An archive of what American newspapers printed about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023.
3,517 clippings from 726 papers, every one a photograph of the page it was printed on, dated and named. Not an argument about the history — the record of what American readers were handed at the time, searchable word for word.
3,517 clippings · 726 newspapers · 1724 to 2023
Who it is for
Journalists, students, teachers, researchers, anyone. Every clipping has its own page, accession number and scan.
What it is not
Not a record of the present. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023. It is the three centuries underneath it.
Still being built
Hold a clipping printed before 7 October 2023? Send it. Everything is verified against the scan before it is published.
A short key to the words
Everything on this site is a newspaper clipping, written at the time for readers who were assumed to know the context already. These are the words and events those readers already knew, and what each one meant for Palestinians.
Covering Palestine — American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023
“Where will we
go?”
Leaders of the Mohammedan-Christian Society, an alliance of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, put that question to an American reporter in Jerusalem in 1919, 20 months after Britain promised their country to somebody else. A Salt Lake City paper printed it that July. Nobody answered them.
"We Arabs have been here for five thousand years. Haven't we Moslems respected the Christians' holy places? Haven't we permitted Jewish pilgrims to flow into and out of the country with perfect freedom? Is it grateful of them to return our favors by demanding that we give up our country to them? Where will we go?"
The Mohammedan-Christian Society, interviewed in Jerusalem · Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 12 July 1919 · CP-1919-008
Covering Palestine is an archive of 3,517 newspaper clippings about Palestinians, printed in 726 American papers, between 1724 and 2023 — the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the Johnson City Press in Tennessee, most of them running the same news-agency copy between the grocery ads and the weather.
A newspaper is a thing you throw away. 50 years on it is the record, and for most Americans it is the whole account. This is the material the account was built out of.
1,897 of 3,517
clippings in this archive were printed before Hamas existed. The oldest is from 1724.
Eight chapters on what these papers called the people they were writing about, and who they said did the killing.
One interview, two days apart
Marion Weinstein interviewed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in March 1919. Two American papers ran the story. These are the lines they printed under the headline.
In the Omaha line, Too Progressive sits inside quotation marks, so it is his phrase. Backward Natives does not, so it is the paper’s.
Whose dead are called civilians
Civilian is a legal category. The laws of war build their protections around it, and a newspaper that prints the word is saying the person who died was not a combatant. These two lines count how often the New York Times printed “Palestinian civilians” and how often it printed “Israeli civilians,” one calendar year at a time, from 1987 to 2023.
- “Palestinian civilians”
- “Israeli civilians”
2002 was the deadliest year of the second intifada, and Palestinians were killed at roughly three times the Israeli rate. The phrase ran 71 times against 180. In the summer of 2014 six Israeli civilians were killed; UN figures put Palestinian civilian deaths above a thousand. The counts that year were 37 and 34. Not until 2023, after some twenty thousand Palestinians had been killed in under three months, did the Palestinian line rise above the Israeli one, 191 to 147.
Whatever these lines track, it is not how many people died.
Where to go from here
Or any other day of the year, as a calendar →
Or a single year, from 1724 to 2023 →
Whose Word Was It — a study of the words these papers chose for Palestinians →
One of the patterns
“4 Israelis killed in firebombing of bus; Arab dies in clash”
Whose death gets explained
The Israelis are killed and the thing that killed them is named. The Arab just dies. Same sentence, same paper, same day — an Associated Press story from 1988, in a paper this archive cannot name.
Read the section →
They were quoted the whole time
Answering back, in American papers
Every line here was said out loud to an American reporter and printed at the time. Nobody is being characterized. They are being quoted.
Being printed is not the same as being heard.
Every quotation carries the accession number of the clipping it was typed off. Anything dated 2023 was printed before 7 October of that year.
In January 1959 a Chicago Tribune reporter walked into a hotel on Mount Scopus and got talking to the barman. His name was Said Ahmad. He was 14 when the militias came to Deir Yassin, where his father had a small farm. “The Jews mowed down men, women, and children with machine guns,” he said. The reporter wrote his name down.
Almost nobody else did. Across the 1,897 clippings here printed before Hamas was founded on 14 December 1987, 82 ordinary Palestinians are named. Said Ahmad is one of them. So is Fahimeh Ali Moustafa Zeidan, 12, from the same village, who lost her mother, both grandparents, two brothers and a three-month-old sister, and whose account of that morning runs to five paragraphs in the Evening Star of 12 April 1948.
That is one clipping. Below are 58 patterns in how the papers wrote — things no single clipping can show you, because they only appear when the same move repeats across decades and hundreds of papers. A word that arrives. A word that leaves. A sentence built the same way for 50 years.
Who was already there +
A country, counted
Who was already there
On 13 March 1923 the Associated Press moved a short dispatch from Jerusalem, and the Madison Courier in Indiana printed it. Palestine had a total population of 757,182. 79% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 10% Christian. The news agency explained the number by comparing it to a city its readers knew: about the size of Boston.
That is a government counting people and a newspaper making the figure legible to Americans, 25 years before 1948.
The rest of this section is the same kind of material: not a case being made, but the ordinary vocabulary of papers that assumed a populated country because they were describing one.
An American government document
In October 1908 the Rochester Journal printed a report from Thomas R. Wallace, the United States consul in Jerusalem, itemizing what the Palestinian peasantry grew and ate. Barley bread, olives and olive oil, cheese, leben, dried figs. Grapes and figs around Jerusalem, watermelons “grown largely on the plains,” apricots, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic. Then the sentence that does the most work:
They grow other vegetables, but ordinarily do not consume them but sell them.
Thomas R. Wallace, United States consul in Jerusalem, in Consular Reports · Rochester Journal and the Post Express, 31 October 1908
Sell them to somebody, somewhere. The report distinguishes throughout between country people and townspeople, who ate three times a day. A consul wrote it, the State Department published it, and a New York paper carried it.
A crop, by the boxful
The Akron Beacon Journal explained the Jaffa orange trade in 1893: recently famous, good for 30 or 40 days in transit, three months if properly packed. The Perris Progress, in the California citrus belt, put a number on it in 1901 — a crop of about 300,000 boxes, grafted on lemon stock. Those readers knew exactly what that meant, because it was their own business.
Shipping and produce columns are the hardest evidence in this archive, because they had no argument to make.
Land, and who reallocated it
The Cincinnati Enquirer of March 1910 called the fellaheen “the aboriginal inhabitants of the Holy Land” in its own subheading, and then set out the machinery of a village: land held as freehold or in common, the common land apportioned among the villagers every year by lot, a sheikh who governed and was “the father of the community,” and one building in every village kept for strangers.
Eight years later a United Press dispatch in the Freeport Journal-Standard gave Nablus “about 25,000 population,” in the same paragraph in which it overstated an advance of 3,000 yards as the capture of a city 33 miles away.
The word
Searching Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s collection of scanned American newspapers, for “fellaheen” returns 2,130 candidate pages. Most are not about this: 1,688 of them also mention Egypt, where American papers used the word far more often. 270 mention Palestine, steadily from the 1880s through the 1920s.
What the word carries is the argument. You cannot write the fellaheen of Palestine about an empty country. Settled agriculture, land tenure, a harvest and a market are inside the term, which is why papers reaching for it were documenting the thing later denied, without meaning to and without anyone contesting it at the time.
And the other description, running at the same time
None of this was the only thing Americans read. An 1812 Philadelphia reprint of Chateaubriand describes villages “laid waste by fire and sword” and Jerusalem as “a cemetery in midst of a desert.” The Kansas City Times in 1937 called it “the barren country.” A Brooklyn traveler in 1931 saw “miles and miles of arid, unbeautiful land… nothing green, nothing growing.”
And in October 1938 the Des Moines Register reprinted a Zionist Organization of America bulletin, saying plainly whose bulletin it was, which argued that “only two generations ago, the entire Arab population of Palestine was less than 300,000.”
Set that against the Associated Press counting 757,182 15 years earlier, and the Philadelphia Inquirer counting 600,000 fellaheen in 1920 and calling them “the actual tillers of the soil from time immemorial.”
“no one seems to have taken into consideration the 600,000 Fellaheen in the narrowest limits of Palestine and more than a million in the borders once ruled by David and Solomon. This population represents the actual tillers of the soil from time immemorial.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, under the headline Zionists and The Palestinian Fellaheen. CP-1920-002
CP-1920-002“Palestine has a total population of 757,182, according to the figures of the census of three months ago. This figure equals approximately the population of the city of Boston as given by the official count in 1920.”
The Madison Courier, Indiana, carrying Associated Press copy. A government counting the people it governed, translated for American readers into a city they knew. CP-1923-001
CP-1923-001“Only two generations ago, the entire Arab population of Palestine was less than 300,000.”
The Des Moines Register, reprinting a bulletin of the Zionist Organization of America and saying whose bulletin it was. 15 years after the census, and a third of its figure. CP-1938-004
CP-1938-004Before there was a PLO +
1925 to 1958
Before there was a PLO
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. These clippings show otherwise: Palestinians were making national claims in American newspapers for decades before it existed.
The Removal Of Hebrew Letters From Palestine Stamps Demand Of Arabs
Two columns of news-agency briefs. The demand that the Palestine government abolish the two Hebrew letters, Aleph and Yud, the two initials of Eretz Israel, on the Palestine post stamps, was made by the Palestine Arab executive in a memorandum submitted to the Palestine High Court.
The same executive asks amnesty for Arab youths who were arrested in connection with the strike which occurred on the arrival of Lord Balfour to Palestine
, and an Arabic paper, El Carmel, is quoted backing a boycott fund. The Jewish Press
Mayors of Leading Palestine Cities Plan Price Control
Mustapha Bey Khalidi, Mayor of Jerusalem; Shabbatai Levi, Mayor of Haifa and Omar II Bitar, Mayor of Jaffa
, sitting with Tel Aviv, and the meeting decided to form a permanent committee and to present a joint declaration to the High Commissioner
. It runs as a story about the price of flour. Buffalo Jewish Review
Palestine Arabs Plan Political Body
The Associated Press, in a Washington state daily: No official political body representing all Arabs of the country has existed since dissolution of the Arab High committee by the Palestine government in October, 1936, during disturbances.
There had been one. The government dissolved it. Peninsula Daily News
Palestine Arabs Ask Creation of Nat’l Government
Eight months later: the Arabs in Palestine this week issued a demand that a National government be established in Palestine. The demand was voiced in a resolution adopted at a conference of representatives of the Arab Chambers of Commerce in Palestine.
21 years before the PLO. Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
Palestinians Due More Voice In Gaza Rule
A council of 23 Palestinians and 7 Egyptians
, and in passing, as background nobody thought remarkable: An all-Palestine government was formed in 1948 with its capital in Gaza and still exists in theory.
The Evening Sun
An executive in 1925, a High Committee until the British dissolved it in 1936, a demand for a national government in 1943, a government in Gaza from 1948, a legislative council in 1958. Each reported in American newspapers at the time, in the ordinary way, as news.
When American papers started saying Palestinian +
A word for the people
When American papers started saying Palestinian
The colonization chart tracks a word for the land. This one tracks the word for the people, and it moves the other way: absent for decades, then standard.
In the 1930s these papers covered Palestine constantly. 109 of the 218 clippings from that decade put Arab in the headline. 3 put Palestinian, and neither of the two that count the dead is counting Palestinian Arabs. Three Palestinians Killed in Ambush, April 1931, reports “two Jewish men and one woman.” 106 Palestinians Killed in Weekend of Rioting, October 1938, counts Jews and Arabs together, twenty Jews among them. Here the word still means a place, not a people. The lines cross in the 1970s, and after 2000 the older word nearly disappears: 58 headlines out of 1,039.
Share of each decade’s clippings whose headline or subheading uses the word. Before about 1930, “Palestinian” in these papers usually just meant of Palestine and was applied to Jewish residents too, so the left end of the Palestinian line is not national identity.
The same turn, measured in the body text
The chart above counts headlines. This one counts every time these clippings name the people in their own sentences — 17,171 references from the 1910s on, counted so that Palestinian Arabs is one name and not two. The two measures agree about the turn. They disagree about when: by the 1970s the body text has crossed, and the headlines are still level.
How this was countedShare of each decade’s identity references, not of its clippings — so this chart and the one above cannot be compared by height, only by shape. Headline, subheading, excerpt and photo caption; the archive’s own notes are excluded, because those are not the newspaper’s words. Uses of Arab-Israeli that name the conflict rather than a person are excluded.
Before 1964, in their own sentences
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, which is the date usually given for when the word acquired its present meaning. This archive holds 163 clippings older than that which use it. Seven of them say plainly who is meant.
“Before the ‘menace’ of Zionism, Moslems and Christians alike are united… They are no longer enemies. They are Palestinians.”
San Antonio Express, under the headline Does Palestine Want To Be Zionized? The correspondent, Clair Price, does not use the word loosely: he defines it in the sentence before. The same dispatch ran in the Deseret News the previous morning and in the Buffalo Courier Express the same day, so the two entries below are the same piece of writing arriving in three cities.
CP-1919-010“Resentment of Jewish Colonization by Natives Whose Demand Is ‘Palestine For Palestinians’ — Moslems and Christians For Once United.”
Deseret News, Salt Lake City. The subheading names the people, their demand and the two faiths making it together. The same dispatch: “None knows this better than the Palestinians themselves.”
“Zionists and the Palestinian Fellaheen.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a headline. Fellaheen is the Arabic for peasant farmers, so the phrase cannot be describing Jewish residents.
CP-1920-002“the same fear of the native Arab Palestinians”
Brooklyn Eagle, on Chesterton. Three words doing the work of a definition.
CP-1926-001“Palestinian Arabs Ready to Live With Jewish ‘Cousins’.”
Boston Evening Globe, reporting a rabbi’s account. The compound distinguishes them from the other people in the sentence.
CP-1948-044“Palestinian Refugees Awaken Arab World.”
Freeport Journal-Standard, Illinois, carrying the Washington Merry-Go-Round column. Seven years before the PLO, in a small Midwestern daily, as ordinary syndicated copy.
CP-1957-009“Plight Of The Palestinian.”
Odessa American, Texas. The definite article and the singular: a kind of person, assumed known to the reader.
CP-1959-002Checked against the Library of Congress
Everything above is a count of the clippings collected here, which were found by searching, which means they can only show what searching found. So the same question was put to Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s collection of scanned American newspapers: millions of pages, assembled by librarians for no purpose connected to this.
How this was countedCounting only pages that also mention Palestine.
| Phrase | Pages | Heaviest decade |
|---|---|---|
| “Palestinian Jews” | 272 | 1940s |
| “Palestinian Arabs” | 78 | 1950s |
| “Palestine for the Palestinians” | 31 | 1920s |
| “Jewish Palestinians” | 26 | 1920s |
| “Palestinian citizenship” | 25 | 1920s |
| “Palestine Arab delegation” | 22 | 1920s |
| “Palestine Arab Congress” | 16 | 1920s |
| “Palestinian people” | 14 | 1920s |
American papers used this word for Jewish residents more often than for Arab ones, by roughly three and a half to one. That is the opposite of a convenient finding and it is the main thing that collection says.
What it also says is that the Arab-referent use is not a late arrival. Palestine for the Palestinians is a political slogan about Arab self-rule, and 24 of its 31 pages fall in the 1910s and 1920s. The Palestine Arab Congress, a body that first met in 1919, is named on 16 pages. So is a Palestine Arab delegation. So is the Palestinian people, ten times in the 1920s alone.
Both meanings were in circulation for decades, and the one that survived was not the more common one. The claim this actually settles is narrow: the word was in American newspapers, attached to Arab political demands, 40 years before the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964.
And the ones that do not count. Several early uses here are the plain geographic sense and are no evidence of anything: a 1902 New York Times reference to the Palestinian Kingdom means the ancient one; a 1920 American Israelite headline about Palestinian Restoration means the Zionist project; a 1946 New Jersey paper calls a Jewish resident of Mandate Palestine a Former Palestinian Native.
The same pattern, in the Library of Congress’s own newspaper collection
The same shape appears in the Library of Congress
Chronicling America holds millions of American newspaper pages, digitized by librarians for reasons unconnected to any of this. Searched for “Jewish colony” and “Jewish settlement” on pages that also mention Palestine, per 10,000 such pages:
| decade | “Jewish colony” | “Jewish settlement” |
|---|---|---|
| 1890s | 9.5 | 5.5 |
| 1900s | 21.8 | 11.1 |
| 1910s | 22.2 | 20.4 |
| 1920s | 44.2 | 61.4 |
| 1930s | 21.5 | 51.3 |
| 1940s | 17.9 | 130.2 |
| 1950s | 1.7 | 31.5 |
Colony leads two to one in the 1900s. They run level in the 1910s. Settlement passes it in the 1920s and by the 1940s wins seven to one.
Across 263,128 pages mentioning Palestine between 1890 and 1959, Arab outruns Palestinian in every decade: 14 to 1 in the 1930s, 34 to 1 in the 1950s.
What this cannot showChronicling America stops around 1963, so it cannot test what came after.
And the word for the place, still in 2001
The chart above is about the word for the people. The word for the country took longer, and one clipping catches an American paper treating its use as news.
“Bush ‘Palestine’ reference noted”
Fifty-three years after the state of Israel was declared, a president used the name of the country next to it and a paper put the word in quotation marks in its own headline. The line under it explains why that was the story: Powell said it is now “appropriate” to call a future Palestinian state by its likely name, Palestine. Appropriate is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The archive holds the same punctuation around Nakba for thirty-eight years; here it is around the name of a place.
CP-2001-022A people can be written about for 40 years without being named as themselves. That is what the left half of this chart is. The right half is not a correction anyone apologized for; the word simply became usable, around the time there was a political movement making it impossible to avoid.
The majority, named by subtraction +
One grammatical form, eight decades
The majority, named by subtraction
There is a way of writing about the people of a country that never says who they are. It says who they are not. In 1899 they were the non-Jewish population; in 1917 the existing non-Jewish communities; in 1919 the non-Jewish inhabitants; in 1929 the non-Zionist population. They were about nine-tenths of the country. Every one of these sentences was printed in an American newspaper.
This is not a pattern inferred from a count. It is a form of words, and it is on the page.
“You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”
Theodor Herzl to Youssuf Zia Al-Khalidi, 19 March 1899, answering al-Khalidi’s objection that the country already had people in it. Printed in English in an Arab American weekly in Brooklyn in 1959, inside a Palestinian’s statement to the United Nations, with the document number in a footnote. The letter is where the footnote says it is: the annexes volume of the report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine carries it in the French original and in the committee’s own translation, attached to the special note of the Indian member. The spelling Hertzl on that page is the paper’s.
CP-1959-006“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”
The Balfour Declaration, quoted in The New Republic a year after it was issued. The sentence protects their rights and does not give them a name. Jews outside Palestine, in the second half of the same sentence, are called Jews.
CP-1918-004“The very first question that was put to the spokesmen of Palestine Jewry was ‘What would be the attitude of the Jews toward the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine?’”
The Jewish Monitor, reporting the American commission of inquiry sent to the region by the Paris peace conference. The commission’s very first question about the country’s majority describes them by what they are not, and it is asked of somebody else.
CP-1919-013“The interests of the non-Jewish population would be not only safeguarded by the mandate itself but likewise in the instrument referred to in which the future constitution of the country would be defined.”
Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner for Palestine, on the king’s birthday, in a Knoxville daily. Two paragraphs earlier in the same speech he had called them the Palestinian people. When he turns to what the law will do for them, the other phrase comes out.
CP-1921-004“A group of Moslems, Christians and Jews waited upon the president of the Syrian state and protested against the situation of the non-Zionist population of Palestine”
The World News, Roanoke. The subtracted term has changed from a religion to a political movement, and the sentence now has to list three faiths at the front to say who is doing the protesting.
CP-1929-007What the form is for
By 1949 it was doing arithmetic. The first report of the UN Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East arrived at the number of refugees like this: by taking the former non-Jewish population of the territory at present held by Israel and deducting therefrom the present non-Jewish population of that territory. A people defined by subtraction, then counted by subtraction, in the same sentence.
And the form outlives the documents that made it. In December 1977 a Boston reporter, writing sympathetically about Palestinians living in the United States, put this in his own copy:
“The non-Jewish population of Israel is 530,000, and it is overwhelmingly Palestinian.”
The Boston Globe. Nobody made him write it that way. He reaches for the phrase first and then, in the second half of the sentence, has to translate it back into a people.
CP-1977-004Seventy-eight years separate the first of these sentences from the last. The subtracted term changes, Jewish and then Zionist, and so does the noun: population, communities, inhabitants. The operation never does. You are told the size of a group, the rights it will be allowed and the number it has fallen to, and you are never told what it calls itself.
You can check this yourself. Read any sentence about a group of people and see whether it gives them a name or gives them a subtraction. It takes one reading, and once you have seen it you will not stop seeing it.
Colonization, then settlement +
The word for what was happening
Colonization, then settlement
Calling it colonization now starts an argument. It used to be the plain word, and the New York Times used it in its own headlines: Jewish Colonization in Palestine (1883), Plan of Colonizing Palestine With Jews (1902), Jewish Colonists Advancing (1908), Jewish Colonists Redeem Palestine (1912). It carried no accusation. American papers of those years ran Italian colony on five times as many pages, and usually meant a neighborhood.
Then American papers stopped reaching for it. Around a quarter of this archive’s clippings from the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s use some form of the word. In the 1950s, which hold more clippings than the 1920s, it is one in two hundred. The turn is not 1948. By the 1920s the Library of Congress’s scanned American newspapers already show settlement ahead of colony, and it is never passed back.
The word never disappears. It turns up about a dozen times after 1948, and what changes is whose mouth it is in: an Arab physicist in 1967 given space to argue back, writing about “when Zionist colonization began”; a Chicago Tribune headline in 1981 about the American Christian colony at Jaffa; after that, critics and historians, always about the past.
How this was countedCounts are from these 3,517 clippings, not from the whole American press. This finding has been checked against the Library of Congress’s collection of scanned American newspapers, and the result is in the section on the word for the people.
Even the word Palestine +
1919 to 2013
Even the word Palestine
Quotation marks around a word are a newspaper saying: this is somebody else’s term, and we are not adopting it. Twelve headlines in this archive put those marks around the name of the country, the name of the people, or the word for their statehood. The first is from 1919. The last is from 2013.
They are not quoting a source. In most of these the marks sit on a noun with nothing attributed to anybody, which is the form that does the work: the paper prints the word and declines it in the same gesture.
… Opposing Settlement of “Their Country”
The earliest. Christians and Muslims in Palestine are found to be in remarkable union against Zionist settlement, and the marks land on the two words that say whose country it is. Not on settlement. On their.
CP-1919-010“Israel Faces Problem Of Arab ‘Refugees’ Who Stayed At Home”
Four months after the state was declared. The marks are on refugees, and the reason is in the rest of the headline: these people never left. A word is being refused because the people it names did not move, which is a definition problem the paper resolves with punctuation.
CP-1948-086“Palestinian” Patriots
Two words, and the marks are on the adjective. Nine years before the occupation and six before the PLO, a headline treats the word for the people as a claim rather than a description.
CP-1958-001“Carter Publicly Endorses Palestinian ‘Homeland’”
A president says the word for the first time, and the paper reporting it puts the word in marks in the same headline. The endorsement is public and unqualified; the noun is not.
CP-1977-019“‘Palestine’ still a knotty issue”
And a paper the same day says the quiet part in its own headline: Even the word ‘Palestine’ a matter of debate. Two printings of one syndicated column, and between them they name the thing this section is about. The word is the issue. Not the borders, not the status. The word.
CP-1982-007“Palestinian refugees cling to ‘right of return’”
The verb in front of the marks is cling. Underneath it are the heavy iron keys to houses destroyed long ago and the crumbling yellow land deeds people in Dheisheh camp still keep, and the marks stay on the phrase all the way through the story.
CP-2001-023“Palestinians don’t want to give up ‘right of return’”
Two weeks later, another paper, the same marks on the same phrase. This one opens with Saber Ayoub, who was 23 and newly married when troops forced his family out of Safad, and 76 and still waiting when a reporter found him in Atlanta.
CP-2001-001“Bush ‘Palestine’ reference noted”
The same Associated Press story ran that day in Grand Rapids and in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the headline was Bush uses ‘Palestine’ deliberately. Both papers put the marks on. The story underneath is that a president used the name on purpose and the State Department called it appropriate; the headline treats the word as still on approval.
CP-2001-022“Obama: ‘Palestine’ named”
Ninety years after San Antonio, on a jump page carrying Obama’s Cairo address at length. Three words and a colon, and the marks are still on. The clipping has no dateline and no masthead: the month is fixed by the speech, and the day is not on the page.
CP-2014-029“Palestinians rejoice over newly won ‘state’ status”
138 of 193 votes at the United Nations the night before. The paper accepts the vote, the margin and the rejoicing. The single word it will not print plain is the one the vote was about.
CP-2012-005“U.S. protests ‘State of Palestine’ placard in U.N.”
The argument reduced to an object on a table. Seventeen days after the State Department objected to the word on official stationery, an American ambassador objected to it on a nameplate, and the Associated Press set the contested words in quotation marks four times in one sentence. Robert Serry of the UN explained that the placard said what it said because the Secretariat “is guided by the membership.”
CP-2013-011One more sits in the same run: the second 1982 printing of the same headline (CP-1982-005).
This archive tracks the same punctuation elsewhere and finds the same thing. Nakba arrives in a headline inside quotation marks in 1983 and is still inside them in 2021 →
What the two sets have in common is that the marks never come off by argument. In the one case in this collection where a headline prints Nakba plain, it belongs to a guest column by two Jewish writers. Nobody took the marks off the word Palestine either. The last headline here still has them.
When a paper puts a word in quotation marks, check whether anybody is being quoted. If nobody is, the marks are the paper talking, and what they are saying is that the word has not been agreed to yet.
Nakba, in quotation marks, for 38 years +
A word held at arm’s length
Nakba, in quotation marks, for 38 years
Colonization is a word the American press used plainly and then dropped. Nakba is the opposite case: a word it would not take into its own voice at all.
It appears in this archive in 1983, and it arrives already quarantined: quotation marks, a translation, and an attribution to the people who use it. A quarter of a century later it is still in quotation marks.
“Already the best-educated Arabs before what they call ‘al nakba’ — the disaster —”
The Register-Guard. The earliest use here, and it carries all three devices at once.
CP-1983-005“Arab Protests Erupt in Violence. 9 people die in riots over Israel’s birth.”
San Francisco Chronicle, running Serge Schmemann of the New York Times. The headline names the day from one side. The other name appears only in the body, twice removed: “an event they call the ‘catastrophe.’” The same report notes Israeli forces killed eight Palestinians in Gaza that day, two of them eight-year-old boys.
CP-1998-004“…commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, their uprooting after…”
Stamford Advocate, in a photo caption. Here it runs without quotation marks, glossed instead. The Houston Chronicle three days later: “unrest over ‘al nakba’”. The Arizona Republic in July: “Palestinians remember ‘Nakba’”.
CP-1998-006
CP-2005-001“‘Al-Nakba denial’ pervades letter.”
The Register-Guard letters page. A reader uses the word as a word, argues about it, and counts “the 531 villages and 11 urban areas.” The readers get there before the newsroom does.
CP-2007-005“Palestinians mourn Israel’s anniversary as the ‘Nakba’. Black-clad marchers, moments of silence mark the ‘catastrophe’.”
The Day, from the Los Angeles Times. Two sets of quotation marks in one headline stack, 25 years on.
CP-2008-001“They left without anything… It was called Nakba, ‘the catastrophe.’”
The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Illinois, quoting Noor Alsaqri of Normal on what her grandparents lost in 1948. 38 years after the first of these, and the quotation marks are still there.
CP-2021-003“Palestinians rejoice over newly won ‘state’ status”
The marks travel. This is not the word Nakba and not 1948: it is the United Nations General Assembly granting Palestinians enhanced status by 138 votes of 193, reported the next morning in Houston. The paper accepts the vote, the margin and the rejoicing. The single word it will not print plain is the one the vote was about.
CP-2012-005“Remembering the Nakba on Israel’s 60th anniversary.”
Wisconsin State Journal, a guest column by Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr: “we are Jews who will not be celebrating.” No quotation marks.
CP-2008-002Every clipping here that prints the word Nakba →
Two words, opposite journeys. Colonization was the establishment’s own term for the project, printed without argument until 1948, after which it stops appearing in these papers. Nakba arrives in 1983 inside quotation marks and is still inside them in 2021, 38 years later.
What the quotation marks track here is not the year. The one headline in this collection that prints the word with no quotation marks around it belongs to a guest column by two Jewish writers saying they will not be celebrating — a piece written from inside the Palestinian account of 1948 rather than reporting on it.
Who was allowed to say genocide +
A word, and whose mouth it came out of
Who was allowed to say genocide
Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944. Four years later the United Nations wrote it into law, and in August 1948, while that debate was still going on, an American newspaper printed it about Palestine for the first time. It has been in American papers about Palestine ever since. The question worth asking is not whether it was said. It is who got to say it.
A syndicated column, 1969
The Sentinel, 14 November 1969 · Joseph Alsop
No quotation marks. No attribution. The paper’s own columnist, in the headline.
A local column, 45 years later
Lincoln Journal Star, 8 August 2014 · Ruth Raymond Thone
The first time in this collection that an American paper says it plainly, in its own voice, with Palestinians as the subject.
How this was countedEvery clipping here that uses the word, sorted by whose voice carries it. Counts are of 33 clippings found by searching for the word, so they describe this collection and not the American press.
A Palestinian, in 1980. The section above sorts the word by whose voice carries it, and this is the earliest instance in the collection where that voice is Palestinian and named. Mamoun el Sayyed, editor of the East Jerusalem paper El Fajar, quoted in a Florida daily on the settlers of Kiryat Arba: Rabbi Levinger is writing his own version of the Nuremberg laws. Kahane is inclined toward deportation and genocide.
On the same page Meir Kahane is quoted saying There is only one solution: The Arabs must leave Israel.
Twice it is the other way round. A Jewish weekly in 1948 calls what is happening to Jews in Arab countries “genocide,” in quotation marks, because the word was four years old. Alsop uses it about Israelis in 1969 with no quotation marks. And in 2014 two syndicated columnists put it in their headlines with no quotation marks in order to deny it: Genocide in Gaza is a lie worthy of Goebbels, and Facts disprove genocide charges hurled at Israel.
The word was in print the whole time. It ran with no quotation marks around it, in mainstream papers, in their own voice, for decades — to warn about Israelis, and to rebut the charge. What took until 2014 was saying it plainly about Palestinians.
The ugliest clipping in this section is the one that has to stay. In August 2002 the Atlanta Constitution reported that white supremacists in Georgia were leafleting homes with the words “stop subsidizing Israeli genocide against Palestine.” The story is about Palestinian solidarity groups barring them from the pickets. Samir Moukaddam of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee describes how the approach goes: “At some point, they start saying, ‘Jews are this and Jews are that.’” Adam Levenstein, who is Jewish and a member of Atlanta Palestine Solidarity: “We want nothing to do with these people.”
Cropped to the leaflet it would say the opposite of what the page says, so it is held whole.
What the clipping records is a tactic. Organized white-supremacist groups attach themselves to Palestinian solidarity in order to move an audience from criticizing a state to a claim about Jewish people, which is antisemitism and is the thing the leafleting is for. The people actually doing the organizing in this story say so themselves and shut it down on the spot: Moukaddam describes the pivot, Levenstein refuses the association. The leaflet is not evidence about the movement it was aimed at. It is evidence about who tries to stand next to it.
60,000 people, six verbs +
23 April 1948
60,000 people, six verbs
Haifa fell overnight. Three news agencies filed by morning, and American papers set the same number of people in motion using whichever verb they chose. Forced out. Fleeing. Set to evacuate. Forced to evacuate. Leaving. Mass exodus. One Friday.
The Associated Press filed from Haifa. Two papers in this archive ran that copy, one of them twice.
The copy underneath never changed. “Arab leaders bowed to a Jewish blitz yesterday and agreed to evacuate Haifa, one of the most important port cities in the Middle East. Zionist militia began a whirlwind attack for control of Haifa Wednesday when the British withdrew from all but the port area… By noon yesterday they had forced the Arabs to sue for peace.”
The dispatch contains both explanations, in order: an attack, a British withdrawal, Arabs forced to sue for peace, leaders agreeing to evacuate. Every one of those three headlines is a defensible reading of it. The editors were not choosing between true and false. They were choosing which half of the sentence went in large type.
One paper did both. The Idaho Statesman printed Forced Out on page one and Set To Evacuate on page three of the same edition, above the continuation of the same story.
International News Service filed from Haifa the same morning, and two more papers ran that.
The copy underneath never changed. “Haifa, April 23 (Friday) (INS) — Jewish forces won complete military control of Haifa last night and today 60,000 Arabs began a mass evacuation from the great port city on Palestine’s…”
United Press filed too, and reached the Daily Report under Report Arabs Fleeing Haifa by Land and Sea. Of the three services it is the only one that says what the Arabs of Haifa were refusing:
The Arab population of Haifa was reported fleeing by land and sea today after refusing a Jewish truce demanding they lay down their arms and submit to search. More than 6,000 fled to sea in small fishing boats across the bay to Acre.
United Press, Haifa · The Daily Report, 23 April 1948
One more sentence begins — It was understood that the British commander, Maj. Gen. H. C. Stockwell, virtually ordered the… — and runs off the edge of the clipping. What survives is enough. A truce was offered on terms, the terms were disarmament and search, and they were refused before the flight.
A third INS story, datelined Jerusalem rather than Haifa, reached the Pasadena Star-News under Militiamen Consolidate Gains in Haifa. Its copy is blunter than any of the headlines: the militiamen consolidated their positions “following a mass exodus of Arabs who fled under attack.”
Four headlines in which the 60,000 do not appear
Of the 12 clippings here from that day, four put the number and the people nowhere in the headline. The story becomes the capture of a city.
And one set the Haifa headline directly beneath an unrelated one in the same column, so the page read PUNISHMENT CONSIDERED OF NO VALUE and then 60,000 Arabs Leaving Haifa In Mass Exodus. That is the Sidney Daily News of Ohio, and it is a layout accident rather than an argument.
What the continuation page carries
The Idaho Statesman’s page three holds what no headline had room for:
Arab men, women and children began leaving the city by boat, truck and other means when the battle began… the only Arabs due to remain in Haifa will be Moslem and Christian clergymen who will watch over religious shrines. British army transport assisted in the evacuation, which will continue today.
The Idaho Statesman, Boise, 23 April 1948, page 3
They left when the battle began. Almost nobody was to remain. And the British army helped carry them out. None of that is in any of the 12 headlines, and the last clause complicates every short version of this story, including the short version this archive would find convenient.
The cable of the same morning
While these headlines were being set, the United Kingdom delegation in New York was sending Ralph Bunche at the United Nations what Jerusalem had just told it. Two letters went, on the 22nd and the 23rd. Both are public.
“Heavy firing continues with mortaring of the Suq (market) area, which is reported deserted… Arabs are evacuating in large numbers by sea to Acre… Military authorities are helping in the evacuation with landing-craft.”
United Kingdom delegation to Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, timed 9.40 a.m. Palestine time. UN document A/AC.21/UK/120. Not in this archive.
“Arab women, children and others were still being evacuated from the Suq area through the port of Haifa and other safe areas… Arabs were by this time suing for a truce and the Jews had replied that they were prepared to consider it if the Arabs stopped shooting.”
The second report from Jerusalem, sent the same day the American headlines ran. UN document A/AC.21/UK/123. Not in this archive.
The official account of that Friday has the market under mortar fire, the port being used to get women and children out, the British military supplying the landing craft, and Arab leaders asking for a truce by six in the evening. The six American verbs carry none of it. What an American reader got was a number and a choice of word for what the number was doing.
Jaffa, from 70,000 to 2,000 +
April 1948 to August 1958
Jaffa, from 70,000 to 2,000
Jaffa was the largest Arab city in Palestine, a Mediterranean port immediately south of Tel Aviv. The United Nations partition plan of November 1947 assigned it to the Arab state, as an enclave inside the Jewish one.
“Arabs Flee by Thousands as Jews Pound Jaffa in Fiercest Fighting Yet in Palestine.”
One United Press dispatch, three papers on the same morning: the Morning Advocate in Baton Rouge, the Lodi News-Sentinel in California as “Arabs Flee City Under Bombs,” and the News & Observer in Raleigh. Thousands of Arabs fled this ancient city today as men of the Jewish extremist Irgun Zvai Leumi battered the city with mortars in the fiercest attack of the five-month ‘war,’ police said tonight.
A British police superintendent is quoted by name: at least four persons were killed and 82 wounded
.
The same dispatch carries the objection from the other Jewish force: A Haganah broadcast tonight accused Irgun of ‘indulging in dangerous adventures.’
CP-1948-052“Arabs Flee Jaffa as Zionist Forces Battle Way Into City.”
The Observer, from the United Press. British tanks are now firing on the Irgun, and the Haganah is pushing in from the south. An Arab defeat seemed probable, and some 60,000 civilian Arabs in the city were seeking to escape. Some boarded Lebanese schooners and sailing ships in the harbor, and others sought to flee through the Jewish lines
The photograph above it counts them again: A reported 60,000 civilian Arabs were reported attempting to escape the city.
The Expositor in Brantford, Ontario, runs the fall of the Manshieh quarter the same day.
CP-1948-065“JEWISH FORCES SEIZE A MILE OF ARAB JAFFA.”
Chicago Tribune. Headline only; the archive holds no body text for it.
CP-1948-030“Arabs Flee Jewish Advance.”
An Associated Press photograph in the Beatrice Daily Sun, Nebraska. There is no story. The picture and its caption are the whole item: A caravan of trucks lines a street in Jaffa as residents of the Arab port city in Palestine pile their household goods aboard the vehicles during the evacuation of the city in the face of Jewish forces advancing from neighboring Tel Aviev.
CP-1948-068“Jaffa Is a Dead City.”
The Boston Globe, the day Israel declared independence and the day after Jaffa surrendered. The subheading does the arithmetic: this correspondent found only 2000 left of its 70,000 people
. The correspondent remembers what it had been: full of wild taxi drivers, donkey carts and smells of bad sanitation
.
CP-1948-034“Refugees Pin All Hopes on Nasser.”
Ten years on, a Scripps-Howard reporter in a camp outside Jericho. ‘I will show you two secrets,’ said a man with flashing black eyes outside a refugee hut near the walls of ancient Jericho. Inside the mud brick hut he untangled a muddle of old clothes and shook two objects out on the matted floor. One was a key to his abandoned house in Jaffa, Israel.
CP-1958-00670,000 people, then 2,000, in 19 days, printed at every stage in ordinary American papers while it was happening. Nothing here was uncovered later.
Three verbs for taking a Palestinian house +
1949 to 1952
Three verbs for taking a Palestinian house
In the summer of 1950 the Associated Press moved one paragraph out of Tel Aviv about the Israeli custodian of abandoned property. Three papers in this archive ran it. The copy is identical down to the figures. The headlines choose three different verbs for what happened.
“Immigrants Use Arab Properties.”
CP-1950-003“Jewish Immigrants Get Former Arab Property.”
CP-1950-004“Immigrants Taking Over Arab Property.”
CP-1950-005A year earlier the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle had described the same machinery from the inside, without a headline verb to choose: land, houses and equipment of all kinds from this source are now being disposed of systematically and legally. The army has priority on all such transactions
. And, on the economics of it: the cultivation of small orchards by a few hired hands ceased to be an economic proposition as soon as Arab cheap labor was eliminated
.
The archive holds the other direction too. In January 1950 an Associated Press photograph ran in Oklahoma under the line Arab families are reunited in Acre following repatriation of Arabs, both Christian and Moslem, who fled Palestine during the fighting.
The news agency expected more of it.
Two years after that, in St. Louis, the Arab position at the United Nations was reported as a single sentence: the Arabs would accept any form of negotiations in the Palestine dispute if Israel respected UN resolutions calling for the repatriation of Arab refugees
.
34 years of plans to settle them in someone else’s country +
Resettlement
34 years of plans to settle them in someone else’s country
15 months after the people left, the proposals start, and for 34 years they are all the same proposal: that the refugees should be permanently housed, fed and employed in Jordan, or Iraq, or Syria, or Libya — anywhere except the towns they came from. Return is not among the options discussed.
It runs for 34 years in these clippings, from a British check to a committee buying advertisements in the New York Times, and the thing being proposed never changes. Only the country named as the destination does.
“Britain Gives $2,000,000 To Resettle Arab Refugees.”
The Evening Star, Washington. Half a million pounds to Jordan “to help the Arab kingdom resettle Palestine Arab refugees on its territory.” The earliest of these, and the frame is already complete: somebody else’s territory, paid for by a third party.
CP-1949-003“Urge $800,000 UN Project To Resettle Arab Refugees.”
The Afro-American, Baltimore. 19 American public figures propose $800 million to settle them “in the Arab states,” of which $500 million is to develop those states’ natural resources so they can absorb the people. Absorption, as a budget line.
CP-1952-001“830,000 unhappy, dislocated people chased out of what now is Israel.”
Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, in a news-agency story about the resettlement program. The sentence that explains why the program exists, printed in an ordinary American daily in 1952, in the same paragraph as the proposal to make the situation permanent.
CP-1952-002“Israel Drafts Plan to Absorb Arab Refugees.”
The Daily Journal, running United Press International. “About 700,000 Palestinians who fled from what is now Israel fell under Israeli control again in this month’s war.” The number and the word Palestinians, in a news-agency dispatch, 19 years after.
CP-1967-010“Jordan no Palestine state, Hussein says.”
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland. The king rejects the proposition that “Jordan was once Palestine, making Jordan the proper Palestinian homeland.” By now the destination has a name and the argument has to be had with the country being volunteered.
CP-1982-004“Is Jordan really Palestine? Well . . .”
Houston Chronicle, Sidney Zion. “Ariel Sharon says yes. King Hussein says no. The State Department agrees with Hussein. It provides no evidence to support the king. But neither does the king.” The question asked as a question, and answered both ways on the same page.
CP-1982-020“Two million Palestinians already have a homeland in Palestine” — so says a group called the Jordan Is Palestine Committee, in ads in The New York Times.
The Morning Union, Springfield, Massachusetts, quoting the advertisement in order to answer it: “Palestinians don’t regard themselves as Jordanians… They want the opportunity to go back to Palestine, preferably to an independent Palestinian state.” A named organization, buying space in the paper of record.
CP-1983-001“Jordan is indeed Palestine.”
Chicago Tribune, Charles Chi Halevi, two months later, making the case in full: “Jordan occupied almost 77 percent of Britain’s original Palestine Mandate.” The advertisement has become a column in a major American paper.
CP-1983-002The sequence does not show that the proposal was unreasonable. It shows that across 34 years, where Palestinians should live is treated as a question with an answer, and that the answer is never the place they had left. The 1952 news-agency story is the sharpest instance: it prints the resettlement plan and the phrase chased out of what now is Israel in the same breath, and treats only the first as news.
See these ten in the archive →
How this was countedTen clippings, 1949 to 1983, found by searching for resettlement and absorption language rather than for any event. The Library of Congress puts the same vocabulary in the same papers from October 1948.
The argument that Palestinians’ own leaders caused their expulsion +
Blame within
The argument that Palestinians’ own leaders caused their expulsion
One of the oldest arguments about 1948 is that Palestinians were failed above all by their own leaders — that the Arab states told them to leave, and so their displacement is not Israel’s doing. It is usually treated as a later rationalization. It is not. It was in American newspapers in 1948, in full, with its sources named, while the people it describes were still moving.
What changes over the following 60 years is not the claim but its standing. In 1948 it arrives attributed: to a magazine, to a letter, to a named Arab official who said it himself. By 2016 it is a headline with no argument attached.
“Thus, the Arab League forced the Arabs to evacuate Palestine. " Having created the Arab ‘refugee’ problem, they now present it as an international " issue.”
Rabbi Aaron Decter, reporting from Israel for the Boston Evening Globe. The same piece sits down with the National Liberation League and the Arab Workers’ Trade Congress, names the men he spoke to, and records that in Nazareth the inhabitants “did not fight, nor did they run away.”
CP-1948-044“Arab Refugees’ Plight Caused by Own Leaders.”
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, carrying a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report of a letter by Herbert Bayard Swope in the New York Herald Tribune. It cites the London Economist on “the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive, urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit,” and quotes Emil el Ghory of the Arab Higher Committee saying the refugee problem is “the direct result of the policy of resistance to partition… and it is they who have to bear responsibility.” This is the argument at its source, seven months after the Haifa evacuation.
CP-1948-059“Martial Law Ordered by Arab Leader.”
Great Falls Tribune, Montana, running the Associated Press from northern Palestine on Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The one clipping here from the period the leaders-told-them-to-leave claim is usually made about. It reports a commander declaring martial law. It does not report anyone being told to go.
CP-1948-006“Murders linked to land sales reopen an ugly chapter.”
The Oregonian, Barbara Demick for Knight-Ridder. It opens on one man: “Ali Jumhour kissed his wife goodbye at 9 a.m. Saturday and headed off to driving school.” Three Palestinians suspected of selling land to Jews killed in a month. The Palestinian Authority blames Israelis; Israelis say Palestinian officials encouraged it. Both accusations printed, neither resolved.
CP-1997-002“Hamas takeover of Gaza.”
Chicago Tribune. A headline with no verb attached to anybody outside Gaza.
CP-2007-003“EU cuts electricity funding to Gaza, says Hamas ‘diverting’ revenues.”
Gettysburg Times, running Ibrahim Barzak of the Associated Press from Gaza City. The word is in the paper’s own quotation marks, and a Hamas adviser is given the reply in the same story: the money, he says, was stolen by the company’s former director, and the investigation will be announced. The aid-diversion frame, on the day it arrives, with its rebuttal attached.
CP-2007-004“Israel accuses Hamas of diverting aid.”
The Rock Island Argus, on Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Nine years on the quotation marks are gone from the headline and the accusation is the story rather than the occasion for one.
CP-2016-002Both cases, printed in the same year: 1958 +
1958
Both cases, printed in the same year: 1958
Every 1958 clipping in the collection, in order, on both sides of the argument.
In 1958 American papers carried the case that Palestinians had been expropriated and forced out, and the case that they were never really Palestinian and left because their own leaders told them to. Both ran in full.
“Palestinian” Patriots
The quotation marks are the headline’s own. most of the so-called Palestinian Arab refugees are probably not Palestinian at all
. And the sourcing chain, named: a British-run station which gave strong encouragement to the exodus that created the Arab refugee problem.
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World
Dorothy Thompson, syndicated. these victims of the partition of Palestine, forced out of the land of their ancestors to make room for a new immigration from elsewhere
… But to do anything for Arabs is an unpopular cause.
Jackson Citizen Patriot
Palestinian Arabs Still Expect to Regain Homes
The Associated Press, on a card worth $1.50 a month. Issued by the UN, it implicitly recognizes that he has been dispossessed
… When an Arab dies in a refugee camp, his family may bury him secretly and continue to draw his rations.
Herald News
Refugees Pin All Hopes on Nasser
Scripps-Howard, from Jericho. Inside the mud brick hut he untangled a muddle of old clothes and shook two objects out on the matted floor. One was a key to his abandoned house in Jaffa, Israel.
Four paragraphs later, both explanations in one breath: The refugees claim they were driven out at Israeli bayonet point. The Israelis say they fled with no urging
. Washington Daily News
Press cards pulled, news agencies closed +
1948 to 1988
Press cards pulled, news agencies closed
Sometimes the American newspaper tells you, in its own type, that what you are about to read has been through somebody else’s hands. Not in a memoir written later. On the page, above the first paragraph, on the morning it ran.
“JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 (Passed by Israeli censor) (AP)”
The Chicago Tribune. Four words inside the dateline, which a reader crosses on the way into the first sentence. No box, no note, no explanation of what was taken out.
CP-1948-136“EDITOR’S NOTE — The following story was submitted to the Israeli military censor, who ordered significant deletions.”
The Monitor, in bold, in its own block, before the byline. The reader is told there are holes and who made them, and is then handed the story anyway.
CP-1988-055May 1948: one survey, and the headlines disagree about who the censor is
On 10 May 1948 the Associated Press filed a survey of who was censoring what across the region. It ran all over the United States. The copy underneath is the same in every paper. The headlines are not, and they do not disagree about emphasis. They disagree about the subject of the sentence.
“Arab Censorship Strictest In Palestine War News”
The Oregonian picks Syria and Lebanon out of the survey and leads on them.
CP-1948-131“Jews Censor News, Pictures”
The Daily Record picks the other side. Three words, and the censor has a people attached to it.
CP-1948-132“Censor News, Photos Out of Palestine”
The Blizzard runs the same Jerusalem dispatch the same day with nobody in the sentence at all. Somebody censors. The headline does not say who.
CP-1948-133“War Censorship in Palestine Held Distorting All News”
The strongest of the six May printings, and the word held keeps it at one remove: somebody holds this, not the paper.
CP-1948-135What the correspondents themselves said is in the body of the Tel Aviv dispatch, and no headline carries it: that coverage had become so fragmentary and so second-hand that they had no assurance that their dispatches are not misinforming. That is not a critic’s charge. It is reporters saying it about their own copy, and American papers printing it.
October 1988: one censored dispatch, four papers
Forty years later, an Associated Press reporter named Mary Sedor filed from Yatta in the occupied West Bank on Israeli army undercover units. The dispatch went through the censor and came back shorter. It ran on a Saturday in at least four American papers.
“Undercover Israeli army units identifying Palestinian activists”
The Tri-City Herald sets the disclosure as a flagged line rather than an editor’s note, and its headline says Palestinian activists where McAllen says Arabs.
CP-1988-056“Israel undercover army units operate against Arabs in Occupied Territories”
The only one of the four whose headline names the Occupied Territories. It carries the editor’s note.
CP-1988-057“Undercover army units battling uprising”
Eleven days later, and two things have been taken out. The editor’s note is gone, so a reader in Odessa is never told the story went through a censor. And the story stops early: it ends on questions have been raised about their tactics, with an end-of-story rule under it, which cuts the journalists losing their credentials, and cuts the shooting at Yatta with the names of the two men killed. What is left is that the units exist and that officials deny the rest. It runs down a narrow column beside a full page of advertising for car batteries.
CP-1988-058The censored story reports the punishment of the journalists who would not be censored. Inside Sedor’s dispatch, seven paragraphs down, is the sentence that closes the circle: the correspondent for the Financial Times and two Reuters journalists had lost their press credentials and were being investigated by police for reporting on these same units without submitting their stories to censorship.
What the government said it was doing
Israel’s Government Press Office explained the suspensions, and an American paper printed the explanation whole. It does not argue that the reporting was wrong.
“There is no connection between the accuracy or inaccuracy of the information published and the obligation to submit news stories to the censor. In spite of Israel’s security situation, Israeli authorities respect freedom of the press and act very liberally with overseas correspondents.”
The Government Press Office, in a statement, in the same story that reports three correspondents losing their credentials.
CP-1988-059“I’m sorry we have come to a situation where such prominent journalists have to be punished… We hope it will be a clear hint for all the other journalists.”
Yossi Ahimeir, speaking for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, on suspending the press cards of Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post and Martin Fletcher of NBC News. The two had reported that Israel killed Khalil Wazir in Tunis without putting it past the censor first. This is the chilling effect described out loud by the government applying it, and printed in a South Dakota paper on a Wednesday. The paragraph below it explains why a reporter cannot comply even in good faith: anything touching security must go to the censor, and the government has not clearly defined security matters.
CP-1988-067“We waited for them to call us and they didn’t so we assumed all was OK. I assumed what I had was right.”
Martin Fletcher of NBC News, after losing his press card with Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post. The story explains that censors usually telephone correspondents when they want to block certain stories. The two were punished for what they did not do: wait for the telephone to ring.
CP-1988-060“Bethlehem, Jerusalem shops ordered closed by Israeli police”
The same morning, the same news agency, and here the credential suspensions are the last paragraph of a story about shopkeepers and flour. The phrase that introduces them is in another development.
CP-1988-061What makes that punishment strange is what was happening in American papers the same week. The thing Frankel and Fletcher lost their cards for putting in print was being argued over freely in the United States, in plainer words than either of them used.
“The government of Israel has not denied, and tends to confirm by its silence, that it ordered the murder of Khalil al-Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad… These are weak justifications for calculated state murder.”
Tom Wicker of the New York Times, syndicated to a Kansas paper on the same day the credentials story ran. He writes state murder and political assassination without hedging, and nothing happens to him, because he is in Washington and the censor’s authority stops at the border. The column also carries the argument as the Israeli press was having it: Zeev Schiff in Haaretz saying the killing cannot end an uprising that did not begin with Abu Jihad, and the paper Hadashot asking who is left to negotiate with if PLO leaders are targets.
CP-1988-068And what a reporter could see for himself
Censorship is one control. Access is another, and the archive holds a clean instance of a reporter simply counting.
“Out of 42 Israeli tanks and halftracks reported destroyed by the Jordanians, the newsmen saw only two… Israel claimed it had killed 150 El Fatah guerrillas, but a spokesman for it and two other guerrilla organizations said their losses were ‘very little’ compared to the Israelis, who acknowledged the loss of 30 men.”
The Niles Daily Star, Michigan. Two claims, and a correspondent who went and looked. The same column records what happened to the cameras: armed men clicked the bolts of their rifles and were calmed only after the newsmen’s cameras were surrendered. The headline over all of it is a Palestinian’s sentence.
CP-1968-006March 1988: the territories are closed, and so is the news agency
In the spring of 1988 the control stopped being a blue pencil and became a roadblock. On 4 March soldiers turned journalists back at the edge of the West Bank, and a North Carolina paper printed the reason officials gave and the denial they gave beside it, in consecutive paragraphs.
“There is no policy” to bar journalists from covering the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said a senior Defense Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The next paragraph is the army spokesman saying “it is not a total closure.” Four paragraphs later a soldier at a spiked barrier outside Ramallah says it without the grammar of denial: All outsiders, including the press, cannot enter. The stated reason for keeping the cameras out is in the same column — Israeli officials contend television cameras and still photographers inflame demonstrations. The correspondent turned back that day is Mary Sedor, the reporter whose dispatch seven months later would run under an editor’s note about ordered deletions.
CP-1988-066“Closing the occupied lands is intended to quell the violence by imposing collective punishment on Palestinians and to keep out journalists, whose reports the Israelis claim feed the rebellion.”
The Register, page 12A, under a banner reading WORLD. Not an accusation by a critic — a news agency sentence explaining a policy, printed in an American paper on a Wednesday. The photograph next to it shows soldiers turning a cameraman away from Ramallah, and the words above the caption are CLOSED TO TV CREWS. That same day foreign journalists asked Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the ban, the first in more than twenty years of occupation.
CP-1988-062The next morning eight police officers walked into the Palestine Press Service in east Jerusalem and shut it for six months under emergency regulations written in 1948. It was the only Arab news agency in the territories, and with the West Bank and Gaza closed to reporters it had become, in the Associated Press’s own words, a critical source for journalists. Its last filing was a report of a woman shot dead in her kitchen in Deir Abu Mashal, made moments before it was closed.
One dispatch, John Rice’s, carried both facts. Three American papers printed it the same day and could not agree which one was the headline.
“Arab Press Agency Closed”
The killing is demoted to the line above, in small caps: PALESTINIAN WOMAN SLAIN. The agency is the news; the woman is the label on it.
CP-1988-063“Israeli troops kill Arab woman, close Palestine press service”
Both, in that order, in one sentence with one subject doing both verbs. This printing also keeps two paragraphs the others cut, including the publisher’s answer to being shut down.
CP-1988-064“Israeli soldiers kill Arab woman; key Palestinian press service closed”
The only one of the three on a front page, and the only one that writes Palestinian rather than Arab for the agency. The semicolon does what the Kerrville small-caps line does, but without ranking them.
CP-1988-065Ibrahim Kareen, who published the agency, said the police told him it was being closed partly because the Palestine Liberation Organization funded it, which he denied. Then he said what he intended to do about it, and one paper in Louisiana kept the line: “All we need is a telephone.”
Two paragraphs further down the same dispatch is the sentence that shows how far the closure reached. The hospital staff who described the shooting would not give their names, and the reason is printed: the officials, who have been banned from speaking to journalists, insisted on anonymity. Not the reporters, the doctors.
Before and after: an exhibit, and a reporter
Four years before the Palestine Press Service was shut, it was the source that gave an American paper the other description of a room.
“The east Jerusalem-based Palestine Press Service said 10 people were arrested late yesterday at An-Najah University in Nablus. It said the Israelis stormed into an exhibit of Palestinian folklore.”
The next paragraph is the occupation authorities’ account of the same room: a hostile exhibit, including nationalistic and provocative displays. Among the weapons the spokesman lists as confiscated are a plastic M-16 and a wooden model of a Kalashnikov. A man who answered the university’s telephone said everything was closed.
CP-1984-005“Our family shouldn’t have to wait another day for justice… No other Palestinian-American or journalist family should have to endure what ours has.”
Anton Abu Akleh, speaking about his sister Shireen, a correspondent for Al Jazeera and one of the best known reporters in the Arab world. She was wearing a helmet and a vest marked press when she was shot in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. The complaint her family joined accuses Israel of deliberately killing and wounding Palestinian journalists wearing press vests. Seventy-four years separate this from the Chicago dateline at the top of this section, and what is being controlled has moved from the copy to the correspondent.
CP-2022-052None of this is a claim that American newspapers were lied to, and this archive cannot show what was cut. The deletions are not on the page; that is what a deletion is. What is on the page is the mechanism, printed: a dateline saying the story was passed, an editor’s note saying deletions were ordered, a press office saying accuracy is not the point, and a reporter counting tanks because counting was the only thing nobody could take off him.
The next time you read a sentence that begins officials said, the useful question is not whether it is true. It is what the reporter was in a position to check.
The word for what they said +
1919 to 2002
The word for what they said
In June 1919 a newspaper in Binghamton, New York printed fifteen sentences that Palestinians had written about their own country. It printed them in order to explain that they were propaganda.
Britain had just taken Palestine from the Ottoman Empire and promised to support a Jewish homeland there. Palestinians were most of the people living in the country, and had not been asked. What follows is one of the ways they said so, and what an American newspaper called it.
The article is the fourth in a series by a correspondent named Marion Weinstein, and what it describes, once you read past the headline, is a small act of publishing. Palestinians were writing political sentences and having them printed on perforated sheets, small enough that a single square could go through the post or be handed to somebody in the street without the British noticing. Weinstein had a set. It held thirty-five of them, and the article calls them “Sentiments.”
“So they hit upon the idea of printing anti-Zionist sentiments on perforated sheets of paper. One of these little squares could easily be slipped through the post or a few distributed in the streets without attracting attention.”
Two paragraphs earlier the same article describes the Zionist movement’s own publicity effort as a dignified campaign. The difference between a campaign and propaganda, on this page, is not a difference in method. Both sides are circulating arguments. One of them is named.
CP-1919-016Because the article reprints what it is condemning, it preserves it. Here are three of the fifteen it reprints, carried to Binghamton by a paper that wanted them dismissed, eighty-three years before an American columnist would write that there had never been such a people.
“Palestine is the soul of the Arab movement.”
“Palestine is a Moslem, Christian, and Arabic country.”
“Every Jew is a Zionist and every Palestinian is an Arab.”
And a street poster from Nablus, translated in the same column, which opens with a word of address: “To the Palestinians.”
The piece ran at least three times. The two other printings in this archive are the same numbered article and they disagree only about the headline.
“New Arab-Jewish Crisis Result of Propaganda”
The only one of the three that drops anti-Zionist and leaves the word standing by itself as the cause of the crisis. It is also the one that shows the thing itself: a plate in the middle of the page reproduces four of the Arabic stickers and translates each of them underneath. PALESTINE IS OUR OWN COUNTRY. BE ON YOUR GUARD AGAINST ZIONISM. PALESTINE IS THE FORTRESS OF SYRIA. IF ZIONISM SUCCEEDS IN PALESTINE WOE TO SYRIA. The line under the plate says how they traveled: mailed one by one to thwart the censor.
CP-1919-018“Arab-Jewish Crisis in Palestine Result of Anti-Zionist Propaganda”
Page three, between a Ripley cartoon and a ladies’ and children’s shoe sale. This printing reproduces the Arabic leaflet as a photograph, captioned One Form of Anti-Zionist Propaganda Used by Antagonistic Arabs in Palestine. The document is shown. What it says is not translated.
CP-1919-017Who else the word covered
Once a word is available it gets used, and the strange thing about this one is how quickly it stopped needing the speaker to be Palestinian. Over the next fifty years it was applied to a lecture bureau running out of seven American cities, to a president’s pastor, to a Jewish council, to the student organization at the center of the Black civil rights movement, to charities feeding refugees, and to a man showing tourists around the city he lived in.
“They furnish lecturers to all parts of the United States, on any Middle East topic from archaeology to oil-politics.”
Arab-American organizations in seven cities, circulating articles and sending out speakers. Their own description of themselves — purely educational, open to non-Arabs, American with no foreign connections — is printed inside quotation marks, which is how a paper prints a claim it is not accepting.
CP-1945-015“Study of Arab Propaganda Here Lists Role of Anti-Zionist Jews”
The clipping that shows what the word was really testing for. Everyone this study files inside the Arab propaganda machine is an American, and the ones it credits most credit are Jews: a council, an author, President Eisenhower’s pastor, an executive director quoted saying precisely because we are Jews. Americans of Arab descent come further down the list. The test is not who is speaking.
CP-1957-022“He described SNCC as a ‘black racist and leftwing revolutionary organization’ and its ‘polar opposite, NSRP,’ as ‘neo-Nazi, white racist.’”
Four months after the June 1967 war. The Anti-Defamation League is the Jewish civil rights organization founded in 1913 to fight antisemitism. SNCC is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group behind the lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Summer. What the report asserts between them and a neo-Nazi party is not a shared politics, since it insists the two are opposites. It is a shared source, and the charge is word-for-word dependence. That is a claim about where a sentence came from rather than whether it is true. A second news agency carried the same announcement four days later and put SNCC first in the headline.
CP-1967-030“Many welfare groups to alleviate the plight of Arab refugees have been established or reactivated… In some of them, ‘humanitarian aims … seem to be accompanied by ill will or propagandistic intent toward Israel.’”
Church congregations, student groups, Black organizations and refugee relief are all listed as fronts or targets. Once relief itself is a delivery system, there is no form the speech can take that clears the bar.
CP-1969-012“Security forces are investigating complaints from tourists that some of the guides from East Jerusalem are propagating Palestine Liberation Organization propaganda and turning tourists against Israel.”
Seven sentences, and this is the whole item. A tourist complains about what a guide said; the Tourism Department passes it to the security services. What is under investigation is a man describing the city he is from.
CP-1978-010“PLO Propaganda Offensive Becomes Intense in Argentina”
The offensive is a United Nations day of solidarity, observed in a municipal hall, with two members of the Argentine parliament speaking and a Jewish human rights group attending. The copy describes their invitation as very warm.
CP-1985-009Where it ends up
In April 2002 a syndicated column ran in Toledo. By then the word has stopped being applied to what Palestinians say and has been applied to Palestinians.
“The whole idea of a Palestinian nation and a Palestinian people is an invention of Arab propaganda… It is not and never was ‘Palestinian land.’”
The column’s evidence that the country was empty is a traveler’s impression of one valley in 1867.
CP-2002-029This archive can answer that from its own shelves, and it does not need an argument to do it. Twenty-six years after Mark Twain rode through the Jezreel valley, an Ohio newspaper printed a report on the port of Jaffa, which it said was surrounded on the land side by orange groves covering 1,780 acres, doubled in fifteen years, irrigated by hand from wells dug ninety and a hundred feet deep.
“The port of Jaffa is surrounded on the land side by orange groves, covering an area of 1,780 acres. New orange groves are constantly being planted, and there are now double as many as there were 15 years ago.”
Nobody arguing about anything. An export trade with a shelf life and a shipping problem, written up for American readers nine years before the word propaganda arrives in this collection.
CP-1893-001None of these papers were lying, and most of them were not even hostile in the way the 2002 column is. The 1919 correspondent went to the trouble of translating a poster. The 1957 report is careful about names and titles. The word is not a lie. It is a filing system. Call something propaganda and the question of whether it is true never has to be opened, and the reader is let off having to decide.
When a claim is described as propaganda, the thing to notice is not whether the label fits. It is whether anybody, anywhere in the piece, went on to test whether the sentence was true.
The word that waited for a verdict +
1956 to 2001
The word that waited for a verdict
On the evening of 29 October 1956 Israeli border police shot forty-eight people at Kafr Qasim, a village inside Israel, as they came back from the fields. A curfew had been imposed that afternoon, in their absence. The same day, Israel invaded Sinai.
No American newspaper printed a word about the killings for forty-four days. The story was held under Israeli military censorship and broke only when the government disclosed it on 12 December. This section is about what happened to the language once it did break, because the archive now holds nine American papers from the week of the disclosure and a further seven from the week of the verdict, and the difference between them is not a difference in the facts.
“Israel Discloses Killing Of Arabs In Curfew Tift.”
Day forty-four. A tift is a petty quarrel, a spat. Forty-eight people had been shot dead walking home from their fields. Of the nine papers in this archive that carried the disclosure, this is the smallest word any of them reached for.
CP-1956-027“48 ARABS KILLED; ISRAEL PENITENT.”
The only one of the nine to lead with the count and the verb killed. Then a semicolon, and the rest of the sentence is about the condition of Israel’s conscience. Penitent is a word about the state of a soul.
CP-1956-033“Bare Slaying by Error of 48 Israeli Arabs.”
No court had sat and no commission had reported. The headline has already settled the question of cause.
CP-1956-030“Knesset Makes Amends to Families of Arabs Slain As Curfew Violators.”
Eleven months later, on 22 November 1957, the same masthead printed the reason they were out: “Unaware of a curfew imposed on the area in their absence,” coming back from the fields the evening Israel opened the Sinai drive. Here they are violators, and the news in the sentence is the compensation.
CP-1956-038“Protests Killing Of Arab Villagers By Israelis.”
The one December headline in this archive that puts Israelis where the actor goes. It exists because a Palestinian filed a complaint: Dr. Izzat Tannous, of the Palestine Arab Refugee Office in New York, who cabled the President of the General Assembly. The agent appears only inside somebody else’s protest.
CP-1956-034“Eight Israelis Ruled Guilty In Massacre Of 43 Arabs.”
Twenty-two months on, and the word massacre enters this archive’s coverage of Kafr Qasim for the first time. It arrives the week an Israeli court convicted eight policemen of murder, and then it is everywhere: Baltimore, Phoenix, Washington, Palm Beach, New York, inside four days.
CP-1958-012“ISRAEL SENTENCES 8 FOR MASSACRE.”
The same newspaper, the same killing. In December 1956 it was Israel penitent. In October 1958 it is a massacre. Nothing about what happened at Kafr Qasim changed in the interval. A court had ruled, and the paper followed the court.
CP-1958-023“Judge Benjamin Halevi accused two of the convicted men — Lt. Gabriel Dehan and Lt. Shalmo Offer — of cold-bloodedly murdering unarmed men, women and children who were peacefully returning to their homes.”
The fullest account in the archive, and the only one that carries the judge’s own words. It puts the count at forty-seven; other papers that week say forty-three, forty-eight and forty-nine.
CP-1958-017“Eichmann Judge Showed Independence In Arab Case.”
Benjamin Halevi is about to try Adolf Eichmann, and a Kentucky newspaper introduces him to American readers through the case in which he convicted Israeli policemen of murdering Arabs. Both trials in one headline, three years apart.
CP-1961-005“Two officers involved in the incident received lengthy prison terms from a military court, but their sentences were reduced… Within three years they were released.”
How it ended, reported thirty-two years later, in a paragraph inside a story about something else. The same paragraph says the village has become a symbol for Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel who believe they cannot get equal justice.
CP-1988-086“Villagers who were in the fields and did not know of the curfew were shot dead by members of the Israeli Border Police as they returned to their homes. Several Border Police officers were sentenced to long prison terms but these were commuted.”
Filed from Paris on the anniversary, inside a story about Israeli schoolbooks. Two plain sentences supply what forty-three years of headlines had left out: they had not been told, and the men who shot them did not serve their sentences.
CP-1999-017“I won’t vote, and neither will 95 percent of the village, said Ali Sarsur, 38, a roofer donating his time for the construction of a mosque.”
Forty-five years on the village is a dateline rather than an incident. An American news-agency reporter files from it two days before an Israeli election, and the history gets one sentence: in 1956 riot police enforcing a curfew killed forty-nine villagers for violating the restrictions.
CP-2001-031Line up the December headlines and read only the verbs. Israel regrets. Israel discloses. Israel mourns. Israel reveals. Israel is penitent. Israel says the Arabs were innocent. In nearly every one, the state is the grammatical subject and what is being reported is its conduct afterward — its sorrow, its candour, its remorse. The forty-eight people are the object of the sentence. One paper called it a tift.
Then look at the single December headline that puts Israelis in the actor’s place. It is in a Louisiana paper, and it is there because a Palestinian in New York cabled the United Nations. The agent arrives attached to a complaint, which is the pattern this archive finds again and again: when the source is official, the sentence has no one in it; when the source is Palestinian, it does.
The word massacre does not appear anywhere in 1956. It appears in October 1958, in the same week an Israeli court convicted eight policemen of murder, and then it is in five papers inside four days. The New York Times moves from Israel penitent to Israel sentences 8 for massacre without a single new fact about the killing. What changed is that a judge had used the word first, and the press was willing to follow a court where it had not been willing to lead.
Two things finish the story and neither is in a headline. The sentences, seven to seventeen years, were cut on appeal and every man was free within three. And it was 1999 before an American newspaper put in one place the two facts that decide what the word should have been all along: the villagers did not know about the curfew, and the men who shot them did not serve their sentences.
When an event takes a long time to acquire its name, the question is not what the papers believed. It is who they were waiting to hear it from.
The commission, and the one paper that printed it +
1987 to 1999
The commission, and the one paper that printed it
On Sunday 27 December 1987, four American newspapers printed the same dispatch about the same thing: the Israeli army preparing military trials for about a thousand Palestinians arrested in the first two weeks of the uprising. One of those four told its readers that an Israeli judicial commission had just found that the security service’s agents had committed perjury, and had made a measure of physical force against prisoners lawful. The other three did not. The one that did was the Anniston Star, in a town of about thirty thousand people in north-east Alabama.
This section is about the Landau Commission, which reported in October 1987 under a former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, and about what happened to it on the way to an American reader. The companion section, where the confirmation came from, is about the allegations. This one is about the document that answered them, and about the twelve years it stood.
“Israel’s security force chastised, not prosecuted.”
The commission reported at the end of October 1987 and this is a Maine paper’s summary of it in five words. Chastised is doing the work that prosecuted would have done.
CP-1987-032“The Israeli army is preparing to begin military trials for nearly a thousand Palestinians rounded up after two weeks of disturbances in the occupied territories.”
John Kifner’s dispatch, three weeks into the first intifada. Four American papers in this archive printed it on the same Sunday. Watch what each one keeps.
CP-1987-037“Israeli military to try Palestinian protesters.”
Waco keeps the trials and calls the thousand people protesters. The commission is not in this version.
CP-1987-038“Ninety percent of the cases involving Palestinians from the occupied territories never involved actual trials.”
Florida keeps the lawyer, Lea Tsemel, who has not been allowed to visit anyone, and the figure that makes the headline strange: nine in ten of these cases never reached a trial at all. The commission is not in this version either.
CP-1987-039“The investigation, by the Landau Commission, also found that Shin Beth agents had perjured themselves in court about the practice.”
The Anniston Star, carrying John Kifner of the New York Times, and spelling it Shin Beth as the news-agency copy did. The commission had found that for sixteen years the service tortured Palestinian suspects into confessing; its report held that the use of ‘mild physical pressure should not be avoided’ when psychological means failed, while adding that agents should not lie about it in court. The paper then notes that the report ‘did not explain what would constitute’ mild physical pressure. Jonathan Kuttab, a lawyer, says that now the phrase has been legitimized the test becomes whether a judge believes the confession: ‘Nobody knows what it means… It’s a secret guideline.’ Felicia Langer, on the secret evidence, says something else: ‘It is a terrible wall of secrecy… You are helpless as a lawyer, you don’t know what you are defending against.’
CP-1987-040“Israeli Study Finds Torture Common.”
Five years on, an Israeli study, and the commission’s phrase is now the standard against which the practice is measured. The case it turns on is Mustafa Akawi, who died in Israeli custody that February.
CP-1992-017“The 1987 Landau Commission — in the words of the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem) — ‘ended up legitimating the use of torture’ with its sanction of ‘moderate physical pressure.’”
Not a news article. A reader’s letter, correcting a government minister quoted in the paper five days earlier, in a story about a Palestinian who had just died under interrogation. The clearest statement of what the commission did, anywhere in this archive, and it arrives in the letters column.
CP-1995-008“He was kept sleepless in contorted and excruciating positions with a stinking bag over his head, he was threatened, he was beaten and he was subjected to violent shaking until he passed out.”
Serge Schmemann’s special report, filed the day the United Nations Committee Against Torture summoned Israel to Geneva. It names the official term, says human rights groups call it torture, and states plainly that the Israeli Supreme Court has regularly condoned the practice. The man it opens on is a twenty-year-old student called George.
CP-1997-011“Israel’s top court bans agents from torturing suspects.”
Twelve years after the commission permitted it, the court restricts it.
CP-1999-013“Israel Supreme Court outlaws torture of Palestinian suspects.”
The same ruling the same morning, two words different. Bans becomes outlaws, and this paper says whose torture it was.
CP-1999-014Put the four versions of 27 December side by side and the difference is not accuracy. Every one of them is true. It is how much room the page had, and what an editor decided a reader needed. Three papers gave their readers a thousand arrests and a courtroom. The fourth gave them the arrests, the courtroom, the perjury, the phrase that made it lawful, and a lawyer saying she did not know what she was defending against.
What the commission permitted, the court restricted in September 1999, and two American papers put that in a headline the same morning. Neither ruling ended the reporting. The allegations in the companion section continue through 2020, which is as far as this collection follows them.
The next time a finding like this is described as obscure, or as something that only came out later, it is worth asking where it was published at the time. In this case it was on page 6A of a small Alabama daily, beside an advertisement for discounted sterling silver.
What it costs to give birth +
1993 to 2008
What it costs to give birth
In April 1996 soldiers at an Israeli checkpoint refused to let Fayza Abu Dahouk through on her way to a hospital in Jerusalem. She was 22, from Nabi Samuel, and her baby was born six weeks early and died. A paper in Tucson, Arizona printed her name.
Six clippings here follow what it took for a Palestinian woman to have a child, and they do not all point the same way. Two of them are about the occupation. Two of them are about her own family and her own society. One of them is about both at once, and one is eight words long.
“The center only dispenses contraceptives to women whose husbands consent, and advises that they be used only for spacing between pregnancies, not to limit the number of children. It does not perform sterilizations.”
Mirray Jhniem of the Women’s Resource Center, the main source of contraceptives in the occupied territories, explaining her own clinic’s rules to an American news-agency reporter. She gives two reasons: the center has to stay clear of Muslim fundamentalists and political activists, and the PLO encourages childbirth to compete demographically with Israel. Palestinian women are being pressed from inside and outside at once, and this is the inside.
CP-1993-014“A Palestinian woman who was raped by a brother-in-law, got pregnant, gave birth last May and was critically beaten by relatives while in the maternity ward.”
Nadera Kevorkian, a sociologist at Bethlehem University, speaking as the first women’s shelter in the Arab world opened. The ward is where the beating happened.
CP-1994-014“A Bedouin woman denied access to a Jerusalem hospital at an Israeli checkpoint gives birth six weeks early.”
Fayza Abu Dahouk, 22, of Nabi Samuel. Soldiers at the checkpoint refused to let her through; the baby came six weeks early and died. The headline blames roadblocks, which is more agency than most headlines in this archive assign. She is named, which almost none of them are.
CP-1996-014“Malake Kafishe lives in Hebron’s Old City, and she was seven months’ pregnant last November when the Israeli military attacked.”
A Florida paper, under a headline that says what it is about: Palestinian women suffer under occupation. The specificity is the seven months.
CP-2001-019“An Israeli and a Palestinian gave birth after being shot.”
One clause, in a front-page summary box, between a weapons lesson in Gaza and a fifteen-year-old girl killed running at soldiers with a knife. Two women were shot and then gave birth, and they share eight words and no names.
CP-2002-057“Palestinian women giving birth at checkpoints because Israeli soldiers won’t let them through (four documented cases last year).”
Twelve years after Tucson printed one of these with a name on it, a traveller’s column from Hebron counts them. The count sits inside a parenthesis, in a list, between a barbed-wire fence built in 2004 and the diversion of water.
CP-2008-016Read in order they make an argument that is harder than the one either side usually offers. The checkpoint is real: a named woman lost a baby at one in 1996, and a column counted four more documented cases in a single year twelve years later. The pressure from inside is also real: a clinic that would not give a woman contraceptives without her husband’s signature, a national movement that wanted higher birth rates, and a woman beaten by her own relatives in a maternity ward. The same decade holds all of it.
What the archive does not hold is any evidence for the claim that circulates most: that Palestinian women were sterilized against their will. Nothing here supports it, and the one clipping in this collection that uses the word says the opposite — that the clinic did not perform the procedure at all. The documented reproductive harm in these pages is a checkpoint, a delay, and a birth that came too early.
Any account of what was done to Palestinian women has to answer the question this archive asks of everything else: which page, which day, whose name. For one of them the answer is Fayza Abu Dahouk, Nabi Samuel, 9 April 1996, the Tucson Citizen.
Where the confirmation came from +
1950 to 2020
Where the confirmation came from
Yasser Faour had been in Beersheba prison nine years when his body was sent back to Lebanon in December 1979. The PLO said he was tortured to death. An Israeli police spokesman said the death was not the result of violence. The paper printed both, and then printed a third thing, which neither side had any reason to dispute: Faour’s father had died while visiting him in that prison.
This section is about the seventy years of American newspaper reports that the Faour story sits inside, and about one thing those reports have in common. The allegation is old. It is being denied in these pages in 1950, and a denial of “reports published here and abroad” is not the beginning of a record — it is a reply to one. What is worth noticing is not that the charge recurs. It is who keeps confirming it.
“Captain Idelovitch and his chief, Inspector General Yehezkiel Sahar, denied reports published here and abroad that captured infiltrators had been maltreated and, in some cases, tortured.”
Twenty-seven years before the first United Nations report in this section, two Israeli police officials are already answering the charge in the New York Times. Read what they are answering. Not an allegation somebody has just made — reports published here and abroad. Here is the American press. A denial dated 1950 means the thing being denied is older than that.
CP-1950-009“Israel frequently tortures Arab prisoners with hypnosis, electric shocks and having ‘their manliness mocked’ by Israeli women soldiers.”
A United Nations special committee reports it and Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, calls the report “biased, false and one-sided,” built on hearsay and the work of “Arab propagandists.” Then the news agency lists where the committee’s evidence came from: an Israeli defense lawyer, the Sunday Times of London, the Red Cross and the Jerusalem Post. Not one of those four is Palestinian.
CP-1977-003“Israeli torture of Arab prisoners in the occupied territories may be a widespread and even common practice.”
That sentence is not an accusation made by anybody in this story. It is the conclusion of a confidential United States State Department cable, filed from Jerusalem on 31 May 1978 and known by its number, Jerusalem 1500. An American newspaper printed its own government’s cable traffic. Three Palestinians describe what was done to them, and the paper explains in its own voice why it will not fully name them: their relatives in Jerusalem and the West Bank could suffer for it.
CP-1979-001“Pathological tests were being conducted to determine how Faour died, but said his death was ‘not the result of violence.’”
Yasser Faour had been in Beersheba prison for nine years when his body was returned to Tyre. The PLO says he was tortured to death; an Israeli police spokesman says he was not. The paper prints both, and then one more fact that neither side disputes: Faour’s father had died while visiting him in that same prison.
CP-1979-002“The most preposterous accusations, which only remind me of the… Goebbels technique of the big lie.”
May Sadegh, leading the Palestinian delegation at the United Nations Decade for Women conference, said Palestinian women were tortured and sexually abused in Israeli jails. Her charge is summarized in a single clause; the rest of the item is Tamar Eshel’s refutation of it. The headline is Israeli denies torture charges — the denial is the news, and the charge survives only as its object.
CP-1980-001“Halim’s decapitated and decomposed body was discovered Friday by Arab shepherds at Beit Horon.”
Hassan Abdel Halim disappeared while researching fraudulent land purchases in the West Bank. His brother says he was kidnapped and tortured before he died. On the Monday the police said it appeared he had been killed making a bomb; by the Tuesday they had retracted it. His brother, his colleagues and the police are all quoted, and they do not agree.
CP-1988-017“Israeli police and the Shin Bet security service routinely use violence while interrogating Palestinian minors.”
The finding is B’Tselem’s — an Israeli human rights organization, reporting on Israeli practice. The children in it are quoted and unnamed, and again the paper says why: Israeli law. The police answer that every complaint is investigated, and a spokeswoman acknowledges that prison conditions need to be improved.
CP-1990-008“Palestinians under interrogation have been violently shaken, shackled in painful positions with foul-smelling sacks on their heads and deprived of sleep.”
Abd al-Samed Hreizat, 30, of Hebron, died in Israeli custody; a pathologist’s affidavit says his head was snapped. Read the sentence above again for where the Times says it comes from. Not a human rights report, and not the family: accounts by former prisoners, and court testimony given by Shin Bet agents themselves.
CP-1995-006“The worst thing about his 40-day imprisonment by the Israeli government wasn’t that he was in solitary confinement in a one-by-two-meter cell. It was that the clothes they gave him smelled like urine.”
Mamdouh Al-Aker, a doctor from Ramallah, held in 1991. He never saw papers saying what he was charged with and was never brought to trial. He is named, he is quoted at length, and he is speaking to a Wisconsin newspaper eleven years after the fact — which is roughly how long it takes for a Palestinian to describe this in his own name.
CP-2002-046“The interrogator also comments on her body, fair skin and ‘eyes of an angel.’”
Ahed Tamimi was sixteen. Her family released the video; an American paper printed what the interrogator said to her, including the threat to arrest her relatives if she would not cooperate. She asserts her right to remain silent and does not answer. The Israeli military says the complaint is being thoroughly examined.
CP-2018-003“One of the men was hospitalized with kidney failure and 11 broken ribs. Another was nearly unrecognizable to his wife when he was wheeled into a courtroom.”
A third had been stitched up after a security dog attacked him. All three were then returned to their interrogators. Forty-three years after the United Nations committee, the news-agency copy still arrives in the shape it arrived in 1977: what was done, who says so, and the official answer, in that order. The same dispatch ran in the Telegraph the same morning.
CP-2020-011Read the sources down the left-hand side. A United Nations committee citing an Israeli defense lawyer and the Red Cross. A confidential cable from the American embassy in Jerusalem. An Israeli human rights organization. Sworn court testimony from Shin Bet agents. An Israeli pathologist’s affidavit. Israel’s own Supreme Court, invoked as the standard in 2020. In forty-three years of these clippings, almost every corroboration an American reader was given came from an American or an Israeli institution, reporting on itself.
The second pattern is who gets a name. Faour is named because he is dead. Hreizat is named because he is dead. The three men in 1979 are not named, and the paper says why: their families could suffer for it. The children in 1990 are not named, and the paper says why: Israeli law. Nobody who conducted an interrogation is named in any of these clippings. The officials who issue the denials are named in all of them — Chaim Herzog, Tamar Eshel, a police spokesman, a military spokeswoman.
The commission that answered all this reported in October 1987, and what it permitted stood for twelve years before Israel’s Supreme Court restricted it. Only one of the four American papers in this archive that carried the story that December printed what it had found. That is its own section.
Hear this called a recent allegation, or something only Palestinians say, and the question to ask is narrow: who was the source. In these clippings, for forty-three years, it was almost never a Palestinian. It was a cable, a commission, a courtroom, or a pathologist.
Held without charge, for eighty-four years +
1939 to 2023
Held without charge, for eighty-four years
Twenty-seven clippings here carry a Palestinian prison story in the headline, across twenty-four papers, from 1939 to 2023. Read in order they are not twenty-seven stories. They are one arrangement, told again and again: a person can be taken and held with no charge, no trial and no end date. That is not the system breaking down. It is a category inside it.
The category has a name in the clippings, and it changes — emergency defense regulations, administrative detainee, security prisoner — but the substance holds. Start with one woman, because the first record here is about one woman and an editor.
“Editor in Jail, Arabs Aroused”
Sathij Nassar, 48, co-editor of the Arabic weekly El Carmel, was serving three months in a concentration camp — the paper’s own words, printed in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1939 — as the first Arab woman sentenced under the emergency defense regulations. The charge was contributing inflammatory articles to her own newspaper. The detail that gives the whole section its shape is one clause: “News of her arrest was suppressed for a week in the interest of public security.” The United Press also records what she did before the arrest: she went to the All-Arab Women’s Congress in Cairo as a member of the Palestine delegation, and was elected permanent secretary of its executive committee.
CP-1939-005Nassar was jailed in 1939, nine years before Israel existed, and that is the point rather than an objection to it. The order that held her was made under the emergency defense regulations the British wrote for Palestine. Israel kept those regulations, and American newspapers have said so plainly ever since.
“a practice held over from British Mandate rule that allows the army to jail Palestinians without trial or charges”
A Minnesota paper, defining administrative detention in the middle of a story about about 300 Palestinian minors rounded up in a year. The same continuity is reported in 1967, when arrests are made under emergency regulations the British wrote in 1945; in 1988, when Israel closes the Palestine Press Service for six months under 1948 emergency regulations; and in 2023, when the Boston Globe traces house demolitions to a British Mandate regulation of 1945. Four papers, fifty-six years, the same instrument.
CP-2003-004Forty-three years later, a Texas paper explained the mechanism more plainly than any other clipping in this archive, and did it while reporting on a war.
The category, stated outright
“Israel’s position appears to be in violation of the Geneva Convention”
That is Douglas Watson of the Baltimore Sun, writing in his own voice and not quoting anybody, in a story the Houston Chronicle printed. Israel had taken 6,000 Palestinians in Lebanon and was holding them as administrative detainees; the 60 Syrian soldiers captured in the same invasion were regarded in all aspects as prisoners of war. The reason given is the whole argument: the Palestinians were not serving in the army of a recognized state. The paper then prints Article 2 of the Convention against that reasoning, and notes the thing Israel was actually weighing — that if the Palestinians got no protection, neither would the ten Israeli soldiers held by the PLO.
CP-1982-036Statelessness is not incidental to the category. It is the qualification for it. A person with no recognized state cannot be a prisoner of war, so he becomes something with no fixed term.
The number that never settles
Every paper counts. No two counts agree, and none of them is corrected by the next one.
“Four thousand Arabs are in jail for political reasons”
Felicia Langer, an Israeli lawyer born in Poland whose husband survived Buchenwald, defending Palestinians charged with offenses that ran, in the paper’s summary, from passing out leaflets to giving a glass of water to a demonstrator. Her flat verdict on the courts: “There’s nothing lawful in the eyes of the authorities.”
CP-1976-010“We have 10,000 prisoners in jail, and the world cares only for this one Israeli prisoner.”
Mohsin Jirjawi, in Al Shifa hospital, where his wounded nephew was. The same page reports that the Palestinian Authority keeps a ministry with 300 bureaucrats simply to track who is inside, and that its own minister was by then in prison. It also reports Fakhri al-Barghouti of Ramallah sharing a cell with two of his sons, all three serving long sentences, and a woman shackled while she was taken in for a Caesarean section.
CP-2006-010Across the clippings the running total is given as 4,000 in 1976, about 2,000 in 1999, more than 5,300 in 2003, 9,200 in 2007, 10,000 in 2006 and about 4,500 in 2012. The papers are not lying to each other. They are each printing whichever figure the source in front of them offered, and nobody is counting the same category twice.
The only thing left to withhold
What a person holds when nothing else is his to give is whether he eats. Six clippings here are about that, and the earliest is about not being allowed to do it.
“Israel bars hunger strike by Arab mayors in Gaza”
The mayors were not prisoners. They planned to meet at Red Cross headquarters and refuse food for one day, in sympathy with Bassam Shakaa of Nablus, who had been arrested and ordered deported with no formal charges brought. Soldiers stopped them on the way. The Gaza mayor, Rashid A-Shawa, was turned back before he had walked 100 yards from his home.
CP-1979-018“conditions are not bad enough to warrant street riots”
Israel opened its main West Bank prison to Israeli, Arab and foreign journalists, who were allowed to interview fasting inmates at random, out of earshot of the wardens. The Associated Press states the purpose without varnish: the government was eager to prove to inmates’ families that conditions did not warrant riots. The prison commissioner offered ventilators in the cells and a taller television aerial to pick up Syrian and Jordanian broadcasts, and said of the crowding that “we have nothing to be ashamed of.” None of the inmates would say why he was there.
CP-1992-010“an Israeli Cabinet minister said he’d rather let them starve”
The prisoners wanted more family visits and telephone access. Prison officials responded by imposing more sanctions. The demands are worth holding beside the answer.
CP-2004-018“Under the terms of the deal, Israel may continue the practice.”
Twenty-eight days without food, 1,600 prisoners, the longest such strike organized by Palestinians, and a Palestinian minister calls the settlement a victory. What the strikers won: eighteen men out of solitary, family visits from Gaza, a promise that the more than 300 men held indefinitely without charges or a trial would be charged or released at the end of their current terms. What they did not win is in the sentence above. The practice stays.
CP-2012-009“Hunger strikes are one of the few nonviolent tools left to Palestinians”
Dana Moss, after a prisoner died in Israeli custody following a strike of nearly three months. The last clipping in this run, eighty-four years after Sathij Nassar, and the sentence that gets printed is the one explaining why anybody would do this at all.
CP-2023-027Released as a favor
The other half of these clippings is about letting people out, and almost every one of them uses the same word for it.
“worthless and meaningless”
Yasser Abed Rabbo on the release of 334 men, which Israel called a goodwill gesture and a Sharon adviser called a trust-building move. More than 180 of the 334 had been convicted of offenses the paper lists as running from stone-throwing to membership in “terrorist organizations”, and at least 150 had been held without trial on unspecified “security grounds.” A release is a gift only if the holding was ever a right.
CP-2003-014“Israel had agreed to release 256 prisoners, but one was held back for further security checks”
The same Associated Press report ran that day in Hanover, Pennsylvania under 255 Palestinian prisoners released and in Bay City, Michigan under Israel releases 250 Palestinian prisoners today. Only the first printing carries the sentence above, so only one set of readers learns that the number in the other paper’s headline is a number that moved. Every man freed had to sign an undertaking first.
CP-2007-015And then the children
“We were not even allowed to see the sun.”
Amer Salah, taken from his bedroom in the middle of the night at 14 and held with nine other boys in a cell about six feet by six. The paper gives the scale from the Israeli Prison Service’s own statistics: 420 Palestinians under the age of 18, the youngest aged eleven. Court figures obtained under freedom of information show bail denied to 70 percent of the Palestinian children detained. B’Tselem’s spokeswoman does not dispute the attacks and does not need to: even when involved in serious offenses, a child offender is still a child.
CP-2016-001A United Nations committee reported in 1977 that Israeli agents made frequent use of torture on Arab prisoners, and the strongest evidence it cited was not Arab testimony but the Israeli press and the International Red Cross. Israel called the report biased and refused to cooperate with it. That clipping ran in Florida, on the same pages as everything else here.
Nothing in this section depends on what any of these men and women did. Some of them killed people. Some of them handed out leaflets. Some of them were eleven. The arrangement does not sort them, which is the point: a category that does not require a charge cannot, by construction, distinguish between them, and for eighty-four years American newspapers printed the category as background rather than as the news.
Prisoners released as a gesture of goodwill: none of these clippings asks the question that phrase assumes. Goodwill costs the giver something he was entitled to keep. What was Israel entitled to keep?
Two runners, and what they trained on +
1947 to 2018
Two runners, and what they trained on
Sport is the emptiest subject in this archive. Out of more than 1,300 clippings, barely a dozen show a Palestinian playing anything. Which makes what American papers did print, in the summer of 1996, worth reading closely.
Palestine’s first Olympic team was two men. Majed Abu Maraheel, a 10,000-meter runner, and Ehab Salama, who ran the 5,000. Two American papers sent reporters to talk to them in Atlanta, and both came back with the same subject: not the race, but the training.
“What else? We have only our seashore… I owe it all to the sand.”
Salama, 20, asked how he trained. He had been on two running tracks in his life. He had been shot in the left thigh during the intifada, throwing stones and then running — and not a medal. Neither man had worn spiked shoes until sixteen days before the Games, and Salama ran with an open wound on his toe because the new ones were too tight. Maraheel, 32, carries an Israeli bullet scar in his right arm from 1987 and a bad knee from falling while running through Gaza. He carried the flag at the opening ceremony: a child’s dream.
CP-1996-011“In Gaza, we ran either in sneakers or barefoot.”
The host city’s own paper explains why the team was two men, and gives two reasons in equal parts: there were almost no athletic facilities in the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel would not let Palestinians who give Jerusalem as their address compete at all. A third athlete existed — the boxer Rashid Judeh, barred by boxing officials who said he lacked international experience. The Israeli Olympic delegation pointedly disagreed with its own government’s complaint about the use of the name “Palestine”, then shook hands with the Palestinians at the opening ceremony and swapped pins.
CP-1996-012“Before, they told us we didn’t have a state, we didn’t have a land, so we couldn’t participate.”
Nabil Mabrook of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, who had spent twenty years at the Games as an observer, going back to Montreal in 1976. He dates the low point to Helsinki in 1983, when Palestinian athletes walked in the opening ceremony carrying a white flag, their own having been banned after Munich. This is also the only clipping here that says out loud what the team was up against: the 1972 killings, the paper writes, made the word “Palestinian” synonymous with terrorism. Abu Mraheel, 36, warming up at the Yarmuk stadium: “I am opening the door now so that other Palestinians can follow.”
CP-1996-013That same story explains where the rest of the team was. There were Palestinian swimmers, gymnasts, basketball players and high jumpers, and they were in France, Jordan, Egypt and Kuwait, until the Gulf war scattered the gymnasts and the committee lost track of them. Gaza had running and martial arts. No pool, no bars or rings, no court, no track.
The two papers do not spell the runners the same way. One has Marahil and Ihab Salama, the other Maraheel and Ehab. Both print the same sentence from the flagbearer about his teammate’s foot: Even if it was amputated, he would run.
Before the word narrowed
“Palestine Tennis Stars To Compete In England”
The earliest sport clipping here, and it is about a word. In July 1947 Palestinian describes where a person is from rather than which people they belong to: the three players entered for Bristol and Wimbledon by the Federation of Amateur Sports Clubs of Palestine — Gertrude Kornfeld, Yehuda Finkelkraut and Mordecai Apel — are Jewish. Within two years the word had stopped being available to everyone in the country.
CP-1947-045“Palestine had an Olympic committee with Jewish and Arab members from 1934 until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.”
Forty-six years later, a Georgia paper states as background what the Tucson clipping above shows in practice. The committee existed, it was mixed, and it ended in 1948. Reporting the IOC’s recognition of a Palestine national team, the same story quotes Majid Asad of the Palestinian Sports Commission on why they took an exhibition match against France in Jericho: “We accepted this game to show the world we exist.”
CP-1993-019Eight years later, a pool with no permit
“It’s not perfect, but it’s made an Olympian of my son.”
Amaal Aweisat, whose son Raad, 17, was training to be the first Palestinian swimmer at an Olympics. The pool is twenty-five meters, in the back yard of several connected houses, built in under a week by residents, family and friends. It has a corrugated tin roof, no ventilation and no temperature control, and his coach watched him swim wearing a wool hat and a winter coat. They asked the reporter not to print where it is, because it has no building permit from the Israelis who control the area. He had swum at the YMCA on the Jewish side of Jerusalem until the YMCA told him to join the Israeli Swimming Federation or swim somewhere else. The pool with no permit is what somewhere else turned out to mean.
CP-2004-010A bag, a brother, a blacktop
“Just the bag and my brothers.”
Monir Abukeshek, 27, on his training facilities in a refugee camp, the day before he became the first Palestinian to win a medal at the Asian Games. He had left home five weeks before his first child was born and had seen his son Yazen only in photographs. What he meant to do with the medal: If I win the medal, I will put it around my son’s neck.
CP-2002-031“Presenting the Palestinian people through sport is an important development — to convince the world that we are normal.”
Jibril Rajoub of the Palestinian Football Association. The champion side is a village of 800 called the Valley of the Porcupines, mostly brothers and cousins, whose coach scouts six-year-olds on the same blacktop playground the first team trains on, because there is no pitch. The national squad is ranked 174th, between Bangladesh and St. Lucia. The story ends on what is still missing: ‘Now, we just need a field.’
CP-2009-029Aweisat’s story ran in at least four American papers on the same January day under four headlines — Palestinian athlete is forced to be resourceful, Swimmer braves weather for dream, Against all odds. Only the first keeps the reason the pool has to be hidden.
And one woman
“I know of other athletes who trained for four years for the Olympics. I trained only one month… It was so difficult to run on the sand.”
Sanaa Abu Bkeet, 19, on running the 800 meters at Athens. The story gives both reasons she had no track: Gaza residents horrified by the sight of her running in shorts threw stones at her, and Israeli security measures put a proper track out of reach. So she trained barefoot on a sand path, then had to learn spikes and asphalt in Athens. " The same page settles what the tin roof over Raad Aweisat’s pool was for. The caption says it plainly: so it won’t be spotted by Israelis.
CP-2004-011“I know it is a big responsibility to be the first Palestinian woman runner in the Olympics and to represent Palestine… I know it’s going to be very hard to win.”
The fullest account of a Palestinian woman’s life anywhere in this archive, and it is a sports story. One pair of generic shoes. A best 800 of 2:28.11. Training that is a teaspoon of olive oil each morning, said by generations of Palestinian matriarchs to bring good health, then ninety minutes on dirt roads that disappear into the sand by the sea. Her sister Wesam, 17, and three other girls run with her for company, and they dodge Israeli army checkpoints and hear not-so-distant gunfire. Her mother Amna is named. Her idol is Maria Mutola of Mozambique. The last sentence is the one to keep: on the back of her plain red T-shirt was the word Palestine.
CP-2004-014The only open direction
Gaza is fenced on three sides. The fourth is the sea, and for a few dozen people it is the only direction in which nobody has built anything.
“God will surf with the devil if the waves are good.”
Dorian Paskowitz, 86, a retired doctor from Hawaii who had been surfing for seventy-five years, handed twelve surfboards across the Erez crossing to Palestinian surfers waiting on the other side. He went because he had read about two Gaza surfers who had one board between them. He wanted to paddle out into the water with them, and was told he could not, because of security concerns. The boards went through the crossing. He did not.
CP-2007-013“Sea and surfing are everything to me.”
Raed Jadallah, 25, a plasterer from a seaside refugee camp, eleven years later. An Israeli bullet broke his femur in two places at the border protests and he did not know when he would walk again. The paper counts the people in the same condition: 1,297 shot and wounded in two weeks, 1,554 more treated for tear gas or rubber-coated steel pellets, 33 killed. The military said at most dozens had been struck by its fire and did not offer supporting evidence. The sentence that carries the whole section is the first one: he belonged to an exclusive club — a small band of surfers who escaped the claustrophobia of blockaded Gaza.
CP-2018-012Eleven years separate the two. In the first, an American reader is invited to think about peace arriving on a surfboard. In the second, the surfboard is beside the point and the man is on a hospital bed. Neither story would exist without the other, and only one of them was written as a sports story.
None of these stories is about politics and all of them are. A reporter asks an athlete a routine question — where do you train — and the answer is a beach, or a pool that has to be kept secret. The occupation turns up not as an argument but as the reason the shoes are new, the track is sand, and the address on a form disqualifies you.
Sport and politics are kept separate by whoever can afford to keep them separate. Ask what the other man had to do to reach the starting line.
What a wedding dress is for +
1993 to 2018
What a wedding dress is for
Of the records in this archive, fewer than thirty touch on a wedding, a birth or a family occasion. Four of them are here. They are worth reading together because they are almost the only place an American newspaper looks at Palestinians doing something other than dying, protesting or being discussed.
“Like a Scotsman’s tartan, a Palestinian wedding dress tells through color, cut and stitching the wearer’s native region, village and clan.”
A style page, on a Sunday, next to a full-page advertisement for a photo lab. It then reads the map: white with red embroidered birds in Haifa; linen woven by the men in Ramallah and embroidered by the bride and her friends for months; metallic thread from Bethlehem in the 1930s, when times were good there; sparse cross-stitching on an 1890s dress from a poorer wedding under the Ottomans; shocking pink from Asdud and Majdal, dyed with the seashell extract that made the coast famous in Roman times. One headdress carries detachable silver bangles in cross or crescent shapes, so a Christian or a Muslim bride could choose her symbol.
CP-2005-007The collector is Hanan Munayyer, a pharmaceutical researcher in New Jersey, born in the 1940s in what is now Israel. Her collection stops in the 1940s on purpose, the paper reports, just before modern Israel was created in 1948. The villages the dresses map are largely the villages that stopped existing, and the way to show them in an American museum is to end before the year they ended.
What the wedding costs
“In 1967, a dowry for a young Arab woman in lands held by Israel was under $300. Now it’s $2,380, and double that for an educated girl.”
Fifty-one words, filed under an economics pun. Thirty-three years before the Associated Press spent a full page discovering that a Palestinian bride’s degree is worth an extra salary, a paper printed the same fact as a brief about inflation.
CP-1974-010“The new generation would not agree to marry without love.”
Nafeza, 36, who was married off at fifteen by her father and uncles over her mother’s objections and says it took her ten years to accept it. Her mother, Nawal Sehwel, 57, is the village matchmaker in Abween and has made about two hundred marriages, none of which she says has broken. Her trade is dying because nearly as many women as men now attend the territories’ forty colleges — which is also why the headline is about a degree. The occupation appears in this story as economics: poverty after six years of fighting, and a wife’s degree worth an extra salary.
CP-2007-008“Better educated women make their own choices”
The same dispatch ran in at least five American papers that week, and the five headlines do not agree about who the story is about. Four of them make the woman the asset: best asset, biggest asset, adding college to marital assets, brides’ assets evolve — to a degree. This one makes her the subject of the sentence. It is also the fullest printing, and the only one that keeps the clause explaining why twelve percent of Palestinian women never marry at all: so many young men emigrate or are in Israeli prisons. The shorter printings keep the matchmaker and drop the prisons.
CP-2007-009“PALESTINIANS MASS WEDDING”
A photograph of brides waiting, and a caption that counts them: 252 couples in one ceremony. No story runs beneath it, so the reason for holding a wedding two hundred and fifty-two at a time is left to the reader.
CP-2018-011And what can happen at one
Palestinian bride Jala Abu Ajamia, 16, prepares to marry her 27-year-old cousin during the Israeli military curfew on Sunday. Because of the curfew, more that half the guests could not attend, and those who did attend were not fed because Palestinian shops were closed or out of stock.
The whole caption, as printed. On the same page is the funeral of Mounir Sansuor, 39, who lay unburied for more than three days while his family sought permission to carry him to the Church of the Nativity; fifty people were allowed to attend. A wedding and a funeral, and the curfew reached both.
CP-2002-030“Israeli soldiers raid wedding party”
Undercover soldiers at a reception. The army would not say whether the target was the wedding, nor whether its soldiers were in civilian dress. Two Palestinians are named and both are named by their relation to the bride: her father Yousef Kabaha, shot in the leg, and her brother Marouf, 28, arrested. The bride is not named. It is her wedding, and she is the fixed point the others are measured from.
CP-1993-012Put together, the four say something the archive rarely gets to say. A dress that records which village a woman came from. A matchmaker whose business is failing because women are going to university. Two hundred and fifty-two couples marrying at once. And a reception that four men leave in handcuffs or bleeding.
Most reports describe Palestinians only in the week something happened to them. Ask what the rest of the year looked like. American papers did occasionally go and find out, and when they did, the people in the story got their names.
The thing they were proudest of +
1976 to 2000
The thing they were proudest of
In December 1983 an Oregon paper opened a paragraph with a sentence that is not about war, land or politics.
“Education more than anything else distinguishes Palestinians. Already the best-educated Arabs before what they call ‘al nakba’ — the disaster — the Palestinians since 1948 have placed such priority on education…”
It is the earliest use of the word nakba anywhere in this archive, and it arrives inside a sentence about schooling. What follows in this section is what happened to the schooling.
CP-1983-005Four girls in a mayor’s office
“Plight of four schoolgirls illustrates frustration of West Bank occupation”
High school girls of sixteen to eighteen, sitting in Mayor Karim Khlaf’s office, fined more than a year’s wages for taking part in a demonstration. The reporter notices them trying not to cry, and the reason is not the fine itself but who has to pay it.
CP-1976-011One university, closed and closed again
Bir Zeit was the main Palestinian university in the West Bank. American papers covered its closures for years, and what they printed while doing so is a record of who objected.
“Human rights is a non-controversial issue.”
Dr. Hanna Nasir, the university’s president, saying so to a Michigan daily — from exile. Five years earlier he had been taken across the Lebanese border and left there. The headline over him is one word: Closed.
CP-1979-005“The Closing of Bir Zeit University Ought To Be Reconsidered”
Sixty Israeli professors petitioned for a Palestinian university to be allowed to open, and an American paper printed them at length alongside its exiled president answering the defense minister.
CP-1979-004“Israelis Decide To Reopen Bir Zeit, Palestinian School”
Closed on 2 May after demonstrations, reopened two months later, and the timing is in the copy: the decision coincided with the visit of Robert Strauss, President Carter’s Middle East envoy. A defense ministry spokesman describes the closure as a punishment, which settles what it was.
CP-1979-007“Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdown”
Written by Munir Fasheh, who had taught mathematics at Bir Zeit since 1962, under his own name in an American daily, with his credentials printed at the foot. The line under the headline calls it a rare Arab-Jew agreement. What they agreed about was whether a university should be allowed to hold classes.
CP-1982-025“Israelis Raid Palestine University”
An-Najah, three thousand students, raided over an exhibition. The Palestine Press Service called it an exhibit of Palestinian folklore; the occupation authorities called it a hostile exhibit, including nationalistic and provocative displays. Among the confiscated weapons the spokesman lists are a plastic M-16 and a wooden model of a Kalashnikov. The university had already been shut for three months the year before, after students marked the anniversary of the invasion of Lebanon.
CP-1984-005And then a question about a poem
In March 2000 Israel’s education minister suggested five poems by Mahmoud Darwish as optional reading in Israeli schools. Three American papers covered the row that followed, on the same day, from three different news services.
“The Arabs are always accused of being a nation of poetry…”
Darwish, answering. He had been banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly thirty years. The line under the headline explains the argument: the education minister is assailed for suggesting the poems, as optional reading.
CP-2000-013“The poetry of Arab pain: Are Israeli students ready?”
A headline that asks whether schoolchildren can withstand a poem.
CP-2000-012“It has little to do with poetry, and a lot with politics.”
The third service’s opening sentence, and the plainest of the three.
CP-2000-014Put in order, these clippings describe something narrower than repression in general. A people whose chief distinction, by an American reporter’s own account, was how much they valued schooling, and a set of measures aimed precisely at that: a university closed as a punishment and reopened for a visiting envoy, an exhibition of folklore raided, schoolgirls fined a year’s wages for cheering, a professor writing from a campus he cannot teach on, a poet whose work is too dangerous to be optional.
When a school closes and the reason given is order, ask what was being taught and who wanted it stopped. American papers recorded all of this at the time, in their own pages.
The Palestinians who are Christians +
1912 to 2022
The Palestinians who are Christians
In January 1950 a syndicated American columnist stopped mid-argument to point out something he had noticed about his own readers.
“It apparently surprised Americans to learn that there were any Christians in Palestine! Yet they constitute a tenth of the Arab-speaking population.”
The same column notes that the United Nations never took one step to guarantee the lives or property of the indigenous Arab population in Jewish Palestine. The surprise he is describing has not worn off. American coverage of this place resolves, again and again, into Muslims against Jews, and a third of a people falls out of the sentence.
CP-1950-006The frame that separates them
The habit of setting Palestinian Christians against their Muslim neighbors rather than beside them is older than the state, and in this archive it begins with a rumor.
“CHRISTIANS MOWED DOWN BY MOSLEMS AT JAFFA, PALESTINE”
The headline states a massacre as fact. Underneath it is an Athens dateline, no casualty counted, no witness quoted, and a single piece of evidence: a Russian cruiser weighed anchor and departed hurriedly for that district. The story does give a figure, and it is the one worth keeping: about 10,000 Christians among some 40,000 inhabitants of Jaffa.
CP-1912-002What they were actually doing
Seven years later, American correspondents in Palestine kept meeting an organization whose name says the thing plainly. Muslims and Christians had not divided. They had formed a society together, and its subject was Zionism.
“If the Jews have a right to Palestine… we Arabs have a right to Spain and the Indians have a right to New York… Haven’t we Moslems respected the Christians’ holy places?”
The Deseret News headline calls them leaders of the Mohammedan-Christian society. They are speaking as one body, and the argument they make to an American reporter is an argument about precedent and about custody of other people’s shrines.
CP-1919-008“PALESTINE NATIVES OPPOSE ZIONISM”
The line under it in the New York Times: Moslems and Christians Have Formed an Association to Protect Their Rights. The alliance is named accurately in the paper of record in 1921. The headline above it calls the people natives.
CP-1921-001Then the verb
By the 1990s the two categories have come apart in American headlines, and a Palestinian has become something a Christian is not. December 1995, Bethlehem handed back after twenty-eight years of occupation.
“Palestinians take over Christmas in Bethlehem”
Take over. The people of Bethlehem are the subject of that verb, in their own town, at their own Christmas. Inside, a banner in Manger Square reads Jesus, the First Palestinian Revolutionary — which is a claim the headline has already ruled out by treating Palestinians as arrivals.
CP-1995-004“Christians in Israel protest settlement”
Ten church heads — Latin, Greek and the rest — close every shrine they have for a day over a Jewish settlement in the Christian quarter of the Old City. The Palestinians in this story are the Christians, and the objection is theirs, but the headline files them under a religion rather than a people.
CP-1990-002“They are denying the citizens from going to their churches and mosques during this incursion… This is very dangerous.”
Mayor Hanna Nasser of Bethlehem, giving his quotes from a house he was not permitted to leave. On the same page, a man who died of a heart attack lies unburied for more than three days while his family seeks permission to carry him to the Church of the Nativity, and the priest who finally says the Mass notes that fifty people were allowed in. The Palestinians in this story are Christians and the thing being restricted is their church.
CP-2002-030When they get their names
“Bethlehem’s Christmas crowds return after years of pandemic quiet”
Four Palestinians named in one story, each with a job and an opinion: a hotel owner, a man who runs an olive wood workshop, the mayor. They are named because this is a trade story about a good season. The separation barrier appears once, in a clause, near the end. Being covered as a business rather than as a conflict is, in this archive, the most reliable way for a Palestinian to get his name in an American paper.
CP-2022-044“Palestinians celebrate singer crowned Arab Idol winner”
Yacoub Shaheen, 22, of Bethlehem, won the region’s biggest television song competition. The headline says nothing about religion. The first sentence does: Palestinians are celebrating a Christian crooner from the West Bank city of Bethlehem. The adjective arrives before the man’s name, which is how you can tell the paper expects it to surprise the reader.
CP-2017-011“Christmas in the Gaza Strip”
Two Palestinian girls, named, in a Christmas news photograph. The caption says refugee and it says Christian Arabs, and it holds both at once without appearing to notice that American readers were being told something they did not know.
CP-1959-004Nothing here was invented by any one newspaper. A frame settles into a language and then does its work without anyone choosing it each morning. But the effect is a specific subtraction: a people who were a tenth of Jaffa in 1912, who organized jointly against Zionism in 1919, and who ran Bethlehem before and after 1995, become visible to American readers only at Christmas, and even then as hosts rather than as residents.
The next time a report explains this as a conflict between Muslims and Jews, the question is not whether that is a simplification. It is who has to disappear for the sentence to work.
Her name was Falestine +
4 October 2000
Her name was Falestine
On one Wednesday morning in October 2000, three American newspapers printed the same Associated Press dispatch from Gaza. How much of one family you were told about depended entirely on which paper you happened to buy.
Laura King filed it from Netzarim Junction, a crossroads in the central Gaza Strip where an army outpost guarded the road to a settlement. Six days earlier a twelve-year-old boy had been shot dead at the same junction while his father tried to shield him. On the Tuesday she was writing about, a 28-year-old man named Fahmi Abu Amounah was hit on a warehouse roof. Onlookers said he was throwing stones. The army said he was probably shooting.
Every printing carries his death. What happens after it is where they part.
“Fighting fire with firepower”
The Journal Star stops at the hospital. It also prints the week’s dead as more than 50 people have died… Most of the rest were Palestinians. What it gives instead, and no other paper here does, is the whole top of the page to a nineteen-year-old: ‘It’s our land, and if I die, my death is a good one’, in italic across the full width, with Yasser Abu Assi’s name beneath it.
CP-2000-015“Mideast clashes pit guns against stones”
The Spokesman-Review keeps the count Lincoln rounded off: 56 dead, of whom 43 were Palestinians and 10 were Israeli Arabs. It keeps the funeral too, two thousand people in the narrow concrete alleys of Nusseirat an hour after he was killed. Its line under the headline gives Israel’s explanation where Lincoln’s gives the criticism.
CP-2000-016“My brother, my only brother,” wept his 20-year-old sister, Falestine.
One sentence further than Spokane, at the end of a paragraph about a funeral, on a jump page inside the paper. It is the only place in the three printings where anyone in that family speaks, and the only place the sister exists at all.
CP-2000-017Nobody censored anything here. No editor set out to remove a grieving sister from a story. A dispatch arrives longer than the hole on the page, somebody cuts from the bottom, and the bottom is where the funeral was. That is all it takes. The count of the Palestinian dead goes first, then the two thousand mourners, then the woman saying the only thing she says.
Her name was Falestine. It is the name of the country, and it survived in one American newspaper out of three because that paper had four more column-inches than the others did.
The next time you read that someone was killed and that the army disputes how, look at where the story stops. Whatever is nearest the end was nearest to being cut, and it is usually the part with a family in it.
The complaint that got printed +
20 to 26 August 2001
The complaint that got printed
On a Monday in August 2001 two American papers printed the same New York Times dispatch about the same three dead people. Six days later one of those papers published a reader’s complaint about its own headline. It is one of very few places in this archive where a paper turns round and examines a headline of its own.
The dispatch names five Palestinians and gives four of their ages. Samir Abu Zaid, 32, killed in his house in Rafah with his son Salman, 7, and his daughter Alaa, 3. Muhammad Abu Arrar, 14, shot in Rafah the same day. Muin Abu Lawi, 38, shot near a checkpoint outside Nablus, walking home with school supplies he had bought for his children.
“Body count climbs in day of heated Mideast violence”
Page A5 of the Star Tribune. Five names in the copy and an arithmetic over the top of it. The line beneath the headline reads: A Palestinian man and his children were among those killed when their home was shelled; the Israeli army denied responsibility.
CP-2001-016“Palestinian father, children killed”
Page 10A of the Register-Guard, the same Monday, the same dispatch, three words. Nothing in the copy made the difference between these two headlines. The difference was made at the paper.
CP-2001-017Then the part that almost never survives. On 26 August the Star Tribune’s reader’s representative, Lou Gelfand, devoted the top of his column to that headline, under a standing head that invites the reader to imagine running the paper.
“The caller, an advocate for Israel, said the second deck of a Monday headline was incomplete and, as a result, inaccurate… The caller said that since how they died was in dispute, the headline should have begun: ‘Palestinians say…’”
The column agrees. Its verdict is one sentence: Comment: The headline needed to underscore the dispute over who was responsible for the shelling.
CP-2001-018The complaint is about the second line of the headline, the one that already carried the army’s denial in its own clause. Nobody in the column raises the headline above it, the one a reader’s eye actually lands on, which turned a man and two small children into a body count. Of the two things that could have been said about that page, the only one that reached print was the one asking for more doubt about the dead.
The item directly below it in the same column concerns a photograph of a two-year-old holding a latex balloon, and whether the paper should print pictures of people ignoring safety measures.
There is no villain here and nothing was hidden. A reader called, an editor considered it fairly and answered in public, which is more than most papers in this archive ever did. That is the point. This is the process working, and what came out of it was a correction in one direction only.
Read a headline over a story with names in it and the question is not whether the headline is accurate. It is which of the true things in the story it decided to be accurate about.
What the censor left behind +
What did not reach the page
What the censor left behind
On 18 October 1982 the Baltimore Sun ran a dispatch from Tel Aviv with a line sitting above the dateline, before the story had begun: “This article was subject to Israeli military censorship.” The story underneath was about an Israeli columnist who had got a cabinet debate past the censor by rewriting it as Polish history from 1922.
A censor who works well leaves nothing behind. These are the clippings where one left something — a notice above a story, a deletion marked on the page, a sentence explaining why the reporting could not be checked.
“Military Censors Hampering News Coverage in Palestine.”
Jackson Citizen Patriot, Associated Press from London. A news agency auditing the censorship around it, the day before the state was declared. It reports that “In Palestine Haganah, the Jewish defense force, censors all Jewish papers,” and that the strictest censorship of the whole region is in Syria and Lebanon. The machinery is older than the state it would serve.
CP-1948-033“The incident occurred immediately after Israeli launched its Sinai campaign but was not disclosed officially until Dec. 12.”
The Evening Gazette, on the trial of the officers and men who shot the villagers of Kafr Qasim. Six weeks between the killings and the disclosure, stated by the paper as ordinary background. “Israeli” for “Israel” is the paper’s.
CP-1957-012“Israel Soldiers Patrol Town; Shops Closed.”
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Associated Press from Ramallah. Two youths arrested for unfurling a flag, and a pair of Palestinian newspapers shut or their editors arrested, reported inside a story about a business strike.
CP-1981-002“This article was subject to Israeli military censorship.”
The Baltimore Sun, Associated Press from Tel Aviv. The notice is the first line of a dispatch about evading the censor: Amnon Abromowitz of Maariv had learned of a near-offensive in Lebanon, and “military censors refused to let him publish it on national security grounds.” So he published it as a Polish cabinet debate of 60 years earlier.
CP-1982-021“The conflict goes on in numerous, non-violent ways. It includes the close, prepublication scrutiny by Israeli military censors of the Arabic-language newspapers that are published in east Jerusalem.”
Omaha World-Herald, under the headline Control of Palestinian Expression Is Invisible Part of Gaza Conflict. The clipping is the headline, the credit line and two lines of the story. The rest was not cut out, so where the sentence was going is not known.
CP-1984-001“Despite government claims that restricting residents and closing off the area to journalists would inhibit violence, military officials said there were major incidents in at least 23 locations.”
Press & Sun-Bulletin, on Land Day. The paper says in its own column that it cannot check the army’s account, and reports in the same column that the army had just closed the Palestinian news agency the correspondents relied on.
CP-1988-011“The military censor, meanwhile, has asked police to open an investigation into a report in the Sunday Times of London…”
Ann Arbor News, Associated Press from Jerusalem. The censor is not only cutting copy at home; he is asking for a criminal investigation into a paper printed in another country. The army spokesman quoted in the same dispatch is, by regulation, not named.
CP-1989-009“Israel censoring news of Soviet immigrants.”
The sidebar carries its own warning in italics — Israeli military censors made deletions from this article — and on the clipping two phrases about the occupied West Bank and Gaza are underlined by hand, where the deletions fell. Somebody marked the holes before filing it away. This is the clipping at the top of this section.
CP-1990-001“Israel bans film about battle at refugee camp.”
The Star-Ledger, on Jenin, Jenin. Four words of headline for a documentary the state would not allow to be shown.
CP-2002-021“lifting a nearly 25-year veil of secrecy and allowing a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of its secret operations.”
Roanoke Times, Associated Press, on Israel confirming it killed Khalil al-Wazir in Tunisia in 1988. It could be printed in 2012 because a military censor allowed it to be. The gardener killed on the way in is mentioned twice and never named.
CP-2012-001The censor turns up in these ten in four ways: as a notice set above the story, as a deletion marked on the page, as a reporter’s explanation of why an account could not be checked, and as a delay — six weeks in 1957, 24 years in 2012. In 1948 the machinery is already running, and running on papers rather than on foreign correspondents, eight days before there is a state.
What this cannot show is the censorship that worked. Every clipping here is a case where an American paper printed the fact of it, which is to say a case where the censoring was visible, reported, or eventually released. A deletion nobody marked and a story nobody filed leave no clipping behind, and this archive is made of clippings. The ten below are the floor, not the measure.
See these ten in the archive →
How this was countedTen clippings, 1948 to 2012, found by searching for the censor rather than for any event. The archive’s wider censorship collection is larger and takes in suppression of other kinds, including a word struck out of a United Nations resolution to get it past the United States.
The grammar of a death headline +
Who is the subject of the sentence
The grammar of a death headline
This archive holds 32 news headlines that report Palestinians or Arabs being killed. Sorted by nothing more controversial than grammar, they fall three ways.
20 headlines report a death with nobody doing it. Someone is killed the way weather happens. “Three Palestinians killed, 137 injured.” “4 Palestinians killed in occupied territories.” “Heavy Toll in Gaza Protests.”
Six name Israel as the one doing it, across 37 years. One of those six adds “witnesses say.”
The same habit, from the other side
When the state does appear in the sentence, it is often the one answering. Somebody else started it. 61 years apart, the same construction:
British troops blew up three Arab houses at Daharia, near Hebron, “in reprisal for an Arab raid.”
Omaha World-Herald. The demolition is the answer. The raid is the deed.
CP-1937-010“Palestinian youths threw stones and bottles Sunday at Israeli troops who responded with rubber bullets.”
Houston Chronicle. Youths throw. Troops respond. One side acts and the other replies, and which is which was settled before the sentence began.
CP-1998-007What this cannot showNine clippings here use the language of retaliation, reprisal or response. In six the state is the one retaliating; in two, Palestinians. Nine is a small number and is offered as an observation, not a measurement.
The same test, run on both sides
One headline, two deaths
4 Israelis killed in firebombing of bus; Arab dies in clash
Associated Press, 31 October 1988 (inferred) · paper not identified on the scan
Same sentence, same paper, same day.
name a specific violent act — firebombing, ambush, shooting, stabbing
use only a mutual or weather noun — clash, unrest, violence, toll
Israeli deaths in these years mostly came from discrete attacks; Palestinian deaths mostly came during protests and military operations, so some of this is circumstance. But offensive, raid, bombardment, tank and incursion all appear in the body text of the same stories whose headlines say violence and toll. The eight were found by searching for Israeli deaths, which makes them purposive rather than random. One more admission belongs here: only one of the eight carries a masthead and a printed date. For the rest the date is reasoned from the copy, and where the line says so the paper is not identified on the scan at all. The verbs are on the page. The provenance of five of these eight is not.
Two days where two papers disagree
Shireen Abu Akleh, and what it took to be named +
May to July 2022
Shireen Abu Akleh, and what it took to be named
The section above counts how rarely an ordinary Palestinian is named in these clippings. Here is the exception, and it is worth reading for what it took.
Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head in Jenin on 11 May 2022. She was 51, a reporter for 25 years, and an American citizen. Over the next ten weeks her name was printed in New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin and Montana. Six papers over ten weeks, and the account moves the whole time: a killing nobody will attribute, then stray Palestinian fire, then an Israeli army conceding a “high possibility” and opening no criminal case.
Al Jazeera reporter killed during an Israeli raid in West Bank
The morning after. The Israeli military initially suggested that Abu Akleh might have been killed by stray fire from Palestinians
— and the defense minister, the same evening: We are trying to figure out exactly what happened… I don’t have final conclusions.
The Star-Ledger
Israeli police beat pallbearers at Al Jazeera journalist’s funeral
Two services, two papers, one day. The Associated Press: causing them to briefly drop the casket in a shocking start to a procession that turned into perhaps the largest display of Palestinian nationalism in Jerusalem in a generation
. Her brother Tony said the scenes prove that Shireen’s reports and honest words … had a powerful impact.
Daily Herald · Dickinson Press
Palestinians say journalist killed by Israeli forces
The Palestinian attorney general: The only shooting was by the occupation forces, with the aim of killing
. The Israeli chief of staff, the same day: No soldier fired intentionally at a journalist. We investigated that. We checked it.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
U.N. agency says Israeli troops killed journalist
The United Nations found the shots came from Israeli forces and that she was not struck from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians, as initially claimed by Israeli authorities
. The photograph beside it is her face on a wall in Bethlehem, next to George Floyd. The Philadelphia Inquirer
US: Israeli fire likely killed reporter; no final conclusion
The State Department: likely fired from an Israeli position, but too badly damaged to reach an absolute determination
and no reason to believe
she was deliberately targeted. An Israeli rights group called it whitewash
. The Billings Gazette
The account moved in print over ten weeks: stray fire from Palestinians, then Israeli fire, then likely Israeli fire and no conclusion about intent. Every stage is in this archive because every stage was printed.
What the naming section measures is not whether American papers can name a Palestinian. It is what a Palestinian has to be before they do.
Security reasons, and what they were given for +
The reason given
Security reasons, and what they were given for
In 1985 five Palestinian women were refused permission to leave the occupied territories for a United Nations conference. The news-agency story puts the explanation in quotation marks: their applications “were turned down because of ‘security reasons.’”
Three years later an American headline prints the same phrase with no quotation marks at all. What those quotation marks were doing, while they lasted, was holding the explanation at arm’s length.
Applications “were turned down because of ‘security reasons.’”
Telegram & Gazette, Worcester, running United Press International from Nairobi. The paper names them: Ni’mah al Helon and Amal Wahdan, social workers and women’s rights activists. Two of the 82 ordinary Palestinians this archive can find named before 14 December 1987 are here, in a story about being refused an exit permit.
CP-1985-002“Israel considering sealing off areas for security reasons.”
Hartford Courant, running Dan Fisher of the Los Angeles Times. No quotation marks. The phrase has become the description rather than the claim, in a headline, in under three years.
CP-1988-010“Palestinian’s arrest schocks Arabs, Israelis.”
Kilgore News Herald, Texas, on Faisal Husseini given “up to six months’ administrative detention.” The first use of the term in this archive. Hanna Siniora, editing a Palestinian paper, is quoted against it: “The road to peace is being obstructed by detentions.”
CP-1988-023Administrative detention orders “normally used to detain Palestinians without trial.”
Ann Arbor News, running Marjorie Olster of the Associated Press. The story is about a Lebanese cleric; the mechanism is explained in a subordinate clause, as background a reader is assumed not to need explained further.
CP-1989-009“‘Administrative detention’: Israelis skip due process.”
The Baltimore Sun, Doug Struck. The term in quotation marks and the translation of it in the same headline.
CP-1991-001“There is no such thing as a benevolent occupation.”
Cordelia Edvardson, filing from Jerusalem for The Baltimore Sun, under the headline Security Reasons. She takes the phrase apart under its own name: “security is also, and more so, the result of national consensus about life and death issues like war and peace.”
CP-1994-006“Netanyahu’s 450 ‘security reasons’.”
The Arizona Republic. Back inside quotation marks, attached to a name, with a number on it: the 450 settlers in Hebron whose presence is stalling the withdrawal.
CP-1996-003“Palestinian freed after 6 years in Israeli jail.”
Journal Tribune, Biddeford, Maine, running Samar Assad of the Associated Press. Ahmed Qatamesh, 46, held since 1 September 1992 without charge or trial, his detention extended for the tenth time. His wife, Soha Barghouti, is quoted: he was never convicted of a crime.
CP-1998-001“7 Palestinians killed by Israeli army gunfire.”
Marshfield News-Herald, Wisconsin, Associated Press. A named agent in the headline, the phrase working quietly in the body, and the Israeli account of the suicide bombing that preceded it printed in the same dispatch. The archive’s own death-headline finding has exceptions, and this is one.
CP-2002-020Quotation marks are the cheapest thing a newspaper owns and the most revealing. On this phrase they come off in 1988, go back on in 1996 when a politician’s name is attached to it, and come off again in a 1994 column that argues with the phrase rather than reporting it. Nothing here shows the explanation was false. What these 12 clippings show is the quotation marks moving, and where they sit tracks how far the sentence stands from the claim it is carrying.
No partner for peace, and the answer printed beside it +
The negotiation
No partner for peace, and the answer printed beside it
The phrase reaches an American headline in October 2000, already inside quotation marks. Google’s database of scanned books does not show it in general use until 2003.
Nearly every paper that prints this argument also prints someone answering it, by name, on the same page. It is the only explanation in the archive that American newspapers rarely ran on its own.
“Arafat rejected $30 billion for refugee relocation, aide says.”
Indianapolis Star. Attributed to an aide, and carrying the older frame inside it: the money is for relocation.
CP-2000-001“Israel has no ‘partners for peace’.”
The State Journal-Register, Springfield, Illinois, over a syndicated George Will column datelined Jerusalem. The earliest use here, in a headline, in quotation marks, three years before the phrase becomes common in print — and it arrives as argument rather than as reporting.
CP-2000-007“It was the Arabs who rejected this plan and every other plan since.”
The Journal News, White Plains, in the letters column. The letter directly beside it is headed Zionist propaganda dehumanizes Arabs. Two readers, opposite positions, same page, same day.
CP-2002-005“They were offered a very generous deal in Camp David, and they rejected it. And this lie…”
San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein. The same news story quotes Dennis Ross, Clinton’s envoy, saying Arafat rejected the deal, and quotes the reply to it. The frame and its contradiction, attributed, in one piece of reporting.
CP-2002-010“Arafat is ‘partner for peace’ all right — as in ‘rest in peace, Israel’.”
The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg. 18 months on the phrase is established enough to be a pun, and the column attacks the New York Times on its way past for burying a report on A10.
CP-2002-012“Arafat rejected the best offer Palestinians are ever likely to get.”
Morton Kondracke, syndicated into the Southwest Daily News of Sulphur, Louisiana. Set as a pull quote, which is how a contested claim becomes the thing a reader takes away from the page.
CP-2002-013“Netanyahu: Israel ‘partner for peace’ with Palestinians.”
Huntsville Times, Alabama. The phrase turned around and claimed, by the man the 1996 clipping in the section above is about.
CP-2009-023Two things are visible here that are not visible in the other explanations. The phrase arrives in American headlines about three years before it becomes common in the books these databases hold, so in the material that can be searched, newspapers had it first. And where the other frames travel unanswered, this one is printed alongside the people disputing it — a former ambassador and the word lie, in the same column of the same newspaper.
How “human shields” changed sides in three years +
A phrase reversing
How “human shields” changed sides in three years
On 19 November 2006 the Israeli air force telephoned a house in Beit Lahiya to say it was about to destroy it, which was the standing procedure. Several hundred people went and stood on the roof. The strike was called off.
The Associated Press filed it as a new tactic. In 2003 human shields named people who volunteered to stand in the way — it was what they called themselves. Within three years the same two words named the opposite: civilians said to be held in place against their will by Hamas. The dispatch about the roof carries both meanings in one column.
“We are here because we decided to be human shields.”
The Associated Press, from Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The paper names two of them: Morad Hashash, 28, a construction worker, and Fatima, 77, who had come to see Arafat for the first time. The phrase belongs to the people it describes, and the verb is theirs.
CP-2003-006“Palestinian human shields thwart Israeli airstrikes on Gaza homes.”
The Star-Ledger, running Sarah El Deeb of the Associated Press from Beit Lahiya. “Hundreds of Palestinians serving as human shields guarded the homes of two top militants yesterday, a new tactic that forced Israel to call off missile strikes.” Israeli officials told her they did not know how to respond. The same story prints what the crowd was chanting, which was “Death to Israel, Death to America.”
CP-2006-003“A cynical exploitation by the terrorists of uninvolved people as human shields.”
The Israeli army, quoted in that same dispatch. This is the whole reversal, and it is already finished. The words are identical. The people on the roof have gone from the subject of the sentence to the object of it, and nobody had to wait for the argument to develop.
CP-2006-003“U.S. nun, priest are human shields at Palestinian militant’s house.”
The Beaumont Enterprise, three days later. Whatever the phrase is describing here, an American nun who flew to Gaza is not being exploited by anyone. The same dispatch carries the objection: Human Rights Watch called militants asking civilians to shield a house a “war crime,” and the UN human rights commissioner called the tactic a sign of Palestinian desperation. Both are printed alongside the volunteers.
CP-2006-004“We can’t go out and fight with guns, so we are participating in the resistance this way.”
A Palestinian woman in Beit Lahiya, to Joel Greenberg of the Chicago Tribune. The headline over her is “Use of human shields complicates Israel’s approach.” She is explaining a decision; the headline above her describes a problem of method.
CP-2006-005“Human shields: Hamas’ favorite tactic.”
Alan Dershowitz, syndicated from the Los Angeles Times into the Log Cabin Democrat of Conway, Arkansas. Two years and two months after Beit Lahiya. The people the phrase now refers to do not appear in the sentence at all, and no version of it is offered in which they chose anything.
CP-2009-016“Hamas is using the Gaza population as human shields.”
Santa Barbara News-Press, in quotation marks, attributed. Elsewhere on the page: 20 of the 27 people killed that Sunday were civilians, mostly women and children, and a photograph captioned “An emergency rescue worker carries a child’s body.”
CP-2012-002“Human rights and human shields.”
USA Today, as a news analysis, the two set against each other in a headline as though they were opposing considerations of the same kind.
CP-2014-005The usual way to describe this is that a phrase was later twisted. That is not what these clippings show. Both meanings are printed on the same day, in the same dispatch, by the same news agency: the people on the roof saying what they decided, and the army describing the identical act with the subject moved. One of those two sentences is the one that kept being printed.
The olive harvest, and who the paper says owns the ground +
1950 to 2023
The olive harvest, and who the paper says owns the ground
Hani Yousef was 22 and he was picking olives outside his village of Aqraba. Palestinians accused settlers from Itamar of shooting him. The Press of Atlantic City printed his name the next morning, down the column from forty Israeli tanks entering Khan Younis and a helicopter missile that killed eight people. The Israeli police spokesman told the paper the death was being investigated and no arrests had been made, and that the farmer had been shot in the back.
Ten clippings here follow the olive tree through American newspapers between 1950 and 2023. A statute puts olive orchards in a schedule of property the state may take title to and sell. An Israeli spokesman calls a field near Nablus state-owned and uncultivable while the village headmen say it belongs to the villagers and grows olives. Human rights groups count about a hundred thousand trees uprooted for a barrier. A village posts unarmed men in its olive groves after an arson killing. And a family in Bethlehem carves the wood, as it has since 1925.
“Israel to Seize Property… To Sell Arab Refugees’ Holdings to State Development Unit.”
The New York Times, reporting the absentees property bill out of the Knesset. What the law reaches is itemized: “almost whole cities like Jaffa, Acre, Ramleh, Lydda and the Arab quarters of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tiberias and Safed, scores of villages and large areas of citrus, olive and fruit orchards, quarries and farm land.” The groves enter the sentence as a schedule of assets. One amendment raising the price the buyers must pay came from Amin Jurjura, an Arab member from Nazareth, and the Knesset adopted it.
CP-1950-007“The headmen said the land was owned by villagers and used to grow olives, but the Israeli spokesman maintained it was state-owned and could not be cultivated.”
The Baltimore Sun, on 2,500 acres seized near Nablus to enlarge the settlement of Ariel. The spokesman says the ground is earmarked for an industrial zone. Two claims about the same field sit in one sentence, and the olives are the villagers’ evidence. Felicia Langer said she had been asked to take steps to oppose the seizure in the Israeli Supreme Court.
CP-1981-006“Palestinians accused Jewish settlers of killing Hani Yousef, 22, as he was harvesting olives near his village, Aqraba.”
Press of Atlantic City. The headline over it is “Israeli tanks enter Gaza; missile kills 10,” and the sentence before his names nobody: “two Palestinian men were shot dead in the northern West Bank, one in a gunbattle with Israeli troops, the other allegedly shot by a Jewish settler in an olive grove.” He is the other one. A second farmer was shot and wounded beside him.
CP-2002-040“On Oct. 6, Hani Minyeh, a 22-year-old grocery store clerk in the village of Aqraba, was killed when settlers from the Jewish community of Itamar, near Nablus, fired on a group of olive pickers.”
San Francisco Chronicle, bylined Danielle Haas for its foreign service, sixteen days on. The same killing, the same village, the same age — and a different name, plus a trade the other papers leave out. The story is datelined Tuwani, in the south Hebron hills, so this is a passing reference in a feature filed from somewhere else.
CP-2002-090“Settlers three weeks ago shot and killed a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was picking olives on his land, according to Palestinian witnesses.”
Hartford Courant, carrying John Ward Anderson of the Washington Post. The identical sentence ran in the Austin American-Statesman three days later. No name, an age two years out, and his death arrives qualified: according to Palestinian witnesses.
CP-2002-091“The Israelis love to talk about the trees they plant in Israel, but they never talk about the trees owned by Palestinians that they uproot.”
Ray Hanania in the Daily Herald, under the paper’s standing label for his column, “An Arab perspective.” He is not describing an incident. He is naming the asymmetry itself, in his own voice, in 2003.
CP-2003-008“Human rights groups say 7,000 acres of Palestinian land have been expropriated for the barrier, and about 100,000 trees uprooted.”
Casper Star-Tribune, Wyoming, under the headline “For Israelis a lifesaver; for Palestinians a curse.” The same story carries the United Nations count of who ends up on the wrong side of it, and keeps its condition: unless the route is changed, 274,000 Palestinians trapped in enclaves and 400,000 more blocked from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals.
CP-2004-008“For now, the village will rely on bands of unarmed young men staking out the sprawling olive groves on its perimeter.”
Omaha World-Herald, from Duma, days after suspected Jewish arsonists hurled a firebomb into a house and killed an 18-month-old. The mayor, Abed Alsalam Dawabsheh, is working out how to protect three thousand people: “The only thing we can carry is sticks and lights… We are not allowed to carry weapons.” The same story carries Yesh Din’s figure: of 1,067 complaints Palestinians filed against Israeli assailants in the last decade, 19 ended in a conviction.
CP-2015-014“Olive wood artisans carry on Holy Land tradition.”
The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Illinois. Bassem Giacaman came back from New Zealand to run the shop and factory his grandfather founded in 1925, because his father Jiries, 72, could no longer manage it from a distance. The trade is carving, and the material is olive wood. Nobody dies in this story.
CP-2017-009“Recently, in a single night, there were well over a hundred attacks by settlers, who shot and beat Palestinians, setting fire to homes and businesses and uprooting olive trees, all the while Israeli soldiers stood by or beat and arrested Palestinians who resisted.”
Kristen Salvatore, writing a column in the Portland Press Herald under the headline “Senators’ silence on Israeli human rights violations equals complicity.” Eight months before October 2023, a reader in Maine is holding her own senators to the olive trees. The count is hers, and the paper prints it as hers.
CP-2023-077These ten were gathered by searching for particular events, so nothing here measures how often American papers covered the olive harvest, or how often they named the dead. Nor is this a census of how the archive treats olive trees: it holds many more clippings in which a grove is scenery, a crop, or a carving shop than ones in which a tree is destroyed.
Three American papers printed that one death three ways. The Press of Atlantic City called him Hani Yousef, 22. Danielle Haas, filing for the San Francisco Chronicle, called him Hani Minyeh, 22, and gave his trade. John Ward Anderson’s Washington Post copy called him a 24-year-old Palestinian man and gave no name at all, and that is the version two papers ran.
Bassem Giacaman buys his wood from farmers around Bethlehem after the October harvest, and he is exact about where it comes from: “The branches come from pruning the trees, never by cutting them.” Carvers there have worked olive wood since the fourth century. A grove is the slowest record a family can keep of where it has been, and it can be taken out in an afternoon. When a harvest is in the news, read for whether the person killed is named in that sentence, and whose account of who owns the land the paper puts second.
Two Americans killed in one week, and the papers that said so +
October 1985 to July 1986
Two Americans killed in one week, and the papers that said so
On 10 October 1985 Alex Odeh went on local television in Southern California and said two things. One was that Yasser Arafat was “a man of peace.” The other was that the hijacking of the Achille Lauro was indefensible. The second was cut from the broadcast. The next morning he opened the door of his Santa Ana office and a bomb trip-wired to it killed him. He was 41, a poet, a father of three daughters, and the West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Leon Klinghoffer had been murdered aboard the Achille Lauro three days earlier. What happened next is not something this archive counted — it is something American papers wrote down themselves, in their own voice, within five weeks: that one of the two deaths had become a national event and the other had barely registered. Two of them were the New York Times, counting its own pages.
“Arab activist killed by Santa Ana bomb.”
San Francisco Examiner, the day after. “Arab and Jewish organizations condemned a bombing that killed an Arab-American civil rights activist.” The paper prints the line he had given an interviewer the night before: Arafat was “a man of peace.”
CP-1985-019“His friends and relatives say he was the gentlest of men, a poet who spent what free time he had with his wife and three daughters.”
The Courier-Journal of Louisville. “He had received threats, but he was an American now in a free and mostly peaceful country. He only occasionally took precautions, such as carefully checking his mail.” What worried him were the trips home to the West Bank, where his 80-year-old father told him about Israeli soldiers.
CP-1985-021“Finally, the West should recognize the evil nature of the PLO.”
Star Tribune, a syndicated column. “If nothing else, the Achille Lauro incident should have opened the West’s eyes to the true nature of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” Alex Odeh is not in it.
CP-1985-008“His only crime was to be an Arab.”
The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “Leon Klinghoffer has been mourned and eulogized across the United States. But what about Alex Odeh?” The Klinghoffer family had personal phone calls from the president. Odeh “drew sparse media attention and perfunctory condolences from the White House.”
CP-1985-023“On the deaths of Alex Odeh, Leon Klinghoffer.”
The same paper, the following day, in its own voice. “Two Americans died at the hands of terrorists last week. One death received great attention; the other was barely noted.” Then everything the country had learned about Klinghoffer, listed: the immigrant parents, the hardware store, the closeness to family, the charity.
CP-1985-024“Most of your front page and several inside pages on Oct. 12 were given over to the aftermath of the Achille Lauro hijacking… On an inner page, it was recorded that the Santa Ana, Calif., offices… had been bombed, killing Alex Odeh.”
A letter to the New York Times, printed by the New York Times, counting the paper’s own pages back to it. “Pity and horror are rightly awakened by the cruel murder of Mr. Klinghoffer, an elderly and health-impaired American. Equal pity and horror should be felt by all of us to the murder of Mr. Odeh, a man in his early prime — and, if it matters, an American, too.”
CP-1985-027“In the same week that Leon Klinghoffer was murdered in the Mediterranean for the crime of being Jewish, Alex Odeh was murdered in California for the crime of being an Arab.”
The New York Times, five weeks after. The piece records that the Anti-Defamation League denounced the Odeh killing immediately, as “domestic terrorism which cannot be tolerated,” and that “a disturbingly different judgment” came from elsewhere.
CP-1985-029“Arab-Americans protest FBI handling of Alex Odeh bombing murder case.”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, from a congressional hearing. The FBI’s director of investigations blamed the bombing on “very few individuals” in Jewish extremist groups and said the case had the highest priority in the domestic terrorism program. “We have suspects in this case,” he said, and would not say when there might be arrests. That is where these clippings end.
CP-1986-022“Let tears be shed for Alex Odeh.”
The Plain Dealer again, nine months on, and this is where the editing comes out: the day before he was killed Odeh had said on television that Arafat and the PLO were not behind the hijacking, and “statements Odeh made denouncing the hijacking and terrorism in general were cut from the broadcast.”
CP-1986-023This archive was built by searching for particular events, so the number of clippings it holds about either man measures collecting and nothing else. No count here establishes how much coverage either death received, and none is offered. The claim is narrower and it belongs to the papers: within five weeks of 11 October 1985, the Star Tribune, the Plain Dealer and the New York Times each printed the disparity as their own subject, and one of the three was being shown its own front page by a reader. Whether anyone was ever charged in Alex Odeh’s killing is not something these clippings answer. In July 1986 the FBI said it had suspects.
One man, and the position he never changed +
1984 to 1998
One man, and the position he never changed
A position often described now as a response to October 2023 was being printed in American newspapers in 1984, when Benjamin Netanyahu was a 35-year-old ambassador giving a speech in a Baltimore hotel.
Nine clippings from ordinary American papers, 1984 to 1998, in which Netanyahu sets out the same position: no Palestinian state, no negotiable withdrawal, no legitimate Palestinian representative, annexation as the answer to a declaration. Every one of them was in print decades before October 2023.
He was out of office for much of this, and the archive holds Israeli governments of several kinds saying overlapping things. What these nine clippings establish is availability: no Palestinian state, no negotiable withdrawal, no legitimate Palestinian representative, annexation as the answer to a declaration — all of it in ordinary American papers, in his own quoted words, between 1984 and 1998. What they do not establish is that any of it caused a later policy. The chronology is the whole claim.
“The Arab decade is over… We smashed the PLO.”
Baltimore Sun, reporting a speech to a thousand people at the Hyatt Regency. One result, he says, is that “no longer is the PLO able to say it represents the Palestinian Arabs.” The argument that Palestinians have nobody entitled to speak for them is already finished and portable.
CP-1984-002“There is no reason to create a 22nd Arab state at the expense of the one Jewish state.”
Arizona Republic. Also: “Israel’s eastern front will remain in IDF hands. That is not negotiable,” and “the real challenge to peace is not our occupation, but would be our giving up the region.”
CP-1985-001He resigns as U.N. envoy and begins campaigning “as a militant Likud-Herut hard-liner, only minutes after tendering his resignation.”
St. Louis Jewish Light, carrying the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. That description is the Jewish press writing in its own voice, in 1988.
CP-1988-012American talks with the PLO send “a very clear message, that terrorism pays.”
Palm Beach Post. Talking to Palestinians is itself the concession to be refused.
CP-1988-036Two weeks after Rabin is buried, the opposition goes back to attacking the peace process.
San Francisco Chronicle. The report recalls the rallies where he “was often the chief speaker,” and which “became the scene of some of the worst excesses of anti-Rabin incitement.” He says he did not see the placards, or the coffin.
CP-1995-002“Killings don’t deter Netanyahu.”
Delaware Gazette. Now prime minister, he calls the settlers “heroes” and promises to strengthen the settlements.
CP-1996-005Declare a state and Israel will retaliate. The likely step is annexation of West Bank land.
The Herald. Israel cannot accept “a new Iraq or Iran” next door, so the answer to a declaration of statehood is to take the territory.
CP-1998-002“Netanyahu: No Palestine.”
Atlanta Constitution, on his rebuff of Hillary Clinton’s call for a Palestinian state. The paper calls him “ever the courtly hard-liner.” A week later, in St. Cloud: Palestinians may have control over their “lives, but not the powers of statehood.”
CP-1998-003Rabbis and Jewish papers arguing against Zionism, and what happened to the argument +
An argument that used to be ordinary
Rabbis and Jewish papers arguing against Zionism, and what happened to the argument
In the years either side of the Balfour Declaration, American papers printed Jewish opposition to Zionism as routine news. Rabbis, editors and congregations argued it in public, and the papers carried it as news rather than as scandal. Most of what follows ran in the New York Times. Two ran in The American Israelite, a Jewish weekly out of Cincinnati.
Says the Zionists Disturb Palestine
Dr. Paul Nathan of Berlin asserts the Jewish cause is imperiled. The New York Times
Palestine Not a Solution of Jewish Problem
"Zionism has no positive message to Jews in America — preservation of Hebraic spirit needed rather than separate nationality." The New York Times
Jewish Socialists for Free Palestine
An appeal to brethren here and in Russia. The New York Times
Jewish Nation Not Wanted in Palestine
"The views of those who are opposed to Zionism, expressed by a leading American rabbi." Printed three weeks after the Balfour Declaration. The New York Times
Americanism vs. Zionism
"Many American Jews unsympathetic to a political homeland in Palestine," says the former Attorney General of New York. The New York Times
Criticizes Zionists’ Methods
Rabbi David Philipson: "In our view Palestine, whenever the independent Palestinian state will be founded, will be a homeland for Palestinian Jews, as the United States is for us. It is not our homeland in any sense." The American Israelite
The Situation in Palestine
"Very disquieting reports concerning conditions in Palestine cause the Jews of the world to pause and consider the next step in the Zionist program." The American Israelite
Anti-Zionist Group Rejects American Democracy, Charge
Judge Louis E. Levinthal, president of the Zionist Organization of America, answers the new American Council for Judaism: anti-Zionists, he says, are “denuding Judaism.” Buffalo Jewish Review
Anti-Zionists to Fight ‘Nationalism’
Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism meets anti-Zionist figures in London. The report frames it as “combatting world-wide proponents of the Jewish State.” Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
Study of Arab Propaganda Here Lists Role of Anti-Zionist Jews
A JTA report on a Beirut study, which it says credits anti-Zionist Jews with more effective anti-Israel pressure than Americans of Arab descent. The cartoon beside it is captioned “No mention of his little gremlin.” Buffalo Jewish Review
U.S. Nurse Tells Israelis Of Sabra Camp Massacre
Ellen Segal, an American Jewish nurse, testifies to Israel’s commission of inquiry: “I can’t sleep at night unless I tell people what happened there.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Remembering the Nakba on Israel’s 60th anniversary
Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr: “Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating… more than 700,000 Palestinians were made into refugees to make room for the future state of Israel.” Wisconsin State Journal
What changes between 1922 and 1957. In the first cluster, Jewish opposition to Zionism is ordinary news, printed without adjectives. By 1942 it is a charge to be answered — a rejection of American democracy, a denuding of Judaism. By 1957 it is filed under foreign propaganda, alongside a cartoon about oil money. The position did not move. What moved was the space allowed for holding it, and the record of that move is in the Jewish press itself.
It does not disappear. It reappears in 1982 in an Israeli courtroom and in 2008 on a Wisconsin op-ed page, and it is still being called the same things.
Houses for rifles +
One practice, 84 years
Houses for rifles
In 1937 the British army blew up three houses at Daharia, near Hebron, then marked more for demolition to match the number of rifles taken in a raid. They offered the village a rate of exchange: return a rifle, keep a house.
The rate of exchange changes. Sometimes it is rifles, sometimes a permit, sometimes a body held back from a funeral. The practice has a paper trail in ordinary American newspapers running from 1937 to 2023.
Jabalia, then and now +
One camp
Jabalia, then and now
Jabalia is a refugee camp in northern Gaza, set up in 1948 for people pushed out of villages a few miles away. It turns up in this collection 13 times over 61 years. The reporters change. The camp doesn’t.
Sabra and Shatila: from who fired to who knew +
September 1982
Sabra and Shatila: from who fired to who knew
Sabra and Shatila were two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, built for people driven out of Palestine in 1948 and lived in ever since; by 1982 they held tens of thousands and sat inside a city under Israeli military control. The killing there was done by Lebanese Christian militiamen, and American papers said so at the time.
They printed the rest of it too. Those militias had been armed and set up by Israel years before. Within a week the question in these pages had moved from who pulled the triggers to which Israeli commanders knew, and when. Israel’s own commission of inquiry spent months taking evidence. Survivors told reporters that Israeli soldiers were inside Shatila while the killing went on.
“Arab refugees massacred. Stench of death rises from rubble.”
The Morning Union. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Abilene Reporter-News carry it the same morning, the Abilene under “Sabra Camp Eyewitness.”
CP-1982-011“Papers say Israel knew of massacre. Government denies advance knowledge.”
The News Tribune, from the AP in Jerusalem. Israeli newspapers report that Begin’s government knew for at least 36 hours and took no action. “Though the government knew on Thursday night,… it didn’t raise a finger nor did it do anything to prevent the massacre until Saturday morning.”
CP-1982-012“Questions from Shatila and Sabra.”
A Washington Post editorial, reprinted in Honolulu. It names the killers precisely: the militia of Maj. Saad Haddad, “set up as a fireforce by the Israelis some years ago,” and the Christian Phalangist militia, “also with Israeli ties.” Then: “THE ISRAELIS, however, cannot avoid their own measure of responsibility… By their invasion they made themselves accountable for its consequences… At the least, it appears, their entry created the conditions in which the massacre took place.”
CP-1982-013“Sabra and Shatila: Where Israel Got Its Wish.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch. The following day the Stamford Advocate runs “From My Lai to Sabra-Chatilla”: “What needs to be established clearly is precisely which Israeli leaders knew what and when.”
CP-1982-015“U.S. Nurse Tells Israelis Of Sabra Camp Massacre.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ellen Segal, an American Jewish nurse, volunteers testimony to Israel’s commission of inquiry because she “can’t sleep at night.” Three weeks later the Sun reports an Israeli soldier whose identification tags were found inside Sabra testifying that he was never there.
CP-1982-022“Survivors: Israelis watched massacre.”
Philadelphia Inquirer, from the AP in Beirut. Three Palestinian women — Ektefa Shallah, her daughter Jamila, 16, and their neighbor Amenah Khalifa — contradict the official testimony. The same sentence states who did the killing: “the slaughter Sept. 16-18 by Lebanese Christian militiamen.”
CP-1982-024Israel’s own Kahan Commission reached the same place the following February, finding Israel indirectly responsible and the defense minister, Ariel Sharon, personally responsible. He resigned the post.
Five children, two accounts +
7 to 17 August 2022
Five children, two accounts
On 7 August 2022 five children were killed in a cemetery in the Jabaliya refugee camp. They were between 4 and 16. They were in the cemetery because it is one of the few open spaces in the camp. What killed them took nine days to settle in American newsprint, and this archive holds all three stages of it.
“Israel said some of the deaths were caused by rockets that fell short.”
Ann Arbor NewsAssociated Press · CP-2022-028
“Israel says some of the children were killed by rockets that fell short. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan attributes all of the deaths to Israeli fire.”
Saint Lucie News TribuneAssociated Press · CP-2022-035
“…was caused by an Israeli airstrike and not an errant Palestinian rocket.”
The Boston GlobeAssociated Press · CP-2022-051
The first version is Israel’s account, printed as Israel’s account. The second is the account and its contradiction, set side by side and left there. The third is a finding: the Palestinian Center for Human Rights examined the shrapnel and concluded the blast came from an Israeli airstrike.
The Associated Press printed its own observation against itself. The same seven paragraphs that carry the finding also carry this: “When The Associated Press visited the site, it saw none of the usual signs of an airstrike by an Israeli F-16 or drone, adding to suspicions that the blast was caused by an errant rocket.” AP had looked, had not found what it expected to find, had said so, and ran the contrary conclusion beside it anyway. That is what a correction looks like when nobody calls it one.
None of the five children are named in any of the three clippings. The archive holds one from five days earlier that does name four other Gazan children killed that week, three of them with ages, which is how the press decides who is a name and who is a number.
This is the same sequence as Sabra and Shatila, 40 years apart, settled in nine days instead of by a commission of inquiry. The next time a first report says a death was an accident, note the date on it, and look for what the same reporters filed nine days later.
One town, four names +
1917 to 1997
One town, four names
On 8 December 1917 a paper in Miles City, Montana set three words in capitals across the top of a news-agency brief: HEBRON, PALESTINE, OCCUPIED BY BRITISH. Nobody was making a point. That was the name of the town.
It had been the name for a long time by then. A Maryland Gazette column of 13 June 1771 lists the towns Ali Bey had taken in “Syria and Palestine” and names Hebron among them, between Joppa and Tiberias, 146 years before the Montana headline. Twenty-eight years on, a Vermont weekly of 8 August 1799 reported Napoleon in Syria under the standing head Foreign Intelligence. The word Palestine appears in it three times and does nothing but name the place: the French advanced on Acre “in order to make themselves masters of the whole of Palestine,” ships were “to be conveyed to Palestine,” the army came “into Palestine.” Gaza, Jaffa, Acre, Nablouse and Jerusalem are all in the same two columns. It is a dispatch about a French general, printed in Vergennes, Vermont, for readers who would never go there.
80 years later the same town appears in the New York Daily News under a dateline that reads HEBRON, West Bank. In between, an American reader could have found it called two other things. Here are all four, in the type they were set in.
“Hebron, Palestine”
In the headline, in capitals.
Miles City Star · CP-1917-005
“the village of Hebron, in Palestine”
In a photograph caption.
The Daily Tribune · CP-1938-008
“HEBRON, Occupied West Bank”
In the dateline, Associated Press.
Poughkeepsie Journal · CP-1980-010
“HEBRON, West Bank”
In the dateline. Occupied has gone.
Daily News · CP-1997-007
Hebron never became part of a country called the West Bank. No government changed its name to that. And between 1980 and 1997 the word occupied left the dateline while the thing it described stayed where it was.
Except that it was never a sequence
Four plates in a row invite a reading that the archive cannot support, and the correction is worth more than the tidy version. The two forms did not replace one another. They ran side by side for at least 20 years. HEBRON, West Bank, with no adjective, is in the Star-Ledger in March 1977 — three years before the Poughkeepsie dateline above. HEBRON, Occupied West Bank is still in use in the Flint Journal in 1985 and the Clarion-Ledger in 1988. The Los Angeles Times went further than either and datelined Hebron Israeli-Occupied West Bank in 1979.
And the dateline often disagrees with the copy beneath it. The 1977 story is datelined West Bank and its first sentence says the occupied West Bank. The 1985 story is datelined Occupied West Bank and its first sentence says the Israeli-controlled West Bank. A dateline is a label with a character budget. A sentence is an assertion. Counting one as though it were the other would be a mistake, and it would be this project’s mistake, not the papers’.
Here is what settles it. On 3 February 1989 the Associated Press moved one dispatch from Hebron. Two American papers printed it that morning. The copy is the same. The quoted speakers are the same. Three things are not.
Miami Herald
Dateline: HEBRON, West Bank
Levinger predicts riots by “thousands”
no mention of the man killed that day
CP-1989-013
Worcester Telegram
Dateline: HEBRON, Occupied West Bank
Levinger predicts riots by “tens of thousands”
“a Palestinian was killed… bringing the toll to 371”
CP-1989-014
So the adjective was never a decade. It was an editor. One paper called the territory occupied and one did not, on the same morning, from the same copy — and the same paper that dropped the adjective also dropped a man’s death and a running count of 371. The difference between the two quotations is a factor of ten, inside quotation marks, attributed to a named man. What an American understood a settler leader to have predicted depended on which paper was on the table.
Every dated Hebron location line in this archive
says occupied says West Bank, no adjective says Palestine
18 printings. Palestine holds the location line until at least 1938 and never returns to it. Occupied first appears in 1970 and is still there in 1989 — and from 1977 to 1989 the two forms run at the same time, in the same years, sometimes from the same news agency. 1980 has three printings and all three say occupied; 1985 has two and they disagree; 1989 has two, from one dispatch, and they disagree. The word that disappears is not the contested one.
The four plates above are still four real printings and the dates are right. They are a range of usages sampled at intervals, not a progression, and the honest summary is narrower and stranger than a drift: the word Palestine leaves the location line and does not come back, while occupied comes and goes from paper to paper and is still there in 1988. That is the opposite of a euphemism quietly creeping in.
The 1997 story is worth reading twice for a second reason. The headline says Arabs. The story underneath it says Palestinian six times: Palestinian school children, Palestinian police, a Palestinian state, Palestinian officials. One word was fine in the body and a different word went in the display type.
What the counting shows
The word itself can be measured, and it has to be measured carefully, because the number of old newspaper pages that have been digitized changes enormously by decade. A raw count of the word “Palestine” falls 94 per cent between 1900 and 1960, which looks devastating and is mostly an artifact of how many pages exist to search. What follows is a rate: appearances of the word per thousand searchable pages in the same year, measured against a word that appears on nearly every page.
Library of Congress, Chronicling America · “Palestine” per 1,000 searchable pages
Flat for 40 years, then a fourfold spike in the year of the war. What happens next is the part worth sitting with: in 1950, two years after Israel was founded, the word is back at 14.02, which is the same rate as 1900, 1920 and 1940. Statehood did not move it. The first drop below the half-century baseline comes between 1950 and 1953.
Newspapers.com · per 1,000 pages, measured separately
Palestine Palestinian
A second collection, which reaches past 1963 where the first one stops. These two charts must not be read across: different papers, different digitizing, different search engines. Inside this one, between 1993 and 2000, Palestine falls by half while Palestinian rises. A gap in what has been digitized moves both words the same way at once. It cannot move them in opposite directions.
That divergence is the closest thing here to an answer. The people did not go out of the newspaper. The country did. By 2000 an American reader met the adjective three and a half times as often as the place, and a person can be Palestinian in a sentence that never says where that is.
One dispatch, one morning, two front pages. On 14 October 1948 the Associated Press moved a short item: Lebanon and Syria had recognized the Palestine Arab government set up at Gaza. The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, Louisiana ran it on page one under a headline, Recognize Arab Gaza Palestine Government, and printed the place as Gaza, Palestine. The St. Augustine Record in Florida also ran it on page one, as two lines in a column of world briefs with no headline at all, between a Communist leader killed in Java and prisoners of war returning to Austria, and printed the place as Gaza. Same dispatch, same morning, both on the front. One kept the word.
What this does not show
It does not show why. A word missing from a page is a fact about the page; the reason it is missing needs a memo, a stylebook or an editor saying so, and this archive holds newspapers.
Nor was any of this quiet. The phrase occupied Palestinian territories appears on more than 9,000 pages in this corpus after 1980, and Judea and Samaria on better than 53,000 since 1967. The West Bank has had more than one contested name in American print, and the argument about which one to use was conducted in the open, in display type, by people who paid for the space.
This is an advertisement, not reporting, and the paper said so across the top of it. It is here because of what it does with the name. It puts West Bank inside quotation marks nine times, and it argues that West Bank is itself the renaming: the land “was renamed the ‘West Bank’ during Jordan’s brief, illegal 19-year occupation.” Whatever a reader makes of that, it settles one question. The name of that territory was not drifting. Someone bought a page to argue about it.
These measurements are narrow and they are not a verdict on anyone’s motives. What they establish is a shape: a word that was ordinary for half a century, that survived the founding of a state without flinching, that thinned out afterwards in two steps, and that has been outnumbered by its own adjective since at least 1970.
In any dispatch from the West Bank, find the dateline and read the two words after the city. Then look up what the same paper called the same town the last time it was in the news, and the time before that.
When the killer was an earthquake +
July 1927
When the killer was an earthquake
An earthquake hit Nablus in July 1927. Three papers here covered it, and between them they do everything the rest of this collection spends a century not doing.
“670 Killed, 3000 Injured in Palestine Earthquake… Property Damage $2,000,000 — Majority of Dead Arabs.”
The Morning Union, Springfield. An exact number. Not scores, not as many as, not reports differ widely. And the dead are identified.
CP-1927-017“Scarcely a House in Palestinian City That Had Stood for Over 2000 Years, Left Intact · Dead Lie Unburied, Injured Unattended · Wailings of Despair by Stricken Population Resound Throughout Desolated Community”
Waco News-Tribune. A Palestinian city, in Texas, in 1927. And grief: the unburied, the wailing, survivors begging the rescue parties to dig out their relatives.
CP-1927-001“Nathan Straus First to Respond With $20,000 — No Jews Killed · Jews of Tel Aviv Aid Anti-Semitic Arabs”
Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. On a story about 670 dead, the news in the second line is who was not among them.
CP-1927-007Everything that goes missing when a person does the killing is here. The exact number. The adjective. The dead identified. The grief. American papers had all of it in 1927 and spent it on an earthquake.
Which means the specific name was available. The next time you read a headline where nobody kills anyone, ask what the same papers managed for a fault line.
Four counts of one morning +
8 October 1990
Four counts of one morning
Israeli Border Police fired into a crowd at al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem on the morning of 8 October 1990. Within three weeks four bodies had counted the dead and filed the figure. No two of them agreed, and they do not disagree in the direction you would guess.
“GRIEVING MOTHER, Mrs. Kefiya Jihad Hamide, 32,… weeps with family members at their Jerusalem home today over the death of her son, among 19 Palestinians shot to death by Israeli troops.”
The Associated Press, in a caption, the next morning. The agency put the same figure in a second caption the same day, in a Buffalo paper.
CP-1990-011“the violence which took place on 8 October at the Al Haram Al Shareef and other Holy Places of Jerusalem resulting in over 20 Palestinian deaths and to the injury of more than 150 people”
United Nations Security Council resolution 672, adopted unanimously four days after. Not in this archive: a UN document, S/RES/672 (1990).
“According to Israel Police statistics, 20 people were killed and 53 injured on the Temple Mount.”
The Israeli commission of investigation into the day, summary released by the Government Press Office and filed to the Security Council as S/21919/Add.3. Not in this archive.
“The number of dead was 17, one of whom was a woman. Over 150 were injured.”
Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization in Ramallah, reconstructing the morning from more than 50 interviews taken between 8 and 11 October by 13 fieldworkers. Filed to the Security Council as S/21919/Add.2. Not in this archive.
The highest figure is the police’s own and the lowest is the Palestinian one. Whatever else these numbers do, they do not show either side inflating its own case. The wounded split the other way and split hard: Israel Police counted 53 injured, al-Haq counted over 150, and the Security Council said more than 150.
The two accounts read the same morning in opposite directions. Al-Haq has Border Guards firing on an approaching crowd without a verbal warning or a shot in the air, and an ambulance and the doctor beside it shot at. The Israeli summary has police whose lives were in danger, a barrage of stones and metal, and live ammunition used at their attackers. Both were filed to the same Security Council in the same week. Neither is in this archive, because neither was printed in an American newspaper.
What the papers did with it
This archive holds 12 clippings from that week and the year after it. The number is almost never in a headline.
“Israeli police gas Moslem crowd at Temple Mount”
Kentucky New Era. The verb is gas and nobody dies in the sentence. The grieving mother and her 19 ran in the same edition, under a photograph.
CP-1990-012“Israeli police close holy site, fire tear gas at Muslims”
The Atlanta Journal, across the top of the page. A site is closed and tear gas is fired. The people fired at are named by religion.
CP-1990-013“Temple Mount inquiry continues · New evidence counters Israel’s claim that shootings were justified”
The News & Observer, six months on. The headline is a process continuing; the line under it is the news.
CP-1991-002“Members of the ‘Temple Mount Faithful’ march to protest the shootings in October of 17 Palestinians by Israeli police”
The Associated Press again, a year later, in the same Vermont paper. Its own captions that week said 19, twice. No correction appears anywhere in this archive.
CP-1991-005Two people left the American count between October 1990 and October 1991, and nobody told the reader. The figure that survived is the Palestinian one, arrived at by an organization no American paper here cites.
Four institutions counted the same morning: 17, 19, 20, over 20. Three of them wrote down how they counted, and those three documents are public and free. When a number reaches you attached to a killing, look for the sentence that says who did the counting and on what day.
We shall overcome, in Beirut +
26 September to 5 October 1979
We shall overcome, in Beirut
In the autumn of 1979 an American civil rights leader carried the vocabulary of the Black American movement to Nablus, to a refugee camp outside Tyre and to a small room in Beirut, and Palestinians answered him in it. Seven papers in this archive carried the two weeks. On each of the three days they carried, no two of them agreed on what had happened.
Jesse Jackson went to Nablus town hall on 26 September, spoke through an interpreter, and told the crowd to take the black struggle for civil rights in America as their model. Some of them shook their heads at him. Then he led them in a cheer and they carried him out of the building on their shoulders.
“But Jackson roused the crowd to a screaming pitch with a civil rights cheer: ‘I am somebody! We can win! We ought to win! We must win!’ The crowd reverted to Palestinian slogans as they carried the American from the room on their shoulders chanting ‘Jackson! Arafat!’”
The Grand Rapids Press, under the headline Jackson Carried Off On the Shoulders of Arabs After Speech. A news agency dispatch from Nablus.
CP-1979-011“Arabs cry ‘Jackson! Arafat!’”
The Daily News of Longview, the same dispatch that morning under a headline made out of the chant. This paper stops the copy at the Jerusalem sermon and leaves out the two American Jewish travelers who accused Jackson of careerism, and Begin’s refusal to meet the delegation.
CP-1979-016Four days later, Beirut
On the way to the meeting Jackson stopped at Rashidiyeh camp outside Tyre, and the crowd there lifted him onto their shoulders too. What they shouted is in the copy: Jackson, Arafat, brothers in the struggle for freedom. He sat up there with his palms resting on their heads.
“Palestinians, Arafat said, ‘suffered from the same attitude, the same circumstances’ as American blacks. But, added Arafat, quoting from the song known as the theme of the U.S. civil rights movement: ‘We shall overcome.’”
The Times of Shreveport, headlined Jackson meets with Arafat.
CP-1979-013“Jackson talks with PLO chief”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, the same dispatch, cut differently. This paper keeps the line about Jackson possibly carrying a message from President Carter and drops the closing paragraph about a new peace conference. The photograph above it is captioned A warm embrace.
CP-1979-014“Jesse Jackson Fails to Get Arafat To Accept Israel, Quit Terrorism”
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, which had sent its own reporter to Beirut rather than take the dispatch. Same morning, same meeting, and the headline is a failure.
CP-1979-015The Atlanta piece is the longest printed record in this archive of Arafat speaking English to Americans, and it is the one that catches him greeting them: We might not have known each other before, but you are here as old friends of my people. Our hearts will be together until victory. We will overcome. Two papers on two mornings, and in both of them he reaches for the same song.
The same piece carries what he did with the word terrorism when Americans put it to him. He pointed at his advisers around the room and noted that none of them held a passport from the country he was born in. Then he asked his guests a question back: Why were you resisting? Why did you not accept the British Empire occupation?
And the last day
“Jackson, Arafat Meet in Lebanon”
The Lexington Herald, with a photograph of the embrace above the headline. Jackson was in hospital with food poisoning and could not come, so Arafat went to the hospital.
CP-1979-012“Jackson, Arafat speak privately”
The Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls, the same dispatch with a different last paragraph: this one ends on Jackson being snubbed by Israeli leaders. The photograph shows him handing a patient the flowers Palestinian leaders had brought him.
CP-1979-017Three days, seven papers. On two of the days it is one news agency dispatch, filed once and set twice: a reader in Longview got a chant for a headline and a reader in Grand Rapids got a man being carried; a reader in Lexington got two men meeting and a reader in Sioux Falls got two men speaking privately. On the third day the same dispatch ran in Shreveport and Philadelphia while Atlanta, which had paid to send its own reporter to Beirut, printed a failure. None of these readers was told what the others were reading.
What survives every version is the part the headlines had no room for. Palestinians in Nablus chanted a name; Palestinians at Rashidiyeh called an American brother; and the man the papers called a guerrilla chieftain quoted two bars of an American hymn at a delegation of American church leaders. Anybody who tells you the two struggles had nothing to do with each other is arguing with the papers on this page.
785,000, then under 100,000 +
One dispatch, eight papers
785,000, then under 100,000
In October 1949 the Associated Press filed a story with two numbers in it. The Arab population of what was now Israel had been about 785,000 before the fighting. It was now under 100,000. Eight papers here ran that story. These are their headlines.
- Arab Population Of Israel Is Less Than 100,000Appalachian News Express · CP-1949-007
- 100,000 Arabs Left In IsraelThe Morning Union · CP-1949-012
- Jews Accused Of Reducing Arab PopulaceThe Arizona Republic · CP-1949-008
- Claim Jews Are Forcing Arabs to Quit IsraelStar Herald · CP-1949-011
- Arabs Complain Israel Making New RefugeesEvansville Courier & Press · CP-1949-010
- Arabs Complain Israel Ejecting Their NationalsIntelligencer Journal · CP-1949-020
- Israel Arabs Say They Are Being BannedPress of Atlantic City · CP-1949-019
- Jordan Liaison Officer Says Arab Population in Israel DwindlingThe Billings Gazette · CP-1949-009
Two of the eight put the number in the headline. Five turn it into something Arabs say: accused, claim, complain, complain, say.
The Morning Union’s is the one to sit with. 100,000 Arabs Left In Israel. Read it one way and a hundred thousand people are still there. Read it the other and they have gone.
What the United Nations counted 17 days later
In these headlines the number is mostly something Arabs say. On 6 November 1949 the United Nations published the same arithmetic as its own finding.
“The number of refugees, in the sense of persons who have fled from Israel and are unable to return, is estimated, from the most up-to-date data available, at 726,000. This figure is arrived at by taking the former non-Jewish population of the territory at present held by Israel and deducting therefrom the present non-Jewish population of that territory.”
First Interim Report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East, document A/1106, headed by Gordon Clapp, lately of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Its own working note puts the non-Jewish population left inside the armistice lines at 95,000 to 105,000. Not in this archive.
That is the same sum: the population before, minus the population after. The American papers had printed it in October as a complaint made by an Arab liaison officer. The United Nations printed it in November as a count, and five weeks after that the General Assembly created UNRWA on the strength of it.
Nothing in this archive shows any of the eight papers going back to the story when the number stopped being a claim.
The number was in the paper +
1892 to 1975
The number was in the paper
While American papers were calling Palestine empty, barren and a desert waste, the same papers were printing the count. It came from consuls, censuses, parliaments and commissions, and it ran in every decade.
Nobody hid this. The figure was public, official and reprinted, and the empty country ran beside it for 80 years.
The 1925 line is the hardest. A British minister, asked in parliament how much of Palestine was available for Jewish settlement, said the Arabs were farming nine million dunam and that no more than half a million would be available in any case. A Milwaukee weekly printed it.
Who did it, counted +
A count, with its limits
Who did it, counted
303 headlines here report the death of a Palestinian. 171 of them name somebody doing it. The other 132 have a death and nobody causing it.
What that leaves is 132 lines in which people are killed by a clash, an incursion, unrest, violence, a tank, a blast, or nothing at all.
The agentless headline is not a feature of this war. It is a habit with a long history, and here is the paperwork.
How this was countedA headline counts if it names a Palestinian or an Arab and reports a death, and it counts as naming an actor if the same line holds a force or a state. That test is coarse: it takes troops without asking whose, and it misses any sentence that assigns blame without a noun. Treat the figure as a floor. Broken down by decade the slices fall to single digits, too thin to show a trend, so this archive does not publish one.
The copy was the same +
One story, four papers
The copy was the same
The facts usually got printed. What got printed on top of them is what people kept.
On 27 October 1933 the Associated Press filed one story from Jaffa. Three American papers ran it that day, and the words underneath are identical in all three, down to the punctuation.
Police today fired upon large unruly crowds of Arabs demonstrating against a recent increase in Jewish immigration, killing an undetermined number and wounding others… A crowd armed with firearms, sticks, stones and other missiles endeavored to break through a police cordon. After making several baton charges, the police opened fire.
Associated Press, Jaffa, Palestine, 27 October 1933 — as printed in the three papers of that date
Then each paper wrote its own headline.
Same story. What each headline told the reader.
Four papers. One story. A reader in Roanoke learned that police shot people protesting an immigration policy. A reader in Rockford learned that there had been a mob.
The fourth paper ran the same dispatch the next morning. The Omaha World-Herald of 28 October opens on the same sentence with one word changed: where the first three say the police killed an undetermined number, Omaha says eleven or more. It is the only one of the four that printed a count, and it printed it a day late.
Nobody lied. The full story is there in every one of the four, and a reader who finished it would have known that police fired on people protesting an immigration policy. Most readers do not finish. They read the headline, and four headlines made four different events.
It happens in a caption too
April 1957, Gaza. A news-agency photographer takes a picture of a woman feeding a sick child in a hospital bed. Two papers run it four days apart with the same caption, word for word. One of them puts three words on top.
Indianapolis Star · 7 April
“This Arab mother, a displaced Palestinian, spoons food for her
child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza…”
CP-1957-003
American Press, Lake Charles · 11 April
“LUNCH ON THE U. N. — This Arab mother, a displaced
Palestinian, spoons food for her child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in
Gaza…”
CP-1957-020
They did print it
None of this means American papers refused to report. They reported. In April 1948 the Evening Star of Washington took three days to go from calling Deir Yassin a village “a Jewish striking force occupied” to printing a Red Cross count of 254 dead and several hundred words from a wounded 12-year-old girl who had lost her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, two brothers and a baby sister.
Six years later a man wrote to a Louisville paper demanding that a Palestinian
produce the evidence; heresay and generalities are not proof.
It had been
sitting in a Washington daily since 1948. Nobody corrected him.
That is measurable, and we measured it. Searching a commercial newspaper database for the words Deir Yassin in American papers between 9 and 12 April 1948 returns 526 pages. The name was not scarce. It was in hundreds of papers inside seventy-two hours.
What was scarce was putting it at the top. The news agency headline that carried the story — JEWS RECAPTURE KASTEL, which is about a hill and a road — ran in 44 American and Canadian papers on 9 and 10 April. One of the 44 added a second line under the headline naming the village and counting the dead, and that one is in this archive: the Morning News of Wilmington, Delaware, Deir Yassin Also Seized; Women and Children Among 200 Arab Dead. Searching the whole of 1948 for that line returns a single page.
Those two figures count pages in one commercial database, not papers and not everything printed: a paper that ran the story on page one and again on page ten is two pages here, and the database is not the whole American press. The Library of Congress collection, which is free, holds five pages carrying the name in 1948 — that is a fact about the Library’s holdings after the copyright line, not about the newspapers.
The reporting was not the failure. The keeping was.
Somebody said this at the time
In May 1988 a Rochester paper sat six local men down for two hours and printed most of a page of it. Abraham Kharroubi, 44, born in what is now northern Israel:
The main problem is that I as a Palestinian have constantly been seen by the West as a refugee or a terrorist or an Arab — never really addressed as a Palestinian.
He was describing what it felt like from inside the coverage in 1988. What follows here is the paper trail on the other side of it: one story reaching different towns, the facts intact, the headline doing the work. The words were usually there. The headline is what survived.
There are eight more cases here where one story reached readers through two or more papers. Find any of them, read the two headlines, and decide which one you would have kept.
December 1987: the intifada begins, and Hamas is founded +
December 1987
December 1987: the intifada begins, and Hamas is founded
On 8 December 1987 an Israeli army truck killed four Palestinians at the Erez checkpoint. They were from Jabalia camp. The protests began at their funeral, and that is where the first intifada starts.
Hamas was founded in Gaza within days, out of a Muslim Brotherhood welfare network that Israel had licensed in 1979 and tolerated for years as a counterweight to the secular PLO. Its charter came the following August.
Four American papers ran a dispatch from Jabalia on 20 December, 12 days in. None of them mentions Hamas, because it was two weeks old and nobody had heard of it. Everything above the 1987 mark on this page was printed before any of it happened.
The letters page +
Who was allowed to speak
The letters page
Everything else in this archive was written by someone paid to write it. This was not. 74 times between 1918 and 2023, an ordinary reader wrote to a newspaper about Palestine and the newspaper printed it — with their name, usually with their town, and once with a street address.
Palestinian women have been organizing since 1922 +
1922 to 2023
Palestinian women have been organizing since 1922
In October 1929 several hundred Palestinian women held the first Arab Women’s Congress in Jerusalem. They elected an executive, passed resolutions, and drove through the city in a motorcade. The Associated Press gave American readers five sentences, and what it counted was the cars.
Associated Press, Jerusalem · The Plain Dealer, 28 October 1929
Arab women at the same time passed through the streets riding in 70 automobiles.
No woman is named. No resolution is printed. Nobody is quoted. The paragraph is balanced by a note on what the Jews of the city were doing that day, and the headline is two words and a full stop: “Arab Women Protest.”
Seven years before the motorcade
The congress was not the beginning, and the same papers had already said so. In January 1922 a dispatch out of Haifa ran in Wisconsin and then in Brooklyn, and it describes a movement already underway — an exhibition of women’s handicraft, the first of its kind in Palestine, opened by the British High Commissioner himself.
“Stimulate move for the emancipation of women in Palestine”
The line under the headline: Women Now Demanding and Receiving Equal Rights in the Home and Elsewhere. The dispatch says they have definitely entered industry and are, as a result, relieved in part of the economic dependence that had kept them subjugated. Sir Herbert Samuel praised them, in his own speech, for the part they are playing in the up-building of the country. The correspondent’s own framing is the ugly part — a paragraph about the more ignorant of the Mohammedans who thought a woman had neither brains nor soul — and it sits directly above the evidence that contradicts it.
CP-1922-004“Women of Palestine Entering the Industrial Field”
Ten days later, the identical copy across a full page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle with three photographs. The headline has dropped emancipation and equal rights and replaced them with industry. The captions are the only new writing on the page: 1. Women Grinding Corn. 2. In Bethlehem. 3. Headdress That Indicates the Married State. Same sentences, and the Brooklyn reader is shown craft and costume where the Wisconsin reader was shown a movement.
CP-1922-005Sixty-seven years later a Palestinian professor in Illinois put the date a year earlier still, at 1921, and named the two women who did it. Her column is further down this page.
16 years later a woman reporter in Jerusalem filed on the same movement and did the opposite.
“Arab Women Plan Future”
Matiel Mogannam, who organized the 1929 congress, is named, her book is cited and she is quoted: Zionism has given the world a false impression of the Arab.
Seven Arab women leaders, Christian and Muslim, are reading European and American feminist programs. All agree that Arab women must have a voice in the settlement of Palestine’s tangled racial problem.
CP-1945-011“Only the Rich Can Share ’Em In a Harem, Arab Gals Insist”
A hundred women demand the vote, seats in parliament, one penal code for both sexes and custody of their own children, and cable Roosevelt and Churchill about Palestine. The ladies of the harem demanded the right to vote and run for parliament and to hold public office.
The photograph of four of them is captioned Them days are gone forever.
CP-1945-01240 years on, five Palestinian women were invited to the United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi and refused permits to travel to it. The dispatch names six of them. It is the earliest clipping in this archive to carry the phrase security reasons
, and it already carries it inside quotation marks.
One story, four papers, eighteen days
In January 1993 Karin Laub of the Associated Press filed about 1,800 words on the lives of Palestinian women, built around Sahar Sleim of El Bireh, who gets up at four in the morning to sew blouses for Israeli shops at a dollar apiece. Five American papers in this archive printed it. No two printed the same story.
The reporting is identical in all four. What changes is who is doing the harm by the time the reader reaches the end.
“Women in waiting”
A full page in Michigan. It runs the army’s toll — Forty-seven women have been killed and 3,000 detained by the army since 1987 — and ends on Zuheira Kamal of the Palestinian negotiating team: we won’t see this social change in this generation. It will be for the next one. It does not carry the modesty squads.
CP-1993-014“Status of Palestinian women is changing ever so slowly”
Arkansas gives every woman a courtesy title the other printings do not — Mrs. Sleim, Mrs. Saed — and then stops. The story ends on the birth rate. No army, no arrests, no fundamentalists, no Kamal. A reader here finishes the piece believing the obstacle is custom.
CP-1993-015“Careful sips of freedom”
Wisconsin keeps what Michigan dropped and drops what Michigan kept. In alone come the modesty squads to roam the streets and ambush women with tomatoes and even acid, Hanan Ashrawi by name, and the line that the PLO encourages childbirth to compete demographically with Israel. Out goes the sentence about the 47 women killed by the army. It also cuts the sentence explaining that the rules are enforced by men, and replaces it with four words: But the rules are tough.
CP-1993-016“Situation of Palestinian women slowly changing”
Illinois runs the whole thing, army and fundamentalists both, and carries one sentence no other printing here does: There are no statistics, but women activists say domestic violence is widespread and tolerated. There are no shelters for battered women.
CP-1993-017“Palestinian women on the brink of change”
Three months after the others, under a kicker reading Feminists have hope. Florida is the only one of the five to add a standfirst of its own, above the reporter’s first line, telling the reader what the story means before the story starts: They live in a male-dominated society, but Palestinian women are being exposed to Western culture, and some want more than subservience. Twenty-five years of occupation, which is the reporter’s own explanation for that exposure, does not appear in it.
CP-1993-018Read only Arkansas and Palestinian women are held back by their fathers. Read only Wisconsin and they are held back by Islamists. Read only Michigan and the army is in the room. Read Illinois and all of it is true at once, which is what the reporter actually wrote.
Thirteen months after the sentence about there being no shelters, the same reporter filed again.
And once, they refused to leave
“Palestinian women say no to release from prison”
Under the interim accord the women prisoners were to go free first. Four were then held back. So on the morning they were to walk out, 21 of them refused to sign the declaration renouncing terrorism that was the condition of their liberty, and went back to their cells, and hung a flag out of them. Arafat sent a delegation to talk them into leaving. One woman had been held apart from the others and had already signed; when Bashaher abu Laban got home to East Jerusalem she said she would have stayed inside too, had she known.
CP-1995-005“Israel: Women to go free”
Sixteen months later, two sentences in a briefs column. Israel is the subject of the headline and the twenty-four women are what is being done. Nobody in it is named except the prime minister.
CP-1997-008“The other women prisoners refused to leave in solidarity.”
One sentence, sixteen months on, in a Texas paper carrying a Boston Globe report. It is the only place in this archive where what those women did is recorded as having worked. Abir Wehaidi came out after four and a half years, with thirty others. The paper is careful about what she did: the Israeli military court and the eyewitnesses both place her away from the scene; she organized the cell. Her mother Maisoun, asked what she would say to Zvi Klein’s widow, says to look forward, not back, to start a new beginning for the sake of all our children. The last word goes to Mona Awad, 24, on why the celebration was only partial, with about 3,000 men still inside: “The time for guns is not over… There is still occupation. They still kill us.”
CP-1997-009The year one of them got to write it herself
Everything above this line is American reporters describing Palestinian women. At the end of 1989 the Detroit Free Press ran 900 words by one. Ghada Talhami taught politics at Lake Forest College in Illinois and was born in Jerusalem, and the first thing she does is move the start date back eight years from where this archive’s own earliest clipping puts it.
“As early as 1921, Christian and Muslim women, the latter often veiled, participated in mass demonstrations in Jerusalem…”
She names the founders of the Arab Women’s Union — Milia Sakakini, a Christian, and Zuleikha Shihabi, a Muslim — and says what they were organizing against: Their initial agenda was nationalist; Zionism, not male chauvinism, was the enemy. She names Samiha Khali, who founded a school and then sat on the three-member Committee of National Guidance in the 1970s. Then she asks the question the piece is built on: why has the American feminist motto, “Sisterhood is global,” failed to include Palestinian women? Her own answer is not a complaint about indifference. It is a structural one: American feminism took the family as the seat of male dominance and attacked it, and to Palestinians under occupation the family is the only indigenous institution beside the mosque and the church to remain impervious to Israeli influences and control.
CP-1989-016The heading over her column says her subject is largely ignored. She had to be given the page to say so.
Four years later a news agency reporter went to the first women’s shelter in the Arab world and found it had been opened by the women Talhami was writing about.
“Palestinian women in the occupied lands and in Israel are among the pioneers in the arab world in confronting violence against women.”
The caption, on a photograph of a 1993 gathering at Birzeit. Two shelters and several hotlines, opened within months of each other. The director, Rima Assy, has room for ten girls and turns away most of the thirty requests she gets a week. The closing item is the one that changes the record: B’Tselem found that nearly all of the 107 Palestinian women reported killed by other Arabs as collaborators during the first intifada had in fact been killed by their families. For six years those deaths had been counted, in print, as something else.
CP-1994-012“Palestinian women seek protection against warped moralists”
Five days later, a third longer, and the headline has changed what the women are doing. Texas has them seeking protection; Texas also runs the part Texas alone runs, and all of it is Palestinian women running institutions. Nadera Kevorkian, a sociologist at Bethlehem University. A counseling center and two hotlines opened by the Union of Palestinian Working Women’s Committees for the West Bank’s 500,000 women. And Amal Khreishe, who answers them, and who took eleven calls on the first day in January, some from women who had never dared to discuss it with anyone.
CP-1994-014One headline says the women establish. The other says they seek protection. The story underneath both is about what women built, in the middle of an occupation, with no state, no police they could trust and an address they could not print. Thirteen months earlier the same reporter had written that there were no shelters at all, and one paper in four printed that sentence.
In Gaza in 1993 a reporter found Ayshe Abu Maghaseeb, who was 30. Through the six years of the first intifada she had commanded an underground cell, stoned and firebombed soldiers, and carried messages from the PLO leadership abroad. She was interrogated by Israeli agents who she says tried to make her talk by threatening rape. 50 Palestinian women were killed in those six years and about 3,000 were detained. She was wearing a head scarf she says she puts on reluctantly, to avoid being harassed by Muslim militants.
Asked what she expected from self-rule, she did not answer about Palestine. She answered about Algeria, where women fought the French for eight years.
Ayshe Abu Maghaseeb, 30, Gaza City · Wisconsin State Journal, 7 December 1993 · CP-1993-007
She is describing the thing this whole section is a record of, and she is describing it as a risk she can see coming.
That dispatch also ran in Oregon, two weeks later, word for word. The two headlines over it do not agree about what it says.
CP-1993-007“Women warriors of Palestine fear being relegated to home”
Fear. The Oregon printing runs the whole dispatch, and what it adds is the rest of the women: Anam Tawil, 29, an architect who beat 21 established Gaza firms to a contract for four apartment blocks in Khan Yunis, whose male secretary rushed to quiet her baby while she showed visitors the model. And in Shati camp, five minutes away, Ibtissam Badri Tahan, 33, taken out of school at 15 to marry, eight children, up at four in the morning making hummus sandwiches for the family stand. “The house is like a prison,” she said carefully, watching her husband across the table for any sign of disapproval.
CP-1993-02094 years after the motorcade, a news agency story about embroidery reaches Birzeit and finds the Surif Women’s Cooperative still going. Its director, Taghrid Hudoosh, is 55, and she is named. We are a continuation of our heritage.
The organizing never stopped. What changed, slowly and not evenly, is whether the paper wrote anybody’s name down.
Only one headline called him an artist +
1972 to 2014
Only one headline called him an artist
On 8 July 1972 a bomb wired to the ignition of a car in Beirut killed Ghassan Kanafani and his teenage niece. He had published the novel that made his name four years earlier. 20 papers in this archive carried the killing, and between them they spell her name four ways and give her age three.
- Explosion kills leader of Arab terrorist group The Star-Ledger
- Arab Militant Leader Dies In Car Explosion Jacksonville Journal
- Palestinian Guerrilla Is Slain Greensboro Daily News
- Israel Accused in Assassination Blast The Flint Journal
- Kanafani: The Artist Who Turned Revolutionary Anchorage Daily Times
One out of 20, and it ran in Alaska. It is the only one that treats the writing as the reason to run the story at all — and it still puts the art in the past tense: the artist who turned revolutionary.
42 years later the Free Lance-Star sent a reporter to artists working in the rubble of Gaza. The word set above the headline read CONFLICT. Four paragraphs down, the screenwriter Naim al-Khatib explained why he had given up trying to write about anything else.
Naim al-Khatib, screenwriter · The Free Lance-Star, 19 September 2014
The paper printed his complaint above his head, as a category. Between 1972 and 2014 the same sentence keeps arriving, from people who do not know each other.
Kamal Boullata, painter
On crayon drawings by children from Baqa’a camp: In front of the human monumentality of these naked works created by the tiny hands of sincere children, I feel all my best work is now reduced to the size of a postage stamp.
CP-1975-008Sahar Khalifeh, novelist
At the Iowa writing program, with books banned at home: I am here without a machine gun, but with a pen.
CP-1981-004Fayez Sirsawi, painter, Gaza
A painting without a reference to Jerusalem, a painting without a Palestinian flag, without any symbol of the cause, would be rejected as not Palestinian art.
One Associated Press dispatch, four papers, four headlines. This one called it political correctness.
CP-1994-008Fayez al-Hasni, who paints the dead for their families
It saddens me that they don’t want the painting to reflect the people they were. But I’m obligated to fulfill their wishes.
At least ten of the dead were his own students.
CP-2004-003In 2000 the Israeli education ministry put five Mahmoud Darwish poems on the syllabus and the government nearly fell over it. Four papers in this archive carried the row, from three different news agencies. Darwish, asked what the objection was: Israelis do not recognize Palestinians as cultural producers. They accept us as obstacles, as part of the landscape but nothing beyond that.
He died after heart surgery in Houston in August 2008. Seven papers here printed it. Five of the seven headlines call him a poet; the other two give his name and his dates. Not one reaches for the word it had used on Kanafani.
The other side of that morning
Across the ten printings the girl who died beside him is Lamiss Nejim, Lamice Fayez, Lamis Najem and Lamis Ndjim, and she is 14, 15 or 19. Palestinian Journeys, the encyclopedia kept by the Institute for Palestine Studies, names her Lamis. This archive cannot tell you how old she was, because no two of the papers that carried her death agree, and none of them printed a correction.
There is no Israeli account of the killing in this archive either. One of the ten headlines has Israel accused. None has Israel answering. So we went and read the Israeli paper of that morning, which is free to anybody and is not part of this collection.
What Davar printed on 9 July 1972
Davar was the daily of the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, and on 9 July 1972 the killing led its front page, reported by Ehud Ya’ari, the paper’s Arab affairs correspondent. The headline runs השערות סותרות על המתנקשים בדובר „החזית“ — Conflicting conjectures about the assassins of the spokesman of “the Front”. It does not use his name. The Anchorage paper that morning called him an artist; the Israeli paper that morning called him a spokesman.
The line under the headline gives three things at once: that he was killed by the explosion of his car; that the Palestinian organizations said the emblem of the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen had been found at the scene and that the ambassador there denied any connection; and that Kanafani’s Danish wife called him the victim of a quarrel between the Palestinian organizations. The copy then lists four possible authors of the bomb — a breakaway faction, Jordanian intelligence, a quarrel with a romantic motive, or Israeli intelligence — and recalls that two years earlier a man with an Irish passport had fired at the flat of another Popular Front leader, Wadie Haddad, and that the Lebanese inquiry concluded he was an Israeli agent who left the country in time.
It also does what none of the ten American printings manages. It gives her a name and an age in the same sentence: his niece, Lamia Fayez, 15, who was with him in the garage under the building in Hazmieh while he started a brown Austin 1100.
Davar, 9 July 1972, page 1, read at the National Library of Israel’s newspaper collection. It is not a record in this archive, which holds American clippings only; the English here is our translation of the Hebrew, and the issue is open to anyone who wants to check it.
The dish, the thread, the wood +
1973 to 2023
The dish, the thread, the wood
Almost everything else in this archive reaches an American reader as a casualty figure, a suspect or a delegation. These pages do not. They are about dinner, about a dress, about wood and paper and beer — and they behave differently, in one measurable way, which is at the end.
In January 2008 a food page in Missouri opened with a sentence that states the subject of this whole archive, and then answered it.
Diaa Hadid, Associated Press, Bethlehem · Columbia Daily Tribune, 16 January 2008
It’s the most talked-about conflict in the world — but the food remains a mystery.
The organizer of the Second Palestinian Culinary Competition in Bethlehem put it to the reporter plainly. We do have fighters
, Fadi Kattan said. But we also have other things that make us Palestinian.
A sidebar on that page defines maqluba, which means upside down, and which is cooked in one pot and turned out onto a plate at the table.
The move is six years older than that page. In July 2002 the New York Times ran a piece
about a falafel sandwich, and underneath the sandwich a fight about whose it is.
We always sort of look at each other and roll our eyeballs when we pass a restaurant that says ‘Israeli falafel,’
said Rashid Khalidi. Aziz Shihab, who wrote a cookbook called A Taste of
Palestine, once picked an argument with the owners of a Dallas restaurant that served it.
This is my mother’s food
, he said.
This is my grandfather’s food.
CP-2002-088
Over the next 14 years that dish is printed in five more American papers, in five more states, and each time somebody different is making it.
A travel page in Jaffa
CP-2018-010A cookbook review
Fethie Abowaznah Loutfi, 85, who walked out of Jaffa barefoot, raised eight children in New York and cooked on the United Nations maintenance staff. The Nakba, printed in a food column.
CP-2019-007Ramadan in Phoenix
Salmah Monsour’s recipe, with weights and timings. The photograph is the family at the table, laughing.
CP-2021-007Rotating iftars
Nadia Labadi, 29, hosting her first. 11 days after Phoenix, in a story that is not otherwise about Palestinians at all.
CP-2021-008Thanksgiving
Hythum Kiswani, who arrived at nine during the Iran hostage crisis, was bullied as Iranian, and begged his parents for turkey and mashed potatoes. Sure, we’ll have turkey, but we’ll still have traditional Arabic meals meant for celebrations.
CP-2022-048The thread
In 1987 Hanan Karaman Munayyer saw 65 Palestinian dresses in New York that an
antiques dealer meant to sell off piecemeal. She and her husband Farah took out a home
equity loan and bought the whole collection so it could not be split up. She is a molecular
biologist. She used the research skills on the dresses, and she says the embroidery is
one of the strongest expressions of Palestinian culture
.
She is in this archive three times across 18 years. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran her bridalwear collection in August 2005. The Los Angeles Times ran the collection again in September 2006. And she is still being quoted in September 2023, in the Santa Fe printing of the dispatch below, explaining when the practice spread. CP-2005-007 CP-2006-031
On 10 September 2023, 26 days before the line this archive stops at, two American papers ran the same New York Times dispatch by Raja Abdulrahim, filed from Birzeit. The Santa Fe New Mexican cut it; the Buffalo News ran it long.
“In every stitch, there is a story. Like layers of history, the hand-stitched Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez, traditionally used to ornament Palestinian dress, tells of towns and villages lost, old customs abandoned, past lives and survival.”
Raja Abdulrahim, The New York Times, Birzeit · 10 September 2023 · CP-2023-074 CP-2023-075
The stitched designs once worked almost as an identification card. A rooster, an old Christian symbol, told you the wearer’s faith. A red bird on a blue-threaded robe worn by a widow meant she was ready to remarry. The argument one of the women makes in that story is the presence case put through needlework: there is a Jaffa thobe and an Akka thobe and a Beersheba thobe, and those garments are from those places. UNESCO recognized tatreez in 2021.
Four years earlier the Associated Press had run the dress as politics. When Rashida Tlaib was sworn in wearing her mother’s red-and-black thobe, the hashtag #TweetYourThobe followed; she wrote that she wanted to bring to Congress “an unapologetic display of the fabric of the people in this country.” The AP story names six Palestinian women — a museum curator, three designers, an exhibition director, and Maha Saca of the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem, who gets the last line. The paper that printed it misspelled political in its own headline. CP-2019-005
What the arts page asked in return
In October 2017 the Los Angeles Times reviewed Jordan Nassar’s cross-stitch
panels at a gallery in Los Angeles. The first sentence is not about the work.
If only negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis could work themselves out as respectfully and inventively as Jordan Nassar has negotiated the divergent forces feeding into his work.
The second establishes that he is married to an Israeli, before it establishes anything he
made. The only politics of his own the review quotes is three words, in the passive: he was
born into the conflict
.
The rest of the review is admiring, and calls the show an oasis of calm. That is the shape of the permission these pages give. A living Palestinian is named for something he made rather than something done to him, which is rare enough in this archive to count, and the condition is that he be read as a diplomat first. CP-2017-017
The wood, the paper, the beer
Olive wood, Bethlehem
A workshop founded in 1925, a craft dated to the fourth century, prices from $40 to $20,000, 95 percent of it exported, and a rule about where the wood comes from: pruning, never cutting. Four Palestinians named.
CP-2017-009Origami, Gaza City
Ahmed Humaid, 29, folding paper in a studio of scrap-metal sculpture. Filed by Wafaa Shurafa, a Palestinian reporter for the Associated Press in Gaza. The blockade appears once, as the reason he cannot travel.
CP-2019-004The keffiyeh, Hebron
Yasser Herbawi once supplied much of the West Bank and Gaza with the
black-and-white scarf; most of his looms now stand idle, undercut by
the world’s newest keffiyeh capital: China
.
The piece then does what the arts pages usually do not: workshops closed, 6,000 shoe
factory workers out of work in eight years, and unemployment in Hebron at 30.5 percent,
the highest in the West Bank. A story about a scarf carrying more of the occupation’s
economics than most news pages here from that year.
Beer, Taybeh
Nadim Khoury, 41, who put $1.5 million into a West Bank brewery in 1994 on the prospect of peace, and who by 2001 was taping over his own label so that the people drinking it would not know who made it.
CP-2001-007The oldest one
The earliest page of this kind in the collection is from 1973, a Sunday feature in the Corpus Christi Caller about the Arabic-speaking families of that city. The Palestinian family gets its own standing head: Palestinian food, music survive. What survives, in the story, is a wedding — nights of parties before the day, songs composed on the spot in Arabic naming the bride and groom, bamboo flutes and the durbaeque. CP-1973-006
20 years on, four inches in an Oregon daily announce Emily Shihadeh performing her own life in an engineering auditorium in Corvallis, free, with comedy and songs in it. The piece is called Grapes and Figs are in Season: A Palestinian Woman’s Story. CP-1993-009
The one that names nobody
On 24 September 2005 the Capital Times in Madison ran a photograph of al-Tatreez and a
caption explaining it.
The color combinations of the thread, and design and color of the cloth, have historically reflected the region where the embroidery was made and the status of the person owning or wearing the item.
Shawls, tapestries, table runners and purses would go on sale that evening in the gallery
space of a restaurant on East Main Street, with Arabic dancing and a suggested donation of
$10, the proceeds going to the Madison-Rafah Women’s Fund.
Not one embroiderer is named. Not one woman in Rafah is named. The only proper nouns attached to people on that page belong to a restaurant, a street address and two Madison organizations. The women who made the objects are the whole reason the item exists and they are nowhere in it, and Rafah survives on the page only inside the name of an American charity. CP-2005-020
These pages name people. The 2008 food page names seven Palestinians. The 2019 dress story names six women. The olive-wood trade story names four. The tatreez dispatch names four, three of them women. The 1973 wedding feature names the family. Nobody in any of them is a casualty, a suspect or a delegation.
Not every one of them. The Madison listing sold the embroidery and left the embroiderers out, which is what happens when the object travels and the people who made it do not. The room was there. That page did not use it.
None of these pages is about the war, and that is the only thing they have in common. When an American paper wrote about Palestinians doing something other than dying, it usually turned out to have room for their names.
Read any page about Palestinians for what the writer thought needed explaining and what they thought could be assumed. Then count the names.
A boy was killed, and nine papers called it crossfire +
1 to 6 October 2000
A boy was killed, and nine papers called it crossfire
Muhammad al-Durrah was twelve years old. He was killed in Gaza on 30 September 2000, sheltering against a wall beside his father, and a French television crew was filming. Sixteen clippings in this archive, from fifteen American newspapers, carry the story over the six days that followed. This is what those papers did with it.
Nine of the sixteen use the word crossfire. Thirteen of the sixteen name Israeli soldiers or Israeli troops somewhere in the story. In three, a sentence puts Israeli fire as the thing that caused a death.
So in thirteen of the sixteen the soldiers are on the page, and in three they are in the sentence where the boy dies. Crossfire is the word that does that work: it describes a place rather than an act, and a child who dies in it has been killed by a geometry instead of by anybody.
This archive counts that habit across a century. 303 headlines here report the death of a Palestinian and 171 name somebody doing it → What the first week of October 2000 shows is the same habit at close range, in six days, on one child.
“Shattering Image”
Page A7. The line under the headline is Family mourns boy, 12, killed in the crossfire. This is the only clipping in the run where a reporter went to the family’s house, and the only one where his mother is quoted at length. Even here, in the piece that comes closest to him, the word in the subheading is the same one the other eight used.
CP-2000-028“Child Perishes In Cross-Fire”
Page A13, the day after. Four words, and the only actor in the sentence is the cross-fire. The boy does not die; he perishes, which is a thing that happens to people in weather.
CP-2000-026“Worst violence in four years erupts in Gaza”
The line beneath is 12-year-old boy killed in Palestinian-Israeli cross fire, and the violence erupts, as though from the ground. This is also one of the three clippings whose body text does eventually put Israeli fire and a death in the same sentence. The headline does not.
CP-2000-022The whole week, as it was printed
Every clipping in this archive from those six days, in date order. Fifteen papers, from Hawaii to Long Island.
- Hawaii Tribune Herald1 October 2000 · CP-2000-022
- Daily News1 October 2000 · CP-2000-023
- The Ledger1 October 2000 · CP-2000-026
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch1 October 2000 · CP-2000-031
- Sarasota Herald-Tribune2 October 2000 · CP-2000-018
- Sarasota Herald-Tribune2 October 2000 · CP-2000-019
- Arizona Republic2 October 2000 · CP-2000-025
- Kalamazoo Gazette2 October 2000 · CP-2000-027
- Newsday2 October 2000 · CP-2000-028
- The Mercury4 October 2000 · CP-2000-021
- Green Bay Press-Gazette4 October 2000 · CP-2000-029
- The Sun4 October 2000 · CP-2000-032
- The Santa Fe New Mexican4 October 2000 · CP-2000-033
- Palm Beach Post5 October 2000 · CP-2000-030
- Spokesman-Review6 October 2000 · CP-2000-024
- The Daily Telegram6 October 2000 · CP-2000-020
Most sections here compare across decades, because most habits of the press only show up at that distance. This one covers six days, and the habit is already visible: the word that removes the actor was reached for by nine papers in a week, on a story where the actor was on camera.
One more thing the week holds. Across the six days his family name is printed four ways — al-Durrah, al-Durra, al-Durah, Aldura — and his given name three: eight papers say Mohammed, three say Rami, one says Muhammad.
The next time a headline says a child was killed in crossfire, the question worth asking is the one these sixteen clippings mostly leave alone: whose fire, and who was holding it.
The day anti-Zionism was first compared to antisemitism +
1898 to 2015
The day anti-Zionism was first compared to antisemitism
People argue now about whether criticizing Zionism is a form of antisemitism. That argument has a paper trail in American newspapers, and it runs for 117 years. This section follows it.
None of this settles the question. It shows where the comparison came from, because somebody made it out loud, at a convention, in front of a reporter, and a Baltimore newspaper printed it on 17 October 1944.
Everyone quoted in the first half of this section is Jewish. That is the point of it. For fifty years this was an argument Jews had with each other, in their own newspapers, in public, by name.
The whole of it, before the evidence:
Each of those is a clipping. Here they are.
1898: the argument starts, and it runs the other way
“Union of American Hebrew Congregations debates Zionism”
The governing body of American Reform Judaism spent an afternoon deciding whether to condemn Zionism, and a Jewish newspaper printed the floor debate with every name attached. Dr. Silverman said it “is a political movement and should be condemned openly.” Rabbi Calisch wanted the “silence of contempt.” Rabbi Tyor argued against condemning it at all, because that would throw doubt on the patriotism of the many Jews who were Zionists. And Simon Wolf took the position that reverses everything to come: Zionism “was simply a feeder for anti-Semitism.” In 1898 the worry was that Zionism would cause the hatred.
CP-1898-002One delegate, Rev. Dr. Krauskopf, gave the answer nobody has improved on since: as an American he opposed it, and as a Jew his heart was with the people whose treatment had caused the craving for Zion.
For the next forty years it is an ordinary word
Papers print it the way they print any political term. Nobody puts it in quotation marks and nobody treats disagreeing with it as a sign of anything.
- Jewish Opposition to ZionismThe Spokesman-Review, Spokane · 1905 · CP-1905-001
- JEWISH OPPOSITION TO ZIONISMEast Oregonian · 1907 · CP-1907-003
- AMERICANISM VS. ZIONISMThe New York Times · 1918 · CP-1918-007
- Criticizes Zionists’ MethodsThe American Israelite · 1920 · CP-1920-001
- THE ANTI-ZIONIST PROTESTThe American Jewish World · 1922 · CP-1922-003
Two of those five are Jewish newspapers. The New York Times sets the disagreement as a debate and gives the floor to a former attorney general of New York.
1942: the argument changes shape
The change happens in the middle of the Holocaust. That has to be said first, because it explains the pressure everyone in these clippings is under. The case for a refuge had stopped being theoretical, and the people making it had stopped being willing to treat the other side as a reasonable position.
“Rabbis Rebuke Jewish Opponents of Zionism”
733 rabbis sign a statement the paper calls without precedent in the history of American Jewry. Opposing Zionism is a “cruel blow” to the Jewish people, and it is now “a departure from the Jewish religion.” Until that sentence, it had been a policy disagreement. After it, it is a question of whether you are still practicing your faith.
CP-1942-003“Anti-Zionist Group Rejects American Democracy, Charge”
A month later, a second charge is added on top of the first. The head of the Zionist Organization of America answers the founding of the American Council for Judaism by calling it “irrational prejudice against our national movement.” The headline supplies the rest. A group of American rabbis who disagreed about Palestine are now rejecting American democracy.
CP-1942-00117 October 1944: the comparison, in a headline
Two years later a reporter for the Baltimore Sun sat in a hotel in Atlantic City and wrote down the sentence this whole argument has been built on ever since.
“Anti-Zionists Compared To Anti-Semites”
Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, at the 47th annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America, says anti-Zionism is a manifestation of prejudice and that its “basic psychology can be compared to the psychology which underlies anti-Semitism.” Then he builds the comparison in front of the room, piece by piece. “It feeds on untruths.” Where the antisemite imagines a council of the elders of Zion, the anti-Zionist imagines a political nation-in-exile. “Where the anti-Semite generalizes: ‘Jews are aggressive,’ the anti-Zionist generalizes: ‘Zionists are un-American.’” He is not describing something he found. He is making an argument, out loud, and he knows it. The people he is comparing to antisemites are American Jews.
CP-1944-001Read the headline again. Compared. The Sun is covering a speech, and reporting what a man in it said. In 1944 everyone in the room understood the difference.
1957: and now they are foreign
“Study of Arab Propaganda Here Lists Role of Anti-Zionist Jews”
A study of the Arab propaganda campaign in America “gives anti-Zionist Jews more credit for effective anti-Israel pressure than it allocates to Americans of Arab descent.” Fifteen years after the position became un-Jewish and un-American, it is foreign influence. The people described have not moved. The category around them has.
CP-1957-022From 1968 the argument moves to a different word and a much louder room, and this archive follows it there: Zionism as racism, the 1975 UN vote and the repeal →
2015: the sentence turns all the way around
“Anti-Zionism is racism”
A column on the fortieth anniversary of the UN vote, describing that vote as “one of the worst instances of anti-Semitism since the end of the Second World War.” The headline is four words and it completes the circle. In 1898 a Jewish leader warned that Zionism would feed antisemitism. In 1944 a rabbi said opposing Zionism resembled antisemitism. By 2015 opposing it is the bigotry, with no comparison left in the sentence.
CP-2015-004The 1944 comparison was made for a reason anybody can understand. Jews were being murdered in Europe at a scale nobody had words for, the argument about a refuge had become an argument about survival, and Lelyveld reached for the hardest thing he could say to people he thought were standing in the way.
What this archive can show is that he was reaching. The comparison was an argument that day, not a finding, and the newspaper printed it as one. What happened afterward is that the argument kept working long after the emergency that produced it, until the room it was made in was gone and the sentence was still standing.
The next time somebody tells you the two things are the same, ask when that comparison was first made, and by whom, and who was standing on the other side of the room when he made it. All three answers are in a newspaper. The people on the other side were rabbis.
Zionism as racism: the 1975 UN vote, the repeal, and the reversal +
1968 to 2023
Zionism as racism: the 1975 UN vote, the repeal, and the reversal
On 10 November 1975 the United Nations General Assembly voted 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. 16 years later it voted 111 to 25 to take it back. What happened in between, and what happened before it, is in these clippings.
Two columns in this archive, one from 2015 and one from 2022, explain where the formula came from. Both say the same thing: it was a Soviet campaign. That is checkable, because American papers were printing the words long before the vote, and the first time they appear here is in the last paragraph of a story about an arms deal.
The whole of what this paper printed
Yahya Hammouda, a month into the job of leading the PLO, tells a Beirut paper there is nothing to stop Arabs sharing a future with Jews who have given up Zionism and racism
. The dispatch ends there.
CP-1968-002The same dispatch, five paragraphs longer
It is stupid for us to ask the Israelis to return to their countries of origin.
And what he was asking for instead: Then git rid of zionism as a political and racist ideology and agree to live with the Arabs in an Arab-Jewish Palestinian state where each can have his share
.
CP-1968-003One paper kept the accusation. The other kept the offer it was attached to. The phrase entered the American press already carrying a proposal, and the first thing that happened to it was that an editor cut the proposal off.
After that it travels fast, and none of it runs through Moscow. In June 1969 a news-agency reporter counts the placards in a lecture hall at Hamburg University, and one of them reads Zionism is racism
. In August an American paper can print the phrase in quotation marks without explaining it. In September Nasser sends a message to the first Islamic Summit calling on Muslim states to stand against zionism and racism backed by imperialism
. In May 1970 a Jewish news agency reports that the Black Panther Party has declared Jewishness, Zionism and racism are identical
. By 1974 it is in the letters columns of Santa Barbara and Worcester.
The vote
The Blade in Toledo ran the count, the losing argument and the winning one on the same front page. Moynihan: A great evil has been loosed upon the world.
Herzog, who tore up a copy of the resolution at the lectern, said the body was on its way to becoming the world center of anti-Semitism
, and that it was fitting the vote fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The paper sets the word as Krystal Night. And the case for it, in the paper’s own summary: Supporters of the resolution equating Zionism with racism said it was anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic. They argued that Zionism — the movement for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine — is exclusive and thus racist.
Three weeks later the Boston Globe filled a page with letters about it, under a photograph of a demonstration in New York. Three placards are legible. One reads NEVER AGAIN. One reads 20 COUNTRIES FOR ARABS ONE FOR JEWS. The third reads ANTI-ZIONISM CODE WORD FOR ANTI-SEMITISM.
What Americans actually thought. Louis Harris put it to 1,475 adults between 22 and 29 November 1975. Disapproval ran 49 to 9. But no more than 9 per cent of the American people believe that ‘Zionism is racism’
, and 42 per cent had no view at all — 63 per cent among people who had left school at eighth grade. The column ran in at least two papers here, under two headlines.
What the delegates thought they were voting for
In January 1980 a New York Times correspondent went and asked them. The delegate of Sri Lanka, the country that introduced the resolution, said: There are problems in my mind. Racism is an ethnic thing. Zionism is a political thing, political security
, and then I’m sorry to say I haven’t taken the trouble to analyze and come to a conclusion.
Nigeria’s delegate was blunter: Whether it is accurate or not, it might produce the desired results. That’s politics, isn’t it?
Brazil’s explained that Brazil is so vulnerable and dependent on Arab oil.
Tunisia’s wanted it kept because Many Arabs want to retain it as a negotiating asset.
11 years later the Des Moines Register printed the whole roll call of the repeal, and three of those four names had moved. Sri Lanka, which wrote it, voted against repealing it. Nigeria voted for repeal. Tunisia did not vote.
The turn
On 17 December 1978 the Associated Press moved a story out of the General Assembly. Two papers here ran it. One of them kept a sentence the other did not.
Ilana Ben Ami, Israeli delegate, to the United Nations General Assembly · Duluth News-Tribune, 17 December 1978
13 years before the resolution was repealed. 37 years before a Florida paper ran those words as a headline. The Kansas City Star carried the same dispatch that morning with all three vote counts and without that line.
After the repeal the argument does not stop, it inverts. One month on, a cartoonist in Michigan draws two panels: the left one boxed and labeled Repealed, a figure holding a placard reading ZIONISM IS RACISM; the right one labeled Pending, a figure at a bank of microphones holding one that reads ARABISM IS TERRORISM. In 1998 the same General Assembly names antisemitism a form of racism for the first time in its history. In 2001 a parallel forum at Durban votes to put the old resolution back. In 2015 the headline is Anti-Zionism is racism
.
Where it kept turning up. The formula was never one vote. It attached itself to UNESCO in Paris in December 1975, to a conference on housing in Vancouver in 1976, to a conference on racism in Geneva in 1978, to the women’s conferences in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985, and to Durban in 2001. Each time it arrived at a meeting convened about something else, and each time the something else is what ran past midnight. At Nairobi the delegates had agreed 94 of the 372 paragraphs of a document on women’s advancement to the year 2000 when the argument broke out.
Three weeks before that, this archive holds a dispatch reporting that Israel had refused travel permits to five Palestinian women invited to the same conference, for security reasons. Neither story mentions the other.
In February 1988 the United States government published its own finding that the occupied territories ran on a dual system
under which Palestinians were usually treated less favorably
than settlers in due process, freedom of movement, land use and social services. In December 1988 an American columnist wrote that the resolution calling Zionism racism was integral to the United Nations’ enterprise of delegitimizing Israel, and his party’s platform promised to cut American funding until it was repealed. Same year, same government. The two documents never meet.
Disabled Palestinians, and the warning that becomes the defense +
1994 to 2022
Disabled Palestinians, and the warning that becomes the defense
In November 2001 the Associated Press moved a story about Shimon Peres and the possibility of restarting talks. Two-thirds of the way down, in the paragraphs where the day’s deaths are listed, is this.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 10 November 2001 · CP-2001-013
He was deaf. The reason given for shooting him is that he did not answer when spoken to, in two languages. Both sentences are printed, one after the other, and nothing in the paper connects them. He is not named. The story runs above a furniture sale, 50 to 70 per cent off, just in time for the holidays.
15 months later the same construction appears in a different paper, about a different person, and this time she has a name.
The Salt Lake Tribune, 7 February 2003 · CP-2003-011
That is twice now, 15 months apart, different papers, different people. Both times the warning is what makes the death defensible. Both times the reason the warning failed is printed in the same sentence as the warning.
Where they came from
In January 1996 two papers ran the same dispatch about Palestinians suing Israel for injuries. It carried the army’s own arithmetic: a total of 1,067 Palestinians were killed by Israelis and 17,987 were injured between the start of the uprising on Dec. 9, 1987, and Nov. 2, 1994
. More than a thousand of the disabled had filed claims. Peres answered that he would pay If it is mutual
, and not otherwise. The San Francisco Examiner, the same morning, reported what the cabinet decided: no blanket compensation, a bill granting the state blanket immunity to the claims
, and a committee for exceptional cases.
Ali Fanoun, shot in the spine at 14 leaving dawn prayers, is called Palestinian Ali Fanoun in the body of the story. The headline set over his photograph reads PARALYZED ARAB SUES.
How they appear
Once the papers have them, disabled Palestinians appear mostly inside stories about someone else, and mostly without names. A man hugged by Arafat in 1994, one of about 20 in wheelchairs
assembled to welcome him home, unnamed on a page where six ordinary Gazans are named. A man in 1997 whom the volunteers have come to meet, named nowhere in a caption that names three Americans. A caption in 2009 that reads, in its entirety, An elderly, disabled Palestinian man sits with his relatives.
A handshake with the Arab League in 2010. 400 of them assembled as an audience for a speech by Abbas in 2005.
And in 1997, one sentence inside a story about a firebombed army truck: settlers at Itamar were arrested for beating a disabled Palestinian, because The stone-throwers fled, leaving behind the disabled man
, who then became the only person who could identify them.
Two editorial pages, on the same subject, doing opposite things. In 2003 the York Dispatch used six sentences to object to the deportation of a blind, diabetic, stateless Palestinian
who had been asked to sign his own release without a lawyer, and put on a plane before his family could drive from Philadelphia. The paper could not say where he had been sent, because he had no country to be sent to.
In 2004 The Day, editorializing on the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, reached for his disability as a prediction: the military assassination of an elderly and disabled cleric held in wide esteem has had the opposite effect
. His quadriplegia is not the subject of that sentence. It is the reason the paper expects the killing to go badly.
And then they organize
In Rafah in 2003 the Palestinian Authority froze the accounts of nine charities, and the people whose welfare ran through them marched. The photograph shows men in wheelchairs at the front, carrying signs written in English. One of them reads LET US LIVE WITH DIGNITY. In 2010 disabled refugees in Lebanon demonstrated for a flotilla carrying supplies to disabled people in Gaza, in a story whose own reporting is that Israel had permitted potato chips and refused medical devices
.
And in May 2016 a coach from Oregon spent a week in a Red Crescent hall in Khan Younis with 15 women and girls, setting up the territory’s first women’s wheelchair basketball team. Mona Khattab is 47 and one of the first female players in Gaza. On the chairs they have:
Mona Khattab, 47, Khan Younis · Chronicle-Tribune, 31 May 2016 · CP-2016-005
Two papers ran that story the same day. One headline kept the word female. The other took it out of a story about the first women’s team.
On 12 July 2014 an Israeli missile hit the Palestine Charity in Beit Lahiya, a residential center for physically and mentally disabled people. Its director, Jamila Alaiweh, counted for the news agency: nine residents, four away with their families for the weekend, two of the remaining five killed, three burned. One of the dead had cerebral palsy. Among the wounded was a quadriplegic. The last thing the Associated Press reported from the site was what the rescuers pulled out of the rubble — a folded-up wheelchair and a children’s workbook
.
The archive
3,517 clippings, oldest first
Search every word of it, or narrow it by paper, state, president or subject.
Try
Searches the full text of every transcribed clipping, this archive’s own notes on each one, and every headline, paper, town, state, page number and accession number.
Or move through all of them: drag the reel sideways, use the arrow keys, or jump to a decade.
Filter by paper, state or president
Filter by subject
What the papers called Israel before there was an Israel. Israel was declared on 14 May 1948. Before that date there was no state to name, and these papers write about Jews, Jewish forces, the Haganah, the Irgun, the Jewish Agency. Jew or Jewish is in 125 of the 329 headlines printed before the declaration, and in 42 of the 842 printed after it. Israel or Israeli is in 365 of those 842. The noun changes when the state does.
The collection
What's in it
Named and unnamed
82 names in 1,897 clippings
Those 1,897 clippings were printed before Hamas was founded on 14 December 1987. Across all of them, 82 ordinary Palestinians are named. After that date there are 325.
A long feature names more people than a two-paragraph news-agency brief, so the fair test is whether the early clippings had less room. They did not. The two halves are within a couple of points of each other: 75% of the earlier clippings run past fifty words against 79% of the later ones, and the later scans are, if anything, slightly the larger. Length cannot account for the gap, because the gap is not a close thing — 4.3 ordinary Palestinians named per hundred clippings before 14 December 1987, against 20.1 after. 4.6 times as many.
Officials were always named. Ambassadors, muftis, lawyers, doctors. It is the ordinary people who appear as quantities: 200,000 refugees, 750,000 inhabitants, 60,000 forced out of Haifa, three killed and 137 injured, a 12-year-old boy at Jabalia whose name the news agency did not carry. Below is every Palestinian these papers named, officials included: 656 people in all, of whom 55 held some office. The figure at the top of this section counts only the ordinary ones, and only in clippings printed before Hamas was founded on 14 December 1987. The distinction between an ambassador and a farmer is the one the papers themselves kept.
One of the 20, twice. Fahimeh Ali Moustafa Zeidan was 12 when the militias came to Deir Yassin. Two American papers printed her, two days apart.
Being named is not one thing. The Evening Star gives her five paragraphs and a subheading. The Mingo Republican gives her the width of the page and lets her speak in the headline, and names her two-year-old sister Khadra as well.
A study of this archive
How the papers wrote
We looked at how American newspapers reported on Palestinians across three centuries: what they called people, where they placed a story, which words they reached for, and what changed.
Everything below was counted. Every headline in this archive, and then, where the archive could not answer the question, every American newspaper we could search.
Most of what follows is about headlines, because we have the headline for every clipping in the archive and a headline is the part of a story almost everyone reads.
Where a finding could be checked against the whole digitized press rather than this collection alone, we checked it, and we say so.
One story, many headlines
Eight papers, one morning
A news agency sends one story to hundreds of newspapers. Each paper writes its own headline. The body is identical. The headline is a local decision, made in a few minutes, by someone who will not be named.
Dozens of those stories are in this archive, and almost every one ran under more than one headline.
In October 1949, eight American papers ran the same story about Arabs being removed from Israel after the war.
“100,000 Arabs Left In Israel”
The Morning Union, Massachusetts. Read it twice. In the story, left means remaining — a hundred thousand Arabs are still there. On the page it reads as departed. The body settles it. The headline never does.
CP-1949-012Where these shared stories report a death, the headlines rarely agree on how to say it. Some say killed, or slain. Others say died, dead, toll, casualties. Some leave the death out of the headline altogether.
In March 1988 three papers ran one story about an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian woman and the army closing a Palestinian news agency the same day. Two of them printed both halves. The Kerrville Daily Times printed “Arab Press Agency Closed.”
Because this archive was partly built by looking for these pairs, how many turn up here is a fact about the collection and not a rate for American newspapers. It is also a floor: we can only detect a shared story where both printings have been transcribed, and most have not.
The word Palestine
It moved to the letters page
Before 1948, an American newspaper printing the word Palestine was usually just saying where something happened. It turned up on opinion pages at about the same rate it turned up anywhere else, which in this archive is roughly eight percent. The word did no work. It was an address.
After 1970 it does something else. More than a quarter of headlines carrying the word now sit on an opinion page: a letter, a column, an editorial. The archive’s overall share of opinion has barely moved. The word has. Then after 2010 it comes back to the news pages, as the name of a state in waiting.
A few of the late ones are arguments about the word itself — Even the word ‘Palestine’ a matter of debate. Most are people writing in. A Free Palestine. It’s Time to Recognize Palestine. The news pages had largely stopped saying it. Readers had not.
The place-names moved faster than the people did. Across the whole digitized American press, “Haifa, Palestine” falls by 98.7 percent between the 1940s and the 1950s, and “Haifa, Israel” replaces it almost exactly as fast. That is what you would expect: a state was declared in 1948 and papers name the state that exists. But the word Palestinian, for the people, took another thirty years to reach American headlines at any scale. The map was redrawn in a decade. The people were renamed over three.
One word, three centuries
Who got called a terrorist
In November 1945 the Washington Daily News told its readers that British troops had gone into two villages with clubs and tear gas looking for Zionist terrorists. Not so-called. Not what the British call them. That is the paper, in its own voice, on its own news pages. CP-1945-004
It was ordinary. Jewish terrorists runs through these clippings all through the 1940s, and so do Jewish extremists, Jewish mobs, the Stern gang. In April 1948 the Record Journal reported that the Jewish extremist groups, Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern gang, took Deir Yassin on the Friday. CP-1948-014
So we went and counted it across every American newspaper we could search, not just the ones in this archive.
In the 1940s, 14,764 American newspaper pages carry the phrase Jewish terrorists, against 1,042 for Arab terrorists. By the 1970s it is 2,596 against 127,224, with another 62,043 for Palestinian terrorists.
Both periods are the newspaper talking. Around three-quarters of the uses on either side are the paper’s own words rather than something it is quoting. The word never belonged to anyone. It was available, and it moved.
It has not left entirely. The Chicago Tribune in 1977 on Menachem Begin’s past as an underground Jewish terrorist leader CP-1977-005, and the Boston Globe in 2023 on Israeli extremists attacking Palestinian towns. CP-2023-041
We publish only what we have tested and confirmed. Hypotheses that did not survive the checking are not on this page.
About
An archive of 3,517 newspaper clippings about Palestinians, printed in American papers between 1724 and 2023. Every one of them was published at the time, for anybody to read. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023, and nothing here is about the attacks of the seventh or anything that has happened since. The archive stops the day before.
1,897 of these were printed before 14 December 1987, the day Hamas was founded. The oldest is from 1724. So when someone says this started in 2023, or started with Hamas, the papers answer for themselves, on their own front pages, decades before the argument existed.
What they show is how Americans were told about Palestine, in the words the papers chose at the time. Colonizing in 1902, printed as a plain description. Colonists redeem Palestine in 1912. Three Palestinians killed, 137 injured in 1989, nobody named and nobody doing the killing. Palestinian death toll mounts in 2022. Line them up and the sentences barely move.
Three centuries of it, written down as it happened.
Found one page at a time, in the Library of Congress newspaper collections and in subscription newspaper archives.
A clipping is included if it is a scan of a printed page, the paper and the date can be read from the scan or confirmed against the archive it came from, the reporting is on or about Palestine or Palestinian people, and it was printed before 7 October 2023. News-agency copy counts as many times as it was printed, because a reader in one town saw one paper.
Every clipping carries a fixed accession number, CP-1948-023 and the like, which is never reissued.
Rights
The clippings belong to the newspapers and agencies that printed them. They are reproduced in full for research and commentary, because a headline can only be examined whole; the oldest have passed into the public domain. Everything else — selection, transcription, counts, writing — is © Maria Robles, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The dataset is CC BY 4.0.
If you hold rights in something here and want it taken down, write to maria@rozumstudio.com and I will remove it.
Collected, transcribed and researched by Maria Robles, an artist, researcher and photographer working in public history and memory.
Her other work includes Slavers of New York, which documents the families who built fortunes on the slave trade and whose names are still on the city’s streets and buildings. That project has been featured in The New York Times, Reuters, Guernica, The Decolonial Atlas and Cornell University Press.
Send a clipping
If you have a newspaper page about Palestinians, a photograph of it is enough. Any American paper, anything printed before 7 October 2023. It will be credited to whoever sends it, unless you would rather it weren’t.
And if you are looking for something you could not find by searching what is already here, write and I will see what I can turn up.
Get in touch
Colonization, the word the papers used
Calling it colonization now starts an argument. For the first half of this archive it was simply the word the papers used — in their own headlines, without controversy, and usually with approval.
Plan of Colonizing Palestine With Jews · 1902
Jewish Colonists Advancing · 1908
Jewish Colonists Redeem Palestine · 1912
Almost every use of that word by a paper describing the project as it was happening sits before 1948. What comes back later is settlement, which names a smaller thing: an outpost, a problem, an obstacle to peace.
So colonization is not a frame this archive lays over the evidence. It is in the evidence, set in headline type, for 50 years. What changed was not the project. It was the vocabulary American readers were handed for it — and that change is one of the things this archive exists to show you.
The record is public. The work of reading it should be too.
I want it to be useful to anyone curious about how Palestinians have appeared in American newspapers over time — but especially researchers, journalists, students, educators, and people trying to understand the history beyond the present.
Contributions can go well beyond adding articles.
Flag what I missed
A cutting, a scrapbook, a paper nobody has digitized. If it was printed before 7 October 2023 and Palestinians are the subject, it belongs here.
Challenge a reading
Argue with an interpretation. The patterns and the readings of them are kept apart on purpose, so the reading can be wrong without the evidence being wrong.
Identify an error
A misread date, a wrong masthead, a bad transcription. Corrections are recorded on the page rather than quietly fixed.
Suggest a source
An archive, a collection, a run of a paper I have not searched. The thin decades are thin because of where one person looked.
Ask a question of it
Suggest something that could be tested against the collection. If it can be counted, it can be answered, and the answer goes up either way.