Ari Shaviet, Leftist Speaks With Fareed Zakaria About Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                                        

"Ari Shavit (Hebrew: ארי שביט; born 16 November 1957) is 67,a  leftist journalist . Shavit was a senior correspondent at the left-of-center Israeli newspaper Haaretz before he resigned" due to his own conduct. He spoke with Fareed Zakaria on CNN today, and I was wondering what would be said about ISRAEL.  

Haaretz has a left bias because:  Such media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation.  They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information reporting that may damage liberal causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. 

• Overall, we rate Haaretz Left biased based on story selection and editorial positions that strongly favor the Left and High for factual reporting due to a clean fact-check record.

"He has for many years been a critic of Benjamin Netanyahu who was born in 1949. Although admitting that Netanyahu is highly intelligent, Shavit argued that Netanyahu "scorns [US] Democrat politicians and liberal intellectuals... as weaklings." Shavit also castigated Netanyahu for not being "a civil leader who truly cares for the welfare of his citizens. He [Netanyahu] is unconcerned by social justice."  This is as Ari sees Netanyahu, and I see no examples as to how he comes to feel this way, as every time Israel has been in a dire situation, they have voted for him.  

In fact, during Netanyahu's long 2nd term, he, "opposed the 2008 Israel–Hamas ceasefire, like others in the Knesset opposition. Specifically, Netanyahu said: "This is not a relaxation, it's an Israeli agreement to the rearming of Hamas ... What are we getting for this?" Forming Coalitions is completely different from the USA democracy and he was to do just that in 2009.  He chose his competition of the Left, to comply.  Tzipi Livni of Kadima turned it down!   Netanyahu did manage to entice a smaller rival, the Labour party, chaired by Ehud Barak, to join his government, giving him a certain amount of centrist tone.                                                                

                                       Suha, Arafat's wife and Hillary Clinton

                                         Arafat, daughter  Chelsea and Hillary Clinton

 In 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced support for the establishment of a Palestinian state – a solution not endorsed by prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom she had earlier pledged the United States' cooperation.  Some cooperation that move was!  Netanyahu said that any furtherance of negotiations with the Palestinians would be conditioned on the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state." 

 None of this was a part of Shaviet's knowledge, evidently.  That's the problem with many journalists;  they write more from personal opinion than fact. 

People gather outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office for protest during a meeting on the confidence vote in the government against Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara (not seen) in West Jerusalem on March 23, 2025.  According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, demonstrators marched from Gaza Street, where Netanyahu’s official residence is located, to his office, where the government was meeting to vote on Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s proposal to withdraw confidence from Baharav-Miara. On Friday, Netanyahu’s office said that the government had unanimously agreed to remove Bar as head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, marking a first in Israel’s history. 

An Israeli writer and journalist, Shaviet spoke with Fareed Zakaria on CNN today after Israel resumed its war in Gaza with Hamas about political fractures in Israel and their impact  on the war with Hamas terrorists. He had resigned from Haaretz when a pattern of sexual misconduct came to public attention. 

Shavit was born in Rehovot, Israel, and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His father was a scientist and his mother was an artist. Some of his ancestors were early leading Zionists.  Shavit was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1975. He volunteered as a paratrooper in the Paratroopers Brigade. He served as a squad leader and took part in various raids against armed Palestinian organizations and camps in Lebanon, including Operation Litani.    

                         Finkelstein                                                   Kramer          "In 2013, Shavit released My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. It was a New York Times Best Seller and received widespread acclaim.  The book received many positive reviews, as well as criticism from both the left, including from Norman Finkelstein, and from the right, including from Martin Kramer."  His book should show just how on the left in his thinking that he was.  

Norman Finkelstein, a real leftist is the guy who "According to Finkelstein, his involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict began in 1982 when he and a handful of other Jews in New York protested against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He held a sign saying: "This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Auschwitz, Maijdenek will not be silent: Israeli Nazis – Stop the Holocaust in Lebanon!"  I corresponded with him for a while and could not budge him.  He'd ignore my evidence and just carry on his merry line, like our president often does.  Martin Kramer caused controversy at the February 2010 Herzliya Conference in Israel,  by advocating for the elimination of Western aid in what he termed "pro-natal subsidies" to Palestinian refugees in Gaza in order to discourage population growth and Islamic radicalization:  Those subsidies are one reason why in the ten years, from 1997 to 2007, Gaza’s population grew by an astonishing 40%. At that rate, Gaza’s population will double by 2030 to three million.  Kramer is a senior and past editor of the Middle East Forum's Middle East Quarterly. Primarily a scholar of twentieth century Islamist intellectual and political history, Kramer has also published columns in the National Review magazine and on the websites of the History News Network.  

Subsidies are one thing.  No one mentioned the Arab allowance of having 4 wives to produce many children at a time.  

The discussion today with Zakaria seemed to be convoluted to him as much as it was to me.  I could not decide what Shaviet was saying as to the cause of Israel's divided situation, except Shaviet mentioned it being Trump's fault and dealings with the USA as a role model for Netanyahu. So even Ari Shaviet, a leftist, couldn't explain why the Israelis were demonstrating in the streets as to what they wanted !   

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Shavit

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/haaretz/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu#Prime_minister_(2009%E2%80%932021)

The Impossible Creation Of A Palestinian State As Facts Show

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Back 39 years ago in 1984, Joan Peters nee Friedman b: 1936 copyrighted her book, From Time Immemorial,  which was about the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine.  Joan was also a Former CBS news documentary producer and author.  She died at the age of 76 in 2015.  

Friedman is a Jewish surname.  I match 25 Friedmans of DNA on FTDNA with 3 of them being 3rd to 5th cousins and may have more on the 2nd page.  So Joan may have been of a Jewish family;  Her 2nd husband, Stanley Kaplan, was Jewish and died.  That may have speeded up her interest, but had nothing to do with finding the facts.  She remarried William Caro, and Caro is a Jewish name-Joseph Caro who had a yeshiva in Safed, Israel born in 1488.  

 She became "fascinated by the Middle East while covering the Yom Kippur War as a freelancer for CBS in 1973".From the information she was picking up from her co-workers and friends, the nasty Jews were taking advantage of the poor Arabs by creating their own country, Israel, out of the land of Palestine.  Wasn't that an Arab country to start with?  So she, being an outstanding newspaper reporter who actually got down into original works, researched, starting off by thinking she was going to prove and uphold the Arab position and rights.                                     

 It's wasn't long until she found how wrong she had been.  She switched her thinking, realizing that the Jews did have the right to their land.  The pocket-book I have is 412 pages long, no pictures, and then gives us 188 more page to page 613 of  notes and a bibliography. 

The entire Arab-Israeli conflict is based on a narrative fabricated by the Arabs that they had lived in Palestine from “time immemorial” until, in the 20th century, Jews from Europe invaded Palestine and drove them out, creating the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

 She came across a remark Winston Churchill made in 1939, challenging the common notion that Jewish immigration into Palestine had uprooted its Arab residents. To the contrary, according to him, “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.”  1939 was the year Germany invaded Poland and started WWII.  Anti-Semitism in Germany was at its worst.  

A 1984 review of her book by Daniel Pipes analyzed the strength of her research: “Making use of work done by Kemal Karpat in the Ottoman records, Miss Peters ascertains the non-Jewish population in 1893 of the area that would later form Palestine under the British Mandate.                                    

Kemal Karpat was a Romanian-Turkish naturalised American historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who worked on Turkish history.  Daniel Pipes is now working on a book about Israel and said,

 "That a just resolution of the conflict requires the Palestinians to lose hope. Only when they give up their war goal of eliminating Israel will the conflict come to an end. Israel must win and the Palestinians must lose.

Peter's book was the first major study that documented how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, perpetuates the refugee status of Arabs who were displaced, or left voluntarily, in the wake of the 1948 War of Independence.

In From Time Immemorial (1984), she argued that Palestinians are largely not indigenous to modern Israel and therefore have no claim to its territory. 

She won the National Jewish Book Award in 1985.  

Critics against her book are:

A lot of people who were outraged by facts!  She only wrote facts, not suppositions.  

Norman Finkelstein b: 1953, received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University.   It was a true academic achievement that Norman Finkelstein who was Jewish,  bashed.  Evidently today's academics like him hadn't thought of actually reading original statements for proof.

 Noam Chomsky (b:1928) also Jewish,  was just as bad.  He would not listen to a word of proof in defense of Israel.  

  Chomsky's latest rant claims that bin Laden was not complicit in the attacks of 9/11 and that Bush's sins were worse than those of the al-Qaida ringleader.  Like Finkelstein, Chomsky was also Jewish. Two Jewish PhDs who not only bashed Israel but Joan Peters as well.   Chomsky wrote many books against Israel but his PhD was in Linguistics.  Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955.  Chomsky is known for promoting apartheid accusations about Israel.  The author of dozens of books, including most recently the upcoming Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky spoke at the invitation of the BU student group Students for Justice in Palestine as part of the University’s first-time participation in Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), a series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe.  

The book, a best-seller, became controversial. Scholars and writers such as Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said-Palestinian, Yehoshua Porath- He specialized in the history of Palestinian nationalism.  

 

                                                   Then Ian and David Gilmour criticized it, who only had opinions. David Jon Gilmour CBE is an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, and member of the rock band Pink Floyd. He joined as guitarist and co-lead vocalist in 1967, shortly before the departure of founding member Syd Barrett.  Ian Hedworth John Little Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, PC was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom. He was styled Sir Ian Gilmour, 3rd Baronet from 1977, having succeeded to his father's baronetcy, until he became a life peer in 1992.  So the Gilmours are part of the British who have been against Israel all along since the 30 year mandate the British had to rule over Palestine until 1948.  They represent the masses that judge by hearsay with prejudice, not by facts.  

Admirers of her book are: 

New York Times Book Review:  The massive research Ms. Peters did...would have daunted Hercules.  In the course of it she turned up a great deal of interesting material from Ottoman recores, the reports of Western consular officers and observant travelers and other sources.

Washington Post Book World:  A remarkable document in itself...The refugees are not the problem but the excuse.  

New Republic:  This book, if read, will change the mind of our generation.  If understood, it could also affect the history of the future.  

Christian Century:  The most thoroughly researched and solidly documented work on the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict...A book that smashes conventional wisdom...Unassailable in its thoroughness...It all makes a totally fresh impact.  

Theodore H. White said that it was a superlative book.  to understand what is happening in the Middle East, one must begin with its past, which Miss Peters traces to the present with unmatched skill."Theodore Harold White  May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986) born in Dorchester, Boston. His father, David White, was a lawyer. He was raised Jewish. Theodore was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series.White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to catch international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.

Palestinian school children chant slogans and raise the victory gesture over a UN flag during a protest at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school, financed by US aid, in the Arroub refugee camp near Hebron in the West Bank on September 5, 2018. (AFP PHOTO / HAZEM BADER)  In April 2021, the US sent $150 million dollars to UNRWA formally restoring aid to the Palestinians.  Biden was quietly ramping up funding to Palestinians; has long said he would reverse freeze put in place by Trump.

Only a year after the publication of From Time Immemorial, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in December 1985 that rejected any efforts to require UNRWA to help Arab refugees engage in resettlement and rehabilitation.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Peters wrote for magazines such as Harper's, Commentary, The New Republic, and The New Leader, was a consultant in the creation of CBS news documentaries in 1973 about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and provided commentary on the subject for PBS. 

Her dedication to the cause of Israel may have been triggered by a visit in the 1970s to the Soviet Union, where officials treated her and her husband with suspicion.

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_H._White

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/joan-peters-a-eulogy-to-an-inspiration-387168

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/jewess-press/impact-women-history/joan-peters-the-myth-of-from-time-immemorial/2015/02/02/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/01/17/joan-peters-journalist-who-wrote-israeli-palestinian-conflict-dies/UC2GsGpLRMeLLGzP8zT1MM/story.html (outrage mentioned) 

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/the-lions-den-daniel-pipes-columns-indepth/path-to-victory-how-israel-can-win-the-palestinian-conflict/2023/01/15/

Julie Bosman's, Others and Myself's Critique on "Palestine-Peace Not Apartheid" by Former President Jimmy Carter

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

The book  by former president Jimmy Carter, Palestine--Peace  Not Apartheid,  was published by Simon & Schuster in November 2006.  I note that this was our first president to attack Israel,  in a whole book yet.  Since he had won the 2002 Peace prize, this makes his book almost biblical in admiration.  

It was shocking to me and most of my friends back then. 

Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s.

It is acclaimed to be a great book by amazon readers today. 

                                            

                      Hamas terrorists marching in street

What was going on in Israel when this book came out?

 In January 2006, the Palestinians held parliamentary elections. In a surprise victory, Hamas ousted the Fatah government, but Abbas remained PNA president. The two factions briefly formed a national unity government, but, in June 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza, routing Fatah forces and killing more than 100 people. Israel responded to Hamas' seize by maintaining even tighter control on the goods and people entering and exiting the territories.

International Fallout           

                              Getting Shalit back from Terrorists

In June 2006, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups took Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, from Israeli territory and dragged him into Gaza. Despite prisoner exchange attempts, Shalit has been held hostage ever since. On July 12 2006, Hezbollah militants crossed the Lebanon-Israel border and attacked an Israeli army patrol, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two others. The incident coincided with a series of mortar and rocket attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah. Both incidents provoked a month-long war in which 1,200 Lebanese and 128 Israelis were killed. Both sides stopped fighting on August 14, 2006. 

The UN and international human rights groups condemned Israel for using cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon. The war was criticized within Israel and sparked more resentment from the Arab world.  

Ha'aretz stated as fact: "The ground invasion was preceded by large-scale artillery shelling from around 4 P.M., intended to "soften" the targets as artillery batteries deployed along the Strip in recent days began bombarding Hamas targets and open areas near the border. Hundreds of shells were fired, including cluster bombs aimed at open areas."

All of these claims are based on the appearance of the shell bursting,

 and none of the sources indicate that actual cluster bomblets have been found. This looks like a case of mistaken identity showing "multiple projectiles" is actually a white phosphorus round or similar, used to 

create a smokescreen. Of course WP is also very controversial. 

However, when Carter's book first came out, that was not the case.   

There were strong critiques against it, thank goodness.  Some people were seeing the inaccuracies thrown against Israel.    

                                                 

Julie Bosman is a national correspondent who covers the Midwest. Born and raised in Wisconsin and based in Chicago, she joined The Times in 2002 and has written extensively about politics, education, law enforcement and literature. Bosman had been with the Times for 12 years, beginning as Maureen Dowd's news assistant in 2002. She'd also covered the 2008 presidential race, education and metro. Her latest role took her to Chicago.

Critical response to Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has been mixed. According to Julie Bosman, criticism of the book "has escalated to a full-scale furor," much of which has focused on Carter's use of the word "apartheid" in the subtitle. Some critics, including several leaders of the Democratic Party and of American Jewish organizations, have interpreted the subtitle as an allegation of Israeli apartheid, which they believe to be inflammatory and unsubstantiated. 

Tony Karon, Senior Editor at TIME.com and a former anti-Apartheid activist for the ANC, said: "Jimmy Carter had to write this book precisely because Palestinian life and history is not accorded equal value in American discourse, far from it. And his use of the word apartheid is not only morally valid; it is essential, because it shakes the moral stupor that allows many liberals to rationalize away the daily, grinding horror being inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza".

The truth is that the American students have not been educated about The Holocaust, Jews or Israel either.  People only believe what they see in print, which was in those days, the newspaper and their church and of course, the TV news with reporters themselves being slanted in their opinions.  Even the book used at Portland State U, Middle East-Past & Present by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks, is highly slanted in their chapters covering Israel.  I took the course.  I read the whole book.

 Former President Bill Clinton wrote a brief letter to the chairman of the American Jewish Committee, thanking him for articles criticizing the book and citing his agreement with Dennis Ross's attempts to "straighten ... out" Carter's claims and conclusions about Clinton's own summer 2000 Camp David peace proposal.  Carter's meetings were a failure whereas Clinton's were successful.  

Critics claim that Carter crossed the line into anti-Semitism. My feeling is that the whole book was defaming Israel right from the title, and Israel was created for our remnant of Jews in the world, so in effect he was attacking Jews.  What was happening in Israel was that Palestinians were trying to destroy the Jews-drive them into the sea, and have the country for themselves.  It's obvious, not a time to be pussy-footing around with semantics--oh, he's calling Israel names but certainly not the Jews--oh yes, I know how much we are loved.  For heaven's sake, the title of the book was accusing Israel of Apartheid, a terrible word used against British-held Africa.  It has connotations of cruelty, hatefulness against a defenseless people.  What more do you want in being anti-Semitic?  

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, initially accused Carter of "engaging in anti-Semitism" in the book;  "Foxman told James Traub later that he would not call the former president himself an "anti-Semite" or a "bigot". Ethan Bronner also asserted that Carter's "overstatement" in the book "hardly adds up to anti-Semitism."  

Some journalists and academics have praised Carter for what they believe to be speaking honestly about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a media environment described as hostile to opponents of Israel's policies.  I argue, what about accuracy?  The honesty comes only from 

Carter in that he's writing about his own belief system; not from facts.

 

Some left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin and Shulamit Aloni argued that Carter's critique of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories reflects that of many Israelis themselves.  

 Norman Finkelstein, a pal of Norman Chomsky,  two of the biggest American-Jewish anti-Semites, did Israel  ultimate harm  who defends Carter's analysis in Palestine Peace Not Apartheid: "After four decades of Israeli occupation, the infrastructure and superstructure of apartheid have been put in place. Outside the never-never land of mainstream American Jewry and U.S. media,  this reality is barely disputed."  They have been so anti-against

Israel has said that they are no longer welcome in Israel.  Finkelstein has eased up, but not Chomsky.  

 In this book Carter argues that Israel's continued control and construction of settlements have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East. That perspective, coupled with Apartheid in the titular phrase Peace Not Apartheid (which many regard as a subtitle) and allegations of errors and misstatements in the book, sparked criticism. Carter has defended his book and countered that response to it 

Even the use of "settlements" is a mis-conscrewed term.  Foreign writers such as Carter keep calling cities 50 years old as settlements.  In USA, a settlement was used when forts were built in the wilderness, but then after a few years were called villages, towns and cities.  A settlement feels like something that  is only temporary.  

Here's what Carter said about his title.

Regarding the use of the word "Apartheid" in the title of his book, Carter has said:  It's his denial: 

"It's not Israel. The book has nothing to do with what's going on inside Israel which is a wonderful democracy, you know, where everyone has guaranteed equal rights and where, under the law, Arabs and Jews who are Israelis have the same privileges about Israel. That's been most of the controversy because people assume it's about Israel. It's not."I've never alleged that the framework of apartheid existed within Israel at all, and that what does exist in the West Bank is based on trying to take Palestinian land and not on racism. So it was a very clear distinction."

 "Sorry but that's not distinction at all.  A title refers to what you're writing about.  The title said it all.  This is double talk.   

Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. 

Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that "he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." Some reviews posted on Amazon.com call me "anti-Semitic", and others accuse the book of "lies" and "distortions. A former Carter Center fellow has taken issue with it, and Alan Dershowitz called the book's title "indecent."

Evidently Carter had to do a little apologizing-after the deed had been done.  

He also wrote a "Letter to Jewish Citizens of America" explaining "his use of the term 'apartheid' and sympathizing with Israelis who fear terrorism." 

As president, didn't he realize such reactions when using that  title?  

He's implying that Israel is apartheid against the Palestinians.  

 He was attacking Israel's integrity, purpose, all they stood for by

  doing so. 

 He was giving ammunition to Israel's enemies to use against  her.   

Carter blamed his title.  He chose that title. 

 From reading that title, I would not stoop to buy  the book and read it. Millions did.  

Today, the book store my friend just visited was full of  Obama's book that also attacks Israel.

 Bookstores can attract customers with such books, and the authors rake in the proceeds, 

so that Israel's enemies gain more power and ammunition.   

Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer from Georgia before he became President, not a historian and expert on Israel, though he was a Sunday School teacher.    

Resource: https://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/03/times-julie-bosman-leaves-publishing-beat-for-midwest-gig-001802/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid 

Facts About Israel, published by The division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem, Israel. 

update: 1/3/21  2:30pm.  addition at ending.