Arab affairs expert raises alarm over “outrageous” report broadcast on taxpayer-funded TV channel.
By World Israel News Staff
A taxpayer-funded Israeli TV news channel used the term “occupied Palestine” to refer to the northern Galilee region, which is within Israel’s 1967 borders, during a report last week.
Makan, an Arabic-language subsidiary of Kan, broadcast a report on August 3rd regarding a car accident in the Upper Galilee region.
A military vehicle overturned on a road near Kibbutz Margaliot in northern Israel, near the Blue Line border with Lebanon. Several soldiers were injured in the incident, though not seriously, and transported to nearby Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat.
Both the accident itself and the hospital to which the soldiers were evacuated are within Israeli territory, specifically the Galilee region, which was included in the country’s 1948 establishment.
However, Makan chose to report that the incident had occurred in “Occupied northern Palestine,” a highly politicized choice of words that was noted by Arab affairs expert Dr. Edy Cohen.
“This crosses red lines,” Cohen wrote on his Twitter account, along with a screenshot of the report on Makan’s website highlighting the use of the term.
Cohen said that the “outrageous report” calling northern Israel occupied territory is “crazy, crazy, crazy,” and noted that the station is directly funded by the Israeli government and taxpayers.
“This is how the voice of Israel speaks about the state,” he wrote.
Cohen referenced comments several weeks ago from Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who expressed concerns over staunchly left-wing perspectives being presented as fact on the public television channel.
“It seems that Kan’s management wasn’t affected by Minister Karhi’s letter [about left-wing bias in their reporting],” Cohen wrote.
Shai Glick, CEO of the right-wing B’Tzalmo NGO, demanded an investigation into Makan.
“Anyone who calls the State of Israel an ‘occupied’ country has no place in the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation but should find employment on Al Jazeera or on Hezbollah’s TV channel,” he said in a statement to Hebrew-language media.
“All those involved in this serious incident should be suspended, and if the ‘Occupied Palestine’ wording is found to be deliberate, they should be fired at once,” he added.
In response, Kan 11 said that “the sentence was changed as soon as we received the complaint, and the issue is under investigation by the corporation’s ombudsman.”