Given the enormous amount of focus that Israel receives in the foreign press, it’s hardly surprising that plenty has been written in the aftermath of what appears to be a Benjamin Netanyahu victory in the just completed Israeli election.
HonestReporting does not endorse any political party within Israel. We do, however, have the benefit of being on the ground, working and living in Israel and actually taking part in the elections.
But what about all of those foreign media outlets that are relying on their own journalists or external commentators for the “expert” analysis in order to decode what is a particularly complex democratic exercise with uncertain and fluid outcomes?
The extremist “experts”
Surely, the most obvious and even representative commentators and analysts to write about an Israeli election would be ... Israelis?
Think again.
Why bother when you can trot out anti-Israel extremists to give their nasty agenda-driven analyses?
Take the LA Times, which gives a platform to Saree Makdisi, a UCLA professor with a track record of falsely accusing Israel of apartheid, maliciously claiming that Israel deliberately kills Palestinian children, urging an academic boycott of Israel, and calling for Israel to be dismantled as the Jewish state – effectively for its destruction. We have previously called him out for questioning why anyone should recognize Israel’s right to exist, accusing Israel of collective punishment in Gaza, and claiming that anti-Israel campus activists are the victims of a campaign of intimidation.
And it’s more of the same in his latest screed where he concludes that “The takeaway from Israel’s election is simple: The two-state solution is dead. What remains is a single racist state whose beneficiaries are satisfied with their government.”
[Editor’s note: This is an excerpt. To read the entire article, please click here.]