NY Times Calls Neighborhood in Jerusalem 'West Bank Settlement'

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

The New York Times, in keeping with the Obama adminstration's policy that many Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are "settlements," has corrected a photo caption in which it used that term for a Jewish neighborhood in the city, also stating it is the "West Bank." The mistake was published last Thursday in a photo caption that read, “Ultra-Orthodox Jews last month in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank,” the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reported.

The following day, the Times wrote, “A picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of a news analysis article about a shift in the Obama administration's Middle East policy referred incorrectly to Ramat Shlomo, the name of a Jewish housing development that Israel says it is expanding despite objections by the United States and the Palestinian Authority. It is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, not a settlement in the West Bank.”

However, the term “East Jerusalem” also is inaccurate. It refers to all parts of the city that were restored to Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and those areas include neighborhoods in southern and northern Jerusalem as well as in the eastern part of the capital.

The term "East Jerusalem” also implies that it is a separate political entity, unlike the term “eastern” or “southern” Jerusalem, which refers to an area in relationship to the rest of the city.

Unlike parts of Judea and Samaria that were to be part of the country of ”Trans-Jordan,” the United Nations Partition Plan did not allocate to Jordan any parts of Jerusalem, which was supposed to be administered by the United Nations.

Following the Arab world’s rejection of the Partition Plan, it tried to annihilate the new State of Israel, which fought until a ceasefire in 1949 left the capital divided until 1967.

Another term that has been recognized internationally but is misleading is “West Bank", meaning the land that lies west of the Jordan River. Literally speaking, that would include all of the Land of Israel whose border is the Mediterranean Sea. In practice it is used to refer to Judea and Samaria.