Irredentist Now, Are We?

Alex Safian points out, over at CAMERA, that the Economist is biased.

This week's issue is devoted to the 40 years since 1967.

Among its 'charms':-

The only use of the word "irredentist" is in regard to Israeli settlements -- called "colonization."

Although portions of the articles focus on the 1967 war, much attention is devoted to railing against settlements built afterwards in the West Bank and Gaza. They are cast as the central, overriding problem -- as opposed to Arab aggression, intolerance and imperial aims. The author claims: "Hamas is to the Palestinians what the settlers are to Israel: it believes that the land was consecrated to Muslims by God, and is not negotiable." Hamas, needless to say, is a terrorist group -- officially designated so by the U.S. and the E.U. for its mass killings of innocent people. The comparison to Israeli settlers who have been the target of Hamas's lethal assaults and who have never, of course, blown up buses, cafes and religious events, is outrageous. (The magazine doesn't always equate settlers to Hamas; while certain settlers are labeled "more fanatical than ever" -- no Hamas member of any stripe is called fanatical.)

Young settlers are just as militant as their parents were a generation ago, setting up small West Bank outposts and resisting their dismantlement in fierce, well-publicised mass protests. Israel's pull-out of the settlements in Gaza in 2005, which seemed at the time to have broken the settlers' spirit, now appears to have left them more united and emboldened. And the interface between ultra-Orthodoxy and religious Zionism has spawned a new breed of young settlers known as hardal (a Hebrew acronym that also means “mustard”), who are more fanatical than ever.