Read Ethan Bronner’s story on Jerusalem in the Times:

Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition… views Jerusalem, west and east, as the undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people, where it can build where it wants. The Palestinians and their supporters throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds view East Jerusalem as holy and as rightfully under Palestinian sovereignty.

He ignores the fact that international law is unified in the assertion that Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, but puts an Orientalist spin on it: he points out that Arab and Muslim world regard Jerusalem as holy, which of course is not inaccurate but is only part of the story.

If I had time, I could come up with a good analogy. But it’s biased. And you know it’s painful to have to read this. It’s leaving out the fact that the reader’s own government and every government in the world regards the East Jerusalem occupation as violating the law. It’s unbelievable. And I can’t believe the foreign editor or whoever edited this didn’t recognize this.

Isn’t that the first thing you learn about when you learn about the settlements? The boilerplate expression should be: Israel claims a right to all of Jerusalem. The rest of the world, including the United States, regards the annexation of Jerusalem as illegal and the settlements as illegal.

This is what the current argument is about, this is what the flap in Washington was about, and Bronner is not pointing out the true facts. The average reader is duped. It just reinforces the idea that there are two mystical groups there, fighting over a holy city.

Update from sitemaster: Holy smoke, Bronner himself accepted this point, in a letter to Partners for Peace, five years ago when he was a foreign editor: