WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An Israeli reader of last week’s “Bye-Bye, Baseball” edition sent an email that deserves to be shared. And reporting of Palestinian Arabs violently confronting Israelis in the heart of Jerusalem needs to call it that, not, pejoratively distorting both people and place, “Palestinians, Israeli Settlers Scuffle in East Jerusalem.”
Last Week’s “Bye-Bye Baseball” – A Reader’s Response
I began last week’s #1058 with a personal recollection of my long ago Philadelphia primary public school days when I asked a Black schoolmate whether he roots for the Phillies or the A’s. He replied he roots for the Dodgers. From this I went on to cite the great impact baseball’s late 1940’s integration had on America ultimately ending government-enacted “separate but equal” and Jim Crow, paying tribute to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers for their ground-breaking role in this. Going on that “that was then and this is now,” I deplored major league baseball’s current endorsement of the Black Live Matters movement, an advocate of which proclaims:
“… Black Lives Matter very explicitly is talking about the dismantling of, um, of the Zionist project, dismantling of a settler-colonial project and very explicitly embracing BDS on those grounds.”
After quoting the ZOA that such “deliberate mischaracterization of Israel as a colonialist ‘settler’ state” is an anti-semitic smear that denies the Jewish people its right to self-determination, I ended:
“… it’s not MLB’s endorsement of BLM per se that drives me away from following the game. It’s MLB’s endorsement of a BLM that for whatever reason – antisemitism of its own, uncritical acceptance of anti-Jewish/anti-Jewish homeland propaganda, just-plain-bullying – seeks to “dismantle” my people’s three-millennia homeland as a “settler-colonial project” that drives me away. If BLM genuinely purges itself of that, MLB would cease to be an accessory to “dismantling” my people’s historic homeland – through verbal attack, economic embargo, potentially more. But of course I’m not holding my breath waiting for BLM to divest itself of “dismantling” Israel, or MLB to divest itself of BLM, before the Messiah comes. So, given that reality, which as Stu would say, sets my political position on this, all I can say right now is – Baseball, Bye-Bye.”
Most weeks, I’ve been favored with emails from readers agreeing/disagreeing with the point I’d been trying to make, which is what has kept me going lo these 1059 weeks, and one reader’s email this past week made two points I particularly want to pass on to you.
Reader Steve Kramer, who made aliyah with his wife Michal long ago, where they spent many years as “settlers” and now live in a hill town where they can see both Samaria and the Mediterranean clearer than Alaskan Sarah Palin sees Russia, can still stand on his head and do pushups, and has authored delightfully readable paperbacks with essays mixing hiking, nature, history, archeology, city and site visits, Israeli people stories and more, and writes regular columns appearing in American Jewish community newspapers (and as a “guest column” blog on our related website www.factsonisrael.com), made two comments.
MLB, BLM and Us
One point Steve made is that its “dismantling” Israel ambition isn’t the sole objectionable aspect of Black Lives Matter: “I oppose BLM even without the anti-Zionist (Jew) proclamation. It signifies everything that’s wrong with US today. I share the dream expressed by MLK. No to the new segregationist/color emphasis.”
Steve’s of course right that MLB’s endorsement of BLM endorses evils beyond its “dismantling” our Jewish homeland ambition, but that particular BLM ambition is a specific gratuitous attack on Jews, and MLB needs to be informed that so long as BLM holds to that ambition MLB’s endorsement of BLM is incompatible with American Jewish fandom of major league baseball. Our American Jewish “defense” organizations should convey this to MLB, but failing that it will be up to us grassroots American Jews to “step up to the plate,” so to speak.
Israel’s Mizrahi Face
In countering BLM’s mischaracterization of Israel as a “settler-colonial project,” I stated last week that the biggest segment of Israel’s population is Mizrahi, descendants of the stream of the Jewish people that never left the Mideast. Steve had a comment on that, that over time “intermarriage” has been blending the Jewish people’s Ashkenazi and Sephardi streams into Mizrahi-appearing ‘Israeli’: “When people visit Israel they invariably say: ‘I didn’t think it would be like that.’ Part of that is the feeling of security and part is the fact that everyone (by a long shot) doesn’t look like Ashkenazi Jews. When young people are asked (if they are ever asked) if they are Ashkenazi or whatever, they probably say they’re ‘Israeli.’” QED.
“European Powers Tell Israel To Stop Settlement Expansion Amid Tension in Jerusalem” – Reuters
A thousand and fifty-nine weeks ago, these weekly emails began as a “media watch,” monitoring malicious mischaracterization by the mainstream western media of the Jewish homeland of Israel. A prime target of media disdain has been our Jewish connection to historic Jerusalem. Never mind that Jerusalem has been the capital of three native states in the past three thousand years – Judah, Judaea and Israel – all of them Jewish, that Jerusalem has had a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Ottoman Turkish rule.
Palestinian Arabs, who have never ruled western Palestine (the land of Israel), including historic (“East”) Jerusalem, ever, say Jews are trying to “judaize” Jerusalem, but they’re not alone. The mainstream western media and the nations of western Europe revel in denigrating Jews today in Jerusalem as “settlers.” Jews had resided in Jerusalem not just in biblical times but all through the eighteen centuries between Hadrian and Herzl (traced in my book, Israel 3000 Years), and during those eighteen hundred years of successive foreign empire rule nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.” JCPA put an article by Lee, of blessed memory, and me in the Conference of Presidents’ Daily Alert, and Elder of Ziyon quoted us, when we said that on Algemeiner.
One such media “Jews-as-Jerusalem-settlers” instance that infuriated me years ago was a 3/14/04 Philly Inquirer Knight-Ridder article ridiculing Jews endeavoring “to re-establish a Jewish presence in the Silwan neighborhood [of Jerusalem] until Arab riots in the 1920’s and ‘30’s drove the Jewish residents out” [emphasis added]. Talk about rubbing it in, TEN TIMES in that article the media called these Jerusalem Jewish neighborhood re-establishing Jews “settlers.”
Which brings us to now. Reuters Thursday (5/6/21) in an article headlined “European Powers Tell Israel To Stop Settlement Expansion Amid Tension in Jerusalem” captioned a photo
“An Israeli policeman gestures as a car belonging to Jewish settlers burns amid tension over the possible eviction of several Palestinian families from homes on land claimed by Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.”
Article lede:
“France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain urged Israel on Thursday to halt settlement building in the occupied West Bank.”
AP headlined Thursday:
“Palestinians, Israeli Settlers Scuffle in East Jerusalem”
What’s outrageous here is not just western media moguls contrasting “Palestinians” and “Israeli settlers” in an “East Jerusalem” and “occupied West Bank,” but we Jews not demanding non-loaded media names for both people – “Palestinian Arabs” and “Israelis,” not “Palestinians” and “Israeli settlers” – and place – “Jerusalem” and “Judea-Samaria,” not “East Jerusalem” and “occupied West Bank.”
CAMERA and HonestReporting tirelessly seek corrections to media misstatements on Israel, but like a rainstorm that never stops misreporting pours down on western publics, endlessly poisoning perceptions of Israel. They can’t contend against this alone. And it is ineffective, to say no more, to contend against imbalanced reporting while acquiescing in and even using ourselves the imbalanced language in which the imbalanced reporting reports. Time for grassroots U.S. Jews to step up to the plate?