Ross: How to safely criticize Israel – just quote Israeli media
Mar 12, 2019, 8:03 AM
As Congress grapples with how to safely criticize Israel, I thought I’d look at what the nation’s media is saying about its own country.
Haaretz is Israel’s oldest newspaper. It’s generally liberal. And on one of its recent podcast episodes, host Simon Spungin opened a discussion of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current corruption scandal by saying, “If convicted, Netanyahu could redefine what we mean when we say ‘Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.'”
Get it? They also called out his racism referring to a report in the newspaper about “the wave of protests that Netanyahu is facing over his political pact with the racist Otzma Yehudit Party. Even AIPAC was aghast, and that takes some doing.”
RELATED: The line between criticizing and antisemitism
AIPAC being the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The hosts called out the racist talking points of the country’s more extreme political parties, which reportedly have proposed paying Arabs to leave.
But most surprising was hearing what, according to polls, is the top concern of the Israeli right wing. It turns out that it is not the Palestinians. What really concerns them “is the issue of violence in schools and in hospitals. That is to say Israelis attacking Israelis.”
So the lesson here seems to be that if you want to safely criticize Israel – just quote Israeli media.
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