DPA Corrects: Jerusalem in Israel, Not Palestinian Territories

CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of a DPA (Deusche Presse-Agentur) photo caption which erroneously placed Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, in the Palestinian territories. As noted yesterday on CAMERA’s Snapshots blog, the English caption of the German news agency had stated:

Gilad Grossman, spokesman of the human rights organisation Jesch Din, in Jerusalem, Palestinian Territories, 26 June 2017. The Israeli government has approved the first state-sanctioned settlement in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the Oslo peace process. The settlements are widely regarded as illegal under international law. Jesch Din is one of the organisations contesting the move. Photo by: Stefanie J’rkel

The erroneous captions were also distributed on the photo sites of leading news agencies AP and AFP. Following communication from CAMERA staff, DPA editors noted that the misinformation was a translation error, and that the original German was correct. Editors commendably corrected the English captions (see below), which now refer to Jerusalem, Israel. The corrected corrections now appear at AP and AFP.
 

CAMERA had also notified DPA that a second caption was likewise incorrect. It refers to a future Israeli settlement to be built in “Palestinian territories.” The land slated for the future settlement of Amichai is in disputed West Bank land, Area C, not under Palestinian control, and is therefore not part of the “Palestinian territories.” The final status of this land is to be determined in negotiations, and has not yet been resolved.
 
 
As of this writing, DPA declined to correct this caption, arguing that “Palestinian Territories” is the generally accepted way of describing the area in the international media. Yet, those media outlets that do describe Israeli settlements, located in Area C of the disputed West Bank, which is entirely under Israeli control, as “Palestinian territory” are wrong. And it is far from universal practice to do so.
 
The status of the territory is to be resolved by negotiations anticipated by U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian interim accords, the 2003 international “road map” and related diplomatic efforts taking 242 and 338 as reference points. The co-authors of resolution 242, U.S. Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg, and British ambassador Lord Caradon made clear at the time and subsequently that Jews and Arabs both had claims in the territories, no national sovereignty over the territories had been recognized since the end of Ottoman rule and negotiations would be necessary to resolve competing claims.
On Sept. 6, 2014, The Washington Post corrected this very same point. (See below.) CAMERA continues to call on DPA to correct the inaccurate placement of the planned Amichai settlement in Palestinian territories.

For additional DPA corrections prompted by CAMERA, please see here.

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