Vice Makes YouTube Video Referring to “Jaffa, Palestine” Unavailable

June 9, 2020

UPDATE, 2:30 pm EST:

Vice Removes Video From Facebook, Twitter

In response to communication from CAMERA, Vice editors commendably removed the video from both its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

After CAMERA's Israel office yesterday contacted Vice News about a video with a blatant geographic error, in which the central Israeli city of Jaffa was said to be in "Palestine," editors have made the YouTube video unavailable. As first flagged by Israellycool blogger, the June 3 Vice News video, "The George Floyd Protests Are Now Global," had referred to a protest in Jaffa, stating: "And in Palestine a group gathered to protest the killed of Iyad Al-Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian man, as well as Floyd." A label over the footage misidentifies the scene as taking place in "Jaffa, Palestine."

In fact, Jaffa, along the Mediterranean coast next to Tel Aviv, is located in the heart of central Israel, within Israel's 1948 boundaries. It is not in "Palestine," a term at times used to refer inaccurately to the West Bank or the Palestinian-controlled territories.

In addition to private communication with editors, CAMERA also tweeted Vice, including a United Nations map clearly showing Jaffa in Israel.

CAMERA's Tweet stating the geographic obvious – that Jaffa is in Israel, not "Palestine" – was too much for anti-Israel masses on Twitter who refuse to recognize Israel in any borders, and who laughably pulled out a 1947 Partition Plan map of the British Palestine Mandate to somehow argue that Jaffa is in fact today in Palestine. Significantly, Arab leadership rejected the Partition Plan, which would have made Jaffa an Arab enclave belonging to the Arab state surrounded by the Jewish state, and opted instead to attack the nascent Jewish state. The Arab armies lost the war that they started, and as a result, Jaffa has been part of Israel since 1948.

While editors have made the YouTube private and therefore largely unavailable on that platform, the uncorrected video with its false designation of "Jaffa, Palestine" is still available on Vice's Facebook and Twitter pages. CAMERA continues to call on Vice to correct the erroneous reference wherever it appears.

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