Israel Matzav

The New York Times Gets it All Wrong

The New York Times weighs in this morning with an editorial about Israel's Tuesday raid of the Jericho prison. As usual, the Times is morally equivalent. The only 'good' news here is that they blame the US and the UK more than Israel:

The acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, should not have allowed the desire to do some election-season muscle-flexing to push him into storming the prison in Jericho with tanks, bulldozers and helicopters. Israeli Army officials ordered inmates to strip to their underwear, which many did, marching out with clothing on their heads, an embarrassing and completely unnecessary provocation that trampled the dignity of any Palestinian watching that spectacle. [Seethe! Seethe! CiJ]

Given the humiliations that ordinary Palestinians suffer merely by trying to get through Israeli checkpoints every day, the prison raid just reinforced the already degrading reality of living under foreign occupation. [Rubbish. CiJ]

Most to blame, however, are Britain and the United States, for withdrawing their prison monitors. They cited security concerns that British and American officials maintain have existed ever since a 2002 agreement established the conditions under which Mr. Saadat and five other Palestinian prisoners would be held. "Regrettably, the Palestinian Authority has never in the past four years met all its obligations under the Ramallah agreement, despite our repeated demands that they do so," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said Tuesday.

That raises the question of why the United States and Britain waited until now to withdraw the monitors. This is an extremely tense time in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, with Hamas working to form a cabinet after its election triumph and Israel heading for elections on March 28. There's no way the British and Americans could not have known that their withdrawal would be tantamount to throwing a match into dry kindling. [Yeah! They should have waited until one of the 'unarmed monitors' was taken hostage or killed. That would have shown 'em. /sarc CiJ]

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:45 PM