Take the Washington Post article I linked to at the top. It's written by Anne Gearan, a respected reporter who surely knows that she misleads her readers. For example, she writes,
"The larger [Trump] peace proposal has been stymied by the Palestinian Authority, which would negotiate any settlement but remains incensed at Trump's decision last year to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel."
No clue here that Trump's decision on Jerusalem was a pre-negotiation slap in the Palestinians' face because it fully embraced the position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is unwilling to make any real concession to the Palestinians. For all his faults, Abbas wasn't being petulant: the people he claims to represent do not accept Israel's claim to an undivided Jerusalem. (And neither do Trump's Gulf state friends.)
Gearan notes that "unemployment in Gaza is about 40 percent, and residents have only about four hours of electricity per day." Whose fault is that? She notes that the UN "says conditions there are dire and growing worse, and it predicts that without intervention, the seaside territory bordering Israel and Egypt will be 'unlivable' by 2020" (emphasis added). Without intervention? It's Israeli intervention that has brought Gaza to its condition. The Gazans shouldn't have to choose between liberation and economic development; liberation would bring development.
The Post reporter writes that "protests on the Gaza-Israel border in April and May led to the deaths of scores of Palestinians" (emphasis added). But the protests, which were overwhelmingly peaceful, did not lead to the deaths. Those Palestinians were murdered by Israel snipers standing safely outside the prison fence. Gearan acknowledges the agency of the soldiers, but only when pointing out that "the Trump administration has backed Israel against international criticism that its soldiers used disproportionate force by shooting civilians rushing the border fences during protests." Picking off imprisoned protesters who get too close to a fortified fence will sound like disproportionate to any reasonable observer.
Gearan goes on:
"A Gaza-focused approach could have at least short-term political benefits for Israel, if a truce on the hostile border replaced images of deadly clashes.
"'We do want to support them,' the senior Israeli official said of the U.S. team, adding that it remains unclear whether Hamas would agree to the truce and a prisoner exchange that Israel would demand at the outset of any proposal."
She withholds from her readers the fact that Hamas has honored truces in the past, only to have them broken by Israel when it needed to flex its muscle to the Arab world.
She further points out that "Palestinians also seek redress for Arabs who left homes in what is now Israel when the state of Israel was established." Those Palestinians did not merely leave their homes, as if voluntarily, which contrary to the evidence is what Israeli propaganda has always asserted. They were consciously driven out by a campaign of murder and mayhem. This ethnic cleansing was fully documented by government archives examined by Israeli historians 30 years ago. "Ethnic cleansing" is the historians' term, and even the Israeli military used the term "cleansing" and "purity" in their documents.
Of course Gearan reports -- as though it were a fact -- that "Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005." I showed that to be a falsehood above.
Finally, Gearan discusses the Palestinian concern that Trump's turn to Gaza may signal a move calculated to separate that group of Palestinians from their brethren in the West Bank:
"Abbas said last month that he rejected a U.S.-organized economic package for Gaza as an attempt by the Trump administration to divide Palestinians and reduce a political conflict with Israel to a purely humanitarian emergency. A statement from his spokesman warned regional countries against backing a project that would further separate Gaza from the West Bank and require concessions on the status of Jerusalem."
But:
"The U.S. official dismissed suggestions that the focus on Gaza is a prelude to a U.S.-driven plan to create a Palestinian state in Gaza, cutting the recalcitrant Palestinian Authority out of the deal."
We have reason to wonder if that is indeed the US-Israeli plan. Jonathan Cook writes:
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