Daniel Estrin has been reporting for NPR from Israel for some years now, always with an anti-Israel slant, sometimes slight, and sometimes most pronounced. In one recent case, he managed to make it seem that the Israeli he was interviewing was an anti-Arab racist. More on his coverage can be found here: “Exposed: Media Outlet Deliberately Misrepresents Israeli Interviewee to Imply Anti-Arab Racism,” by Simon Plosker, Honest Reporting, May 8, 2023:
Just how far will some journalists go to imply that Israeli Jews are anti-Arab racists or bigots?
According to an NPR report titled “Palestinians weigh in on Israeli street protests“:
Palestinians have largely been absent from the historic demonstrations in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis are protesting plans by the right-wing government to weaken the courts. NPR’s Daniel Estrin explored why Palestinians are rarely in the crowd.
Introducing the story about “Palestinians” is misleading, given that one of the two Arabs interviewed is an Israeli Arab citizen, while the other happens to be a former spokesperson for the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
Clearly, there is a significant difference in how Arab citizens of Israel relate to the country and the recent political demonstrations, as opposed to Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza, who do not hold Israeli citizenship. However, this is not something that the author, Daniel Estrin, addresses.
Arab citizens of Israel are much more immediately affected – as much as Jewish Israelis – by the judicial overhaul plan than are Palestinians, who are members of quite a different polity, the Palestinian Authority.
He [Estrin] says: “Palestinian political activist Nour Odeh is following the protests from where she lives in the West Bank, where Israel maintains a military occupation, and there is no democracy.” [Emphasis added.]
Estrin fails to point out that the lack of democracy in the West Bank is primarily a symptom of the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to hold elections, the last of which took place for the parliament in 2006 and for the presidency in 2005.
The PA is not a democracy. Its President-for-Life is Mahmoud Abbas, who is now in the nineteenth year of his four-year term, the one he began in 2005. There is no freedom of speech or freedom of assembly in the PA. That is the “lack of democracy” that Estrin should be talking about. As non-citizens of Israel, the Palestinian Arabs of course have no vote or say in the Israeli government, any more than a citizen of Uruguay or Burundi would have. If the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank want to live in “a democracy,” they will have to take it up with Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen, not with the Israelis. And in Gaza, the Palestinian Arabs will have other despots to contend with – the hard men of Hamas, as despotic as Abbas and even more violent.
But more seriously, Estrin claims (at 1 min 20):
Some Israeli Jewish protesters say they don’t want Arab citizens in the streets protesting with them.”
To back up this assertion, Estrin interviews one of the protesters:
ZOHAR DVIR: Let’s say, keep it clean…
ESTRIN: Zohar Dvir a retired deputy police commissioner.
DVIR: …Not, you know, to see Palestine flags.”
But did Zohar Dvir really say that he did not want Arab citizens protesting alongside him?
No, he did not.
We tracked down Major General (ret.) Zohar Dvir, who happens to be a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at Reichman University, Herzliya, and asked him to clarify what he had actually said to NPR some weeks prior to the publication of Estrin’s report.
He told us:
Having Israeli Arabs at the protests would be a wonderful thing and they are welcome to join. It’s only the Palestinian flags that are problematic as they are a distraction from the main purpose of the pro-democracy campaign.”
Far from being against Israeli Arabs joining the demonstrations against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plan, Zohar Dvir says their presence “would be a wonderful thing.” What he worries about is if they decide to wave Palestinian flags. That raises a different issue than what the protests are supposed to be exclusively about. Many of the Israeli Jews protesting would take offense at would rightly regard as injecting a “Palestnian nationalist” theme that they do not support. Such flags would split the protesters, between the far-left Jewish supporters of a Palestinian state and the majority of protesters who would not want to be seen as endorsing such a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. That’s what Zohar Dvir was attempting, laconically, to express, and what Daniel Estrin chose to ignore, painting Dvir as an anti-Arab racist who objected to Israeli Arabs joining the protests, when all he objected to was the appearance of Palestinian flags.
That’s one significant leap from not wanting Arabs at the protests to not wanting Palestinian flags. It also leaves Daniel Estrin and NPR with questions to answer concerning the editing of Dvir’s interview. It appears that Estrin has deliberately misrepresented Dvir, leaving the audience to potentially consider the interviewee to be racist or bigoted….
A small contingent of left-wing Israelis who oppose the military rule has been ostracized by other protesters for waving the Palestinian flag and trying to raise the Palestinian issue in the protests, for fear that it might push more mainstream Israelis away or be used by opponents to smear the protests as a cover for radical leftists.”…
Organizers say they have repeatedly invited Arab Israelis to participate but are keeping their message focused tightly on the overhaul. …
HonestReporting has sent a complaint to NPR’s Public Editor calling for an investigation into the unethical journalism behind Daniel Estrin’s treatment of Zohar Dvir. Readers can also send their complaints via the Public Editor’s contact form, making sure to note that the item was heard on the “All Things Considered” program and to supply the URL.
NPR’s Public Editor has a duty to respond to the request for an investigation into Daniel Estriin’s treatment of Zohar Dvir. Estrin clearly wanted to leave the impression that Dvir didn’t want to see any Israeli Arabs at the demonstrations, when Dvir had made perfectly clear that he “welcomed” them in a part of the interview that Estrin carefully did not play on NPR, as long as they didn’t wave Palestinian flags that would only detract from the protest’s focus, and might even cause some Israeli protesters, alarmed at being linked to Arabs. with their flags seeming to be calling for a Palestinian state, to pull out of the protests altogether.
Estrin should be asked why he did not play that part of the interview with Dvir where he clearly welcomes Israeli Arabs to join the protests, and instead makes him seem to be against their appearance, when he was only expressing his misgivings over the appearance of Palestinian flags.
Frances Weingarten says
Danial Estren is a very sick man and should be removed from Israel!! Whether he can be seen as reasonable seems to be unlikely as he is definitely a Jew Hater and as such, cannot be considered to be rational!!!