MSNBC has apologized for airing a deeply “confused” and “absurd” graphic last week claiming to show how much land Israel has taken from Palestine.
“Last Thursday, in an attempt to talk about the context for the current turmoil in the Middle East, we showed a series of maps of the changing geography in that region,” said MSNBC’s Kate Snow Monday afternoon.
“We realized after we went off the air the maps were not factually accurate and we regret using them,” she added. “Clearly, that set of maps was wrong.”
Longtime Middle East correspondent and MSNBC reporter Martin Fletcher, who was involved last week in presenting the misleading graphic, also apologized for giving the map credence.
“First of all, I wish I’d said it right away when I saw them. The bottom line is that the first map showed the area as if it was a Palestinian state,” he said. “It looked as if it was all full of Arabs. And then the succeeding maps then showed fewer and fewer, less and less land all the time.”
Fletcher has covered unrest in the Middle East for nearly 40 years.
“The bottom line is it was completely wrong. There was no Palestinian — there was no state called ‘Palestine,” he continued. “In 1946, it was a British mandate land.”
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“Britain was given control of the area by the League of Nations. And as a matter of fact, at that time, roughly in that area, and this is my estimate, there was about half a million Jews living there and about a million Arabs,” he said. “So, if anything, the map should have reflected that demographic reality. And it didn’t. And it gave the wrong impression.”
Snow and Fletcher conceded over the weekend that the maps in question painted an inaccurate picture of the mounting tensions between Israel and Palestine.
When MSNBC first aired the misleading graphic last Thursday, Snow and Fletcher said supposedly shrinking land claims explain the recent wave of Palestinian violence that has washed over Israel.
“This is what it’s all about,” Fletcher said of the graphic. “It’s all about the land.”
“The Israelis say, look, ‘You know this is our homeland, too. And we’re Jews. We have the right to live anywhere, same with anywhere else in the world. We should be allowed to live anywhere we like,'” he added. “And that’s hard to argue about, except it’s taking the land of a future Palestinian state, which, that’s what the frustration and the violence is all about. For the most part, the occupation of their land.”
However, aside from the maps being factually inaccurate, this explanation ignores that much of the Arab-on-Jew violence appears to come at the behest of Palestinian government and religious officials.
“Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in response to reports that Israelis have been planning to approach the Temple Mount. “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”
A Gaza Imam also reportedly said in an address earlier this month, “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews.”
“Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats,” he said, adding later as he allegedly brandished a knife, “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”
The now-debunked maps aired by MSNBC appear to have been inspired by a similar graphic that “only confuses and distorts the issue, and seems clearly designed for propaganda purposes,” according to the Economist.
“[T]he map fails to distinguish between land that is owned by Jews or Palestinians, and land that is controlled by Jewish or Palestinian political entities,” the Economist reported in 2010 when a graphic similar to the one shown by MSNBC was first making the rounds.
The idea that Jews in 1947 and 1948 seized land from Palestinian owners “is absurd,” the group reported.
“What happened was that a piece of empty desert which had been under the control of the British Mandate (who got it after the Ottoman Empire fell apart) was awarded to the Jewish state,” the Economist said.
