U.S. media corporation offers discounted 'birthright tours'

Tuesday November 13, 2007 00:52 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC

The U.S. media giant MSNBC has begun offering discounted trips to Israel to the corporation’s internet audience.

Map of tour from agency, which does not show the Palestinian territories at all

Free and discounted trips to Israel are common in the United States, from the ‘Birthright’ trips offered free to Jewish youth between 18 and 25, to the Congressional tours offered free to U.S. members of Congress.

The purpose of such trips, which are generally sponsored by Zionist organizations, is to give a highly biased view of the Israeli state – a view which Palestinians and their supporters say is extremely one-sided and unfair.

The Palestinian groups make this claim because the ‘package tours’ offered to American Jewish youth, and to U.S. Congress members, show only the Israeli viewpoint, and ignore the Palestinian population that is living under Israeli military occupation.

The MSNBC tour includes in its description, “a drive around the Sea of Galilee to Yardenit, continuing to Beit Shean in the Jordan Valley to visit the excavations and Roman amphitheater.”

The tour description fails to mention that the so-called ‘Jordan Valley’ is actually in the occupied Palestinian territory known as the West Bank, and that the Israeli holdings in the Jordan Valley are considered Israeli settlements that have been condemned by the United Nations, and are illegal under international law.

Palestinians from the Jordan Valley have, since the construction of this and other settlements, been excluded from their land, forced to become refugees, and forced to watch their homes and farmlands destroyed by the Israeli military for the construction of Israeli settlements on their land.

A further option offered in the MSNBC tour is “a drive via Ma'aleh Adumim and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in the Judean Dessert to visit Masada, a fortress of King Herod.”

As in the first example, there is no mention, either in the trip brochures or during the tour itself, that Ma’aleh Adumim is a settlement that is considered illegal under international law, as it has been constructed on confiscated Palestinian land.

The tour brochure itself features a map of ‘Israel’ that shows Israel as the entire land of Palestine and Israel, with no mention of the Palestinian territories nor of the internationally-recognized ‘Green Line’ border between Israel and Palestine. In a move known to map-makers as ‘cartographic aggression’, the makers of the tour map have simply taken Palestine off the map, as if it does not exist.

It is examples like these that Palestinians and their supporters give in challenging the free and discounted tours given to Americans. Many have called such tours ‘propaganda for Israel’, as they fail to show the 40-year-long Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land.

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