JERUSALEM — Sometimes reporters just don't get it.

Heck, I'm a reporter and I'm the first to admit that.

But at a joint press conference here Tuesday, Canada's Stephen Harper and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu essentially teamed up to say that, when it comes to politics in the Middle East, reporters just don't get it.

For the last two days, Canadian, Palestinian and Israeli journalists have, in Harper's view, been trying to get him to say something bad about Israel and Netanyahu. After all, it says on a Canadian government website that it is official Canadian policy that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal. Why, the journalists asked, couldn't Harper just say that?

More to the point, after spending a good chunk of his historic 2,400-word speech to the Knesset on Monday explaining that there was no way he was going to single out Israel for criticism in any public forum, Harper must have been wondering why the heck reporters continued to try to get him to do just that.

So he turned the tables.

"Yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, no one asked me there to single out the Palestinian Authority for any criticism in terms of governance or human rights or anything else," Harper said, speaking about the press conference he'd held Monday in Ramallah side-by-side with P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. "When I'm in Israel, I'm asked to single out Israel. When I'm in Palestinian Authority I'm asked to single out Israel and in half the other places around the world you ask me to single out Israel."

This observation brought a wry smile to Netanyahu's face and grim laugh from Employment Minister Jason Kenney, seated in the front row of Tuesday's press conference.

Now, let me just make one small but important observation. By Harper's own insistence, the 11 parliamentary journalists who followed Harper here have been limited to precisely four questions in three days. If he'd take a few more questions, well, the problem Harper described might be resolved.

But that said, Harper makes a reasonable point.

Since August, 2005, 16,000 rockets have been fired into Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The Palestinians have forever — long before Jewish settlements in the West Bank started going up — rejected Israel's right to exist.

Why didn't we ask what Abbas was doing to improve governance in his territory? What about the accountability of Abbas and the Palestinians? Canadian reporters had two chances to ask Abbas a question — in Ramallah, of all places — and instead of asking him why the Palestinians will not acknowledge Israel's right to exist, we wanted Harper to explain why the Jewish settlements were illegal.

Netanyahu spent a remarkable 10 minutes explaining to us why Harper was right, why those were the wrong questions.

"The core of the conflict is not settlements. The core of the conflict is not the absence of a Palestinian state. The core of the conflict is the persistent refusal to reconcile to an independent nation state of the Jewish people. That's what this conflict is about," Netanyahu said.

And in an any event, the major issue in the Middle East today is no longer Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu explained. Journalists were missing the big picture.

"I think it's important for commentators in the Middle East to adopt their commentary on Canada-Israel relations to the new Middle East," he said. What are the concerns of many of the world's leading Arab countries these days?

"The first is the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons. And the second is the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood. And in meeting those twin challenges, these (leading Arab) countries do not see Israel as their enemy but as being on the same side of a difficult conflict."

Point taken.