Security reasons, and what they were given forIn quotation marks in 1985, bare in a headline by 1988 · 1985 to 2002
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 twenty-two ordinary Palestinians this archive can find named before 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 twelve clippings show is the quotation marks moving, and where they sit tracks how far the sentence stands from the claim it is carrying.