This week’s anti-Netanyahu piece – a blistering attack in response to the Israeli PM’s election victory – is par for the course for the New York Times.
By Ron-Ami Meyer
The New York Times editorial board has unleashed a scathing attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The editorial comes in response to Netanyahu’s decisive victory in last week’s national elections.
Combined with the Likud party’s 35 mandates, the prime minister’s natural allies earned him another 30 Knesset seats. This virtually guarantees Netanyahu a clear path to forming a coalition and the start of his fifth term as the Israeli leader.
The editorial claims that “Mr. Netanyahu has set a course that could end Palestinian chances for statehood,” neglecting to take into account the 25-year history of failed US-brokered attempts to achieve a viable Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
In July 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted talks at Camp David between arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, former head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state on 92% of the area of Judea and Samaria and 100% of the Gaza Strip. He also agreed to consider giving the Palestinians a capital in eastern Jerusalem and sovereignty over half of the Old City, including the Temple Mount.
Two years after Camp David, the UK-based Guardian recalled: “Arafat said no. Enraged, Clinton banged on the table and said: ‘You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.’”
Some years later, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dedicated his last cabinet meeting in 2009 to blaming the PA for its failure to accept his terms for a peace deal. Olmert told The Jerusalem Post at the time: “We were ready to sign a peace agreement; the Palestinians, to my regret, did not have the courage to do so.”
Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, has just re-elected Netanyahu in response to what its citizens believe are his accomplishments in the areas of economy, security and diplomacy.
Yet the Times sees little hope in a Netanyahu-led nation. “Under Mr. Netanyahu,” write the editors, “Israel is on a trajectory to become what critics say will be an apartheid state like the former South Africa.”
Israeli ‘Apartheid’ Claimed by BDS Activists
Claims of apartheid are prevalent among supporters of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other anti-Israel organizations.
Rev. Kenneth Meshoe, president of South Africa’s African Christian Democratic Party, for example, has said that after numerous trips to Israel, he has yet to encounter apartheid. He recounted an incident concerning a friend, a South African pastor, who was hospitalized briefly during a visit to Israel. After hearing much about Israeli apartheid before his trip, the pastor reported:
“There I lay in an Israeli hospital, a Palestinian Muslim on my left and a Jewish Israeli on my right, with this black South African in the middle. And I thought, what apartheid?!”
This week’s anti-Netanyahu piece is par for the course for the New York Times. In May 2018, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) unveiled a giant billboard outside the Times offices, criticizing its biased coverage against Israel.
“Since the beginning of 2018, the Times has published so many egregiously factual errors that CAMERA created what it calls a ‘New York Times Line,’ a timeline that tracks the newspaper’s errors on Israel,” JNS reported at the time: