For Reuters, history itself begins in 1967

Scan through almost any Reuters story on the Middle East conflict, particularly one that mentions Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), and you will likely find Reuters correspondents characterizing that settlement as beginning in 1967, when Israel liberated the territory from Jordanian occupation in a defensive war.

The success of Reuters' long-standing propaganda campaign against the Jews and in favor of the Palestinian Arabs depends critically on deceiving readers into believing, not only that Jewish settlement in the territories is illegal, but that Jews only began living in the area following the Six-Day War in 1967.

Of course, both of these notions are utterly false.  As the Mandate for Palestine, resolved by the League of Nations in 1922, and Articles 79 and 80 of the Charter of the United Nations make clear, Jewish settlement in the territories is not only fully legal in international law, it was originally encouraged by the international community:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

International law never gets cited in a Reuters story because to do so would undermine the agency's mendacious and malicious propaganda campaign targeting the Jews, which seeks nothing less than to facilitate ethnic cleansing of the Jewish community from the territories by swaying public opinion in that direction.

Just as Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda sought to influence public opinion so as to facilitate ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Europe.

In addition to a careful censorship of relevant citations of international law, Reuters employs what in propaganda studies is known as historical reconstruction, i.e., fabrication, to falsely depict the Jews as interlopers and colonizers of their own land.  To so portray a people that created and constituted a sovereign state in the area over three millennia ago, rich with culture, language, religious worship, and edifices still in evidence today -- a state that was repeatedly invaded, occupied, and colonized by others (including the Palestinian Arabs) over the last 2,500 years -- is no mean feat.

Reuters seeks to blot out indelible historical and legal Jewish ties to the land by systematically referring to 1967 as the year in which Jews began settling in the territories; hence we see this type of ahistorical and hysterical rhetoric from the keyboards of Reuters journalists like Dan Williams:

The first settlers were viewed by many compatriots as a patriotic vanguard on territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war. But some of their offspring, in the thrall of messianic and supremacist rabbis, combined an ecstatic skullcaps-and-sandals piety with the spurning of secular Israeli rule.

As we noted in a previous post, this handling is reminiscient of the scene in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List where the Nazi commandant Göth addresses the Jews at a concentration camp worksite:

"Today is history. The young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history and you are a part of it... When, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Kazimierz the Great, so called, told the Jews they could come to Cracow. They came... They trundled their belongings into this city, they settled, they took hold, they prospered... For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Cracow... By this weekend, those six centuries, they're a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."

Substitute Jerusalem for "Cracow" and thirty-five centuries for "six", and you have a sense of the atrocity Reuters correspondents are contemplating and in which they will be complicit if their propaganda campaign is successful.