From: Ali Abunimah
To: morning@npr.org, atc@npr.org
Subject: NPR: In Palestine today...

November 13,1998

Dear NPR News,
If you had less Middle East coverage, I probably wouldn't complain about that. It's just a fact that the Middle East gets a disproportionate amount of attention from the media, and so really we are spoiled.

But it is legitimate to ask that the coverage you do have be more evenly balanced. For the past week I have raised several times that you have failed to report on the major new settlement activity that Israel has undertaken in the wake of the Wye agreement. You had brief news spots on "Har Homa" yesterday, but none of your many full-length reports have focussed on the matter. Now you've missed the boat: judging from the past, it is likely that Israel will use any crisis with Iraq as cover for a greater upsurge in confiscation, demolition and colonization. But most of your "assets" will probably be deployed to cover Iraq. This might be excusable, given your limited resources, if you'd done an adequate job when you had the chance.

Since you didn't report on the major settler moves yet again, I thought we'd reverse roles and I'd report it to you. Here goes:

AP reported that Israel announced a major new Jewish bypass road plan that will require the confiscation of "huge tracts" of Palestinian land. and the BBC's Paul Adams reported from the Palestinian village of Sinjil in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where a few nights ago, residents awoke to find that in the dead of night Israelis from the nearby Eli settlement had paved a road through the middle of village lands, and tractors had been placed to start plowing more land. Adams interviewed a settler named Rivka, who said that the settlers strategy to respond to Wye was "simply to build." Adams noted that this was occurring throughout the West Bank ("Newshour," BBC World Service radio, 11/13/98 1300GMT)

In Chicago, this is Ali Abunimah
ahabunim@midway.uchicago.edu