Santiago O’Donnell finds it difficult to write an article about international affairs without getting basic facts wrong and leaving out critical information. In his piece in today’s Pagina/12 he says that wall separating Gaza from Egypt,
… had been built in 2006 to seal the Egyptian frontier after Hamas, led by Ismael Haniyeh, had won the right to form a government of the Palestinian Authority after winning free and fair elections.
This is false. Israel had withdrawn from Gaza by September 2005 having built the wall before it left. Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in January 2006.
He goes on to say that,
Olmert decided that the best response would be to impose an international boycott [on the new Hamas government] with the support of his allies the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan.
So the government of Israel decided what attitude the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan were going to take to the Hamas government. I guess the Israeli Foreign Ministry just sends a daily e-mail with instructions to their colleagues in Washington, Brussels, Cairo and Amman. Or maybe that isn’t necessary, maybe the Israelis have their own people embedded in all those governments and it’s they who are in charge of setting policy in the Middle East.
He then goes on to say that Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers on the border with Lebanon. In fact the number of soldiers kidnapped was two (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) not three.
And now we come to the really fun part. He writes,
The boycott led to tension between Hamas and Al Fatah and put Palestine on the edge of civil war until in June last year when there was a carve-up (repartija) of territory with Hamas taking control of Gaza and Fatah keeping the West Bank.
I’ll leave aside the question of whether the Palestinian factions might have had their own reasons for hating each other and not simply have been responding to external pressures. What actually occurred in June 2007 was rather more than a rise in tension; Hamas and Fatah slugged it out for control of Gaza in bloody combat that cost the lives of 161 Palestinians. Full details of what happened are available here. The upshot of the fighting was that President Abbas accused Hamas of having launched a coup d’état, withdrew recognition of Haniyeh’s government and set up his own administration in Ramallah. So, far from having been on the edge of civil war the Palestinians actually had the first round of it with Hamas coming out as the clear winner.
How does this guy manage to make a living as a journalist when he can’t even get the most basic facts right? How?
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