WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Per Pew, only a bare majority, 58%, of American Jews “are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel.” I suggest acquainting more US Jews with the voices of participants in our time’s seminal struggle for Israel’s independence rebirth, taking on the increasingly hostile Israel reporting, and curing ourselves of using language that delegitimizes our homeland and is self-disrespecting.
This Week: 3 Tasks for Aware American Jews
Three Signs of Inadequate Emotional Attachment to Israel by American Jews
I’ve seen three signs lately that Charles Krauthammer was right when he worried in an op-ed 3/14/16 (Philadelphia Inquirer, “Krauthammer: Identity and the Holocaust”) that American Jews inadequately appreciate the monumental Jewish event of the “miraculous age” that’s our time: “the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty,” and all that entails – “the revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique in human history), the flowering of a unique Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world.” These are those three signs that I see:
*** Last week, I cited a disturbing recent (5/21/21) Pew study, “U.S. Jews Have Widely Differing Views on Israel,” that “Among U.S. Jews overall, [only] 58% say they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel.”
*** This week, commentator Melanie Phillips posted a scathing critique of mainstream western media Israel coverage, “Media Malpractice as a Weapon of War,” citing egregious examples and concluding:
“Since then, the inflammatory incitement against Israel by the BBC, the New York Times and much of the mainstream media has gotten far worse. Yet with some heroic exceptions, this relentless onslaught has been received with near silence by Jewish community leaders.
“This media malpractice is not a marginal issue. It is a weapon of war. And it’s time for a proper counterattack.”
*** A fortnight ago, our #1066 was an open (unanswered) letter to the publisher of the Philly Inquirer, protesting the Inq’s championing of the Muslim name, al-Aqsa mosque compound, of what has been known in the western world for millennia as the Jewish Temple Mount; the Inq’s headlining of the Israeli government’s reopening of the Temple Mount to Jews, following its temporary closure to Jews due to Arab rioting, as “Mosque Visits Resume” (visits by Muslims had not been suspended); and its calling Jews visiting the Temple Mount on that reopening to Jews day their having “visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” expanding the scope of that Muslim holiness claim from the Al Aqsa mosque building itself at the Mount’s southern end to the entirety of the Temple Mount complex, extinguishing any Jewish claim to the site.
A number of you Gentle Readers emailed me your interest in a response by the Inq, which never came (why should it, from their perspective?), but an open letter from an obscure “media watch” weeks after that “Mosque Visits Resume” article should have been dwarfed by a local Jewish “Day of Rage” on the Inquirer’s sidewalk the day after the Inq ran that holiest-of-Jewish-homeland-holy-places-delegitimizing “Mosque Visits Resume” article.
What To Do About It #1: Awaken emotional attachment to Israel
There are specific things we can do (see below), but Job One, I think, is to try to awaken in some of that 42% [!] of American Jews who don’t feel “very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel” a feeling of such attachment. How to attempt that? I think by exposing such American Jews, 1-on-1, to the voices of those of our people who were personally part of what Krauthammer rightly called this “miraculous age.” These Jews’ dedication and determination are fortunately grippingly captured in books by and about participants in these events. I would have you individually cajole a currently uninspired-re-Israel American Jew or two to read such a book.
So books on what aspect of our people’s struggle for our homeland’s sovereign rebirth would you recommend to, all right, press upon, a currently uninspired-re-Israel American Jew? To me, the most moving such books are those embodying the very words of participants – both survivors and escorts – in the Aliyah Bet, the heroic undertaking, against determined British obstruction, to extricate Jewish survivors from still-Jew-demonizing Europe and bring them home by sailing them in rickety ships into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British blockade.
Among these most meaningful most readable books are Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua and Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade, but the central event, of course, is the saga of the passengers and crew of the Exodus. Tracing their ordeal begins in the Nazi concentration and then Allied displaced person camps, then recounts their trek through British obstacle-strewn Europe, surreptitious boarding and pilotless escape from port, bloody battle with British boarders off Palestine’s coast, prison ship deportation to France, refusal to disembark during weeks-long punitive holding there, then removal to Germany, forced removal there and holding yet again in Germany camps. Readers will not encounter deeper comprehension of the meaning of historic homeland and of determination to surmount all obstacles to getting there than in these books’ searingly conveyed voices of these people. Among these moving books are Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of The Exodus (bio of ship commander Yossi Harel), Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, and Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine. I strongly recommend them all to you Gentle Readers and through you to your less emotionally attached to Israel Jewish friends.
What To Do About It #2: Monitor the Media
The environmentalists are right at least about this: “Think globally, act locally.” For many years, this “Media Watch” focused primarily on my hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has long had a thing about Israel. In the last few years, I’ve escaped from such narrow confines, but given, e.g., “Mosque Visits Resume” and Jews “visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” and other outrages of late, and Melanie Phillips’ assessment of mainstream western media anti-Israel bias only getting worse, perhaps it’s time to focus back.
If any of you-who-put-up-with-me-weekly are game for reading the Inquirer’s Israel coverage so-to-speak religiously, perhaps we can form an Inq-focused media monitoring group, accumulating and documenting current imbalance instances, and bringing attention to them to our community.
When my late co-author Lee and I were giving media bias Powerpoint talks to synagogue groups, we were sometimes asked whether what we were doing differed from the work done by CAMERA. Andrea is one of my heroes, but as the two of us discussed once in a 1:1 conversation, CAMERA communicates with the media with the aim of getting story corrections and attaining balanced reporting on Israel. Alevai, but our aim is documenting and making known to our community the intensity and gravity of that imbalance, hopefully arousing responsive action.
What To Do About It #3: Wash Our Own Mouths Out
The thrust of our efforts in this “media watch,” in Lee’s and my book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, and on our website, www.factsonisrael.com, has been one long if less than successful campaign against we Jews ourselves using the loaded lexicon of poisoned anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives conjured by those who oppose it.
It’s one thing for our adversaries to rechristen Judea-Samaria, the names used by the world for millennia (including the United Nations itself in 1947) as “the West Bank,” but another thing, self-disrespectful as well as counter-productive, for we Jews to use it. “West Bank” was conjured by Jordan in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in 135 – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
The same for capital-E “East Jerusalem.” “East Jerusalem” is not a suburb or satellite of Jerusalem, as is, e.g., “East St. Louis.” “East Jerusalem” is that historic city itself, three times capital of a native Jewish state and none other, with renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule. “East Jerusalem” existed for only19 years, from 1948 invader Jordan’s capture of the historic part of the city until ousted by Israel in 1967. Those who don’t recognize even western Jerusalem, under Israeli control since 1948, as Israel’s capital seek to perpetuate the city’s 1948-1967 Israel-Jordan division.
The 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders, which excluded historic Jerusalem and which left Israel nine miles wide in the lowland middle overlooked by Jordanian-held Judea-Samaria, are not “1srael’s 1967 borders.” They’re not among the Holy Land’s holy places, and are indeed less holy than their successor 1967 war ceasefire lines, including historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, with the Jordan River, Jordan Valley, and Judea-Samaria ridge forming a defensible natural border coextensive with the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home after excision from the Mandate of the 78% of Palestine east of the River as today’s Arab Jordan.
Jewish presence in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, integral parts of that Jewish national home, is not “Jewish settlements,” lovingly contrasted by the media with nearby “Palestinian towns, villages, neighborhoods.”
The Temple Mount, site of the Jewish temples that successively stood there for a millennium, remains the Temple Mount, what it has been called in the West for millennia, not exclusively Haram al-Sharif or al-Aqsa mosque compound.
Israeli presence over the 1949 ceasefire lines in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem is not “Greater Israel.” Shrinking Israel to a rump ghetto state “along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps” in a “two-state solution” that ignores Jordan as existing Arab Palestine would create Lesser Israel, deprived of its meaningful and defensible heart.
Jews’ Arab adversaries in the Jewish-Arab struggle over western Palestine are Palestinian Arabs, not exclusively “The Palestinians.” The UN in 1947 called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” and during the Mandate it was actually Jews more than Arabs who called themselves “Palestinian.” E.g., “the Palestine Post,” today’s Jerusalem Post.
What I would like to do is publish a pamphlet of “dirty words” and their corresponding historically accurate terms in Arab-Israeli conflict reporting and public discourse. Want to contribute bad-good terminology to it? Come be part of it.