#803 – This Week: “Most Polarizing Politician’s” Return

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The Philly Inquirer (Inq) ran a brief AP piece this week on “polarizing” Avigdor Lieberman joining Israel’s cabinet, but, unlike in years past, his mere cabinet presence wasn’t purveyed as dooming peace prospects between Jews and Arabs.

This Week Not Much In The Inq:  “Most Polarizing Politician’s Return”

The Associated Press, not bashful in news articles over the years in contrasting “hard-line” Likudniks versus “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, reported in my hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq) this week that Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon, “one of the last moderate voices in the Likud Party,” had resigned, deepening “the rift in the cabinet between the security establishment and the hard-line politicians,” and that PM Netanyahu “reportedly intends to appoint” as defense minister Avigdor Lieberman [of the Yisrael Beiteinu party], “one of Israel’s most polarizing politicians.”  [emphasis added throughout]

What’s new and different here is not the Inq et ilk labeling Lieberman “polarizing,” but that this news made only a, ho-hum, 4-paragraph news-in-brief “Around the World” squib This Week In The Inq (Inq, Sat, 5/21/16, A3).  There was a time when news-making by Avigdor Lieberman was like waving a scarlet flag in front of a bull to the Inq.  The contrast below, like the Inq last week passing up reporting on “Nakba Day,” annual Arab commemoration of the “catastrophe” of the failure of their 1948 invasion for Israel’s destruction, evidences a remission in the Inq’s obsession with its perceived evils of Israel.  Come and see.

2006

When Yisrael Beiteinu joined the Likud-led coalition in 2006, the Philly Inquirer greeted this news with an article (Inq, 10/29/06, A3) by its own Ned Warwick calling Yisrael Beiteinu a “far right-wing party, led by the polarizing Avigdor Lieberman, who bluntly believes Arabs and Jews can’t live together.

The Inq followed up two days later (Inq, 10/31/06, A10) with AP article it headlined “Israeli Cabinet Adds Hawkish Partner,” which said Lieberman calls “for trading Arab towns inside Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank,” which, horrifyingly, “would effectively strip Israeli Arabs of citizenship by shifting them to a Palestinian state.”  This, the AP decried, in what that week’s BSMW labeled “a lead paragraph 1 burst of AP opinion in contradistinction to fact, “effectively ruled out any serious moves to revive Middle East peace negotiations.”

With, I think, precious little appreciation of the irony embraced in the contrast between its article’s lede’s and last paragraphs’ references to respective Israeli and Palestinian Arab attitudes toward such revival of “Middle East peace negotiations,” the AP appended as tail-end paragraph 11 of 11 of this article that Hamas, which “won Palestinian parliamentary elections in January and formed a government [n.b.],” calls “for Israel’s destruction.”

2007

The AP and Inq, however, declined to descend into declarations of “Middle-East-Peace-Process” Doom the very next year (AP in Inq, 10/11/07, A5, Inq-headlined as “Palestinian Envoy Touts Exchange of Israeli Land”) in an article that led:  “The Palestinians are ready to yield parts of the West Bank to Israel if compensated with an equal amount of Israeli territory, the lead Palestinian negotiator [Qureia] told the Associated Press yesterday.”  (And nothing about his “bluntly believing Arabs and Jews can’t live together.”  And see also AP in Inq 5/23/10, A4, calmly Inq-headlined: “Abbas Sheds Light on Mideast Talks,” that calmly led:  “The Palestinians are ready to swap land with Israel, though differences remain over the amount of territory to be traded.”)

2009

Another Israeli cabinet shakeup in 2009 provoked an Inq “WorldView” column by its house world affairs columnist Trudy Rubin (Inq, Sun, 3/15/09, C1).  Ms. Rubin began by characterizing Netanyahu as preparing to form a “right-wing” government appearing to include Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, whom she called “notorious for calling on Israel to rid itself of most of its Arab citizens and relocate [!] them to a future Palestinian Arab ‘entity.’”  She direly warned that Lieberman’s “inflammatory views may undercut any new peace moves in the the region.”  Charming.

That week’s Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA, not known as especially right-wing) article in Philly’s Jewish Exponent (3/19/09) stated that in 2004 Lieberman had “declared his support for the two-state solution of Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side,” and characterized him as “calling for Israel’s borders to be redrawn to exclude Israeli towns near the West Bank; those towns would become part of Palestine, while Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank would become part of Israel.”  (Hardly “undercutting any new peace moves in the region.”)

And as to the Inq et ilk’s permanent hysteria over land swaps only when Lieberman proposes them, Arutz Sheva reported on 6/10/09 (over which nobody when apoplectic):  “U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell sounded out the Palestinian Authority on a land swap that would allow Israel to retain large population centers in Judea and Samaria in return for the PA’s receiving land that includes Arab cities.”  It added:  “The land swap idea originally was proposed by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beitenu party.”

And, with regard to which side’s saying Arabs and Jews can’t live together, here’s what the “moderate” Mr. Abbas’ Fatah said on the subject at its General Assembly in 2009, per Caroline Glick’s Jerusalem Post “Column One: Fatah’s Message” (8/13/09):  “[Fatah] demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem [another resolution said Fatah demands all of Jerusalem] ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

2010

BSMW #496 of 7/4/10 led with, perhaps, the understatement:  “Not for the first time, the mainstream Western media This Week In the Inq portrayed Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman’s peace process statements unfairly.”

The Philly Inquirer of 6/30/10 (A8, AP) carried the Inq headline:

“Israeli Official: No Palestinian State by 2012”

sub-headlining that these remarks by Israel’s “hard-line foreign minister could complicate” U.S. envoy Mitchell’s impending visit.

But, contrary to the impression of a foreign minister fiat purveyed by the Inq’s headline “Israeli Official: No Palestinian State by 2012,” what Israel’s foreign minister DID say that week, per the Inq’s so-headlined article’s paragraph 3, was:

“We can express interest, we can dream, but in reality we are still far from reaching understandings and agreements on establishing an independent state by 2012.”

The New York Times (hardly a right-wing Zionist voice in the media world) that same day quoted Lieberman in similar words.  Some fiat.

Upshot

 If Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman is “one of Israel’s most polarizing politicians,” as the AP yet again called him this week, inter alia, in the Inq, mainstream Western media, along with some Israeli media, mischaracterization of his positions

– not least on land swaps, portrayed as statesmanship when coming from others, and racist when coming from him –

have had a hand in so painting him.

But that the Inq, not least in so painting Lieberman in years past, passed by so mischaracterizing his land swap position this week in the Inq, does seem to be further evidence of remission of its Israel obsession.  And that’s a good thing, for as long as it lasts.