Readers of Toronto's Globe and Mail, Canada's newspaper of record,
got a different version than the rest of the world of this week's summit
meeting between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority
Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
According to Globe and Mail reporter
Carolyn Wheeler, the meeting
took place in "Mr. Sharon's flag-draped residence in the Muslim Quarter of
Jerusalem's Old City," on "disputed home turf."
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The
Prime Minister's official
residence in Rehavia |
In fact, the meeting was held at the prime minister's residence in the
Rehavia neighborhood of the capital, where there is no dispute over
sovereignty.
Wheeler then waxed for two paragraphs about the alleged site of the
meeting: "Mr. Sharon's purchase of the stately Old City stone home in 1987,
and the subsequent removal of its Arab tenants, created great controversy at
the time. The building is now rarely used, but it is still under heavy guard
and remains a stinging symbol for Palestinians struggling to hold onto Arab
neighborhoods in East Jerusalem."
After outraged readers pointed out the error, the Globe and Mail issued a
correction. "Obviously, it's a very embarrassing error," said Guy Nicholson,
the newspaper's interim foreign editor. "We asked her for some background
about where the story location was. Unfortunately, she was not actually at
the scene of it. She wrote it off of television and wires."
Dov Smith, executive director of
HonestReporting Canada, which tracks
Canadian media for anti-Israel bias, questioned how the reporter was able to
describe participants in the meeting as "grim-faced" - a phrase that
appeared in the article - if she wasn't actually there.
"We believe Carolyn Wheeler's reporting is inconsistent with the
standards that the Globe and Mail wishes to maintain," Smith said.
Wheeler, a freelancer who is married to Mark MacKinnon, the Globe and
Mail's full-time Israel correspondent, recently moved to Israel with her
husband. Nicholson said the paper is "generally very trusting with her and
pleased with her work."
"This was a very tangential element of the story," Nicholson said,
pointing out that the error was limited to two paragraphs "very, very deep
in the piece." In fact, the error also appears in the second sentence of the
story, which was 16 paragraphs long.
"This is such a closely watched issue that it's getting a little bit
blown out of proportion, to be frank," Nicholson said. "I certainly
understand the nature of why this was wrong, but we did immediately correct
the error and she was mortified at having made the mistake."
This episode brings up one of the most widespread myths promulgated by media coverage of the Mideast conflict
― the claim of Palestinian 'dispossession' of land and
property at the hands of 'usurping' Israelis.
For example, the entire disputed territory of the West Bank is often
referred to in media reports as 'Palestinian lands' ― a term that implies all
Israeli presence in that region is illegitimate (see HR critiques of this
practice
here,
here and
here). In fact, nearly all Israeli construction in the West Bank took place in
non-developed areas that, if previously owned by Arabs, were purchased at
significant cost by current Israeli landowners.
In some cases, the dispossession myth extends even to pre-1967 Israel. A
Palestinian spokesman
describes Israel's birth in this manner:
There is
nothing like it in modern history. A foreign minority attacking the national
majority in its own homeland, expelling virtually all of its population,
obliterating its physical and cultural landmarks, planning and supporting this
unholy enterprise from abroad...
This type of deliberate distortion of Zionist and early Israeli history underlies nearly all attacks on the fundamental
legitimacy of the Jewish state. In fact, as meticulously documented by Aryeh Avneri in his book
Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948:
1)
