The Electronic Intifada 11 April 2001
Israel has long been trying to get journalists to normalise their annexation of East Jerusalem and occupation of Palestinian land with language. There was an outbreak of reporting in the media on 23 October which described Gilo — an illegal Jewish settlement built on expropriated and annexed land from East Jerusalem (part of the Palestinian West Bank) — as a “community” in Jerusalem:
“Spokesmen from both sides have been reacting to Sunday’s violence, when Israeli helicopter gunships and tanks fired on Palestinians in the Beit Jala suburb of Jerusalem, after what the Israelis said was Palestinian gunfire against a Jewish community in Gilo.” — from “Opinions remain poles apart,” BBC News Online, Monday, 23 October, 2000. 12:28 GMT 13:28 UK
“The Israeli Army said the attacks followed Palestinian gunfire against a Jewish community in Gilo, south Jerusalem” — BBC News Online, 23 October 2000. This page has since been removed. Subsequent stories on the BBC website currently refer to Gilo as a settlement, cf. “US concern over new Palestinian ‘alliance’,” from Thursday, 26 October, 2000, 05:30 GMT 06:30 UK.
AP and Reuters photo captions have also described Gilo settlement as a “neighbourhood”, or “suburb”:
Last week’s firefights between Gilo, an Israeli suburb of Jerusalem, and Beit Jalla, a suburb of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem, introduced a wrinkle to the struggle here that neither side ever anticipated. It turned middle-class bedroom communities into battlegrounds.
—“Across a valley, suburban streets become a battleground”, October 28, 2000, AP.
Additionally unreported, Gilo settlement is built on land confiscated from Palestinian residents of Beit Jala, the nearby West Bank town from which instances of Palestinian gunfire have been reported.
The map below clearly shows Gilo’s location on East Jerusalem land, unilaterally and illegally annexed to Israel.
