Just when you think you’ve seen it all from the New York Times.
It’s hardly a secret that the newspaper has an antisemitic blindspot. Under the guise of “legitimate criticism of Israel,” malicious smears and clear disinformation have regularly been spread on the pages of the so-called “newspaper of record.”
Related Reading: New York Times Antisemitic Cartoon Shocker
But the Times seems to have outdone itself with the decision to attach an illustration of the notorious “Disappearing Palestine” maps to a hostile guest essay by Diana Buttu.
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Buttu, a former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was declared a terrorist organization by the US in 1987, framed the recent pogroms against Jews by Israeli Arabs as a natural reaction to being “second-class citizens,” in an article titled “The Myth of Coexistence in Israel.”
But arguably far worse than the piece itself was the Times’ choice of a graphic, one that spreads the tendentious lie that between 1948 and 1967 ‘Palestine’ shrunk. And this ‘disappearance’ continues up until the present day.
When pressed, the Times’ deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy submitted that the graphic should not be taken literally. “This image was used as art atop an opinion essay… and we felt that the art image helped illustrate her arguments” he said in a statement.
The deputy editor of the @nytimes opinion page @patrickhealynyt has responded to objections regarding the fake maps his page ran yesterday. This is a radically inadequate explanation, in at least two ways, which I will explain below. pic.twitter.com/x4598M5WJ0
— Shany Mor שני מור شني مور (@ShMMor) May 27, 2021
But the image is not simply an illustration of her arguments. Rather, it makes a clear — and false — claim: Israel has stolen land from the Palestinians.
The maps are duplicitous in numerous ways, amongst them is the mixing of reality with imagination. Whereas the land really was divided along the lines seen in three out of four of the maps, the terms used serve to create a false impression that a sovereign entity called ‘Palestine’ is being gradually eroded over time. But a closer look reveals that’s not the case at all.
In reality, the set of maps, regularly shared by proponents of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, is a fraud. The land depicted as “Palestinian” was actually first under the British Mandate, then under Jordanian and Egyptian control. Only much later did some of the land ever come under semi-autonomous Palestinian control.
Moreover, the lines drawn dividing the territory never actually existed. In reality, they were only a theoretical outline for fairly dividing the land between Arabs and Jews. The Jews accepted the plan, despite its numerous drawbacks, but the Arabs did not – and ended up with even less land after waging war on their Jewish neighbors.
Back in 2015, MSNBC apologized for using these same deceptive maps following a social media backlash. And in February 2020, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was roundly criticized after appearing before the United Nations Security Council holding up a series of maps that he labeled “The Palestinian Historic Compromise.”
Related Reading: Misleading Palestinian Maps Twist the Truth
Nevertheless, years after this series of maps has been disproven as misleading propaganda, the New York Times commissioned its own design, thus spreading the lie to a mainstream audience of millions around the world.
