Mortars fired from Gaza are yet another “test” of the ceasefire, according to AP, while somehow, the closing of the border crossings—which were contingent on the ceasefire working—are labeled as the cause of the mortar fire by the AP. Note the headline: It’s a cause-and-effect summation.

Israel closes Gaza, Palestinians fire mortars

You see? As a result of closing the border crossings, the Palestinians fired mortars at Israel. Not as a matter of habit, this being the third day in a row that the Palestinians have violated the truce by firing rockets and mortars. But that’s not the worst of it. The AP is outright blaming Israel for the rocket fire. Look at the lead:

Israel refused on Friday to fully open crossings with the Gaza Strip and Palestinian militants attacked Israel with mortars, further testing an already fragile truce.

For the third day in a row, Israel prevented food trucks from entering Gaza by closing crossings in retaliation for repeated Palestinian rocket attacks, Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner said. Later in the day, Palestinian militants fired two mortar shells toward Israel, Israeli police said, but no injuries or damage were reported. It was not immediately clear which militant faction fired the shells.

Notice the order of the events in the paragraphs. Israel closed the crossings, and THEN the Palestinians fired rockets. The AP is framing the situation as an Israeli cause—”refusing” to open the crossings—and a Palestinian effect—firing rockets and mortars. As if those are the natural progression. What the AP is no longer doing is calling the rocket fire a violation of the truce. The Israeli refusal to open the crossings is following the terms of the truce, which the AP knows full well, having published many articles detailing the truce. First, the attacks were supposed to stop. Then Israel would send more goods into Gaza. If three days went by without an attack, more goods would go in. Since the Palestinians are violating the truce, Israel is doing exactly as was agreed, and not sending in more goods or opening the crossings. But the AP is not reporting this honestly. The news service is trying to make its readers think that Israel is violating the truce by “refusing” to open the crossings. You have to dig down ten paragraphs to find the word “violation” anywhere in this article. And it’s used in the context of a revenge attack.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called for retaliation for the attacks.

“I am not interested who fired and who didn’t fire at Israel,” she told reporters Thursday. “It is a violation, and Israel needs to respond immediately, militarily, for every violation.”

Notice that the only Israeli quoted is made to look like a bloodthirsty, well, “militant.” Strangely for the AP, which manages to find a quote for every single Palestinian casualty of Israeli fire, there are no quotes at all from Hamas or terrorist groups in this article. And in this short piece from early this morning, the AP outright calls Israel’s closure of the crossings a violation of the truce, thus following the Hamas line.

Israel has refused for the third day in a row to fully open crossings with the Gaza Strip in retaliation for rocket attacks. The rockets and closure both constitute violations of a cease-fire that began June 19.

Truly, is there anyone out there anymore who thinks the AP is an objective news source? Because if so, I have this bridge that’s been in my family for generations, for sale, cheap.

J-Street has a wonderful new feature that allows you to send a letter to the editor of a local paper to support J-Street’s views. I decided to take advantage.

Amy Teibel’s report on the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has a very important sentence in the middel, “Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for the past year, has said it will enforce the truce, but not confront militants from other groups who violate the deal.”

In other words Israel made a deal with a partner unwilling to live up to its side of the bargain. Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh said last week that his organization would not stop the smuggling of weapons into Israel.

In word and deed Hamas is showing itself to be just as committed to peace as Fatah was:not at all.

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You’ll note that my text doesn’t match the default message that J-Street recommended.

Why’d I go to J-Street. Well you see they’re very proud of an ad (pdf) they just sponsored in the NY Times. The ad reads in part:

If Israel had gone to war this week, established pro-Israel organizations would have rallied to its side. There would have been ads, press releases, fundraising appeals and political speeches. Let’s have the courage to support Israel loudly and clearly when it pursues security through diplomacy.

If Israel had reacted to the repeated provocations by going to war against Hamas this week, much of the world would have ignored the reasons went to war and reflexively condemned Israel for protecting its citizens. Pro-Israel organizations would have rallied to support Israel in the face of the concerted efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. It isn’t a matter of supporting war, it’s a matter of trusting Israel’s government to defend the lives of its citizens.

When J-Street asks pro-Israel groups to show courage, it’s a shame that it lacks the courage to criticize Israel’s enemies who show contempt for diplomacy and care nothing for the lives of Jews in Israel.

They cannot even bring themselves to criticize Hamas for working against peace.

And yet they call themselves pro-Israel and pro-peace. I wonder what color the sky is in that world the denizens of J-street inhabit.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Taking its cue from the NY Times that recently introduced “Op-classics,” the Washington Post is inaugurating a feature called “Re-posted.” (I like the name Op-Classics better, but the idea is still a good one.)

Here’s the deal:
This RePosted article comes at the suggestion of a reader, Howard Schmitt of Pittsburgh,
who recently came across a 1999 Post essay about the perils of cheap gas and praised it for its prescience. That essay, originally published in The Post’s Outlook section, is “reposted” below, along with the article that originally accompanied it.

We’re grateful for Mr. Schmitt’s generosity. He also got us thinking: What other columns or editorials from The Post’s archives would you like to read again? Are there past opinion pieces that you think are newly relevant? Do you remember editorials or columns that were spot-on — or dead wrong? Do you wonder what the Post had to say about a particular historical event that might shed light on what’s happening now?

Send your suggestions to reposted@washingtonpost.com.

We don’t expect you to recall headline, byline and date. And we can’t promise that we’ll get to every request. But give us as much guidance as you can — and explain why you think it would be helpful or interesting to read again now. Then we can start digging through the archives.

Here’s my suggestion: Charles Krauthammer wrote a column “The end of the illusion” on March 7, 1996. The column started:

This is peace? “Israelis Unnerved by Peace That Kills ,” says a Washington Post headline, March 5. Peace that kills ? This is an absurd oxymoron. If peace means anything, it means at its very minimum an absence of violence. After all, “armistice” and “truce” — lesser forms of peace — mean cease-fire. Peace must mean at least that .

This Orwellian conjunction of peace and violence demonstrates the state of hypnosis that Americans and Israelis have placed themselves under since the September 1993 Handshake on the White House lawn. What followed has been called a peace process. It has been nothing of the kind. The Palestinian war on Israel has been unrelenting. More Israeli civilians have been massacred since the handshake than at any time in the entire history of the country.

The ” peace process” is in fact nothing more than a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. The Palestinians have gotten Gaza, West Bank autonomy, huge influxes of foreign aid, international recognition, their own police force, their first free elections ever (something their Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers never granted them).

In return Israel has gotten what? Pats on the head from the United States. The occasional trade mission from Tunisia. And, from the Palestinians, death. This is peace?

I already criticized the Post’s coverage of Hamas’s breach of the ceasefire it concluded with Israel last week. In short, the Post’s correspondent Griff Witte departed from straight reporting in his portrayal of Hamas’s bad faith.
1) He termed the firing of rockets at Israel as “rattling” neither “breaching” nor “violating” the ceasefire, and thus downgraded the seriousness of the action.
2) He failed to report (unlike the New York Times) that a leader of Hamas claimed that the organization had no obligation to stop the firing on Israel.
3) He reported Hamas’s claim that Israel’s renewed closure of Gaza was a violation of the truce, effectively declaring Hamas the good guys.
4) He termed those who criticized the truce as “hard-liners,” and then quoted an Israeli critic. The critic, Gen. Moshe Yaalon was correct when he called the truce unstable, largely because Hamas will not stop the smuggling of weapons as it committed to and, as mentioned, won’t stop the firing on Israel.

Just as the Post’s correspondent (I think Barton Gellman) 12 years ago declared “peace” where an extremist group was violating its terms, (then it was Fatah,) now Witte pretends there is a ceasefire or truce when an extremist group (now Hamas) was violating every one of its terms.

I don’t expect that the Post will follow my advice; it seems averse to self criticism. But what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.