Genetically Modified News

Following the The Six-Day War at 50 anniversary, the NY Times allowed a long piece to be published in it’s Sunday Review, called “The Past 50 Years of Israeli Occupation. And the Next by Nathan Thrall.

Nathan Thrall is another product of the ‘New Journalism’ school; where the ‘personal voice’ had given voice to ‘alternative facts’ and personal bias. Columbia is full of them…

Walter Cronkite would not be hired today, because Thrall and his likes, are championing a new field of Genetically modified news.

The structure of the arguments is based on the usual miss-characterization of the facts, just like a rape victim is blamed for what she was wearing, minimizing the hostility of her brutal attacker.

A little background:

1. Israel is the only country that when attacked, time and again, has to turn their spoils of war back and retreat – like a looser.
2. The US, under pressure from the Soviets, led the UN pressure for Israel’s stopping and for ceasefire. Since the Soviets didn’t want Israel to get further into their Syrian ally’s land, they agreed for a resolution that conditions Land for peace.
3. All the UN resolutions are against Israel and when there is finally one that is not – we have multiple interpretations to make it different than it is.
4. Neither Dayan, nor Eshkol or Rabin wanted to conquer the holly sites in Jerusalem and when they did, they had turned them to the Jordanian control.
5. US “financing” and backing was not existent. US was mired in Vietnam, and didn’t support Israel during the 67 war, but only when Russia was going to send their fleet and more, they turned the 6th fleet from Spain towards Israel. McNamara clearly states that they had no intention on intervening.
6. Eshkol had to beg for spare parts after the war, and Dayan had written his famous piece that Israel is doomed, because the Arabs will always get replenishment of their weaponry and Israel has none. Israel was all alone for quite some time.
7. After 67, Dayan kept saying that Israel is waiting “for the phone call”, for land for peace, but instead we got the Khartoum 3 nos.
8. To see the writer’s bias, you can see how they twist facts;
   1. First – making it Golda’s ‘desire’ being fulfilled, the writer goes onto creating a fictional arc, where in fact, nearly no one wanted to keep Israel 3 times larger than it was. Second, the writer states: American financing …, with Israel now receiving more military assistance from the United States than the rest of the world does combined. look at the numbers: It is just not true but no one will do the fact checking because the NY Times is a paper full of distorted biased facts. In the New Memorandum starting at 2018, Israel gets $3.1 billion, to be spent entirely in the US (Unlike other countries) out of The $35 billion US spends on foreign aid (Egypt: $1.5 billion, Afghanistan: $1.1 billion, Jordan: $1.0 billion, Pakistan: $933 million and more).
   2. Initially, the threat was of an attack by the Arab states. But that soon crumbled: Israel made a separate peace with the strongest one, Egypt; The actual peace pact was done in 1980. Which by all accounts was not that SOON! Allowing for the internal forces in both nations to increase the stakes and hostilities.
   3. The author writes; Arabs proved incapable of defending even sovereign Lebanon from Israeli invasion; when in fact it was the Syrian invasion that destroyed Lebanon, the Middle Eastern Switzerland or old,  and Iran’s push for Hezbollah’s domination of the country’s south, that mired Lebanon in wars.
   4. In the two intifadas Israel had suffered thousands of victims, but Instead of writing about how incitement by the Palestinian’s leaders for terror had cost us peace, after our withdrawal from most of their land in the 90s, he writes, But Israel, with the strongest army in the region, has repeatedly demonstrated that it can endure and outlast whatever bursts of resistance the divided and exhausted Palestinians can muster.
9. The fictional narrative builds a story, that is not different than all biased distortions on pieces of facts. But today such writers have plenty of alternative facts platforms to put their distortions – The NY Times king of the field.

Ultimately, the writer puts but a lip service on the fact that the Palestinians are responsible for their fate: For the most part, the Palestinians themselves have done much to support the status quo. But he immediately changes the tone to the Palestinian government is that cooperating with Israel’s occupation — which, in fact, makes the occupation less costly, more invisible to Israelis and easier to sustain.

1. When he finally admit that it was the PLO who refused to negotiate and that the terror against Israel precedes 1967’s occupation, he puts it as part of Israel’s MYTH, rather than his words. Then he puts it as if things had really changed: When the P.L.O. finally did so, in 1988, the rug was pulled out from under it. Palestinians woke up to find that 22 percent of the homeland had been redefined as their new maximalist demand. Shimon Peres was among the few Israeli leaders to recognize the magnitude of the Palestinians’ concession. He called it Israel’s “greatest achievement.”

Why would any other country’s negotiations be accepted but when Israel finally gets to establish – finally, a hold on the land that was withheld from them throughout most of the century, under England’s mandate cooperation with the Jordan and the Palestinians, so as to push Jews from their holly sites, the writer has a problem with it. Israel was a sovereign country that 3 Arab nations tried to destroy while the world had stayed silent. As the victor and the victim for decades of aggression, Israel has the right redefine it’s “Maximalist demands” which are a joke – since Israel is willing at the same time to make land swaps to moderate its hold on such territories. But the author drowns these facts in his fictional narrative.

1. More fiction: In the last quarter-century of intermittent American-led negotiations, the powerlessness of the Palestinians has led to still further concessions. The P.L.O. has accepted that Israel would annex settlement blocs, They never did, or we’d have peace by now.

There are many biased people and biased ‘intellectuals’. We should not give them legitimacy. But the Liberal west loves them. Bless then – but that is why we have to suffer from the likes of Trump and Bibby. Because the world is sick of these distortions.

Personally, I see the author’s fiction not different than G’amal Abdul Nasser’s fiction about Israel’s aggression or about how their troops are marching into Tel-Aviv, just to wake up to see his Anti-Jewish caricaturized landscape taken over by his victim’s ‘real’ people.

Just another propaganda nonsense that the NY Times loves to spread. Hate them.

It states that Nathan Thrall, is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, and he is the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.”

What I want to know is whether besides partial truths and biased news – has Thrall ever done anything of substance?

I know many Israelis who have. They are nowhere to be found in his writing.

Instead – I’d recommend that one reads Yossi Klein Halevi’s book – As Dreamers or follow balanced Peace loving attempts by many Israelis and Americans who’ve tried to help bring peace to a region that has been fighting Muslim Fundamental Proxy wars that are lacking any possible outcome but war.