I want to like the Times of Israel, but as an online daily I
just don’t. The first line on this article on American-Israeli Jews encapsulates
the ‘why’ I don’t.
“Fifteen percent of West Bank settlers are American citizens”.
No, and not quite. Once, I get over the fact that the Times of Israel
has picked the side of the Arabs for referring to the disputed territories by
its’ Arab name, I am still left trying
to reconcile the differences and interplay between bias, nuance and facts.I would have accepted the first sentence if it read, ‘ Fifteen
percent of West Bank Israeli settlers were originally American Jews’ or ‘American
Jews make up to 15% of Israeli settlers in the West Bank’. I would even accept ‘Fifteen
percent of Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank originate from America’.
But even forgetting the awkwardness of the first sentence; just what is so newsworthy about a minority population
of Israelis living beyond the so-called Green Line? The only real thing one can
learn from this article is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis living in
the disputed territories are not American olim (immigrants).
This all came about because an ‘Oxford’ professor discovered
that of the 170,000 Israeli Jews of American origin living in Israel, and of
those; 60,000 chose to live over the so-called Green Line out of an American
olim total population of 170,000. If that isn’t bad enough the article suggests
the community of Israelis from America are disproportionately represented as living
in the disputed territories.
“This provides hard evidence that this constituency is strikingly over-represented, both within the settler population itself and within the total population of Jewish American immigrants in Israel,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn, the author of the forthcoming book “City on a Hilltop: Jewish-American Settlers in the Occupied Territories Since 1967,” said during a presentation at Jerusalem’s Limmud conference, Haaretz reported.
I am left wondering if ‘oxford professor’ is now a synonym
for dumber than shit or it is the poor reporting skills of TOFI that
should be blamed for accurately communicate the Hirschhorn’s thesis?
Apparently, there is an Israeli population of over 750,000 living across the so-called Green line, of which 60,000 are Jews of American origin, so
my question is; how many of those Israelis of American origin live outside the
city of Jerusalem? I suspect the vast
majority of those 60,000 American olim live in Jerusalem, the united eternal capital
of the Jewish people, but we don’t know because of the vapid shallowness of
this so-called ‘news’.
One of the sources the Times of Israel draws from is an
article found in Ha’aretz. I have no
idea what the Ha’aretz report actually says, as it is behind the paywall, and
I, like the vast majority of Israelis won’t pay to read Ha’aretz – not for love
or money.
