WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Jonathan Tobin had an important article this week, defending the JNF sticking its toe over the “Green Line.” He referred to “misleading terminology” on that subject, but, by me, used some himself, and we ourselves shunning such terms is what I’d discuss with you this week.
This Week: Lamenting Misleading Terminology Using Misleading Terms
Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), wrote an important JNS article this week, “Don’t Stop the JNF From Doing Its Job” (2/12/21), defending a planned extension of the current activities in Israel of the venerable Jewish National Fund (in the old days, of the pushke, the little blue coin box saying “Jewish” no less than the doorpost mezuzah in Diaspora Jewish homes).
It’s not what JNF is maybe up to – sticking its own toe over the “Green Line” – that I’d discuss with you this week, but how Tobin describes how others describe what JNF is maybe up to. He laments there’s a lot of “misleading terminology” permeating discussion on this subject (and that’s a fact) but, by me, some of that misleading terminology leaks into his lamentations. And in that, JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, high among the Good Guys, is alas not alone. And that’s what’s important for us – making our Jewish people’s homeland case to the land of Israel, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria included, in clear strong non-loaded terms.
Tobin explains that the current arrangement has been that the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency For Israel – in “a complicated arrangement that is inscrutable except to those fully versed in the arcane details of official bureaucracy” – have split development of the land of Israel inside and outside the “Green Line” between them, respectively, letting the JNF assure foreign donors whose sensitivities might be offended thereby that JNF itself “had no part in settlement–building.” But now, says Tobin, JNF
“is set to approve a plan to invest an as yet unspecified amount in purchasing land in ‘Area C’ of the West Bank. ‘Area C’ is the part of the territory under full Israeli control and where Jewish settlements exist.” (emphasis added)
“Settlement-building, Jewish settlements”
“Settlement-building” is of course a dirty term, which Tobin himself acknowledges in the very sentence in which he deplores “the misleading terminology that is used about this subject,” He says that what those who speak of “settlement-building” are really opposing is “building homes in existing communities and parts of Jerusalem,” that “there have been virtually no new settlements built in nearly 30 years.” So we can fairly take Tobin’s own use of “settlement-building” here as him mockingly using the JNF’s critics own words.
But the “settlements” issue runs deeper than just where – whether in new or in existing communities – this construction activity over the 1949 ceasefire lines is occurring. The issue embraces a term – “Jewish settlements” – Tobin uses in his own right in the first quotation of him above.
“Settlers” and “settlements” may once-upon-a-time not have carried negative nuance, but here are a couple of long-years-ago examples from my hometown paper, the Philly Inquirer, definitively laying any such innocence of such connotation to rest.
#1: The Philly Inquirer of Saturday, 3/16/02 carried this revealing “Clearing the Record”:
“In an Inquirer article Thursday [3/14/02] on President Bush’s news conference, the words “Palestinian settlements” were used in reference to attacks by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The attacks were directed at Palestinian towns and refugee camps.” (emphasis added)
Actually, Israel’s “attacks” were directed “at” terrorists in those “Palestinian towns” and Arab “refugee camps” from the 1948 war, but the point here is instant retraction by the less-than-zealously-Zionist Inq of inadvertently associating Palestinian Arabs with “settlements.”
#2: Ten times in a 3/15/04 Inq Knight-Ridder [of less-than-Blessed-memory] article on Jews attempting
“to reestablish a Jewish presence in what had been a Yemenite Jewish village in the Silwan neighborhood [of Jerusalem] until Arab riots in the 1920’s and ‘30’s drove the Jewish residents out ” (emphasis added)
the article called those Jerusalem Jewish community-reestablishing Jews “settlers.”
The media revels in contrasting “Jewish settlements” with nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, villages, towns,” as in that above-quoted 2002 instant Inq switcheroo of “Palestinian settlements” to “Palestinian towns,” and none of us, from Israelis running for Prime Minister on down through Jewish journalists to Diaspora grassroots, should say “settlers” and “settlements.” And not least in an internet article defending the Jewish National Fund’s right to stick a toe over the “Green Line.”
“West Bank”
If Jonathan Tobin remembers me, I hope his recollection includes my standing objection to his insistent referencing of Judea-Samaria as “the West Bank,” a name designed to disassociate these intrinsic parts of the Jewish homeland from Jews. The UN itself referenced “Samaria and Judea,” Hebrew-origin names, in 1947, and so, not least in these days of the World denying tbat we Jews have homeland rights there, should we.
“The Two-State Solution”
Apart from the substance of “The Two-State Solution,” my views on which are not secret, focus for a minute on the fairness-to-the-facts of that name. A “two-state” solution suggests that upon its implementation there would exist in Palestine two sovereign states, one Jewish and one Palestinian Arab. But there wouldn’t. There’d be three such states in Palestine, two of them, the new Palestinian Arab state and Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan (78% of the initial Palestine Mandate), and Green Line or thereabouts Israel. We, for our part, should call that “the Three-State Solution” (“Four-State” if you include Gaza).
“The Palestinians”
It’s not especially persuasive for us to claim that it’s all right for the JNF to build homes for Jews in “Jewish settlements” in “the West Bank.” Compare “in Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria.” But there’s an even bigger dirty term permeating what Tobin called “the misleading terminology that is used about this subject.” That term is “the Palestinians.”
They aren’t. Really. The AP acknowledged (12/11/11) that during the Mandate,
“Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.” (emphasis added)
The United Nations in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution called its Jews and its Arabs
“the two Palestinian peoples.”
We Jews were not newcomers to western Palestine in 1947. There were in western Palestine at the time, according to Mandate-surrendering Britain, 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews. As Katz pointed out in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine (1985 ed., p, 23), “independent calculations claim 800-900,000” Arabs. Jews had again been Jerusalem’s majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Ottoman Turkish rule. Following Roman defeat of Judaea in 135, we’d been pummeled into a persecuted minority during the eighteen hundred years of exclusively foreign empire rule (mostly non-Arab at that), but as Parkes pointed out in Whose Land (p. 266), the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” had written our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.” (And see Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.)
Talking about dividing Palestine between Jews and “the Palestinians” rather begs the question of who are the indigenous people and who the outsiders. Unlike the terms highlighted as section titles above, “Palestine” and “Palestinian” aren’t dirty words. They’re not just exclusively Arab, and the time’s long come for us to re-assert Jewish homeland equity in them.