|
Trending Topics
|
The New York Times and Israeli Settlements - Again
(Council on Foreign Relations) Elliott Abrams - The New York Times was at it again on Oct. 14. In an editorial about the symbolic vote in the UK parliament backing Palestinian statehood, the Times' editorial board unloaded yet again with a barrage of untruths. The Times claims that "Israel continues to build new settlements" and that expansion of existing ones is "shrinking the territory available for a Palestinian state." Neither assertion is true. In the last decade the Israelis removed all the settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank. The days of building new settlements all over the West Bank are long gone. And "settlement expansion" has meant expansion of population, not territory, so their footprint in the West Bank has not changed. The writer is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR.