Repeat, repeat, repeat: Israeli settlements are news even when there's no news to report

The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and, of course, The New York Times, lead the pack when it comes to ongoing coverage of Israel and the Middle East by elite American newspapers. Some of their reporting is excellent, some of it is done poorly, and some of it is just repetitive.

That's about what one should expect, because journalists succeed and fail, I'd say in the absence of any hard evidence, roughly as much as any other human subset.

Let's dissect the repetitive. And, yes, I'm well aware that given how often I post on Israel issues for GetReligion, I'm in danger of being repetitive myself. But, here goes anyway.

This week, the Post ran a news feature that it's editors (or at least those who produced Tuesday's edition) saw fit to give four-column, above-the-fold, page-one display in the paper's print edition. That, despite the story providing no new information.

The question is why?

Headlined, "A new wave in the West Bank?", the news feature struck me as a rehash of events that the Post and everyone else has widely covered -- which is what Donald Trump's election victory means for Israel's West Bank settlement project.

The bottom line is that Trump, and his designated appointee as U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, appear set to give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a free-hand to continue settlement construction. That's the opposite of what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry want.

If you support the settlements, Trump and Friedman are a welcome good-news story. If you oppose the continued building, as I do, they're utterly bad news.

Trump's Israel ambassador pick stirs great discord among Jews, and there's a story there

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, or so the city's image spinners tell us. Personally, I have no experience of this, since Las Vegas is a place I avoid.

Israel is a very different story, however, and here I do have a bit of experience.

That experience tells me that just about everything that happens in Israel becomes an international balagan, with a potential for violence -- not to mention a United Nations resolution or two slamming the Jewish state for being solely at fault for whatever transpired.

Take the ongoing flap over the public broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer.

NIMBY disputes over traffic, noise, and property uses are a staple of the local religion beat. No one in America seems to want a megachurch, a newly enlarged religious school, an exotic Hindu temple, or -- the current ultimate concern -- a mosque, coming to their neighborhood. But unless the dispute rises to a higher court, NIMBY squabbles rarely make news beyond the local level.

Not so in Israel, where a case involving the Muslim call to prayer, known in Arabic as the adhan, is of a different magnitude from the get-go. That's even more so the case when it involves Jerusalem, the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Seemingly making my point, The Washington Post played its story on the front page of its print addition. The implication was that Israeli Jews just want to stifle a religious freedom Muslims take for granted.

Which leads me to the incoming Trump administration's promise to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the president-elect's designated ambassador to Israel, his personal bankruptcy attorney David Friedman.

There's much on the line here. Being the chief U.S. representative in Israel is as delicate a foreign diplomatic posting as there is. Lives -- Israeli Jewish and Muslim and Christian Palestinian -- hang in the balance.