Tuesday, March 2, 2010

NY Times' Jerusalem property makes it protagonist in Palestine conflict


Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2010

(Left: Ghada Karmi standing by the front door of her childhood home in Jerusalem's Qatamon neighborhood in 2005. (Steven Erlanger) )

"During an appearance at Vassar College in early February, controversial New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was asked about the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families from homes in East Jerusalem which Israel occupied in 1967. Israeli courts have ruled that Jewish settlers could take over some Palestinian homes on the grounds that Jews held title to the properties before Israel was established in 1948.

Bronner was concerned, but not only about Palestinians being made homeless in Israel's relentless drive to Judaize their city; he was also worried about properties in his West Jerusalem neighborhood, including the building he lives in, partially owned by The New York Times, that was the home of Palestinians made refugees in 1948. Facts about The New York Times' acquisition of this property are revealed for the first time in this article.....

The New York Times-owned property Bronner occupies in the prestigious Qatamon neighborhood, was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar (1905-2007). Karmi was forced to flee with his family in 1948 as Zionist militias occupied western Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods. His was one of an estimated 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem that Jews took over that year.

The New York Times bought the property in 1984 in a transaction overseen by columnist Thomas Friedman who was then just beginning his four-year term as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Hasan Karmi's daughter, Ghada, a physician and well-known author who lives in the United Kingdom, discovered that The New York Times was in -- or rather on top of -- her childhood home in 2005, when she was working temporarily in Ramallah.....

Thus, in a sense, Bronner's structural and personal identification with Israel has become complete: when the younger Bronner joins army attacks in Gaza, fires tear gas canisters or live bullets at nonviolent demonstrators trying to save their land from confiscation in West Bank villages, or conducts night arrest raids in Ramallah or Nablus -- as he may well be ordered to do -- his father will root for him, worry about him, perhaps hope that his enemies will fall in place of his son, as any Israeli parent would. And on weekends, the elder Bronner will await his soldier-son's homecoming to a property whose true heirs live every day, like millions of Palestinians, with the unacknowledged trauma, and enduring injustice of dispossession and exile."

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