Reuters Corrects: Israeli Ownership in Jordanian Border Area Traces Back to 1920s

November 12, 2019

CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of a Reuters video which mistakenly reported that private Israeli claims to lands in the Jordanian border area date back to the 1970s. In fact, the private Israeli claims to those lands date back to the 1920s.

In the video entitled “Jordan closes land to Israeli farmers,”  about the Jordanian-Israeli border area now returned to Jordan, the narrator erroneously reports (57 seconds): “Israelis trace private ownership rights there back to the 1970s when the territory was part of British Mandated Palestine.”

Of course, Britain’s Palestine Mandate ended in 1948, and private Israeli ownership of the land in question dates back to the 1920s. Indeed, in the preceding sentence, the narrator rights reports that Israeli farmer Eli “Arazi says his kibbutz, or agricultural community, has been growing crops in one of the areas for 70 years.”

Screenshot from the corrected Reuters video

Moreover, the accompanying Reuters article by Elana Ringler correctly reports: “Israelis trace private ownership rights there to the 1920s, when the territory was part of British-mandated Palestine.”
In response to communication from CAMERA, Reuters yesterday promptly corrected the video. The corrected version, on Reuters’ site, now accurately reports:
Israelis trace private ownership rights there to the 1920s when the territory was part of British Mandated Palestine.

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