Love of the Land: Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA Media Analysis
23 March '10

"It's clear these leaders have no clue what's happening in Israel's largest city," veteran Ha'aretz writer Akiva Eldar charges in his March 22 Op-Ed, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. But one wonders whether it's not Eldar himself who hasn't got a clue when he writes in the very same paragraph:

For 17 years, since the days of the Peres-Yitzhak Rabin administration, holy places in the Old City have been closed to Muslim and Christian believers from the occupied territories. The only East Jerusalem residents allowed to enter the Temple Mount compound are women and the elderly.

In general, the thousands of West Bank Palestinians with permits to enter Israel (for work, study and other purposes) and all east Jerusalem Arabs, including men, have had free access to the Temple Mount over the last 17 years. There have been periods of heightened violence which prove to be the exception; at those times, access is usually limited to men over the age of 45 or 50 and women of all ages. An example of this restricted period fell earlier this month, as Hamas called a "day of rage," inciting violence on the Temple Mount and beyond. The fact that intermittent closures and restrictions are the exception, as opposed to the rule, is apparent from the media reports which note the beginning or the end of a more restrictive period. Thus, Akiva Eldar's own newspaper reported March 17, 2010:

Earlier Wednesday, Israel lifted its closure on the West Bank and granted open access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, with police saying that thousands of troops will remain on high alert but reported no disturbances. Israel originally sealed off the territory last week.

There are also periods of complete closure on the West Bank, such as during Jewish holidays, in which West Bank Arabs may not enter Israel aside from humanitarian cases. Yet even during a period of closure during the Jewish new year (Rosh Hashanah) which fell on September 2009, nearly 60 percent of the West Bank Palestinian population still had access to Jerusalem, according to the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Sept. 16-29 "Protection of Civilians Report" by OCHA details:

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Love of the Land: Ha’aretz Writers are Subversive

Ha’aretz Writers are Subversive

FresnoZionism.com
09 October 09

The Ha’aretz newspaper is… something else.

Called the “NY Times of Israel”, Ha’aretz writers are often far more anti-Israel than those of the NY Times, which is no slouch in that department.

The previous editor, David Landau, famously told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a ‘failed state’ which needed to be ‘raped’ into a settlement with the Arabs by the US (I originally thought that Landau must have been thinking of the Hebrew word “לאנוס” which means both ‘to force’ and ‘to rape’, but then I discovered that he had come to Israel from the UK at the age of 23). He also said that this would be a “wet dream” for him.

One writer, Gideon Levy, accused Israel of committing ‘war crimes’ on the first day of the Gaza war. And Amira Hass, here validating the libelsof the Goldstone report, is as eloquent a spokesperson for the Palestinian cause as you will find anywhere.

Today it’s Akiva Eldar doing the devil’s work:

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.

The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.

The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction.

This appears in the ‘diplomatic news’ section of Haaretz.com (English).

So an unnamed source is ’stunned’ by unnamed congressmen who are ‘furious’. One of the most basic principles that an intelligent person applies when making judgments about accusations like this is to ‘consider the source’, but Eldar — in a news article — doesn’t tell us. This is more ‘National Enquirer’ material than responsible journalism.

I haven’t heard Netanyahu say anything like “Obama is an enemy of Israel”, have you? And if Obama is “furious” at Netanyahu, I haven’t heard him say that either. So why present an unsourced slander against the PM in a news article?

There can be only one reason, which is to strike a political blow against him in Israel and to discredit him in the US.

This is not a bit surprising, when you consider Eldar’s degree of left-wing extremism. Recently, he argued that the concessions Olmert offered in negotiations with the Palestinians were insufficient to compensate them for years of ’struggle’! Struggle indeed.

Love of the Land: Ha’aretz Writers are Subversive