This is a guest post by Clawes
The Middle East Monitor (Memo) is a website that concerns itself with media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the tagline ‘Creating new perspectives’, Memo hopes to:
‘Provide our clients with up-to-date reporting and carefully reasoned commentaries rooted in factual evidence.’
As you might expect, given that Memo is the brainchild of Dr Daud Abdullah, who famously refused to back down from supporting the Istanbul Declaration, its perspective is pro-Hamas, and not very pro-Israel. But hey, if even The Guardian admits to highlighting some stories over others, then Memo can just go ahead and do it too.
And normally, their commitment to ‘carefully reasoned commentaries rooted in factual evidence’ means that any underlying bias is barely noticeable.
Sadly though, despite Memo’s commendable efforts thus far to provide objective and informative coverage of the conflict, an article appeared today that I believe falls well short of their normal high standards.
In many ways, ‘Netanyahu’s Lebensraum’, by Khalid Amayreh, lulls you into a fall sense of security with its reasonable opening paragraphs – assuming of course you ignore the casual Nazi comparison of the title. Discussing Netanyahu’s plan to keep the Jordan Valley in the event of the West Bank gaining independence, Amayreh is pretty sceptical:
‘It is obvious that Netanyahu’s reasoning for the need to retain the Jordan valley in any future deal with the Palestinians is false. In the age of rockets and long-range missiles, natural barriers have lost most or all of their strategic value.’
I don’t know anything about rockets, so that sounds vaguely plausible.
Amayreh then reveals that, like many of us, he’s still pretty upset Livni didn’t become PM:
‘The Israeli regime, as is amply clear, never runs out of pretexts and excuses to maintain its occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories.’
Reassuringly, Amayreh continues to make clear that he has no truck with religious irredentism:
‘Sometimes, it quotes distorted ancient scripture as if God Almighty were a real estate dealer working for Zionist leaders.’
(Ironic) Amen to that! However, after this point, the article rapidly goes downhill. First of all, there’s a citation of Shlomo Sand:
‘Sometimes, they speak of Jewish continuity as if these Khazari racists had any biological connection with Jacob and the ancient children of Israel, most of whose descendants had long converted to Islam and Christianity. Fortunately, there are Israeli historians, like Shlomo Sand, who deny any concept of the so-called Jewish peoplehood.’
Then there’s a statement about Jewish immigrants that could be misconstrued as a little bit, well, prejudiced:
‘Sometimes, they allude to imagined historical rights as if these pathological liars from Eastern Europe, who lie as much as they breath oxygen, had any truly historical rights in the land of Palestine.’
And then, perhaps because the author spent too much time reading radical feminist tracts on International Women’s Day, there’s a somewhat gratuitous rape reference:
‘More to the point, the Jordan Valley is not more precious than Jerusalem, one of the most sacred cities in Islam, which is being violated and raped by Zionist Jews for many years.’
Amayreh thinks he has a solution to all of this though:
‘Sallahuddin al Ayyoubi waited many years before he finally wrested Palestine and especially Jerusalem from the hands of the Crusades. History must repeat itself and if millions need to be sacrificed in order to redeem and deliver the Aqsa Mosque form the sinful hands of Zionism, then be it. Oppression must be resisted and repulsed, or otherwise chaos and anarchy would spread all over the world.’
Millions sacrificed? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Amayreh recognises that at this stage, some readers might be questioning if this still counts as ‘carefully reasoned’ commentary:
‘Some people, particularly in the West who have been exposed to Zionist propaganda for a long time, might think I am being too hard on Israel or worse exuding anti-Semitic feelings.’
Those people…are wrong:
‘Zionism is much more than criminal and nefarious. It is also genocidal, racist, rapacious, covetous, and of course utterly mendacious. Zionism is expansionistic, very much like a malignant cancer. This is why, no people on earth can remain safe if living with or next to Zionism. In other words, if you don’t eradicate Zionism, Zionism will eradicate you.’
Now, I’m not sure how this article made it onto the website, but I really think Mr Abdullah should be told. After all, if it gets out that Memo publishes this kind of material, well, I don’t know how they’ll get all these nice people to come to their events in the future.
