WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: These days, we American Jews disagree on much, but all of us who call ourselves Israel supporters, whether or not we’re for a “two-state solution,” have to fight the loaded lexicon that, inter alia, calls Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem not “disputed” but “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” Here’s a list of Dirty Words to look out for and fight.
Fighting the Loaded Lexicon’s Anti-Jewish-Homeland Pejoratives – An Israel Issue on Which All Pro-Israel American Jews Can Agree
With the U.S. presidential election season heating up, there are many political issues, including some relating to Israel, on which liberal and conservative American Jews, both sincerely wanting what’s best for both the U.S. and Israel, will increasingly vociferously disagree. But let me suggest one issue – fighting the loaded lexicon of poisoned anti-Jewish-homeland pejoratives pervading Israel reporting and common discourse – that’s in our common interest to fight.
So here, culled mostly from “Dirty Words” on our website, www.factsonisrael.com, are a dozen Jewish homeland-delegitimizing expressions to look out for in media news reporting, opinion pieces and political speech.
“Apply Sovereignty” vs. “Annex”: To “annex” means “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state” (Encarta dictionary). “Apply sovereignty” connotes extending your law to areas you lawfully possess. Even if you’re for [which I’m not] “two states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” use terms that make ceding territory by Israel to a western Palestine Arab state mean something.
“West Bank” vs. “Judea-Samaria”: “West Bank” isn’t a synonym for “Judea and Samaria,” the Hebrew-origin names these areas were known by for thousands of years (including by the U.N. in 1947). “West Bank” is an antonym, invented by invading Jordan in 1950 to disassociate Judea-Samaria from Jews. And when the media calls “Judea-Samaria the biblical name for the West Bank,” what it should say is “’West Bank’ is the Jordanian name for Judea-Samaria.”
“Palestinian” or “Occupied” vs. “Disputed” Territories: Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are disputed between Palestinian Arabs and Israel. Calling them “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem” (UNSC 2334, 12/23/16) spits on “disputed.”
“East Jerusalem”: “East” Jerusalem isn’t some satellite city or suburb of the city that’s been the capital of three native states – all Jewish – in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule. It is that historic city, dubbed “East Jerusalem” to disassociate it from the historic “Jerusalem” of the Jews.
“Jewish Communities” vs. “Settlements”: “Settlements” today is a dirty word, evidenced by the media pointedly contrasting “Israeli settlements” vs. nearby “Palestinian towns” or “villages,” sometimes in the same sentence. The one time the Philadelphia Inquirer unthinkingly referred to “Palestinian settlements,” it instantly withdrew it (3/16/02). Say “Jewish communities.”
“Greater Israel”: The media mockingly calls Jews who claim that the Jewish claim to western Palestine, the land of Israel, doesn’t stop at the green line, the 1949 ceasefire line, “ultra-nationalist” believers in a “Greater Israel.” On the contrary, it’s those who would cut from the Palestine Mandate with its “Jewish national home” not only the 78% sliced off as today’s all-Arab Jordan, but also Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, who believe in “Lesser Israel.”
“1948 Creation of Israel”: The media loves to call Israel “created” or “founded” in 1948, as though artificially and out-of-the-blue. It does this to conjure images of a sudden upheaval and influx of foreign newcomers displacing the natives, “the Palestinians.” But Palestine’s 1948 population was c. a million Arabs and 600,000 Jews, i.e., mixed (and there’d have been a hell of a lot more Jews but for the Germans and British). Israel, where Jews have lived continuously for 3,000 years, twice previously sovereign, became in 1948 through natural fruition into statehood the land of Israel’s next native sovereign state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. “The Palestinians” have never ruled Palestine ever.
“1949 Ceasefire Line” vs. “1967 Border”: The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly defined the “green line” it drew as a military ceasefire line exclusively, representing where the two armies then stood, not an international border. Those who would delete from the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home Judea-Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem, which fell in 1949 on invading Jordan’s side of the green line, ignore what the green line was and call that 1949 military ceasefire line “Israel’s 1967 border.” Borders have a gravitas in international law which military ceasefire lines don’t. The military ceasefire line of 1949 is not among the Holy Land’s holy places. Indeed, it is less holy than its successor 1967 military ceasefire line of subsequent fighting, again initiated by Jordan, between the same sides.
“Captured by Israel in 1967”: The media insistently dates Israel’s connection to “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” to “their capture by Israel in 1967.” Off by about 3,000 years.
“Al Aqsa Mosque Compound” vs. “Temple Mount”: It’s natural for different religions to have different names for places holy to both, most famously for what was originally the site of Solomon’s Temple and Jews’ Second Temple, long before the building there of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. But the western media has gone from “known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount” to “the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount.” (See CAMERA, 2016, “Mapping Changes in Terminology Used by BBC to Describe the Temple Mount.”) The Philly Inquirer has gone a step further, wholly adopting the Muslim name. On 7/15/17, both the Inq and Times of Israel ran the same AP photo. TOI, in keeping with Jewish and Western tradition, captioned it “the Temple Mount”; the Inq captioned it “the Al Aqsa mosque compound,” period.
“The Palestinian Refugee Issue”: The war begun by the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948 (which the media calls “the war that followed Israel’s creation”) and its aftermath saw some half-million Arabs leave tiny Israel and some 800,000 indigenously Middle-eastern Jews leave vast Arab and other Muslim lands. Most of these Jewish refugees opted to go to Israel, and Israel absorbed them, where their descendants and those of the Old Yishuv comprise the majority of today’s population of Israel – an indigenous Middle-eastern state, not a European colonial “Zionist entity.” Arab “hosts,” including the Palestinian Authority in Palestine itself, have kept these Arabs and generations of their descendants – for years referenced by the media misleadingly as “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” – in UN-supported “refugee camps.” You wouldn’t know this from the western media, but the Arab-Israeli conflict has a two-sided “refugee” issue, not a “Palestinian” refugee issue.
“In 1947, the UN sought to partition Palestine between Palestinians and Jews”: Not exactly. The media saying “partitioning Palestine between Palestinians and Jews” is like it saying “partitioning Pennsylvania between Pennsylvanians and Jews.” What the UN actually attempted to do was to partition Palestine between “Arabs” and Jews, saying “the Arab State” and “the Jewish State” over and over. And – bottom line – as Begin pointed out in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, and David Bar-Illan over and over in his “Eye On The Media” column when he was Editor of the Jerusalem Post, Palestine’s Arabs are not “THE Palestinians.” Palestine’s Jews are, well, at least used to be, Palestinians too – e.g., Palestine Post [today’s Jerusalem Post], Palestine Electric Company, other “Palestine”-named Jewish institutions testify to this, as did Diaspora Jews in, e.g., “The American League for a Free Palestine.” Just as we should not say, e.g., “East Jerusalem” and “West Bank,” we should not cede Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
Summing Up
What ought to strike you from all this isn’t only the one-sidedness of slant – uniformly against us – of these slanted Arab-Israeli conflict expressions, but the consequence for Israel and us from our averting our eyes from them. Indeed, worse than that, the American Reform and Conservative movements’ open letter to President Trump last year sought his objection to Israel “annexing” territory in “the West Bank” over “the 1967 border.” This followed the UN adopting 14-zip with US abstention in the Obama administration’s final days UNSC 2334, declaring
“the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
This UNSC resolution didn’t address “the Palestinian refugee issue” (a/k/a the “right” of return) or other issues between Palestine’s Jews and Arabs. It just nullified the Six Day War, leaving historic Jerusalem-less Israel nine miles wide in the lowland middle, and made historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “Israeli-occupied territory” of “Palestinians” who’ve never ruled any of it for one day in history. All of us American Jewish supporters of the Jewish homeland of Israel, including those who support some compromise two-state solution, have to oppose, along with all the other poisoned pejoratives the most consequential of them all, calling Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem not disputed, but “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”