International Law Not Fit to Print: The New York Times and Israel/Palestine

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These shortcomings came to a head in an April 19 piece by Steven Erlanger, The New York Times' correspondent to the region, titled 'Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank'. The article's thesis that, 'the likely impact of the provisional new border on Palestinian life is, perhaps surprisingly, smaller than generally assumed,' was essentially based on the flawed analysis of the Wall's impact by David Makovsky. Mr. Makovsky, a former Editor of the right-wing Jerusalem Post, is now a Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spinoff from the right-wing American Israeli Public Affairs Committee(AIPAC). On top of paraphrasing Mr. Makovsky's arguments, Mr. Erlanger quotes 144 words from Mr. Makovsky, versus only 23 words from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. 'The land between the green line and the barrier is 8 percent of the West Bank,' Mr. Erlanger reported. He happily added that, 'Eight percent is half of what the figure was last summer,' ignoring the reality that Palestinians don't accept Israeli annexation of any of their land, Mr. Erlanger wrote that the revised Wall 'route has sharply reduced the number of Palestinians caught inside the barrier: fewer than 10,000 of the two million Palestinians in the West Bank.' He then added caveats - 10,000 does not include Wall impacts on 195,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the Wall has cut off most of the Palestinians' best agricultural land, and the Israeli army can completely seal off Palestinian towns like Qalqilya that the Wall nearly surrounds. Though Mr. Erlanger never admits this, these caveats add hundreds of thousands of Palestinians negatively impacted by the Wall, making Mr. Makovsky's figure of 10,000 Palestinians totally misleading. Worse, Mr. Erlanger notes three times that Israeli annexation of 8% of the West Bank is close to the 5% that President Bill Clinton supposedly proposed in 2000. The emphasis on annexing 5% - 8% of the West Bank serves Mr. Makovsky's partisan political agenda - lowering the bar for expectations of what constitutes a just resolution. However, there is no justification for 'lowering the bar' when international law requires that Israel withdraw from the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, analysts like Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolition have explained repeatedly that Israeli annexation of a strategic 5% of the West Bank will leave Israel in control of the West Bank, and prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.