The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.
“Empty land” tends to be a consequence of human behaviors. Europeans spreading a plague through North America produced a lot of vacant real estate. Changes in environment - upstream dumping, massacre of native flora and fauna, Chernobyl style disasters - can kill a lot of people in short order and render land vacant.
But the most consistent and heavily practiced method of producing Free Real Estate is by pogrom. Rounding up all the locals and killing them until they leave.
Without that you’re stuck. Any area of the planet that’s habitable was inhabited tens of thousands of years ago, during the last big outward expansion of homo sapiens. Before that, we had near-human populations stretching around the world as far back as 2M years ago.
And that’s not even getting into the volume of mega-fauna and other native life we’ve obliterated during the Holocene Extinction. There is no such thing as “Empty Land” in a material sense. There’s only land that’s relatively easy to push other people off of.