While the shock announcement last week that Israel and the United Arab Emirates has been warmly received by many, the blowback has been all-too-predictable. Chief among the accusations has been that any progress on normalization with Israel is problematic since it empowers Israel to continue managing the situation without resolving it together with the Palestinians.
Though many may disagree vehemently, that’s a legitimate opinion, one which people are allowed to express in an editorial in the media. But a piece by Yousef Munayyer published on the CNN website this week crossed the line and opportunistically used recent developments to smear Israel.
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Entitled “Opinion: UAE helps normalize Israeli oppression,” Munayyer’s piece features a litany of lies and half-truths – and CNN must be held accountable for allowing such demonstrable falsehoods to be disseminated on any of its platforms.
Disregarding reality to blame Israel, Netanyahu and Trump
Already in the second paragraph, Munayyer makes a spectacularly disingenuous claim:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump — neither of whom seem to be particularly interested in peace, justice or equality.”
It takes a special kind of politically-motivated ideologue to witness an historic move towards a peace deal, only to claim that the leaders responsible do not “seem to be particularly interested in peace.” Let’s not forget that – love him or loathe him – Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in the White House together with Yasser Arafat in October 1998, to resume the implementation of the Oslo Accords. And in 1997, Netanyahu was as signatory to the Hebron Agreement that saw the IDF withdraw from 80% of the ancient city, which for all intents and purposes was transferred to Palestinian control. This, despite Hebron being a site of huge significance for the Jewish people.
That, however, was merely the opening volley in a wide-ranging diatribe. Soon after, Munayyer makes another demonstrably false claim:
The reason that Arab regimes, including the UAE up until now, have yet to normalize ties with Israel is because of Israel’s treatment of their kin, the Palestinians.”
Wrong.
The real reason that Arab regimes have yet to normalize ties with Israel is because they have been committed to Israel’s destruction from even before day one of its existence. Simply put, Israel was never given a chance.
Immediately after the UN announced it had approved a plan to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, numerous Arab states sent forces in to bolster the local Arab uprising. The morning after the British left and the State of Israel was proclaimed, a military coalition of Arab states entered the territory of what had been called British Palestine.
Egyptian, Transjordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Saudi Arabian and Iraqi forces weren’t protesting the treatment of their Arab brethren by Israel – there had been no time for that. Their aim was the complete and utter destruction of Israel, and so utter was their disappointment that Israel prevailed and secured its existence, that their failure to destroy it became known as the Nakba, “the catastrophe”.
Palestinians’ place in Israeli society
Palestinians today continue to live under Israel’s military occupation in occupied territory, as second class citizens inside Israel, and as refugees denied repatriation by Israel.”
While it is undeniable that Palestinians can be said to live under Israeli military rule, what Munayyer fails to note is that international law actually demands Israel use its military to administer the West Bank. Until a peace deal is reached or Israel surrenders the territories, annexes them, or some combination thereof, the Israeli military is mandated to control the West Bank. That’s the rule of occupation, and international law is quite clear on its legality. Should the Palestinians want to end this situation, they can do so at any time – by coming to the negotiation table and meeting in good faith to fairly resolve the conflict.
As for the laughable claim that Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel, Munayyer looks past the generations of Arab-Israeli lawmakers, sport stars, musicians, diplomats and Supreme Court justices — one of whom even sent a former Israeli prime minister to jail. Palestinians thrive in Israel in a way that they simply do not in any Arab country.
Misreading international law
Munayyer then smears Israel again, this time spreading misinformation about the application of international law:
[Israel] has transferred its civilians there, spending billions on colonies and infrastructure and taking natural resources. These violations of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes.”
Israel has not transferred any civilians to Judea, Samaria, or eastern Jerusalem. Israel is a democracy, and its citizens are free to choose where to live. Every single resident of the areas disputed by the Palestinians are there of their own volition. And these are not colonies, a highly-charged and ill-applied political term; this is the heart of the Jewish homeland. Whether or not Munayyer likes it, the Jewish people have an ancient connection to this land. Perhaps most significantly, the war crime of transferring civilians was designed to prevent the practice of relocating “undesirable” civilians or foreign citizens to populate conquered territory, causing them great distress.
Jewish civilians choosing to live in their ancestral homeland on their own free will clearly do not have much in common with Bosnian Muslims, for example, who were forced by Serbs in Srebrenica onto buses and sent far from their homes and loved ones to live in a tent city with very little means of making a living and no knowledge of the whereabouts or fate of their loved ones, friends, and neighbors. That’s the kind of population the Geneva Conventions were intended to protect.
The A-Word
After so many false claims, like Godwin’s law about invoking the Nazis, it was only a matter of time until Munayyer reached for the ‘Apartheid’ claim:
There is a word for a system in which one group of people is subject to rule without being afforded the same rights, such as voting, because of their group identity. It is apartheid—and that is the best way to describe this unending system of injustice today.”
It’s really tiresome to dismantle this claim time after time, so we’ll summarize here: Apartheid is a form of discrimination that treats groups differently because of their ethnicity. This is not the case with Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian residents of Israel have the same rights and duties as their Jewish co-citizens.
Related Reading: Do Arab Israelis Really Suffer From Apartheid?
The reason Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are treated differently is because they are not Israeli citizens, just as French, Italian, and Canadian citizens do not receive the same treatment when they are in one another’s countries. None of them can vote in the elections of another sovereign state, and none of them are victims of Apartheid. So too with Palestinians who are not residents of Israel.
CNN’s failure to disclose
None of this is surprising from an individual who was the long-time head of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in America. Munayyer is not just a “nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC,” but a leading activist in a movement noted by the German government, among others, to be antisemitic.
This latest attack is par for course for an individual who is a cheerleader for convicted supermarket bomber Rasmea Odeh and who shamefully used a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 to attack Israel.
Munayyer is the guy in the middle, forming the ❤️https://t.co/SKeySu4R1T pic.twitter.com/14HdMimJo0
— Dr. Petra Marquardt-Bigman (@WarpedMirrorPMB) August 17, 2020
All people should have a right to express their opinions. But nobody has a right to spread lies and hate in a national media outlet. And CNN has a responsibility to its website readers to let them know whose words they are reading, and what they truly believe in.
