Daily News's Praise That Stings

 
by Michael Goldblatt 

	The Philadelphia Daily News has finally published a brief editorial praising
Israel--yet in the same breath, the News managed to smear Israel's prime
minister, defame a large segment of Israeli society, and draw a false moral
equivalency between Hamas terrorists and Jewish residents of Judea-Samaria.

	What prompted the News  to run its ostensibly friendly editorial on January
16 was Israel's decision to surrender most of Hebron to the PLO.  But instead
of appreciating the risks Israel is taking in the hope of peace, the editors
of the News used the occasion to take some gratuitous slaps at the Jewish
State.

	The Hebron deal was made possible, according to the News, by the fact that
the Netanyahu government does not have to worry that the Labor opposition
might "do what Netanyahu's Likud Party did: Utilize fear and violence
perpetrated by others to enhance its own political standing."

	In fact, Netanyahu and Likud did nothing of the sort.  They did not
"utilize" the "violence perpetrated by others" (for some reason the editors
of the News did not mention that the perpetrators were Palestinian Arab
terrorists); if Arab terrorism motivated some Israeli voters to back Likud,
it was a decision based on the voters' assessment of how various parties'
woiuld respond to terrorism.

	The editors of the News  also took the opportunity to declare that the
Hebron deal has marginalized "the fanatics of Israeli society, who would use
the Bible as a land title."  If the News's editorial staff were better
acquainted with Israeli society, they would know that "fanatics" are not the
only Israelis who hold the Bible (the Torah) in high esteem and who cherish
the Jewish people's 3,000 year-old biblical connection to the Land of Israel.
 Indeed, even David Ben-Gurion (later to become Israel's first prime
minister), himself a staunch secularist, publicly affirmed the relevancy of
the Torah  to Israel's  territorial rights.  During his testimony before
England's royal Peel Commission, in 1936, Ben-Gurion was asked to explain the
basis of the Jewish claim to the Holy Land.  He replied:  "The Bible is our
mandate."

	And the News editors managed to get in one more shot at Israelis (the third
slap in an editorial that was just 7 paragraphs long): they declared that
there may be attempts to "blow up the process--literally" by "Hamas and the
other Palestinian saboteurs" as well as by "many Jewish settlers."  

	Such moral equivalency between Hamas and the Jews of Judea-Samaria is false
and outrageous.  The Hamas terrorists (that is the appropriate
description--not "saboteurs") regularly massacre defenseless Jewish
civilians, are cheered by the Palestinian Arab masses for doing so, and are
praised by Yasir Arafat as "heroes" and "martyrs."  By contrast, the Jews in
Judea-Samaria are, overwhelmingly, peaceful and law-abiding citizens; the
tiny number of individuals who, in anguish over Arab terrorism, have attacked
Arabs, have been denounced by Israel's leaders and almost the entirely
Israeli public, including the settlers.

	The Philadelphia Jewish community had been waiting a long time for the
editors of the Daily News  to write something friendly about Israel.  But
after seeing their January 16 editorial, many of us wonder: With "friends"
like the News, who needs enemies?

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