The Media Accountability Project  

On April 4, 2023, The Guardian (Charlottetown) and Saltwire published and widely syndicated a letter to the editor from CJPME, rebutting a letter which had attempted to defend Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Betzalel Smotrich, after his inflammatory comments about ‘erasing’ the Palestinian town of Huwara. The letter reads:

A recent letter by Robert Walker criticizes another writer for misrepresenting the context around Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich’s comments calling for a town in the occupied West Bank to be “wiped out.”

Walker's letter repeats the error he complains about, that of “missing some information.” Only in this case, most of the information is missing.

In acting as Smotrich’s apologist after his genocidal remarks, Walker accepts Smotrich’s pathetic excuse that it was somehow an emotional “slip of the tongue.”

When Smotrich made this comment, he was responding to a question about why he had liked a tweet from an Israeli deputy mayor calling for Huwara to be “erased.” As such, this was his second public engagement with the idea, making it hard to believe that this was part of an emotional flare-up.

Furthermore, Smotrich even complained that the media was trying to create a “distorted interpretation” of his words rather than owning up to them.

To underscore the superficial core of his apology, just weeks later Smotrich would take the stage in Paris and say, “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” The destruction of a Palestinian village was scarcely extreme for Smotrich. He would prefer to erase the idea that Palestinians exist at all. I'm not sure why Robert Walker feels compelled to defend the indefensible.

On March 27, 2023, the Winnipeg Free Press published an article about Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization, Noa Tishby about an upcoming speaking event. However, the headline incorrectly identified Tishby as an “activist,” reading “Distressing rise of hate on agenda for activist’s lecture,” even though the event description highlights her role as an Israeli Official. Moreover, the piece failed to identify Tishby as an Israeli Official until the 12th paragraph.

CJPME wrote to the WPF to notify them about this error, arguing that the failure to identify Tishby as an Israeli Official would fundamentally alter a reader's understanding of the event. The letter also noted that the article had omitted reference to some of her controversial statements (more here). While the WFP claimed that Tishby would be attending the event as a “private citizen,” the event description itself did not make this claim.

On April 3, the Winnipeg Free Press corrected this error by changing the headline to read “Distressing rise of hate on agenda for Israeli official’s lecture.” Unrelatedly, that same day, Tishby was fired from her role as Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization by Benjamin Netanyahu, presumably for her relatively mild criticisms of Israel’s judicial reforms.

Thank you for your fair and credible reporting, and for rightfully including the ‘Palestinian issue’ as a major aspect of the story. I also appreciate your analysis of the creation of Ben-Gvir’s ‘national guard’ as an element of Netanyahu’s decision to ‘pause’ his legislative agenda, and your inclusion of the perspective of the (small) anti-occupation bloc within the protests. I also thought that you accurately represented the perspective of most Palestinians on the “pro-democracy” protests, in a way that is consistent with what my organization has been hearing.

Haaretz quotes the human rights group Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) in describing the national guard as "a private, armed militia that would be directly under Ben-Gvir's control,” and warns that “this is a police force that will first and foremost act in mixed cities, first and foremost against the Arab population [read: Palestinian citizens of Israel].”

It is critical that this element of the story is included in your reporting, so that the coverage highlights the immediate consequences for Palestinians as a result of the legislative pause.