WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week I spoke to those of you who cringe when especially fellow American Jews say “West Bank … 1967 borders … occupied territory” etc. I asked you to be a Word Warrior in objecting to such delegitimizing of our Jewish people’s historic homeland of Israel. Here’s what came of it.
New This Week: A Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop
What I asked
In last week’s #1084, I argued [1] that “West Bank … 1967 borders … occupied Palestinian territories” etc., etc., aren’t randomly coined terms describing the Arab-Israeli conflict, sometimes slighting one side, sometimes the other, but are all one-way-slanting pejoratives of a loaded lexicon aimed at poisoning public perception of our Jewish homeland of Israel; [2] that alas many American Jews and our institutions (many perhaps unknowingly) themselves use these pejoratives; and [3] that grassroots American Jews must actively stand up against this language. I asked each of you readers on your own to take a Jewish homeland word warrior’s pledge to do just that, and I told you about what’s on our website, www.factsonisrael.com, that can help you feel more informed and less alone. (If you missed #1084, with the text of the pledge, egregious American Jewish terminology misuse examples, more about what’s on our website, etc., it’s on the website at the top of the stack under “Media Watch.”) I asked each of you to TELL ME whether you’d taken this Jewish homeland word warrior’s pledge by clicking “reply” to #1084.
How’d I do?
Early on, Steve K in Israel emailed me, “Are you getting enough hits to make the effort worthwhile?” I answered “enough to get started,” which I recap below, but you be the judge. What we hope to build is public awareness, starting in our own American Jewish community, that we strongly do not acquiesce in, let alone ourselves use, Jewish homeland delegitimizing terms like “West Bank … occupied Palestinian territories …Israel’s creation (as though artificially and out-of-the-blue) in 1948,” etc., etc., that are so commonly used in Arab-Israeli conflict discourse.
Bob A., Frank B., Henry F., Rainer M., Alan M. and Steve S. emailed back “I took the pledge,” and some of them sent it on to their own lists. Sid K. devoted a big part of his own email newsletter this week to our effort. Steve F. emailed me a response he made to an anti-Israel article, and Julia L. emailed me four. These and my responses this week are recapped in this week’s new “Word Warrior Workshop” below, which we’ll run when we have stuff to put in it. Bob S. emailed encouragement: “A long hard fight … the effort hopefully will continue.” Ah, there’s the rub. Pro-Israel and other “media watches” build up cadres of “letter writers” who respond, today by email, to news articles that are prejudicially wrong on particular stories’ particular facts. We need to do this at the slanted terminology and history portrayal level. One thing for sure is we won’t suffer from a lack of opportunity to make our views known. If we starters of this effort muster the gumption to stick with it, we’ll build up our number and notice.
Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop
“Settlements in the West Bank”
I’ll start with my own actions in this realm this week, shall I? I posted terminology-oriented comments to two of Jonathan Tobin’s JNS articles. In October 28’s Is This the Beginning of a New Cold War Between Biden and Israel?, Jonathan referred to one bone of contention as “settlement building in the West Bank … West Bank settlements.” I commented: “It is self-defeating to explain and justify Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in Judea-Samaria by calling them ‘settlements in the West Bank.’”
US Reform and Conservatives’ Two-States’ Borders that “Hew Precisely to the 1967 Borders”
In Friday’s Hypocritical Israeli Coalition Politics Get Ugly, Jonathan dealt with, among other turbulent issues confronting Israeli MKs, the long struggle between haredim and Women of the Wall and their followers over egalitarian prayer and women’s prayer practices at the Western Wall. Netanyahu this week retweeted a call by a Shas leader calling for a turnout “to disrupt the service being held by Women of the Wall.” Jonathan criticized Bibi for acting like “he is writing off the views and sensibilities of the overwhelming majority of American Jews who identify with non-Orthodox streams.” In my comment, which so far has received two likes and no responses, I stated my support for egalitarian prayer at the Wall, but said that in 2019, the American Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, along with other big groups, wrote then President Trump, “calling for a two-state solution with borders that ‘hew precisely to the 1967 borders’ (which of course they weren’t) save for agreed ‘territorial adjustments.’ So by this majority of American Jews, the Western Wall would not even be in Israel at all,” so Bibi shouldn’t be blamed for not taking their views on Western Wall prayer into account.
“Trouble Began” When Jewish Man Engaged in Prayer on “Islam’s Third Holiest Site”
Steve F. posted a response this week to a Yahoo/Time article on Facebook Wednesday that claimed: “The trouble began on Yom Kippur when a Jewish man engaged in prayer on the city’s 37-acre acropolis that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary or Haram al-Sharif,” adding “Israeli police, who are in charge of security at Islam’s third holiest site, ordered him to stop,” and that it’s “a place Judaism also holds sacred.” Steve rightly bitterly criticized this skewed comparison of Judaism’s holiest site, and Jews’ right to pray there, versus [a different part of] the site being “Islam’s third holiest site.” Steve: “Have you ever read or heard what the ‘third holiest site’ is of any other religion? Of course not.”
Public Unions’ Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Doesn’t Belong in Our Schools
Julia in California: “Jerry, does this published letter count toward taking the pledge?” Indeed. It’s a protest letter by Julia in a California Jewish paper against California teachers’ unions finding time to provide school children a “foreign policy” hostile to Israel instead of directing their efforts “to assuring that all Los Angeles children can read, write and compute adequately,” an “agenda that will not bring either peace or education.”
Making Known Historical Facts Not Known by the Public
Much attention is devoted in the media to alleged evils of Israel’s “occupation,” but invader Jordan’s 1948-67 control of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem isn’t even referred to as occupation, let alone telling what went on then. Julia strove to correct this in letters this week to California papers: “During the Jordanian occupation between 1949 and 1967, Jordanians blew up dozens of synagogues, used Jewish tombstones to pave roads, and drove all Jews from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Israelis were not allowed to pray at their holy Western Wall, in violation of provisions for religious rights in the armistice, Article VIII, 2.”
And Now What?
So that’s why I told Steve K. in Israel we’ve got enough folks “to get started.” But I agree with Bob S.: “A long hard fight … the effort hopefully will continue.” Keep at it, and keep sending me stuff.