The Media Accountability Project  

"The article is about a workshop organized by the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation (OSSTF) entitled “Anti-Palestinian racism: Nakba denial.” Unfortunately, the article fails to provide a Palestinian perspective nor to explain what the Nakba represents, leaving the reader with a single perspective. Below, I will outline two areas in this article that urgently require an update.

First, your article fails to include a Palestinian perspective, even though the workshop in question is about anti-Palestinian racism. While you mention that the session presenters did not respond to requests for comment, more efforts should have been made to provide a Palestinian point of view on the importance of this workshop and the concepts under discussion. Following the Canadian Association of Journalist’s (CAJ) ethics guidelines on diversity, news organizations and journalists should seek to “include views from all segments of the population.”"

"We insist that any discussion of Israel’s 'democracy' must come with a qualification that it is not extended to everyone under Israeli rule, and should note the findings of apartheid from the human rights sector. We expect that this critical aspect of Israel’s judicial reforms, and the broader impact on Palestinians generally, will be touched on in future reporting."

"Above all, it is highly problematic that neither article on the erosion of Israel’s democratic institutions once mentioned the Palestinians, who are under Israeli control yet largely excluded from its democracy. Of the 6.8 million Palestinians under Israeli rule, only a small minority of them (1.6 million) hold Israeli citizenship and have the right to vote in national elections (albeit with a second-class status and significant restrictions). The remaining 5.2 million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, have no right to vote for the government that rules them. In fact, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN experts, and Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups like B’Tselem, have argued that is Israel is not a democracy, but should properly be defined as a regime of apartheid."

"The absence of Palestinians from this segment is also unacceptable due to the impact that Israel’s judicial reforms could have on its control over the occupied Palestinian territories, including the threats of settlement expansion and annexation. New Israeli annexation claims were made only hours before the announcement of judicial reform. In fact, it is a widely held view that annexation and judicial reform are inextricably bound."