WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I was privileged this week to be a panelist on an anti-Israel media bias-discussing webinar. Here’s what I called the five worst media bias expressions, and why I picked them.
This Week on the Internet: The Five Worst U.S. Media Anti-Israel Biases, and Why I Picked Them
“Tell them the five worst American print media anti-Israel biases,” my friend Steve Feldman, Executive Director of the Greater Philadelphia District of the ZOA, told me, in inviting me to participate, which I did Tuesday, as one of three panelists, along with Steve himself and a radio station executive, on this week’s Philly ZOA webinar on anti-Israel media bias.
I have my own notion of what constitutes “worst.” Over the past 19 years of these mostly-media-watch weekly emails, I’ve railed against such memorably contemptuous media outrages as, e.g., my hometown Philly Inquirer headlining “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians” whom its article quoted Hamas as calling its members on “a jihad mission” of planting explosives near the Gaza border fence (Inq, 4/29/08), and headlining as “Israel Defends Assassination” a wire service article leading “An unrepentant Israel yesterday defended the assassination of the radical Hamas movement’s military leader [n.b.],” whom the article later on quoted Israel as identifying as a ringleader in “a long string of terror attacks” including the Sbarro Pizza and seaside Dolphin Disco bombings of young people out for enjoyment (11/25/01).
But notwithstanding the deep contempt for the Jewish people’s historic homeland and us embedded in such media malfeasance, the American public can and hopefully did grasp that Hamas members on an explosives-planting jihad mission aren’t just plain “Palestinians,” and that bomb planners of pizza parlors and discos aren’t “military leaders.”
What the public is less equipped to grasp from life experience is misstatement of other countries’ histories. The damage the American media does to the Jewish people’s homeland of Israel through incessant repetition of imbalanced portrayals of what happened in 1948 and 1967, and is happening now, by me dwarfs the damage done by mischaracterization of particular incidents.
Media Mischaracterization of the Events of 1948
#1 – “Israel’s Creation in 1948”: The media loves to mischaracterize Israel as having been “created in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue. It does this to suppress our people’s three millennia connection to the land of Israel and to conjure images of a sudden influx of newcomer strangers displacing an existing homogeneous population of Palestinian Arabs.
But Palestine’s 1948 population of less than two million people (that’s all) was mixed, a good third of it Jews. And there would have been a hell of a lot more Jews but for the Germans and British. What happened in 1948 was that modern Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between 135 CE and 1948 having been a foreign empire invader. And Judaea’s Jews hadn’t been exiled by Rome, but had remained on the land, yes, for long a minority but again the majority in Jerusalem since 1800’s Ottoman rule. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever. No sense of this millennia-long, twice previously sovereign historical Jewish presence is conveyed by the media saying over and over “Israel was created in 1948.”
#2 – “The Palestinian Refugee Issue”: The media loves to reference “the Palestinian refugee issue” caused by “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” What really happened had been a UN partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction in which Palestinian Arabs had been encouraged temporarily to get out of the invading Arab armies’ way, and that in the war started by that invasion and its aftermath a greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews had been displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Most of these Jewish refugees fled to Israel, which absorbed them, while Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself, have maintained generations of these Arabs’ descendants in internationally-supported “refugee camps.” The Arab-Israeli conflict created a two-sided refugee issue, not a “Palestinian refugee issue,” but you wouldn’t know that from the American media. And one further fact: the descendants of those Middle-eastern Jews from Arab lands together with the descendants of the Old Yishuv today comprise the majority of Israel’s population, an indigenous population, giving the lie to Israel being “a colonial European implant in an Arab Middle East.”
Media Mischaracterization of the Events of 1967
#3 – “Israel’s 1967 Borders”: Borders have an international law gravitas which mere military ceasefire lines, not least those obliterated by renewed fighting between the same sides, do not. The war begun by that 1948 Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction ended in a series of military ceasefire agreements, not peace treaties, the one between Israel and invading Jordan expressly defining the “green line” it drew as a military ceasefire line exclusively, representing only where their respective armies then stood, without prejudice to the sides’ claims respecting borders.
In 1967, in renewed fighting between Israel and Jordan (again initiated by Jordan) Israel ousted Jordan from historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, driving it back to the east bank of the Jordan River, the pre-1948 boundary of what had been Transjordan. The media and most of the rest of the world, ignoring the express language of the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, and San Remo and the Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home, howl that Israel’s nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle, historic Jerusalem-less 1949 ceasefire lines had been “1srael’s 1967 borders,” and that it should slink back to them. But the truth is that the “green line” had never been among the Holy Land’s holy places, and indeed is less holy than its successor 1967 ceasefire line along the defensible-by-Israel Jordan River.
#4 – “West Bank, East Jerusalem as Occupied Palestinian Territories”: The only context in which the media uses the names “Judea and Samaria” is as “the biblical names for the West Bank.” Indeed, these Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” go back to biblical times, but they remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries – including by the UN in its partition resolution in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”). “West Bank,” coined by Jordan in 1950 to disassociate Judea and Samaria from Jews, isn’t a synonym for “Judea and Samaria.” It’s an antonym, which the media uses exclusively. And “East” Jerusalem isn’t some satellite city or suburb of the historic Jerusalem of the Jews. It is that historic city – thrice capital of Jewish states and none others; renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s – renamed “East” to disassociate it from Jews. Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are contested, disputed between Jews and Arabs, not “occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories.” It begs the issue of contested ownership to call them, which the media incessantly does, those Arab equity-connoting names.
Media Mischaracterization of What’s Happening Now
#5 – Applying Sovereignty as “Annexation”: The media loves to say “Israel captured the West Bank in 1967,” but this suppresses three thousand years’ twice previously sovereign historic Jewish connection, recognized in San Remo and the Mandate. Israel has physically possessed these areas for more than 50 years (vs. invading Jordan’s 19), and is now contemplating formally applying its laws to parts of Judea and Samaria. These are not territories of a foreign country which it seeks to “annex.” But that’s exactly what “annex” means – “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state” – Encarta Dictionary.
The Point of All This
My greatly missed colleague Lee and I were asked, in the Q&A following one of our “Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talks, how what we were attempting to do, expose anti-Israel media bias, differs from the work of CAMERA. There’s a big difference, I think (completely consistent with my regarding Andrea – the most effective of us disciples of David Bar-Illan – as one of my heroes). CAMERA relentlessly contacts the media, points out inaccuracies in the reporting of particular facts in particular news stories, seeking and frequently obtaining corrections. I don’t directly seek “Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America” (not that I’d object to it). What I’m seeking is American Jews’ rejection of the loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives in which Middle East reporting is purveyed in America, and doing something about it.
You may remember an exchange I had with CAMERA some time ago, conveyed to readers in these weekly emails, over Jews using terms like “West Bank.” CAMERA said, and I don’t doubt that they’re right, that if they told an editor to use “Judea-Samaria” (which they agreed with me is “historically justified,” though used by only “a very minute fraction of the world’s population”) instead of “West Bank,” their letter would just end up in the editor’s trash. But what I appended to that in one of these weekly emails, was that “that very minute fraction of the world’s population” is us, and that the more an historically justified place name that we use differs from that used by the rest of the world, the more important it is that we use it.
These “five worst” anti-Israel media bias expressions that I discussed above and in that ZOA media bias webinar this week ought not be used by the media. The media ought to refer to Israel’s 1948 independence, not “creation” or “founding”; to the Arab-Israel conflict’s refugee issue, not “the Palestinian refugee issue”; to the 1949 military ceasefire lines, not “Israel’s 1967 borders”; to Judea-Samaria and not “the occupied West Bank”; and to Israel’s application of sovereignty to parts of Judea-Samaria, including the Jordan Valley, not “annexation.”
But none of this will happen unless we ourselves discipline ourselves to stop using terms designed by their designers to delegitimize us, and then start demanding that others, not least the American media, stop using them in Arab-Israeli conflict reporting. In the ZOA’s webinar, I was asked what we as individuals can do. I suggested appending comments to internet articles, including by our own people, that use “West Bank … annexation” and other misleading terms. But individual actions aren’t sufficient. We need to lean on American Jewish organizations that have not lost their self-respect lately to lead the way in contesting the loaded lexicon in which Israeli and Arab respective land of Israel equities are purveyed to Americans.