Remembering 1948 through the WaPo’s pro-Arab, anti-Israel lens

Leo Rennert:

In its June 27 edition, the Washington Post runs a huge spread by Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg about plans for a new housing development in a scenic valley at the entrance to Jerusalem that would tower over a crumbling village abandoned by Arabs during the 1948 war. Greenberg’s article, with accompanying maps and photos, takes up more than half of the front page of the World News section.

The headline conveys the flavor of the piece: “Building on history — Israeli plans to redevelop abandoned Palestinian village have stirred painful memories.”

Greenberg reports with much empathy a controversy stirred by preservationists and Palestinian families with ties to the village, who have gone to a court to block the city’s building plans.

He starts by writing that 3,000 people who lived in the village of Lifta fled “during the war that accompanied the establishment of Israel.” That, of course, is an immediate dead-giveaway of Greenberg’s pro-Palestinian bias. The establishment of Israel wasn’t responsible for the 1948 war. That war was launched by half a dozen Arab armies intent on eliminating the nascent Jewish state, in defiance of a UN two-state partition plan.

But Greenberg isn’t interested in real history as much as in conveying a Palestinian agenda to revise history so as to validate Palestinian claims to the land, while discarding Jewish ones.

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