When foreign journalists cover the West Bank / Judea and Samaria, the story is written before they arrive. Tents, small structures and half-built homes on land that is supposedly swallowed up by Jewish civilians. It’s the story of Palestinian villages being slowly erased, and it runs on a loop.
The reason for that imagery being front and center in the news at all times is simple. It is the story that fits the narrative.
Sunday, I went on a tour with Regavim of Palestinian villages. Not the ones that make the front page, but villages full of multi-story mansions worth millions of dollars. Yet many of the houses remained empty and the streets eerily quiet. The homes that did have cars, more often than not, had Israeli licence plates, meaning they may also maintain a residence within Israel or have their vehicle registered there. This wasn’t the story of one village built to impress that has since remained largely vacant – but countless villages, each with more impressive homes than the next.
And not a single foreign journalist joined. Not because they weren’t asked. They were. And they declined the invitation.
“This isn’t anything new. What’s the story?”
The story is the one they are purposefully leaving out of the frame.
The one that never turns the camera to the angle that would show a million-dollar home sitting empty in a village devoid of basic needs such as supermarkets, pharmacies, and schooling options found in any other community, but isn’t needed in one that is void of people to make use of such needs.
The story that would actually require an explanation – money, ownership, who’s building what and why – never gets asked.
That story doesn’t sell.
And as the homes in these villages largely sit empty, so too does the front page.
Because what’s the point of writing a story when the conclusion derails from the rest of the fantasy that’s already been sold?
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
