From the Liveblog of
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Gantz blasts reported CBS News refusal to say Jerusalem is in Israel: ‘The eternal capital of the Jewish people’
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National Unity leader Benny Gantz pushes back after employees at CBS News were reportedly told by a senior executive not to refer to Jerusalem as being in Israel.
“Jerusalem’s status is clear and undisputed – the eternal capital of the Jewish people,” Gantz writes on X. “It has been so for millennia, and will always remain so. No attempt to distort or hide that reality will change it.”
CBS News’ senior director of standards and practices, Mark Memmott, made the comment on the status of Jerusalem in an August email to staff on “controversial” terms, the Free Press newsletter reported last week.
“Yes, the US embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed,” Memmott wrote. “The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
The revelation about the instruction to staff at CBS came amid a growing controversy over host Tony Dokoupil’s pointed interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about Israel.
The seven-minute morning show interview on September 30 was about Coates’s new book of essays, and Dokoupil zeroed in right away on a section about Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, saying the essay “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” He wondered why Coates’s writing did not include references to Israel being surrounded by enemies that want to eliminate it.
Dokoupil later asked Coates about what offended him about the existence of a Jewish state, and he said that Palestinians “exist in your narrative merely as victims of Israel,” as if they had not been offered peace at any juncture.
Coates said that he was offended when anyone — including the Palestinians who talked to him for his book — are treated as second-class citizens in the country where they live, comparing it to the Jim Crow-era United States where his ancestors grew up.
CBS News leaders reprimanded Dokoupil for the interview, although the outgoing head of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, later said it had been a mistake to do so.
Dokoupil, who is Jewish, has two children from a previous marriage who live with their mother in Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.