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The Economist Misleads With Flawed A-Z on the Arab-Israeli Conflict
In what should have been a well-researched piece, The Economist recently provided its readers with an A-Z glossary on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unfortunately, the “glossary” is rife with inaccuracies, omissions, and flat-out mistakes that mislead rather than inform.
Here are the most egregious examples from the A-Z list, each followed by our brief responses.
Al-Shifa Hospital
THE ECONOMIST: Gaza’s largest hospital. Israel claims that Hamas has its underground headquarters below the building, which Hamas denies. Attacking health-care facilities can be illegal under international law.
Response: Israel has exposed Hamas tunnels under the hospital. The Israeli army also said it had found “weapons, ammunition, grenades, military equipment disguised in medical containers, and anti-tank explosives” at the site, and released some images of these. When healthcare facilities are used for terror activity, they lose their legally protected status under international law.
Arab Revolt in Palestine
THE ECONOMIST: In 1936 unrest broke out in the British mandate of Palestine amid frustration at rising Jewish immigration in the wake of Britain’s Balfour Declaration. By the summer of 1939 the uprising had been suppressed—but Britain later faced Jewish revolts and after the second world war handed the problem to the United Nations, which voted to partition the land.
Response: The Arab Revolt was not a mere “unrest.” It was a wide-scale, violent Palestinian uprising fueled by leadership incitement against Jewish immigration. More than 400 Jews were killed by Arabs during the revolt. Ignoring these facts creates the false impression that it was an anti-colonial rather than an anti-Jewish revolt.
Armistice (1949)
THE ECONOMIST: Peace deals signed after the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948. Israel and Arab states divided up the land. No Palestinian state was created; Egypt controlled Gaza while Transjordan (later Jordan) formally annexed the West Bank.
Response: The 1949 Armistice comprised of ceasefire agreements between Israel and its belligerent Arab neighbors, not peace deals. The armistice line (not a permanent border) is where the Israeli and Arab armies happened to be when the fighting was halted.
Hostages
THE ECONOMIST: Israeli prisoners held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On October 7th 2023 around 240 people were taken by Hamas from Israel to Gaza.
Response: Calling hostages “prisoners” suggests they have been detained or imprisoned under some form of legal framework. It also paves the way to morally equate them to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails over violence and terror charges. But the Israeli hostages, children included, were not prisoners nor were they “taken” by Hamas to Gaza. They have been brutally kidnapped from their homes and other places after witnessing horrific atrocities inflicted on their families and communities. According to accounts of released hostages, they have been terrorized and suffered starvation and abuse while in Hamas captivity.
Israel
THE ECONOMIST: The modern state of Israel was established in May 1948 by Jewish leaders after the withdrawal of Britain from Palestine. The name also refers to a kingdom in ancient Palestine comprising the lands occupied by the Hebrew people.
Response: The phrase “ancient Palestine” suggests that a nation known as Palestine existed in the past, with the word “ancient” giving the impression that this nation has deep roots in the region, and thus has a natural claim to be revived in the form of a modern state called Palestine. This is false, as there has never been a state of Palestine as today’s supporters are calling for. This phrase, as well as the word “occupied,” also subtly suggests that a Jewish presence is foreign to the region. In reality, Jews are indigenous to Israel and have had a presence there for centuries.
Israel Defense Forces
THE ECONOMIST: Israel’s army. Largely made up of reservists with a small core of professional soldiers. Led in 2023 by Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi.
Response: The word “professional” suggests that Israeli soldiers sign up for a non-compulsory army service. A more accurate word would have been “conscripted,” as these soldiers are required to complete a mandatory military service.
First Lebanon War
THE ECONOMIST: Four month conflict between Israel and Lebanon in 1982. Known in Israel as Operation Peace for Galilee. Israel invaded in order to dismantle Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation which had taken control of the south of Lebanon. The war killed thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, along with hundreds of Israeli and Syrian soldiers. The PLO subsequently moved its headquarters to Tunisia. In 1985 most Israeli troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, except for a border “security zone”.
Response: What’s omitted here is the reason for the war — the terrorist activity of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Before the war, the PLO had launched numerous lethal attacks against Israel from its southern Lebanon bases. The deadliest one was the 1978 coastal road massacre, in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were killed. Palestinian terrorists had also constantly targeted Israel’s northern communities with artillery and rocket fire. The immediate trigger for the war was the assassination of Israel’s ambassador to the UK by Palestinian terrorists in June 1982.
Second Lebanon War
THE ECONOMIST: Conflict between Israel and Lebanon between July and August 2006. Launched by Israel in an attempt to destroy Hizbullah, an Iran-backed militant group and political party which had created a “state within a state” in the south of the country. Israel imposed a naval blockade, bombed Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, and invaded the south. Six years earlier Israeli troops had withdrawn from the security zone established in 1985.
Response: Again, the reason for the war is omitted. Israel retaliated against a Hezbollah attack in which three soldiers were killed and two others kidnapped, while a barrage of rockets was fired at Israeli territory on July 12, 2006. The terrorist group had been constantly attacking Israeli forces, despite their withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
Six-Day War
THE ECONOMIST: Brief armed conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours in June 1967. Israel tripled its territory, capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula. Israel has since moved to build Jewish settlements on some of the land occupied during the war.
Response: The entry makes Israel look like the aggressor in an unprovoked war. In fact, this was a war of self-defense. Arab armies were amassed on Israel’s borders in preparation to attack and destroy it, and Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran, a strategic supply route for Israel. Moreover, Israel had been constantly subjected to terrorist attacks from the West Bank. And while the armed conflict was “brief” in the sense of its timeframe, its results were seismic for the region.
Suez crisis
THE ECONOMIST: In October 1956 Israel invaded Egypt, capturing the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The conflict was planned in collusion with Britain and France in order to allow them to regain control of the Suez Canal which they had run until Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, nationalised it in July 1956. America was outraged and pushed Britain to abort the mission. In December 1956 the Israelis withdrew from Sinai and in March 1957 they withdrew from Gaza.
Response: The Economist fails to mention that Israel’s main goal in the Sinai operation was the eradication of the Palestinian “Fedayeen” based in Sinai, who had terrorized Israeli communities since the beginning of the 1950s. It also fails to mention that Egypt had illegally closed the Straits of Tiran in 1955. Instead, it makes Israel look like a co-conspirator in a colonial war.
West Bank
THE ECONOMIST: Israeli-occupied territory run in part by the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians view it as the core of their would-be state. Right-wing and religious Israelis regard it as their ancestral territory, with many biblical sites, and are pushing for Israel to annex it in part or entirely. Home to increasing numbers of Israeli settlers.
Response: The area is presented as the object of two competing worldviews, without mentioning the fact that it actually is the ancestral Jewish homeland, known also as Judea and Samaria. Such phrasing undermines the validity of the Jewish claims to the region.
Zionism
THE ECONOMIST: A movement founded by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew, with the aim of creating a Jewish homeland. In the 1920s the movement was dominated by socialists, who went on to establish the state of Israel on socialist principles. In more recent years religious Zionism, an offshoot, which regards Zionism as a fundamental component of Orthodox Judaism, has become a powerful force.
Response: The aim of Zionism was to establish a state for the Jews in their historic homeland, not to create a Jewish homeland. It is clearly stated in Herzl’s book, The Jewish State. Presenting Zionism’s core idea as an out-of-the-blue creation undermines the very basis of the Jewish national movement.
The Economist was right to publish an A-Z explainer on the Arab-Israeli conflict. News consumers need basic information on complicated issues. But this is exactly why such efforts should be performed with extra care. When every word matters, when every mistake tilts the narrative, when every entry is loaded, The Economist should have known better.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
The Oxford Circus station in London’s Underground metro. Photo: Pixabay
JNS.org – In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. This week, my peg is another act of violence—one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community. According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to The Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain—not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however. Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minority. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews—with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry—are willing to compromise on. What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time. We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well? I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel—firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of power; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States—a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora. Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.” The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death. As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life—which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
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Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from the terrorist organization Hamas called the changes made by the US to the ceasefire proposal “vague” on Saturday night, speaking to the Arab World Press.
The official said that the US promises to end the war are without a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and agree to a permanent ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden made “vague wording” changes to the proposal on the table, although it amounted to an insufficient change in stance, he said.
“The slight amendments revolve around the very nature of the Israeli constellation, and offer nothing new to bridge the chasm between what is proposed and what is acceptable to us,” he said.
“We will not deviate from our three national conditions, the most important of which is the end of the war and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” he added.
Another Hamas official said that the amendments were minor and applied to only two clauses.
US President Joe Biden made the amendments to bridge gaps amid an impasse between Israel and Hamas over a hostage deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire have been met with Israeli leaders vowing that the war would not end until the 120 hostages still held in Gaza are released and the replacement of Hamas in control of the Palestinian enclave.
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Sacred Spies?
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – How far away is theory from practice? “In theory,” a new system should work. But it doesn’t always, does it? How many job applicants ticked all the boxes “theoretically,” but when it came to the bottom line they didn’t get the job done?
And how many famous people were better theorists than practitioners?
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle taught not only philosophy but virtue and ethics. The story is told that he was once discovered in a rather compromised moral position by his students. When they asked him how he, the great Aristotle, could engage in such an immoral practice, he had a clever answer: “Now I am not Aristotle.”
A similar tale is told of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He, too, expounded on ethics and morality. And like Aristotle, he was also discovered in a similarly morally embarrassing situation.
When challenged, his rather brilliant answer was: “So what if I teach ethics? People teach mathematics, and they’re not triangles!”
This idea is relevant to this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, which contains the famous story of Moses sending a dozen spies on a reconnaissance mission to the Land of Israel. The mission goes sour. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise to see the best way of conquering Canaan. But it resulted in 10 of the 12 spies returning with an utterly negative report of a land teeming with giants and frightening warriors who, they claimed, would eat us alive. “We cannot ascend,” was their hopeless conclusion.
The people wept and had second thoughts about the Promised Land, and God said, indeed, you will not enter the land. In fact, for every day of the spies’ disastrous journey, the Israelites would languish a year in the wilderness. Hence, the 40-year delay in entering Israel. The day of their weeping was Tisha B’Av, which became a day of “weeping for generations” when both our Holy Temples were destroyed on that same day and many other calamities befell our people throughout history.
And the question resounds: How was it possible that these spies, all righteous noblemen, handpicked personally by Moses for the job, should so lose the plot? How did they go so wrong, so off-course from the Divine vision?
Naturally, there are many commentaries with a variety of explanations. To me personally, the most satisfying one I’ve found comes from a more mystical source.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his work Likkutei Torah, explains it thus: The error of the spies was less blatant than it seems. Their rationale was, in fact, a “holy” one. They actually meant well. The Israelites had been beneficiaries of the mighty miracles of God during their sojourn in the wilderness thus far. God had been providing for them supernaturally with manna from heaven every day, water that flowed from the “Well of Miriam,” Clouds of Glory that smoothed the roads and even dry cleaned their clothes. In the wilderness, the people were enjoying a taste of heaven itself. All their material needs were taken care of miraculously. With no material distractions, they were able to live a life of spiritual bliss, of refined existence and could devote themselves fully to Torah, prayer and spiritual experiences.
But the spies knew that as soon as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna would cease to fall and they would have to till the land, plow, plant, knead, bake and make a living by the sweat of their brow. No more bread from heaven, but bread from the earth. Furthermore, they would have to battle the Canaanite nations for the land. What chance would they then have to devote themselves to idyllic, spiritual pursuits?
So, the spies preferred to remain in the wilderness rather than enter the land. Why be compelled to resort to natural and material means of surviving and living a wholly physical way of life when they could enjoy spiritual ecstasy and paradise undisturbed? Why get involved in the “rat race”?
But, of course, as “holy” and spiritual as their motivation may have been, the spies were dead wrong.
The journey in the wilderness was meant to be but a stepping stone to the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt: entering the Promised Land and making it a Holy Land. God has plenty of angels in heaven who exist in a pure, spiritual state. The whole purpose of creation was to have mortal human beings, with all their faults and frailties, to make the physical world a more spiritual place. To bring heaven down to earth.
While their argument was rooted in piety, for the spies to opt out of the very purpose of creation was to miss the whole point. What are we here for? To sit in the lotus position and meditate, or to get out there and change the world? Yes, the spies were “holy,” but theirs was an escapist holiness.
The Torah is not only a book of wisdom; it is also a book of action. Torah means instruction. It teaches us how to live our lives, meaningfully and productively in the pursuit of God’s intended desire to make our world a better, more Godly place. This we do not only by study and prayer, the “theoretical” part of Torah but by acts of goodness and kindness, by mitzvot performed physically in the reality of the material world. Theory alone leaves us looking like Aristotle with his pants down.
Yes, it is a cliché but a well-worn truth: Torah is a “way of life.”
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