The Guardian published a commentary by MP Gerald Kaufman (pictured) saying that Israel’s disengagement is a “veil for continued persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” He goes on to elaborate:
One of the motivations of this policy is to make the lives of the Palestinians so intolerable that they get out. The success of this ethnic cleansing is shown in Ramallah, which in the two years since I was last there (meeting Yasser Arafat in the bunker where he was incarcerated) has become bloated as Palestinians from other areas of the West Bank huddle together there.
Kaufman is certainly entitled to express his views, but even op-eds must be based on legitimate facts. As James Hill, the managing editor of the Washington Post Writers Group said:
“You have to hold columnists to the same standard as anyone at the newspaper. If a column writer is making egregious errors in the process of stating his or her opinion, eventually it’s not the columnist who’s doing that, it’s the paper that’s doing that.”
Click to send comments to The Guardian and MP Kaufman.
