WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In countering the loaded lexicon of anti-Israel pejoratives, we must prioritize puncturing canards that most deeply denigrate our homeland claim through misportraying Israel as a recent western intrusion upon “occupied Palestinian territory.” Arab-Israeli peace will come, if it does, only upon acceptance of the Jewish people as having never-abandoned indigenous Jerusalem-centered Middle-eastern roots.
Three Deep-Cutting Anti-Israel Expressions
It was Steve’s and my late colleague Lee who coined the motto at the top of our website, www.factsonisrael.com:
“If you forfeit the language, you forfeit our heritage and history.”
We try to make this warning more than just words on a website. By spotting anti-Israel pejoratives and puncturing them for readers who’d be misled, we’re contributing to making the Jewish homeland case. The loaded lexicon is pretty big, and all of its animus-engendering expressions aim to delegitimize us, but some animus-engendering expressions more deeply delegitimize us than do others. Here’s a trio.
“Israel was created and founded in 1948”
It was not. Israel gained its independence that year, and its existing homeland army of homeland Jews, the Haganah, which became the IDF, successfully threw off invasion for its destruction, the acid test of existing statehood. Calling Israel “created” and “founded” in 1948, which for many years the western mainstream media reveled in saying, suppresses the Jewish people’s pre-1948 existing connection to the Jewish homeland of Israel.
This “1948 founding” canard is the foundation for miscalling the Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” and that in turn for miscalling seemingly one-sided civilian displacement caused by that invasion “Palestinian refugees from the war that followed Israel’s creation.” Media silence about the greater number of mostly Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel adds to the misperception of a “1948” intrusion of Jews into the Mideast. A majority of Israel’s population today is descended from the Old Yishuv and Middle-eastern Jews.
“Israel is ‘The Zionist Entity’”
Calling Israel “the Zionist entity” cuts deeper than just avoiding calling it “Israel.” It’s an attempt to attribute the Jewish connection to the land of Israel to the late nineteenth century-begun Zionist movement, suppressing Jewish connection to the land of Israel between Hadrian and Herzl. That Jewish homeland connection, including through physical presence (see e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine), never ceased.
Zionism even in its pre-state heyday wasn’t an effort to create a Jewish homeland where none already existed, but to invigorate that homeland presence by bringing more people and modernity to it. It was a new means to that millennia-established end – i.e., as the old quip went, “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.” Katz in Battleground :
“Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new. The living movement to the land had never ceased.” (Katz, Battleground, p. 97, quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, p. 140)
“ . . . the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem”
“… the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem ….” Those are the exact words of the United Nations Security Council’s resolution 2334, adopted 14-zip with U.S. abstention (to say no more) in the final days of the Obama administration. It is a total flat denial of Jewish homeland equity in historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David and all), thrice in history the capital city of a homeland Jewish state and no other, with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman times, and in Judea-Samaria, still called that by the UN itself in 1947, none of which Palestinian Arabs have ever ruled ever.
UNSC 2334 was not an attempt to settle the long Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict. It didn’t deal with, e.g., refugees (even Arab, let alone Jewish). It just sought to undo the Six Day War and take away from the Jews and hand 100% to the Arabs “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.” Ok, guys, negotiate your “two-state solution” from there.
All the pejoratives besmirching Jewish rights beyond “the 1967 borders” (i.e., 1949 ceasefire lines declared in their defining document not to be borders, just military ceasefire lines only, and which as such were nullified by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan) – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … seized/captured by Israel in 1967 (as though there’d been no previous Jewish connection) … occupied territory … Palestinian territory … occupied Palestinian territory … Jewish settlements (in pointed contradistinction to nearby ‘Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages’), etc. – all find their international sanctification in UNSC 2334.
Bottom Line
Secure Jewish homeland advocate Mark Langfan gave Lee a three-dimensional plastic map of the land of Israel. We showed it at talks that we gave. It gives you a sense of the Judea-Samaria hill country overlooking the heavily-populated narrow nine miles wide middle-of-Israel lowland coastal plain. Allon and Rabin, top Israeli military leaders, both believed that Israel’s security border had to be the Jordan River, with both slopes of the Judea-Samaria ridge on the Israeli side of Israel’s longest eastern border. But anyone looking at Mark Langfan’s map would see that there’s no natural geographical separator west of that river, let alone one that doesn’t enticingly literally overlook Israel’s narrow lowland middle.
But “having to have” Judea-Samaria, and, for Jewish meaningfulness, historic Jerusalem, isn’t sufficient. We have to be historically and legally entitled to it. It has to be historically and legally ours. And it is – continuous homeland-claiming presence (see, e.g., Parkes – Jews’ tenacious homeland claiming presence all through the post-biblical centuries wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds”), and see San Remo and the Mandate with its Jewish national home and provision allowing withholding that national home east of the River.
Israel wasn’t “founded” in 1948, and it’s the Jewish homeland, not “the Zionist entity.” And it’s not “occupied Palestinian territory,” whatever the UN may say in violation of the Palestine Mandate and permanently in effect San Remo Treaty. Eastern Palestine, Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab majority is 78% of that Mandate.
We all hope for eventual full peace between Arabs and Jews. It will come, if at all, with Arab acceptance that Israel isn’t a recent western intrusion upon “occupied Palestinian territory,” but the historic homeland of a Middle-eastern people, the Jewish people, that has deep, never-abandoned, Jerusalem-centered homeland roots there. Canards like “Israel was founded in 1948,” is “the Zionist entity” with no pre-Zionism roots, and that “East” (i.e., historic) Jerusalem and “the West Bank” (nee Judea-Samaria) are “occupied territory” of “The Palestinians” who’ve never ruled any of it, are designed to prevent that. We must not acquiesce in these pejoratives, let alone voice them ourselves.