Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] BETRAYING TRUTH 165
Europe could finally forget the famous picture of the boy in the Warsaw
ghetto with his hands raised. The meaning of this statement . . . is obliteration
of the Holocaust through the overlapping of Israel and Nazism. . . .
It means pretending to believe blindly, without investigation, the Palestinian
version of a highly disputed episode and of many, many others; it
means taking for granted the “atrocities” that the Palestinian spokespersons
always talk about, and ignoring every proof or fact that doesn’t
serve this position. 102
Perhaps even more egregious than the inaccurate reporting of the al-
Dura incident was the almost total non-reporting of the landmark libel case
to which it gave rise. 103
The “Massacre at Jenin”
In the Arab-Israeli media over the past five years, perhaps no phrase
has become more of a lighting rod than the “massacre at Jenin.”
In April of 2002, shortly after the Israel Defense Forces invaded a
Palestinian refugee camp area adjacent to the West Bank city of Jenin, a
report came out over the wire that Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN’s special
envoy in the region, witnessed the event, which he described as “horrific
beyond belief.” His views were quoted widely in the international press,
and trumpeted by Palestinian Arabs and their supporters as evidence of
Israeli brutality. PA leaders, among them Saeb Erekat, charged that Israel
had massacred at least 500 Palestinians. That figure made its way from the
Cable News Network to the UN Security Council, which immediately
demanded access to the site of the killings. 104
The harshest criticism appeared in the British press. The Independent,
the Telegraph, and the London Times all quoted the same lone Arab, who
said he saw Israeli soldiers heap thirty bodies beneath a half-wrecked
house: “When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing
its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank.” 105
The Telegraph reported that hundreds of victims “were buried by bulldozer
102. Fiamma Nirenstein, “A Former Communist on Jews, Israel, and Anti-Semitism,”
National Jewish Post & Opinion, September 3, 2003.
103. See infra notes 124-142 and accompanying text.
104. John Kifner, “Annan Picks Team to Examine Camp Attacked by Israel,”
New York Times, April 23, 2002, p. 12.
105. “Jenin Camp ‘Horrific Beyond Belief,’” BBC News, April 18, 2002, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1937387.stm. Phil Reeves, “Amid the Ruins of
Jenin, the Grisly Evidence of a War Crime,” The Independent (London), April 16,
2002, p. 1.