shot Rabin dead at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. In that moment, many historians have argued, the Oslo accords suffered a fatal blow. Without Rabin to reassure a nervous Israel that Oslo was a genuine path to peace, extremists quickly began to drive events on both sides.

Were things wonderful and peaceful and hopeful between July 1994 and November 1995?

During that time there were dozens of drive-by shootings of Jews on the roads, as well as stabbings. On August 26, 1994 - Shlomo Kapach, age 22, and Gil Revah, age 21, were killed at a Ramle building site, and the PA protected their killers.

On October 19, 1994, a Hamas bomb killed 22 people on a bus in Tel Aviv.

On January 22, 1995, a double suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction near Netanya killed 21 others.

On April 13, 1995, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Hadera Central Bus Station, killing 5 and injuring 30.

On July 24, 1995, 6 civilians were killed when a terrorist blew himself up on a bus in Ramat Gan.

On August 21, 1995, three Israelis and one American were killed when a terrorist blew himself up in an attack on a Jerusalem bus.

But none of those deadly attacks - and these are only a few of scores of them - are considered by Vick to have harmed the Oslo process. No, Arab violence is never the problem. Only Jews are responsible for ruining "peace." The dozens of Israelis killed before Rabin's assassination weren't killed by Arab extremists, according to Vick - their extremism only started after Rabin's assassination.

Beyond that, Vick is clearly unaware that Rabin never advocated a Palestinian Arab state. He never advocated dividing Jerusalem. His last speech in Knesset before his assassination described his red lines:

We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.

...First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term...

(UPDATE): Moreover, as Soccer Dad reminds me, within two months after Rabin's assassination Israel left every single major Palestinian city except for Hebron. In other words the peace process accelerated after the assassination. It was only after the terror attacks of Feb-March 1996 that the peace process went off track.

So who are these anonymous historians that Vick confidently quotes, and what are their credentials?

Vick goes on:

Violence erupted in 2000, and Israel's peace camp was destroyed in the face of the ensuing wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. The center of Israeli politics shifted firmly to the right.

"Violence erupted" as journalists have done hundreds of times, Arab terror is something that simply happens by itself, without any responsibility.

Most outrageously, to Vick, the tragedy of the second intifada wasn't that Arabs were slaughtering Jews by the hundreds - it was that their deaths killed the Israeli peace camp.

Vick, of course, doesn't mention that prime minister Olmert went way beyond the Israeli offer in 2000, showing that even with so many murdered killed during the PLO's and Hamas' terror spree, Israel still wanted peace. That narrative doesn't make it into the mainstream media which is wedded to the lie that Jews are the only people responsible for setbacks to peace.

Then Vick just makes things up:

Two decades after the White House signing, Palestinians have less income, less land and much less freedom than they did in 1993.

The implication is that this is all Israel's fault. They may have less income and less freedom - but that is because of the terrorism that forced Israel to separate Arabs from Jews. Does Vick think that an international border between Israel and "Palestine" would allow workers to freely enter Israel?

But how can Vick say they have "less land"? There was no Palestinian Arab autonomy before Oslo, but now 100% of Gazans and about 97% of West Bank Palestinian Arabs live under Arab rule, with Arab security forces, Arab infrastructure and in what are virtually two separate Arab states, one of which is recognized by most of the world's nations.

Vick's bias is once again obvious. Yet these lies are the accepted conventional wisdom, and Time doesn't even bother to fact check it.

Accompanying the story is a photo essay that is even more biased than this piece, if that is possible. It portrays Arabs as eternal victims does not show a single Jew living in Judea and Samaria who is not represented as an aggressive interloper on Arab and Muslim land. Muslims work fields or are victims of Jewish terror; Jews are not shown as normal human beings.

(h/t Phyllis, AR)

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Karl Vick's anti-Israel bias shines through again

Time magazine's Karl Vick lists nine reasons to be skeptical about the chances for a peace agreement - and not one of them blames Palestinian Arabs or the PLO.

However, his first reason is enough to show how Vick will selectively choose or even twist facts to fit his anti-Israel mindset:

1. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to submit any agreement to a referendum. Bibi’s promise, made Sunday at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting, brought cries that he was shirking the leadership role required of a statesman, though acting consistent with his reputation for governing by poll. In any event, an Israeli plebiscite would likely sound the death knell for an agreement based – as any to emerge from Kerry’s planned talks would have to be – upon the Oslo Accords, the 1994 framework for a Palestinian state that, as a candidate, Netanyahu used to burn in effigy, marching beside a coffin labeled “Oslo.” Polls consistently show most Israelis want a peace agreement but do not believe one will come, one reason surely being that most Israelis reject the specific concessions a deal almost certainly would entail. To take only one issue: Two out of three centrist Israelis in one recent poll refuse to divide Jerusalem, the city Palestinians insist must also serve as their capital. And this week, even in the absence of any specifics at all, only 55 percent of Israelis said they were inclined to support an agreement Netanyahu might present.

So Bibi's promise to hold a referendum is a bad thing, according to Vick, because forcing Israelis to accept something they don't want or believe in is the correct action for a democracy. and he knows that the public will reject such a peace agreement. How? Because a poll shows that only 55% of the Israeli public would support a plan that Netanyahu recommends!

And we all know that 55% is, in Karl Vick's mind, a minority.

How's that for pretzel logic?

But it gets better. Because Mahmoud Abbas said the exact same thing, that he would hold a referendum. Vick doesn't see this as a problem (if he is even aware of it.) There is no doubt that the Palestinian Arabs would overwhelmingly reject any deal that does not include the "right to return" and destroy Israel demographically, or that would allow Israel to keep Jewish neighborhoods around Jerusalem, things that are non-starters for Israel. Poll after poll prove that Palestinian Arabs aren't interested in real peace, and Vick has read the polls.  But Vick has nothing negative to say about Abbas' call for a referendum, while slamming Bibi for the exact same thing..

 No, according to this faux-Middle East "expert," Netanyahu and Israelis are the only stubborn, intransigent parties. The Palestinian Arabs who are fed a steady diet of antisemitism and rejectionism in their media, their classrooms and their popular culture are given a free pass by Vick. Even Hamas is considered moderate by Vick, who stated nearly two years ago that it was on the verge of recognizing Israel. How did that prediction pan out, Karl?

This is only one of the many examples of bias in this article alone. Fisking the whole thing isn't necessary when it is so easy to prove bias, but just another tiny example:

Vick states that Israel approves "very few" Arab structures in the territories. In fact it mainly is concerned with Area C. Arabs can build all they want in Area A and Ramallah is filled with new buildings.  I showed recently how a French-backed industrial park in Bethlehem, adding potentially thousands of jobs, is about to open with full Israeli cooperation. But Karl Vick will never report on that - because it contradicts the web of anti-Israel lies he has spun over the years, and his concern over being proven a fraud is far more important than reporting the truth.

Vick has been proven not just wrong, but consistently wrong over the years. Why he is still respected? Mostly because he writes to confirm the biases that he and his fellow reporters helped create, rather than report reality.

Israel and Israelis Jews are intransigent, Abbas and the Palestinian Arabs are moderate, Hamas is moving towards moderation, and everything is always Israel's fault. How do we know? Because the Karl Vicks of the world keep saying it, without the slightest shred of proof, or the tiniest bit of embarrassment at being proven wrong!

(h/t Zvi)

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Today's lies from Time's Karl Vick

From Time (paywalled):

After Statehood Bid, 'Doomsday'

The day after the U.N. voted 138 to 9 (with 41 abstentions) to recognize a rump Palestine, Netanyahu's government unveiled "the doomsday settlement," in the words of Jerusalem geography specialist Danny Seidemann. Casting aside assurances to Washington that date to the Administration of President George W. Bush, Netanyahu moved to virtually chop the West Bank in half, pushing forward plans to build housing for Israeli Jews on the last stretch of usable Palestinian land east of Jerusalem. Outraged diplomats said that would effectively end the possibility of a two-state solution.

We have already shown that it doesn't chop the West Bank in half, that the Clinton parameters were much more expansive than this plan, and that the most liberal Israelis accept that Maaleh Adumim would be a part of Israel in any peace plan.

Karl Vick doesn't mention that Daniel Seidemann is hardly an unbiased "geography specialist." Seidemann has founded at least two one-sided European-funded NGOs against any Israeli building in Jerusalem, Ir Amim and Terrestrial Jerusalem. Using Seidemann's loaded term of "Doomsday" to describe the building in the headline is more than irresponsible - it betrays Time's bias.

Beyond that, while Israel has postponed building on E-1 in recent years, it never promised any administration that it would never build there as Vick implies.

Moreover, there is zero reason that the E1 plan would end the possibility of a two state solution. Just because Palestinian Arabs pretend that they cannot have a state without arbitrary preconditions doesn't mean it is true. That simple fact eludes essentially everyone in the media.

Yet another item to add to the ever-growing  list of reasons that Karl Vick is an anti-Israel idiot.

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Reason #11 Time's Karl Vick is an idiot

We have shown pretty conclusively that Time magazine's Karl Vick is an idiot when it comes to reporting about Israel. No matter how many times he is proven wrong, he keeps barreling on with his rose-colored view of Arab intransigence and his continuous blaming of everything on Israel.

Here's reason #11 Karl Vick is an idiot.

Last week he wrote:

Earlier this year, however, Meshaal endorsed the Abu Mazen approach. While reserving the right to violent resistance and not renouncing the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Meshaal said the time has come for negotiations with Israel and nonviolent protest in the spirit of the Arab Spring. "Now we have a common ground that we can work on--the popular resistance, which represents the power of the people," Meshaal said.

And here is what Meshal said just last week at the same time that Time was publishing Vick's drivel:

Reiterating his support for the Arab Spring, Mash'al said: "Hamas recognizes the value of Arab peoples, and it has no other way than to support the rights of the peoples and their aspiration for freedom and honor... Hamas has memory, values, and morality, and therefore it does not forget those who assisted it and who continue to do so. The movement will not strike a bargain over the blood of the ummah and of Arab peoples... The best defense, and the strength of [our] foreign policy, which is based on conflict (with Israel), is manifested in our support for the resistance and by granting rights to the people. Today is the day of the Arab Spring. There is no turning back. Democracy is our right, and resistance is our duty."

Mash'al went on to warn that Israel intends to create a new reality in Jerusalem, and that therefore, "following the [Arab] Spring, we [Arabs] must prepare for the project of liberating Jerusalem – and the Palestinian role [in this] is no substitute for the Arab role." He called for ending negotiations with Israel: "The time has come to overturn the negotiating table on those who wished to enslave us."

He then called on the Palestinian leadership and all its factions to begin the major step of ending division and completing the national reconciliation, adding: "Resistance, not negotiation, is the path to the restoration of rights. Nothing will restore the homeland but jihad, the rifle, and self-sacrifice.

Vick never reports on Hamas' warmongering statements, except to downplay them. And his bending over backwards to make Meshal into some kind of peacemaker at the exact same time Meshal is pushing a terror war is simply the latest example of his willful blindness - and, by extension, the willful blindness of Time magazine.

Other reasons Vick is an anti-Israel idiot who will tilt every fact towards how he wants it to be rather than what it actually is:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10

And these are just the articles I happen to have noticed in the past couple of years.


(h/t Ian)

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Time magazine's infomercial for Mahmoud Abbas - and Hamas

You know how the Palestinian Arab leaders are frustrated about how Western media attention has been on Egypt, Libya and Syria instead of them?

Apparently, this malaise extends to frustrated mainstream media reporters like Time's Karl Vick who spend their lives covering the Palestinian Arab leaders. Their reliable front-page stories are being pushed back, and they want the spotlight no less than their Palestinian Arab idols.

So the newly marginalized Vick managed to get an exclusive interview with the equally irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas, and Time allowed Vick to write a 3000 word paean to Abbas's "leadership" which sweeps everything negative under the rug and to try to restore the corrupt, intransigent PA back to prominence.

The article is filled with deceptions like this:

Missiles still fly out of Hamas-controlled Gaza from time to time, but according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tallies every reported incident on occupied territory, most violence in the West Bank is now committed by Israeli settlers against their Palestinian neighbors rather than the other way around. There have been spectacular exceptions, including the March 2011 slaughter of five Jewish settlers in their West Bank home. But month by month, the Palestinians tend to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators.

OCHA does not track all violent incidents - they only track incidents that result in injuries. So the vast majority of Palestinian Arab firebombs and stone throwings, which are really daily events in the territories, are simply not counted because Israelis have armored cars and buses and fenced communities in Judea and Samaria.

Another knowing deception:

Abbas' 2011 U.N. bid so irked Israel and Washington that each held back vital funding to Abbas' Palestinian National Authority (PA), the Palestinian transitional government. The revenue shortfalls wreaked havoc on the Palestinian economy. By September, people were burning tires in the streets to protest not Israel's 45-year military occupation but the PA itself.

The PA economy's woes have nothing to do with temporary withholding of some aid a year ago; it is from paying tens of thousands of people to not work in Gaza, paying families of suicide bombers, and other questionable economic policies of the PA.

If you read between the lines and know anything about the conflict, you can see Vick contradicting himself:

Abu Mazen himself spends more and more time abroad, flying on a chartered jet provided by the United Arab Emirates, a statesman without a state, relentlessly grooming an image of a peaceful people denied a homeland in foreign capitals.

Without me even having to point out the polls proving that they are still anything but a peaceful people and how they really want to destroy Israel in stages, Vick goes on:

If Abbas retires, as he frequently says he wants to, he will leave with no clear successor. Polls show Palestinians would elect Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic Fatah militant not currently available; he's serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. In recent months, Palestinian business leaders have talked up Khaled Meshaal, a notion that speaks volumes about the changes roiling Palestinian politics. Since 1996, Meshaal had held the most senior position in Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, long the face of Palestinian terror.

So the "peaceful people" would overwhelmingly choose terrorists as their leaders!

But Vick needs to soften Hamas' image, so he adds this amazing fact:

Earlier this year, however, Meshaal endorsed the Abu Mazen approach. While reserving the right to violent resistance and not renouncing the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Meshaal said the time has come for negotiations with Israel and nonviolent protest in the spirit of the Arab Spring. "Now we have a common ground that we can work on--the popular resistance, which represents the power of the people," Meshaal said.

So after seeing Arab governments fall from nonviolent resistance, Meshal now adds that to his arsenal of weapons to destroy Israel - and Vick reads this as Hamas moderation and a victory for Abbas' ("peaceful") approach!

Once you know that the goal of both Fatah and Hamas is the destruction of Israel - whether by using violence, politics, demographics, legal tactics, public relations or clueless magazine writers - then the switch from one tactic to another is not nearly as important as understanding the end goal. Vick purposefully ignores the goal and praises the means, which is frankly insane. But that insanity gets described this way:

To have a leader like Meshaal, whose organization dispatched numerous suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians, adopt the Abu Mazen approach was still a remarkable philosophical victory for Abbas.

Vick ignores the fact that last week Islamic Jihad held a massive rally in Gaza celebrating terror, and Hamss didn't only condone it - they sent one of their leaders to participate. But thst's not the face of Hamas that Time readers are seeing.

He ends off with:

Whatever new governments emerge from the Arab Spring, they are unlikely to be more understanding toward Israel than the bookish moderate who, when asked last October why he was going to the U.N., replied with one word: "Hope. All the time we give them hope."

Meaning that Vick completely misunderstands the Arab Spring. Abbas' current relative moderation, as far as it goes, is not reflective of his people. and if a Palestinian Arab spring emerges - and the anti-Abbas protests have already started - he will be replaced by someone more in line with the people's will, meaning someone more violent. Which means that any "peace" is illusory if the people prefer terror. Israel's peace with Egypt is holding for now, but it has weakened considerably after their revolution; a Palestinian Arab revolution will in all likelihood bring in something worse. That is not a reason to make a fake peace agreement now - it is reason to be wary of making agreements with leaders who don't represent their people.

This is basic, but it is beyond Karl Vick.

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According to Karl Vick's logic, Islamic Jihad is now peaceful!

Earlier this week, Karl Vick at Time Magazine came up with this piece of convoluted logic that only a self-described Middle East expert can conjure up:

Quite possibly biggest news out of Cairo was deep in the fine print: Efforts are under way to bring Hamas into the PLO, or Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella for all Palestinian factions. ...Hamas has wanted to join it since at least 2005. If Hamas finally gets in, the implications would appear to be immense. It would mean agreeing to the positions and agreements the PLO has already made. This includes recognizing Israel, and renouncing terror -- two things Hamas has never been willing to do.

As I mentioned at the time, this venerable journalist and analyst didn't even consider that Hamas' joining the PLO would mean that the PLO would change its position, not Hamas.

So who is right - an anonymous blogger with a ridiculously ironic name or the Time Magazine's Middle East expert analyst Karl Vick?

A hint can be seen in this article:

An Islamic Jihad delegation has arrived in Cairo to discuss national unity, party officials said Thursday.

The group, headed by the movement's general-secretary Ramadan Shalah, was invited for talks following a meeting between Fatah leader President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal in the Egyptian capital last week, Islamic Jihad officials told Ma'an.

On Wednesday, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Liberation Front said they had received invitations to send delegations to Cairo on Dec. 4 and Dec. 6 to discuss the unity deal. Later this month, the secretary-generals of all factions are due to attend a collective meeting in Cairo.

The Islamic Jihad delegation will discuss joining the Palestine Liberation Organization, officials said.

By Vick's logic, this means that Islamic Jihad is now a moderate, peace-loving organization! They want to join the PLO!  And the other terror groups discussing unity are probably not far behind! "The implications would appear to be immense!"

But wait:

Senior leader Sheikh Khalid al-Batsh told Ma'an on Sunday that Islamic Jihad would be interested in joining the PLO, but only on condition that it is restructured and its new agenda does not include any recognition of Israel.

Following talks between Abbas and Mashaal on Nov. 24, it was announced that an all-encompassing leadership body tasked with reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization would hold its first meeting on Dec. 22. The body was first envisioned by a 2005 agreement among factions.

Hamas is not part of the PLO, which is dominated by the Fatah movement. Hamas, which is shunned by the West for its hostility to Israel, believes that joining the PLO would bolster its international standing.

That sound you hear is the sound of the entire mainstream media ignoring the facts.

Fatah is moving towards Hamas-style rejectionism; Hamas is not moving towards peace. And the PLO might be reformed to accommodate terror groups while keeping its international cachet.

This is pretty obvious to anyone -  except to Middle East experts employed by major media outlets.

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Two more data points for the clueless Karl Vicks of the world

Yesterday I wrote about how Time magazine's Karl Vick was wedded to the idea of a moderating Hamas despite all evidence to the contrary.

Since then, Hamas' "political wing" member Sheikh Salah Aruri has emphasized that terrorism is a "right":

Our agreement with Fatah has nothing to do with the rest of our choices and our visions. We remain with our previous position, that all forms of resistance are a right and duty, with no restrictions on the resistance.

And Khaled Abu Toameh, the Arab that the liberals love to ignore even though his track record is orders of magnitude better than theirs, writes:

Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal have twice lied to the Palestinians in the past six months.

The first time was in May, when the two men announced in Cairo that they had reached a "historic" reconciliation agreement to end their differences and form a unity government. The second time was last week, when they met once again in the Egyptian capital and declared that they had agreed to open a new page in their relations and work as partners.

Palestinian Arab leaders lying? That concept is way too foreign for the intelligentsia who know that what they say in English must be the absolute truth.

(h/t Silke)

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