Q – al-Quds: Not Your Forefathers’ Jerusalem
“Naming things” is a large part of what fighting anti-Israel media bias is all about: “Judea and Samaria” vs. “West Bank,” “settlements” vs. “communities,” “terrorists” vs. “militants,” “ceasefire lines” vs. “borders,” etc. Not least in the name used to refer to it, ”the core of the core is Jerusalem,” as Netanyahu told a Jerusalem conference in a somewhat different context in 2010.
An article generated by Arabs (10/15/11, www.onislam.net) entitled “U.N. Warns Israel Over Al-Quds Settlements” used this appellation in its lede:
A new Israeli plan to build a new settlement in Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem) is inviting huge condemnations….
An article generated by Israelis (12/15/11, Arutz Sheva) reported on a meeting of what is viewed as a “very popular” subcommittee dealing with the naming of cities on highway signs in Hebrew, English and Arabic, the Subcommittee for the Authorization of Place Names of the Knesset Names Committee. Arutz Sheva wrote:
Of most concern is Jerusalem–Yerushalayim in Hebrew–which is called “Ursalim” in Arabic. Most of the highway signs on Road 1, in fact, currently use Ursalim, adding in parentheses the term “al-Quds,” a transliteration of the Hebrew “Ir Hakodesh,” or Holy City. In traditional Jewish literature, Jerusalem is usually termed “Yerushalayim Ir Hakodesh,” but the latter part of the term is not commonly used today by secular Jews. Meanwhile, the Arabic term “al-Quds”–really a copy of the Jewish term–has come to be used by anti-Israel groups, signifying an “Arabized” term for the city, and indicating Arab “ownership” of Jerusalem’s history.
The Western media doesn’t literally call Jerusalem “al-Quds” in its “Arabized” sense. But it has on occasion come close by displacing the name of the Jewish people’s holiest site, in Jerusalem, with the name used by Muslims who came there a millennium and a half later, calling it “Haram as Sharif, known to Jews as Temple Mount” (A.P., 1/17/01, Inq., A3). Netanyahu correctly calls Jerusalem “the core of the core” of the Jewish people’s homeland connection to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. The core of that core is the Old City and City of David, with their incalculably precious archeological remains of formative Judaism and ancient Israel. These and nearby historic Jewish neighborhoods are not an “East” Jerusalem the M.S.M. calls “traditionally Arab,” and in which Jews, of all peoples, are alien “settlers.” They are an integral part of the Jerusalem that in the past 3,000 years has been the capital city of three native states–all of them Jewish–and which has again had a Jewish majority since the 1800’s.
Jerusalem has never been ruled by Palestinian Arabs. The land’s next native state following Jewish Judaea’s final fall in 135 C.E. is modern Israel in 1948. The Jews’ tenacious physical presence in Jerusalem from ancient times through the long post-Biblical foreign-rule centuries is summarized in Section 2 V.