WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Most of us recognize that we have to contest pejoratives like “West Bank … 1967 borders” etc., permeating Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict discourse. They poison perceptions of Jewish v. Arab Palestine equities. But we have to fight ALL the dirty words, not just some of them. And, alas, there are some pretty poisonous ones that we don’t.
It’s Not Just “West Bank … ‘67 Borders … Settler-Colonial State”; The Arab-Israeli Conflict’s ENTIRE LEXICON is Loaded Against Us
Among the wonderful Jackie Mason’s comically accurate characterizations of ourselves was that of our somewhat kosher Jews who profess they don’t eat bacon or ham, only shrimp … and only at Chinese restaurants … and there only on Christmas. What’s less an innocuous laughing-at-ourselves matter is our failure to appreciate that not just a few dirty words but the entire lexicon of Arab-Israeli conflict discourse is disdainfully loaded against us.
Expressions Delegitimizing Israel as the Historical Homeland of Jews
Verbal attacks on Israel as Jews’ historical homeland hammer away at two themes – Israel as a recently created entity sans historical roots, and Israel as the dispossessor and/or exploiter of the land’s indigenous population of Palestinian Arabs.
“Israel was created/founded in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, doesn’t explain how an existing homeland army of homeland Jews threw back and then some the instant invasion for its destruction of several neighboring Arab states. And it ignores the twice previously sovereign Jewish presence in the land for three thousand years, with today’s Israel as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
“Israel was created because of the Holocaust” not just dates its claimed founding to the mid-twentieth century but carries the implied, sometimes openly expressed, predicate “So why should The Palestinians suffer?” Both the Zionist movement and Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home and close settlement of Jews on the land preceded the Holocaust, as of course did three thousand years Jewish presence.
Calling Israel “the Zionist entity” is not just an avoidance of saying “Israel,” but falsely dates Jewish connection to the land to the late nineteenth-century-begun Zionist movement. This canard both suppresses previous continuous Jewish connection and physical presence, but mischaracterizes Zionism itself. It didn’t start something new but modernized and invigorated a Diaspora return to the homeland that had never ceased (Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 97). The old pre-State quip of Zionism being “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine” had a nugget of truth.
Can you conceive of a more slanted phrasing of who are the natives and who the outsiders than media phrasing of the UN General Assembly’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution as “The UN sought to create in Palestine ‘Palestinian’ and Jewish states”? Actually, what the UN said over and over in that resolution was “the Arab state” [emphasis added] and “the Jewish state,” and it called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”
“Israel’s creation displaced Palestinians,” often phrased by western media as “Palestinian refugees of the war that followed Israel’s creation,” ignores that the land’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews, and that there’d have been innumerably more Jews but for the homeland Jew-slaughtering campaigns of Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and others, Jewish immigration bans of foreign empire rulers, and European bans of “transport of Jews to the East,” dating from those of medieval rulers and popes to the before-during-and-after the Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine British blockade. And that “war that followed Israel’s creation”? It was a multi-nation Arab invasion whose leaders called upon Palestine Arabs “temporarily” to get out of their way.
The current campaign calls Israel “apartheid” and a “settler-colonial” state. Most Westerners would be surprised to learn that Israel’s Jewish population is not “white European” but majority Mizrahi – descendants of Israel-absorbed Middle-eastern Jews who’d lived persecuted lives for centuries in Arab and other Muslim lands. These Middle-eastern and North African “Jews of color” are as indigenous to the Middle-east as are Arabs. The white European Jews whom Israel absorbed did not enter Israel as European “settler-colonialists,” but had fled that cursed continent which over the centuries had devised every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – expressly for Jews.
What the media misleadingly calls “the Palestinian refugee issue” is a two-sided refugee issue. More indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the 1948 war and its wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. That Israel absorbed the bulk of these Jews while Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself, have isolated these Arabs’ descendants [apartheid, anyone?] in UN-supported “refugee camps” does not turn what had been in effect a population exchange into a one-sided “Palestinian refugee issue.”
Expressions Delegitimizing Land of Israel Areas Israel Liberated in 1967
Expressions delegitimizing Jewish connection to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, liberated by Israel in 1967, suppress millennia prior Jewish connection and call these areas “Palestinian.”
International borders have gravitas, surviving subsequent fighting between the two sides, which military ceasefire lines lack. The 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and invading [Trans-]Jordan expressly defined the “green line” it drew between where their respective armies then stood to be a military ceasefire line exclusively, without prejudice to either side’s border claims. As a non-border military ceasefire line, and not one of the Holy Land’s holy places, it was voided, succeeded and replaced by the post-Six Day War ceasefire line, infinitely more Jewishly meaningful and militarily secure for Israel. Resurrecting the old defunct 1949 line as “Israel’s 1967 border” is doubly misleading – it was a line, not a border, and 1949, not 1967.
Calling every inch of the land of Israel over the old 1949 ceasefire line “occupied Palestinian territory,” which the UN did in the Obama administration’s final days in UNSC 2334, is triply wrong – historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria aren’t Israeli “occupied,” aren’t “Palestinian,” and aren’t a defined “territory.” Jews have lived in Jerusalem since the days of King David (and in Judea-Samaria even before that), relentlessly returning whenever foreign empire rulers kicked them out. Jerusalem’s been the capital of three homeland Jewish states and none others in the past 3,000 years. It’s had a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s. The League of Nations-adopted, UN-accepted Palestine Mandate called for re-constitution in Palestine of the Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land. The Mandate had a withdrawal clause for Palestine east of the Jordan River (today’s Jordan), but not for west of the Jordan. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Jerusalem or Judea-Samaria, and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099. The 1949 ceasefire lines snaked through the city of Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, based not on definable geographic features but on where the two armies then stood. The land of Israel’s meaningful and naturally-defined defensible border is the Jordan Valley, embracing the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem.
In 1950, the invader [Trans-]Jordan renamed Judea-Samaria as “the West Bank” for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in 135 – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. The media says “Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for the West Bank,” which they are, but not just the biblical names. These Hebrew-origin names remained in use all through the centuries, including by the UN itself in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
The media insistently says that Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem were “captured by Israel in 1967,” which suppresses three-millennia prior Jewish presence. Jews have resided in Jerusalem since the time of King David, and in Judea-Samaria even before that. In the past three thousand years, Jerusalem has been the capital of three native states – Judah, Judaea and Israel, all of them Jewish – and no others, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s.
The media lovingly contrasts Jewish “settlements” in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem with nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages.” In today’s parlance, “settlements” is a dirty word. In its product labeling decree, the European Union, with specific reference to Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, declared that “settlement” connotes not just newness of presence in a place, but “foreign” newness. The one time the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one western paper, found itself saying “Palestinian settlements,” it immediately withdrew it.
The media mocks Israelis asserting Jewish claim to the entirety of the 22% of the Palestine Mandate which Britain’s authorized withdrawal of Transjordan from it left for the Jews as “ultra-nationalist” believers in a “Greater Israel.” Exactly backwards. It’s those who deny that today’s Jordan sits on 78% of the Palestine Mandate and has a Palestinian Arab majority population, and would again divide between Arabs and Jews that 22% that Palestine’s first division left for the Jews, who champion what would be a Jewishly meaningless, militarily indefensible Lesser Israel.
The UN wasn’t wrong in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution in calling Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” The AP (12/11/11) acknowledged that during the Mandate Palestine’s Muslims, Christians and Jews were “all” called “Palestinians.” Jerusalem Post editor David Bar-Illan in his ground-breaking “Eye On the Media” column repeatedly showed that during the Mandate “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were far more used by Palestine’s Jews in reference to themselves and their institutions than by its Arabs. Prime Minister Begin in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, asserted the Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” and that these names had been hijacked by Arabs. Is we ourselves calling our adversary in the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine “The Palestinians” any more kosher than Jews just eating shrimp just in Chinese restaurants just on Christmas?