Dear Sasha,
I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit
an op-ed to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we must respectfully
decline.
On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of
the “paper of record” has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan's
admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no
one is entitled to their own facts.
A case in point was your decision
last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:
It is important to note that the
last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at
the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community
was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In
November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered
in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled
Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future
state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions
ensued.
This paragraph effectively turns on its head an event within
living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan
accepted by the Jews and then joined five Arab states in launching a war
to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it
past the most rudimentary fact-checking.
The opinions of some of your
regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They consistently
distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has
taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by
suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu
and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy
or Israeli society as a whole. Worse, one columnist even stooped to
suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister
Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was "bought and paid
for by the Israel lobby" rather than a reflection of the broad support
for Israel among the American people.
Yet instead of trying to
balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the
surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days,
no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack
Israel. Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel
is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on
gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the
future.
Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I
discovered that during the last three months (September through
November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and
International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two
categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack
against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically
elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”
The
only "positive" piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous
Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous
charge of Apartheid.
Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a
few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone's previous
submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in
the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging
that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his
position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was
apparently news unfit to print.
Your refusal to publish “positive”
pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of
supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and
Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an
op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the
United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama
administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an
age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong
bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made
your cut.
So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will
forgive us for declining your offer. We wouldn't want to be seen as
"Bibiwashing" the op-ed page of the New York Times.
Sincerely,
Ron Dermer
Senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu