How The Wall Street Journal’s Omar Abdel-Baqui Reports on Jewish ‘Settlements’

The very word “settlement” is intended to provoke anger at the thought of Israelis seizing – “stealing” — “still more” land in the West Bank that rightly belongs, we are encouraged to believe, to the Palestinians. “Under New Editor, the Wall Street Journal Is Misreporting Facts About Israel,” by Andrea Levin, Algemeiner, July 31, 2024:

Indicative of the shoddy reporting on settlements, a photo caption asserts that “the number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank has ballooned since the 1990’s.”

The opposite is true. The large majority of existing settlements were founded in the 1970s and 1980s (a total of 116), with just seven added in the 1990s and another five in the last 24 years up to the recent present when there has been “tentative” recognition of a possible four of five additional settlements. Thus, there are about 133 settlements with nine or ten founded “since the 1990’s.” The intent of the Journal’s claim is seemingly to suggest rampant Jewish settlement expansion — regardless of the facts.

When alerted that the rate of growth in the number of Israeli settlements has not “ballooned since the 1990’s” but rather declined dramatically compared to earlier decades, the Journal corrections editor refused to correct or clarify.

Caught out for a gross error on the size of the increase in Israeli settlements, instead of publishing a correction, the “corrections editor” refused to do so, without explanation. The malevolent charge still stands; readers have no way of knowing just how wrong it was, unless they receive emails from CAMERA pointing out the error.

CAMERA noted in communication with the Journal that the reporter was likely conflating the supposed addition of new settlements with population increase within existing ones which has, indeed, occurred, and urged editors to correct the record on the error. The Journal was, however, content to misinform readers, injecting in the private correspondence reference to counting “illegal outposts”– which are not “settlements” and were not referenced in the original problematic photo caption — and citing the partisan claims of Peace Now.

The lesson of the exchange was the striking indifference of the Journal to adhering to professional standards mandating accuracy.

More serious is another uncorrected error Journal editors have chosen to promote in their coverage. The news pages have rhetorically awarded the West Bank to the Palestinians — having decided to refer to the West Bank as “Palestinian land” or “Palestinian territory.” Of course, the land is not Palestinian but rather disputed until, per the Oslo Accords to which the Israelis and Palestinians are signatories, there is a negotiated agreement on the disposition of the territory….

For the Journal editors, the West Bank (as the Jordanians renamed “Judea and Samaria” in 1950) is “Palestinian land.” That’s not what the League of Nations believed, in establishing the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, when all the land “from the river to the sea” was assigned to the Mandate’s territory, which was in time to become the Jewish state of Israel. The League of Nations recognized the Jewish connection to the land that went back some 3500 years, and given how much of the former Ottoman Empire would now become Arab countries — there are presently 22 Arab states stretching from the Atlantic to the Gulf — it hardly seemed wrong to provide that small sliver of land where the Jewish people had lived since 1500 B.C., as the place where Jews could rebuild their ancient commonwealth. But for Abdul-Baqui, the Mandate for Palestine does not exist.

The West Bank is not “Palestinian land,” but rather, “disputed land.” When other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, have described the West Bank as “Palestinian land” and then been corrected by CAMERA and other hawk-eyed readers, they have published the appropriate corrections. But under Emma Tucker, the Wall Street Journal has failed to corrected any of its errors about Israel and the Palestinians.

The former Wall St. Journal editor-in-chief, the late Robert Bartley, would be deeply dismayed, both at the errors prompted by the paper’s current bias against Israel, and at the Wall Street Journal’s refusal, when those errors have been politely pointed out by CAMERA’s Andrea Levin and others similarly hawk-eyed, to correct those errors. Emma Tucker, who as editor-in-chief is ultimately responsible both for the errors, and for the intolerable refusal of the Journal to correct them, needs to be taken to task or better still, given her desire to run “life-style stories with snappy headlines” in the news section of the Journal, she ought to be offered the post of editor of Teen Vogue, where she should feel right at home.