Jerusalem Coverage Balanced, Not Biased

In a Sept. 22 letter, Rustin Silverstein '99 and David Honig '99 criticize the printing of a Reuters photograph of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy being beaten by an Israeli soldier, saying that this coverage was "surprising and sad." Surprising, perhaps, since the U.S. media is generally so skewed towards the Zionist perspective, but not sad, for by no means is every critical exposure of Israeli biased or wrong. This photograph represented a move towards more balanced coverage, while their letter was simply a return to the revisionist writing about Israel and Palestinians that is normalized in mainstream U.S. discourse.

Silverstein and Honig argue that using the name "Arab East Jersualem" inaccurately describes the eastern part of Jerusalem because there is currently a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem. However, they neglect to mention that this majority was only achieved through a systematic pumping in of Jewish settlers and concurrent expulsion of native Palestinians by means of physical and legal violence. To uphold the policy of keeping Palestinians off of their land, denoted by such incidents as the notorious 1947 Deir Yassin massacre in a village in the Jerusalem district, Israeli law refuses building permits to native Palestinians in Jerusalem, legally deemed foreigners, and confiscates Palestinians' residence permits. This has resulted in an artificially high proportion of Jews in the Holy City. Furthermore, East Jerusalem has been shamelessly gerrymandered to establish a fictive Jewish majority. Finally, their claim that there existed a Jewish majority in the Palestinian city in 1840 is patently false. In fact, the British Census from almost a century later, in 1931, report that only 41 percent of the residents of Jerusalem were Jewish.

The authors also invoked U.S. and Israeli support for a united Jerusalem as the capital of the settler state. However, they seem to have overlooked the international community's virtually unanimous condemnation of Israeli occupation of Arab East Jerusalem and therefore of Israel's claim to Jerusalem as its eternal, united capital.

Most recently, Israeli authorities destroyed more than 25 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem based on the claim that they were built without a permit-virtually impossible for Palestinians to attain in the first place. Such action, along with the building of the settlement on Jabal Aba-Ghneim (Har Homa) and last September's opening of a tunnel underneath the Dome of the Rock, is clearly in violation of the Oslo peace accord's stipulation that the status of Jerusalem not be altered until final status negotiations. The authors, on the other hand, are concerned that The Crimson's reference to East Jerusalem as "Arab East Jerusalem" deems it Arab in advance of permanent status negotiations. If they really want to worry about violations of a 'peace' agreement, that had no chance to begin with, their concern would perhaps be better directed towards the Israeli's systematic, on-the-ground infractions, rather than The Crimson's adherence to the international convention of referring to eastern Jerusalem as 'Arab East Jerusalem.'

Finally, with regards to their claim that the picture of the soldier beating the 12-year-old boy ignores context, we ask, Under what circumstances can an armed soldier legitimately attack a young boy? However, they do raise a point which we believe is crucial to an understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: decontextualized violence often comes across in Western media as barbaric outbursts of terrorism, when in fact they are tragic reactions to the systematic violence that has been inflicted upon Palestinians from the inception of the colonial state of Israel in 1948 to the present. This foundational injustice must never be forgotten. Mohammad Al-Ississ '99, Amahl Bishara '98, Waqaas Fahmawi '99, Society of Arab Students