JERUSALEM – A clue in the Sunday crossword puzzle in official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reinforced the false notion that all of Israel is “occupied territory.”
The clue (9 down) read: “A port in occupied Palestine.”
The right answer was “Haifa,” a city in the north of Israel.
According to Israeli NGO Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the PA takes pains to avoid accepting Israel’s legitimacy by using euphemisms to replace “Israel.”
The official PA daily routinely presents all of Israel as “occupied Palestine,” “occupied Palestinian Interior,” or “1948 territories,” and defines Israeli cities as “occupied.”
The newspaper recently published an article on an invention by Israeli Arab students from Technion University in Haifa that measures the quality of watermelons without the need to open them. The article described the students as “Palestinian students from the Interior that was occupied in 1948” and the city was termed “the occupied city of Haifa.”
A similar euphemism was used in an article about Jerusalem Arabs.
“Thousands of citizens from occupied Jerusalem and within the 1948 territories (i.e., Israel), and about 200 adults from the Gaza Strip, held Friday prayers yesterday at the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque plaza,” the article in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida noted.
On Sunday, Breitbart Jerusalem reported on a new pop song broadcast on official PA TV whose lyrics extolled the fact that Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are a “thorn in the throat of Zionism” who have given Israel “a taste of grief.”
The song listed Arabs from the Israeli cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Lod, Ramle, Acre, Nazareth, Galilee, Beersheva, Tiberias, Safed, Beit Shean, and Jerusalem, but did not distinguish them from Arabs in Palestinian cities such as Jenin, presenting all as being part of “Palestine.”