Netanyahu erases Palestine (again)

Michael F. Brown Media Watch 8 September 2024

Benjamin Netanyahu with map of Gaza and Israel that erases West Bank

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with one of his prop maps, but at an angle that doesn’t clearly show the erasure of the West Bank.

Ohad Zwigenberg UPI

The Biden-Harris administration, already complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is now more deeply implicating itself in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Israeli leaders are clearly undeterred by President Joe Biden’s November op-ed claim in The Washington Post that he has “been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable.”

The State Department did not respond to questions from The Electronic Intifada about holding the Israeli military accountable for the killing Friday of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American activist protesting in the West Bank village of Beita which has been subjected to attacks by Israeli settlers.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Friday merely told The Electronic Intifada, and others, that “We are aware of the tragic death of an American citizen, Ayşenur Eygi, today in the West Bank. We offer our deepest condolences to her family and loved ones. We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death, and will have more to say as we learn more. We have no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens.”

This is a lie. The Biden administration is providing enormous amounts of weapons to an Israeli military killing both Palestinians and American citizens such as Omar Assad and Shireen Abu Akleh. The administration’s priority is certainly not on the “safety and security” of Palestinian Americans or those Americans who support their freedom and equal rights.

Phil Gordon, national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, tweeted vaguely about the killing of Eygi.

Neither Biden nor Harris tweeted about Eygi’s death, though both tweeted about the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin in the Gaza Strip days earlier. Biden, in a statement reiterated by Harris, said, “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” The two Democratic leaders do not use similar language for when Americans are killed by the Israeli military – or when thousands of Palestinian children are killed with American weapons.
In contrast to the weak US position, Turkey’s foreign ministry called the attack on Eygi a “murder carried out by the Netanyahu government.” The ministry also noted that “Israel is trying to intimidate all those who come to the aid of the Palestinian people and who fight peacefully against the genocide. This policy of violence will not work.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey, denounced the attack on Eygi and Palestinian demonstrators as “barbaric” and pledged to work to “end Israel’s occupation and genocide policy.”

Biden and Harris would never speak so forthrightly. Israeli war criminals aren’t walking all over them so much as the American leaders are actively joining hand in hand in arming the apartheid country despite the deadly consequences for Palestinians and Americans alike.

American congressional representatives who do claim to care need to speak much more strongly than Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

What will be the consequences legislatively of the ongoing killing of American citizens with US weapons employed by Israel’s apartheid army? Jayapal doesn’t say, presumably because there will be none.

Netanyahu and his prop maps

On Tuesday, Miller had nothing substantive to say about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent use of a map wiping away the occupied West Bank – where Eygi was killed Friday. All that territory was marked as Israel.

Politicians who become enraged – “fuck that” in the juvenile KKK-channeling words of Democratic Senator John Fetterman – at the idea of equal rights between the river and the sea are silent when Netanyahu depicts ethnic cleansing or apartheid with his own maps. Netanyahu’s preference isn’t entirely clear (and ethnic cleansing can certainly be part of an apartheid system).
Netanyahu did assert this week that “We don’t intend to drive these people away. They want to drive us away.” His claim is belied by his map and the facts of Palestinians being pushed out of their homes in the West Bank. Violent Israeli settlers are acting as an arm of the state.

These maps are trial balloons from Netanyahu – and not for the first time has he turned to expansionist maps without a word of public complaint from the Biden administration. He did so last September at the United Nations as well.

Asked by a journalist about the map, Netanyahu claimed: “I didn’t include the Dead Sea. It’s not shown on the map. I didn’t show the Jordan River. It’s not on this map. I didn’t show the Sea of Galilee.”

He added: “There is a whole issue of how to achieve peace between us and the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. I didn’t get into that. That’s another press conference.” His use of “Judea and Samaria” is a verbalized effort to erase the West Bank and Palestinians’ legitimate claim to that occupied territory.

If the Biden-Harris administration is unwilling to push back then a Trump administration definitely won’t and European leaders may offer only a few words of “concern.”

The fecklessness of Secretary of State Antony Blinken has brought the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and jeopardizes the safety and rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

And Netanyahu isn’t backing down. Why would he when he faces no meaningful pushback?

After employing the map in a news conference Monday evening for Israeli viewers, Netanyahu tweeted out such maps the next day in English. He’s surely noticed that his land grab – real and merely mapped – scarcely has led to a ripple of dissent in the US government.

News media went out of their way to obscure the land-theft maps, zooming in on the part showing Gaza right next to Israel. The New York Times, The Guardian, Haaretz, CNN and Reuters all decided in inital articles to avoid clearly showing Netanyahu’s map replacing the West Bank with Israel.

A Times of Israel article by Jacob Magid did raise questions and Dahlia Scheindlin criticized Netanyahu’s map of dispossession in a 5 September Haaretz column. The BBC showed the map, but in a caption reference merely said the map “appeared to have erased the occupied West Bank.” In fact, it was erased.

Largely the US and British media ignored the significance of the erasure map. This continues to have deadly consequences for Palestinians – and for Americans such as Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.