April 24, 2002

Dear NPR News,

I always appreciate the commentaries from Israeli and Palestinian youths, such as those on Morning Edition today.

But it was fundamentally dishonest for NPR to say of the Israeli girl who gave a commentary today that she lives in "Efrat, which is half an hour from Jerusalem."

To omit the information that Efrat is an illegal Jewish-only settlement established in 1980 inside the occupied West Bank was to make a nonsense of the commentary.

The Israeli girl complained that she "can't understand why the world can't see it the way it is," and whined that she and her friends have to go to school in a bullet proof bus.

This is no doubt unfortunate and frightening for them, but confusion is understandable if NPR does not explicitly discuss the relationship between the settlers and surrounding Palestinian communities on whose forcibly expropriated land the armed camp of Efrat is built. The relationship is not one between neighbors, but between coloniser and colonised.

Obviously, this is the heart of the matter, and to fail to identify Efrat for what it is, is to deliberately mystify the causes of the conflict and the violence, and to buy into the Israeli myth that its causes are in an abstract "hatred" rather than in relationships and structures of oppression which need to be dismantled.

It is also not accurate to describe Efrat as being "a half an hour from Jerusalem." Perhaps it is for settlers who have free access to the Jewish only roads. But for Palestinians , on whose seized land Efrat is built, Jerusalem is an eternity away, besieged as they are so that settlers can live in pretend oblivion to the price of their forced and illegal presence in someone else's country.

This was a great disappointment.