Blogoland

Power Line carries the writings of a pro-Israeli group called IRIS, which accuses the NYT (where I, full disclosure, occassionally draw a freelance paycheck) of 'anti-Israel falsehoods' regarding the situation in Jersusalem during the first Gulf War. The Times's Steve Erlanger quotes the 93-year-old owner of the American Colony as saying the following:

During the first Gulf war in 1991, she remembers, the Israelis, under the threat of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons and Scuds, handed out gas masks, but only to the guests, not to the Palestinian staff of the hotel.

To which IRIS retorts: "Here are the facts"

During the Gulf War in 1991, Israel distributed gas masks to every Israeli citizen [i.e. Jewish and Arab] but not to the local Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza. After a petition to the Supreme Court, the court ordered the army to distribute gas masks to the local population, as well.

Gee, that looks pretty bad for the NYT, doesn't it (we'll leave aside the fact that it took a Supreme Court dictate to ensure that all the citizens under Israel's rule were protected). Well, actually, what are we talking about here? It seems that IRIS and Power Line, in a zealous campaign to identify anti-Israeli intentionality at the NYT, essentially dispute the memory of a first-hand witness to history and call her a liar, even though, I'm willing to bet, neither Power Line nor the writers for "IRIS" were in the American Colony when the events took place. And, surprise, IRIS and Power Line truncate the graf from the NYT's story in order to distort. Here it is in full:

During the first Gulf war in 1991, she remembers, the Israelis, under the threat of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons and Scuds, handed out gas masks, but only to the guests, not to the Palestinian staff of the hotel. "But we diddled them," Vester said with pride. "We made an imaginary list of hotel guests. I mean two can play at that game. It was shocking, really."

In other words, Vester, the owner of the hotel, said she saw for herself that her Palestinian staff were not getting gas masks from the government -- so she concocted fake lists of guests to insure that her staff got the masks. Maybe she was making the whole scenario up, I don't know, but I do know that Power Line and IRIS can't dispute it with the "evidence" they've mustered.

Oh, and here's a Washington Post article I dug up from October, 1990. Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai was the commander for all of central Israel at the time:

Mordechai said the army's operation amounted to transferring chemical-warfare equipment "from central storage to home storage" and was not an emergency procedure. For that reason, he said, the army would not now distribute masks and other equipment to the 1.7 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Military officials said last week that Palestinians would be given masks but would be charged the equivalent of $ 20 for them. Israel does not now have enough masks for the Palestinians but plans to import new supplies from Europe, the officials said.

"In this still-not-emergency situation we are not doing anything" in terms of providing masks to Palestinians, Mordechai said.

I'll leave it to the reader to digest those astonishing quotes. The point then, is this: the government of Israel did not want to distribute gas masks to Palesitinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and only under force of a court order did so. Moreover, a witness (and she doesn't appear to be alone, I've read other accounts in my research) to history said that even then, masks were not distributed.