Dear Editor,
Teddy Minch's March 17 column "Israeli Insubordination" tells the reader about an announcement from the Israeli government. He shows us how this announcement had implications for the diplomatic process in the ongoing conflict. He spends most of the piece discussing these diplomatic results. He concludes that the United States should be tougher with Israel and not allow the Israeli government to act as they had intended. So essentially, he tells us what Israel did, how the United States responded and what he thinks about that response.
The problem is that he told a bold-faced lie and no one on the Tufts Daily staff noticed. Mr. Minch writes, "Israel's Ministry of the Interior announced that it had approved construction of 1,600 new settlements." I am unclear if this was meant to be deceitful, or if Mr. Minch is uneducated in how to properly use this terminology.
A "settlement" is like a town. When someone uses the word "settlement." they are referring to a small town in the territories that Israel has occupied since the Six Day War in 1967. A settlement can have anywhere from a few hundred houses to a few thousand. The total number of Israeli settlements is under 200. It has been years since Israel approved the building of a single new settlement.
To claim that Israel plans to increase their settlement number from 200 to 1,800 is complete nonsense. I believe what Mr. Minch was referring to was the plan to build 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem. To confuse housing units with entire settlements is a mistake so large that it makes the rest of the column unintelligible. If the whole piece is about the fallout of the Israeli announcement but Mr. Minch got the announcement wrong, then the rest does not make much sense, does it?
I would like to give Mr. Minch the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not intend to mislead. He is probably merely uneducated in this arena. Therefore, I would like to propose that Daily columnists be required to undergo more extensive training in crafting articles so as to avoid issues like this in the future.
Sincerely,
Alex Baskin
Class of 2013
