Letter to the Editor of New York Times

Dear Editor,

I have just finished reading yet another New York Times article that focus’s its main attack on Jewish settlements in Judea & Shomron. These articles clearly promote the opinion that the root cause to the current stalemate between Palestinians and Israeli's is Jewish housing projects. The continual western journalist's fetish for Jewish settlement is becoming apparent given the events of the past decade concerning this conflict. According to your editorials, it is as if Oslo, Disengagement, rise of Hamas and its subsequent rockets, have poof, up and vanished, or made awkwardly irrelevant to any genuine observation of this crisis.

Still, these cheap stylized settlement expose's are being generated at a dizzying rate, so that the false belief that the thousands of heinous terror bombings, rocket attacks and classrooms that teach genocidal anti-semitic doctrines is all the result of a Jewish family living in a certain geographical location. As if the mere presence of a Jew living in an Arab neighborhood is the lone reason for the hate and intolerance found in a genocidal Palestinian society. By this sort of logic, Jews then should be directed to live in only certain sectors and delineated zones that meets certain cultural requirements. This sounds alot like a line one would come across in a medievel European town, not a nationally syndicated US newspaper, let alone the whitehouse.


The settlement issue is newsworthy, the NY Times description of the settlement issue is unfortunately not. The type of editorials in the New York Times, can be aptly characterized as; a convenient lack of scrutiny to the consequences and of the legitimacy of such a policy. This brazen lack of a fact-finding approach to this community is unconscionable.

Obama is achieving a closer diplomatic posture with the Arab world at the expense of Israel, by taking advantage of the settlement pop cause, demanding a halt to all settlement construction (including for natural growth, and East Jerusalem), putting Israel's democratically elected government in an unwinnable situation. Rather, what one is left with in the NY Times is a superficial, pro-Palestinian stance that disregards the relevant, simple and generic questions required of a policy reversal concerning one of the US’s closest ally’s, and doing it with a voodoo policy to a conflict that spans generations.

The journalistic hubris on display in the NY Times's settlement portrayal can be summed up in the refusal to countenance the alternative to the governing opinion on Jewish settlements in the Obama administration, the inability to provide an adequate expression to the reasons and justifications of this 40 year enterprise that includes the lives of over 304,000 people (not including E.Jerusalem), and finally, a general unwillingness to treat the settlement issue in a wider context of an Arab-Jewish struggle.

There is no discussion of the preceding settlement withdrawal exhibited in Gaza, which subsequently saw Hamastan, import of Iranian influence/weaponry and rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers. The NY Times does not question in the slightest the argument being made currently by Obama; that Jews living in their ancestral land is the cause of hostilities today. Even though such an argument smacks of bigotry and willful ignorance considering the Olmert administrations desperate attempts to reach a solution with a rejectionist PA authority. Begging the question why a future Palestinian State must be Jew free, but Israel, with its 1.2 million Arab citizens, must remain a model of multi-culturalism. There is no mention that according to international law that these territories are actually “disputed” lands and not “occupied” lands. This is due to the fact that Israel conquered this land not from any Palestinian State but from The Kingdom of Jordan (who in '88 relinquished its claim to it), and only after Jordan opened up hostilities in ‘67. Finally, after the failure of the Oslo process, after the failure of disengagement where in both cases, Israel showed good faith and the Palestinians exhibited a lack there of, why is it that Israel, a staunch US ally, is being once again cast as the party required to prove its peaceful intentions through a contentious and painful sacrifice. All the while, Abbas sits on the fence (as he made clear in his interview w/ Washington Post), waiting, reclining, relaxing and watching as yet another Israeli government cowtows to international pressure at the expense of its national interests and security considerations.

The basic assumption underlying the Obama policy concerning Israeli settlements in the very least requires further elucidation due to the current stalemate it seems to have reinforced. And yet, your paper refuses its professional obligations to ask these simple questions (even if unpopular), and to inform your readers not on just some of the facts, but on all the facts. To accept a political argument as truth without need for rigorous investigation, which is what the NY Times is accomplishing by not questioning President Obama, is at best, marketing an incomplete product, and at worst, an informal collusion of political agenda’s that calls into question the ability for the New York Times to report the news and let its readers decide.