An article in the Irish Times about Donald Trump, Jews, and Israel is riddled with lies, which all make sense when you see who the writer is. Lara Marlowe has a history of anti-Israel articles, which HonestReporting has documented.
Trump has made some ambitious statements about making a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, but according to Marlowe, the reason why this would be unlikely to happen is because of Trump’s apparently “ugly portrayal of Palestinian ‘terrorists.’”
This makes you wonder, what does Marlowe think is an appropriate way to portray terrorists? And what portrayal is she referring to anyway? Is it when Trump condemned the “barbaric behavior” of the terrorists who killed a father in front of his family in a drive-by shooting, or stabbed to death a 13 year old girl, Hallel Yafa Ariel, as she slept in her bed? Does Marlowe have a problem with these cold-blooded murderers being called barbaric? Of course she may not even consider them to be terrorists in the first place, as it seems she can only use the word if it’s put in “scare quotes.”
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Marlowe claims that promises made by Trump’s Middle East policy advisors to maintain“defensible borders” for Israel are:
code words for the refusal to return to Israel’s 1967 borders, as required by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.
First of all, the 1967 line was not a border, it was an armistice line agreed on in 1949 between Israel and the Arab armies who had tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state. It was in the 1967 war that the lines proved indefensible, and Israel captured the West Bank. Marlowe refers to it as “land seized from Palestinians since the 1967 war;” in fact before that it was occupied by Jordan, which had captured it in the 1948 war against Israel, and then proceeded to expel all the Jews.
As for UN Security Council resolution 242 (which was reiterated in resolution 338), it calls for negotiations to agree on “secure and recognized boundaries.” The resolution refers to an Israeli “withdrawal from territories,” not the territories, meaning the issue of land and borders is something that would have to be compromised and negotiated on, especially taking security into account.
And while 60 percent of the West Bank is Area C under Israeli control, it is not “reserved for sole Israeli use,” as Marlowe describes. Around 150,000 Palestinians live there. Meanwhile there are not 500 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank. There may be around that number of gates, roadblocks, etc, but there are only 27 checkpoints. So… a slight exaggeration of only a few hundred.
Marlowe makes the bizarre projection that
Trump may, like earlier US presidents, attempt to impose Israel’s vision of a Palestinian state comprised of small, disconnected enclaves under Israeli hegemony. If the Palestinians refuse, they will be blamed, again.
Israel’s vision?
As though the Jewish state, its citizens and government with 120 MKs from ten different parties from Arab to ultra-Orthodox Jewish has agreed on one preferred solution to the conflict. For their part, at least the Palestinians have tended to be quite consistent in their vision, which encourages terrorism, rejects Israel’s right to exist, and ultimately aims for the destruction of the Jewish state, to be replaced by a Palestinian one from the river to the sea. Going by Marlowe’s sympathies for how terrorists are portrayed, her denial of Israel’s history, and her apparent objection to Israel having defensible borders, it seems her vision isn’t so different to that of the Palestinians.
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