Z – “Zionist Entity”
The false image which Israel’s enemies purvey by calling Israel “the Zionist entity” is the same as that purveyed when they call Israel “created because of the Holocaust,” to portray Jews as “Western colonialists” alien to the Mideast.
For example, a 2/2/06 Inquirer staff writer article (Inq., A1, 8) quoted Hamas leader Mashaal: “We shall never recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil.”
An article (A.P., 11/27/07, Inq.) quoted Iranian leaders that Israel is “a fake and forged state, called the Zionist regime,” and an article (A.P., Inq., A3) quoted “a Hamas spiritual leader” referring to “the Zionist colonizers.”
In a piece titled “Is Fatah Moderate” on its website, the media watchdog CAMERA quotes an English version of Fatah’s constitution describing “the Zionist entity” as “racial, colonial and aggressive” (Article 7). Other articles speak of “demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine” (Article 22), “complete liberation of Palestine” and “eradication” of “Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence” (Article 12), and “uprooting the Zionist existence” (Article 19). (For a similar translation, see www.acpr.org.il/resources/fatehconstitution.)
Is this propaganda, which is spread in part by using the M.S.M. as a megaphone, working? An August 2008 History News Network article by Boston University Professor Richard L. Cravatts, “How to Get the World to Hate Israel,” showed that it is. Citing a 2006 survey ranking Israel last among nations in public popularity, Dr. Cravatts wrote that to get the world to hate Israel, these are some of the things that you do:
Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for being created “illegally”—through the “theft” of Palestinian lands and property—and thus decide, because of its original sin, it has no “right to exist.” You accuse the government of a “brutal,” illegal “occupation” of Palestinian lands, especially Gaza and the West Bank (but for many, all of Israel), of being a “colonial settler state,” a Zionist “regime” or “project,” a land-hungry nation, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a Palestinian “people” “from time immemorial.”
A shocking instance of M.S.M. elevation of the “colonial Zionist entity” canard to the status of legitimate claim occurred in the N.Y Times’ and International Herald Tribune’s August 5, 2005, news article reporting archeologist Eilat Mazar’s unearthing in the City of David part of Jerusalem what may well be King David’s palace:
N.Y. Times:
The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem – whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasser Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.”
International Herald Tribune:
Her discovery is also bound to be used in the other major battle over Jerusalem – whether the Jews have their deepest origins there and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians believe – including the late Yasser Arafat – that the notion of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.
And an article (A.P., 2/3/09, Inq., A5) begged a rather fundamental question:
Hamas does not accept a place for a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East.”
As with Holocaust and ancient Jewish history denial, the M.S.M. allows its powerful voice to be used for Israel’s enemies’ dissemination of the “colonial Zionist entity” canard. Countering anti-Israel M.S.M. bias in this context begins with demanding that, when a news article quotes a leader or spokesperson calling Israel “the Zionist colonizers,” etc., it state the Jewish people’s continuous homeland connection and presence for three millennia, quoting an Israeli or Jewish leader if necessary.
Here’s one such Jewish response, in an August 2008 article by Nathan Jeffay, “The Other Middle-East Refugees,” in the Jerusalem Report. After quoting a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry that “Jewish refugees from Arab countries will be an important factor in peace negotiations,” the article continues, quoting spokesmen for the Jewish refugees, that the existence of the Middle Eastern lands’ Jewish refugees
…cuts to a deeper issue, the nature of the Jewish state. Israel’s detractors–including Jewish ones–claim it “is a white European state plunked right in the center of the Middle East, where it has no place”….But confronted with the issue of Jewish refugees, these critics are forced to ask where these Jews came from….They had been in many of the countries of the Middle East for 2,600 years, which is 1,000 years before the advent of Islam….The fact that many of these Middle Eastern Jews now live in Israel shows that it is not, as critics claim, a colonial state displacing a native population, but a country heavily populated by people indigenous to the region, cruelly displaced from nearby countries, This underscores the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state….”
The Jewish people has been physically present in the land of Israel itself continuously during the past three millennia. That presence has not been as stray individuals but, throughout, as that of an organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming people. (See, for example, Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.)
EXHIBITS: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39a, 42, 43, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68