According to Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, BDS has nothing to do with the occupation

Israel Hayom, Israel’s most-read newspaper, deletes crucial explanations from an Associated Press article, leaving its readers with zero understanding of why Palestinians might want the world to boycott Israel.

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man| +972 Magazine | Sep 17, 2018

The campaign, founded in 2005, calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, cultural institutions and universities. BDS says it seeks to end Israel’s occupation of lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war and what it describes as discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority. It calls for the ‘right of return’ for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to homes their ancestors fled or were expelled from in the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.

The Associated Press published a feature article last week discussing the impact that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement has had on the Israeli music scene as of late.

Spurred by a few high-profile cancellations at a recent music festival in Israel, most notably by singer Lana Del Rey, the article did what one would reasonably expect an international wire service covering such a story to do: it explained the phenomenon, gave some subjective views and objective facts, and, of course, explained what the BDS Movement is and what its demands are.

The article was reproduced and published by a typically large number of international news outlets, including the New York Times. One of those publications, however, the English edition of Israel’s most-read newspaper, Israel Hayom, made an interesting change to the AP article in the version it put online for its readers.

According to the Israel Hayom version of the article, the BDS Movement has absolutely nothing to do with the occupation. [The parts] which Israel Hayom deleted, represent one of the more balanced and even-handed descriptions of the occupation and Palestinian refugee problem that one can fit into two sentences, and actually veer far closer to the Israeli narrative than the Palestinian one.

Read the full article here →