#1040 12/27/20 – My Plea This Final Week of Twenty Years: The Lexicon is Slanted Against Us; American Jewish Grassroots Has To Contest It

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: So what plea can I make to you Gentle Readers, some of you having put up with me now for twenty years?  Just this: The language of American public discourse on Israel is loaded with pejoratives denigrating our Jewish homeland of Israel.  If this is to be contested by American Jewry, grassroots American Jews have to do it.   

My Plea This Final Week of Twenty Years: The Lexicon is Slanted Against Us; American Jewish Grassroots Has To Contest It

This weekly email, Brith Sholom Media Watch (BSMW), aimed at urging grassroots American Jews to recognize and respond to mainstream media misreporting on Israel and anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives lacing common discourse, began the first week of January 2001.  So this #1040 this last week of December 2020 marks the completion (all right, with some bonus “two-weeks-in-one” editions brought to you mostly by Canadian bass and hawks at Cape May) of twenty years.

Two decades of emails from You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly have been the fuel that has kept BSMW going.  I deeply appreciate them all, certainly those of encouragement, but also sincere (if wrong-headed) defenses of “West Bank,” “the 1967 borders,” the “two-state solution,” etc.  I so-to-speak celebrated this year a millstone birthday of 80.  I hope to keep BSMW going, because I think we grassroots American Jews need to keep contesting public discourse terminology denigrating Israel.  I offer you this twenty years’ occasion to, as we say in my software development profession, “press Escape,” but stick around some more if you will.

It was Dr. Mike Goldblatt of the ZOA, himself a fugitive from my fraternal order Brith Sholom, who suggested to me back in December 2000 that Brith Sholom, of which I was then chair of its “Israel” committee, start a “media watch.”  So we did.  In BSMW #1 that first week of January 2001, I told the order’s board of governors and a few others what I’d read that week in my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”):

 “This past week, the philadelphia inquirer told its readers in a Knight Ridder News Service news story that under President Clinton’s plan, ‘Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .’” (Thurs., 1/4/01, article on page 1 and 16, emphasis added)

I told those charter BSMW subscribers why this was grossly misleading.  “Four million” Palestinian Arabs did not leave Israel in 1948.  Palestine’s entire population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews.  Not all the Arabs lived in the part that became Israel, and not all of them left.  Some half-million left.  And Arabs didn’t leave “during the creation of Israel,” but in an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction following Arab rejection of western Palestine’s partition between its Arabs and its Jews.  More indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, about whom the media is silent, were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in that war and its aftermath than Arabs left tiny Israel.  Israel absorbed these Middle-eastern Jews, whose descendants today are at least half of Israel’s population, while Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself, have kept these Arabs’ descendants in UN-supported “refugee camps.”  I told those charter BSMW subscribers that countering such monstrously misleading statements in the American media was the duty of us grassroots American Jews.

“Millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” was just one of the mainstream media’s misleading misstatements on Israel.  That particular one was eventually abandoned (I had small media-acknowledged hand in that), but others rage on to this day.  The organized American Jewish community itself disgracefully uses some of the loaded lexicon’s poisoned pejoratives (see some below), so the need remains for the grassroots to respond self-respectfully.

Many years ago, I wrote a letter to a Philly Inquirer editor, citing many instances of Inq unfairness to Israel.  Her reply referenced my citations as claimed “inaccuracies.”  That’s not how I viewed them.  Let me cite you a pair of Inq headlines a few years later that shine a bright light on Inq-think regarding our Jewish homeland of Israel, and ergo us.

***  On April 29, 2008, the Inq carried a brief AP report quoting Hamas that it had sent four of its members “on a jihad mission” of planting explosives near the Israel-Gaza border fence, who’d been spotted and killed by Israeli forces.  The Inq headlined, context, shmontext:  “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians.”

***  Just three days before that, the Inq had carried another AP report that two Israeli factory guards had been executed point blank by a Palestinian Arab whom a spokesman for Islamic Jihad said had snuck into Israel to a border zone factory which employs Palestinian Arabs.  Inq headline: “Two Israeli Factory Guards Die.”

(Those of you Gentle Readers who wander around with a lamp in the daytime seeking redeeming occasional accuracy in Philly Inquirer Israel news headlines – but see Bender & Verlin, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, under “H: Headlines – Not Always What Happened” – might find it in this:  Two weeks later, 5/11/08, the Inq ran an AP story on “militants” firing rockets into Israel from Gaza, one of which killed an Israeli “while he was gardening at his home.”  The Inq headlined: “Gaza Militants Fire Rockets, Mortars Into Israel.”  I’d expected: “Israeli Gardening Enthusiast Dies.”)

My Pressing Israel co-author Lee (of Blessed Memory) and I gave somewhere between fifty and a hundred “Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talks loosely based on our book.  I remember at least the cigar club and the ZOA Convention where we got turned loose in The House That Mort Built.  At one men’s club brunch we were asked whether what we were doing about anti-Israel media bias differs from what CAMERA does.  CAMERA interacts with the media, trying to get it to portray Israel more fairly.  I’m not against that, but as I told Andrea once in a lengthy 1:1 conversation, BSMW and now our website, www.factsonIsrael.com, address not the media directly, but grassroots American Jews.

Here are two pleas, Gentle Readers, that I make to you as of the end of these, lo, twenty years:

[1]  Contest the Anti-Jewish homeland dirty words.  The language of American media Israel reporting, and the parlance of American Arab-Israeli conflict discourse, is laced with anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives.  Go look at the “Toxic Terms” and “Dirty Words” pages on our factsonisrael.com.  It is counter-productive to peace, as well as self-disrespecting, for we ourselves, e.g.,

***  to call Judea-Samaria, Hebrew-origin names used for millennia, including by the UN itself in 1947, “the West Bank,” coined by the invader [Trans-] Jordan in 1950 to disassociate that part of the Jewish national home from Jews;

***  to call homeland Jewish communities [and Israel is guilty of this too] over the 1949 ceasefire lines “settlements,” which the media lovingly contrasts, often in the same sentence, with nearby “Palestinian towns, villages, neighborhoods”;

***  to call those 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders, Israel’s “1967 borders,” and Israel’s possible application of sovereignty to parts of the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home over them not “application of Judea-Samaria sovereignty” but “West Bank annexation,” as though Israel has no legitimate claim over those 1949 ceasefire lines.

Don’t just don’t use this loaded lexicon of anti-Jewish homeland dirty words.  Actively object to others using it, from the media to pillar organizations of American Jews.

[2]  Appreciate that it has to be us grassroots that has to do this.  Back in 1948, the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism represented a small minority of American Jews.  No more.  Today, not just the extreme anti-Israel American Jewish groups, but the very pillars of American Jewry, the Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, along with many other important American Jewish organizations, not just support “the two-state solution,” which Israelis themselves do not, but do so using terminology not of compromising Jews’ legitimate homeland rights beyond the 1949 lines, but of pre-peace negotiations conceding that such rights simply do not exist.

If this seems unlikely to you (which it should), reflect on the open letter that nine heavyweight American Jewish groups – the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union for Reform Judaism; the Conservative Movement’s  United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Zionist affiliate Mercaz; “the Anti-Defamation League, the lead Jewish civil rights advocacy group; Ameinu, a liberal Zionist group; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Israel Policy Forum, a group focused on reaching a two-state solution” (JTA. 4/13/19, “Reform, Conservative Jews to Trump: Don’t Let Netanyahu Annex West Bank”) – jointly addressed to the President of the United States.

That letter by those nine American Jewish organizations called on the American President

“… to clearly express your opposition to unilateral measures outside of this framework [i.e., “a negotiated two-state solution”], including annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank.” [emphasis added]

It went on:

“… While that [two-state] solution is unlikely to hew precisely to the 1967 borders, any territorial adjustments must result in a signed agreement between the two sides.”  [emphasis added]

If not us grassroots American Jews, who?  And if not now, when?