Geraldo Rivera Regrets Not Backing Palestinians During Second Intifada
Geraldo Rivera attends an event at The Paley Center for Media in New York City. Image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
By Aiden Pink April 4, 2018
Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera said last week that one of the biggest regrets of his journalistic career was not “backing the Palestinians” during the Second Intifada.
Appearing on the channel to promote his new autobiography, Rivera was asked if he ever regretted one of his stories.
“I regret in 2002 backing down from backing the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, the Second Intifada,” Rivera said, adding, “I saw what an awful life they live under constant occupation and oppression.”
“They are an occupied people and I regret chickening out after 2002 and not staying on that story and adding my voice as a Jew, adding my voice to those counseling a two-state solution,” he went on to say. “It’s so easy to put them out of sight, out of mind, and let them rot, and be killed, and keep this thing festering. And I think a lot of our current problems stem from – that’s almost our original sin, Palestine and Israel. I want a two-state solution. I want President Trump to re-energize the peace process.”
Rivera, who is Jewish, has spoken out previously about his more dovish views on Israel. At a 2014 speech to the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, Rivera beseeched the audience to “spend one night with a Palestinian family, as I have done many times over the years. You can’t imagine how devastating it is to them to be second-class citizens in the land they claim a part of as their own, and for them to watch helplessly as the Israeli settlements continue to expand into the Palestinian territories, as they yearn for a nation and a passport of their own.”
He again criticized Israel in a 2017 tweet. “You cannot say Israel is a true democracy when you turn a blind eye to the noxious expansion of settlements on Palestinian land,” he wrote.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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