When media outlets interview academic experts, news consumers deserve an in-depth analysis. But Newsweek’s attempt to do so this week, in a piece titled “Israel-Hamas war: What it Will Take to Rebuild Gaza,” is not only intellectually shallow but also factually wrong and infected with personal animosity towards Israel.
Instead of asking serious questions and presenting various views, the magazine quoted biased experts whose level of analysis matched that of an average high school student on TikTok.
With subheaders that don’t require a Ph.D. — such as “Dr. Asher Kaufman: Rebuilding Gaza Will Take Years and Cost Billions, “Professor Best Dawn: Clearing the Rubble in Gaza Alone Will Take Years,” or “Professor Atalia Omer: There Is a Fear That Israel Has Rendered Gaza Uninhabitable” — the piece is an insult to common sense.
But perhaps more importantly, the magazine gave a platform to the historical revisionism of these so-called experts, who didn’t even bother doing their homework on the basic facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Take Oxford University anthropologist Professor Dawn Chatty, for example, who falsely claims in the article that Israel implemented military Plan Dalet in 1948 to “clear Palestine of Palestinians,” i.e. ethnic cleansing.
The deliberate misinterpretation of events in 1948 to delegitimize Israel and claim it was born in sin is not new. Historian Benny Morris has categorically debunked the claim that there was a Zionist “plan” to evict Palestinians during the War of Independence. Doesn’t Newsweek employ editors who either know a thing or two about the region’s history or are prepared to do some rudimentary fact-checking?
As historian Benny Morris said: “There was no Zionist ‘plan’ or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of ‘ethnic cleansing.'”
And most Palestinian refugees weren’t forcibly expelled but fled to escape the war. pic.twitter.com/P19AR1xf9i
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 28, 2025
Related Reading: The Palestinian Refugees: 1948 to Today
When HonestReporting raised these questions on social media, Chatty replied by telling us to “Read Ilan Pappe,” a charlatan who admitted he didn’t care about the truth and whom Benny Morris called “at best… one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest.”
Also in the Newsweek article, Chatty spread blatant disinformation by claiming that the Palestinians’ “right of return” is enshrined under international law. She conveniently ignored the fact that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 is not legally binding and there’s nothing in international law guaranteeing a Palestinian right to destroy Israel as a Jewish state demographically.
None of the above is surprising if one takes a quick look at Professor Chatty’s X account (formerly Twitter), which is almost exclusively full of anti-Israeli propaganda, including a post calling to suspend the Jewish state from the United Nations. She also reposted what bona fide antisemite Jake Shields — whom the ADL says “has a history of espousing a range of hateful tropes and narratives including antisemitism, anti-Zionism, the Great Replacement theory, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and more — had to say against Israel in a tweet about the USS Liberty incident:
But Newsweek editors don’t seem to do any background checks on their experts.
They certainly didn’t do any due diligence on Professor Atalia Omer, who shared posts about “Israel’s state violence” and “apartheid.”
And Newsweek had no qualms about quoting her false claim that the ICJ deemed Israel’s actions in Gaza as “plausibly genocidal.”
Sadly, it seems no editor was able to remind her that the former ICJ president said that “[The court] did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
And here’s Joan Donoghue, former President of the International Court of Justice, clarifying it on air 👇https://t.co/bFIORYUZQ5
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 28, 2025
So what Newsweek gave its readers was nothing more than a superficial mix of biased pseudo-academic analysis and lies.
In fact, the once-respected magazine used the former to mask the latter.
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