P – Palestinian
If one loaded term can be singled out as the most devastating to balanced understanding of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine, it is universal anointment of Palestinian Arabs as “The Palestinians.” It is difficult to conceive of a just partition of Palestine between “Palestinians” and others. But although the media characterizes the U.N. as having intended to do just that
e.g.,
? “1948” entry in McClatchy timeline, May 8, 2008 (Inq.): “1948: U.N. proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states; Britain left on May 14…fighting between Jews and Palestinians caused two-thirds of Palestinian population to flee.”
? A.P. (2/28/09, Inq.) referenced the UN 1947 partition plan as calling for “…separate Jewish and Palestinian states.” The Inq. headlined: “…separate states for Palestinians and Jews”
? A.P. (3/16/08, Inq.): “…the U.N. partition plan of 1947, which envisioned Jewish and Palestinian states living side by side in peace,”
that is not what the U.N. set out to do. Over and over in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, the U.N. referred to “the Arab [not “Palestinian”] State” and “the Jewish State,” and it expressed for
“… the peaceful development of the mutual relations between the two Palestinian peoples throughout the Holy Land” [emphasis added]
January 10, 2015’s Jerusalem Post editorial, “Words Matter,” correctly noted that “Palestinians” used to refer “to the Jewish population of British Mandatory Palestine,” an historical fact that the media-bias-fighting late Jerusalem Post editor David Bar-Illan pointed out over and over in his pioneering “Eye On The Media” column.
Jews, to our own great detriment, are certainly culpable in participating in this fundamental shift in perspective, but we are no more irrevocably bound by it, or by “West Bank” (referenced in the U.N.’s Partition resolution by its millennia-known-name “Samaria and Judea”), than African Americans were irrevocably bound through the generations to sit in the back of the bus.