Don't know much about history; don't know much about geography...

We're big fans of Sam Cooke and nobody covers him better than Reuters. In an effort to elicit sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs while demonizing Israel, Joseph Nasr, Mustafa Abu Ganiyeh, Douglas Hamilton, and Jon Boyle deploy the classic propaganda techniques of appeal to poverty and appeal to pity and in the process, manage to completely mangle history and geography.

The Reuters' team suggest that Jewish "settlement began after Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war" and refer to "five Israeli settlements on the nearby ridges and hilltops south of Jerusalem".  We wonder if they're referring to the Jewish community known today as Gush Etzion which was originally founded in 1927 by a group of Yemenite Jews and where residents were repeatedly victimized by Arab violence culminating in 1948, with a massacre at the hands of the Arab Legion.

Or perhaps their reference to Jewish "settlements" refers to Hebron, a town Reuters decribes as "proud to be considered a stronghold of Palestinian nationalism", but where history has recorded a Jewish community for more than 3,000 years -- interrupted in 1929 by the massacre of scores of Jews in Arab riots and which, under threat of further Arab violence, was evacuated of its remaining Jews by British troops in 1936.

Reuters, acting as arbiter, has also it appears, unilaterally determined the fate of Jewish communities east of the 1949 armistice lines asserting that these towns would either, "have to be handed over to a new Palestinian state or bought in land swaps elsewhere on the borderline".

No, they don't know much about history or geography but how fortunate for the Palestinians that Reuters correspondents fancy themselves as experts in international law.