WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A recent JPost article dealt with Israeli leaders saying “West Bank.” That term had been coined in 1950 to disassociate from Jews what had been known as Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” for the preceding three thousand years. But the full power of “West Bank” is its place in a loaded lexicon of like-working pejoratives that together paint a picture delegitimizing our Jewish national home.
The Loaded Lexicon of Jewish Homeland-Delegitimizing Dirty Words: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
What bothered me most about the Jerusalem Post article, JPost, 4/12/22, Bennett: It’s Judea and Samaria, Not the West Bank, a fortnight ago quoting Israeli PM Bennett that though he had used the expression “West Bank” in a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Blinken wasn’t Bennett’s concession that “the correct phrase is definitively Judea and Samaria,” or even, as the JPost’s sub-headline put it, “When he was in the premiership, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also used the phrase West Bank.” What bothered me most was utter absence from the article of any recognition that individual anti-Israel dirty words like “West Bank …East Jerusalem … 1967 borders,” etc., don’t stand alone, but fit together like pixels to paint a biased picture delegitimizing our Jewish national home.
Contending against we American Jews ourselves self-disrepectfully mouthing the anti-Jewish homeland dirty words (all of them), ok, is my shtick. I group them into the particular dirty pictures they’re trying to paint.
Canards Delegitimizing Ancient Israel: A favorite ancient Israel put-down among even some archeologists, as cynically phrased by one, was dismissal of King David as having been “as real as King Arthur.” Discovery of a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription mentioning the “House of David” put an end to that, but the pooh-poohing of ancient Israel’s historicity goes on. See, e.g., Tamar Sternthal of CAMERA’s 9/15/21 sterling JNS article, The New York Times’s Corrupted Lessons on Ancient Jewish History, calling out, inter alia, the NYT’s Isabel Kershner’s “The Jews enjoyed two previous periods of sovereignty in the land in ancient times, but both lasted only about 70 or 80 years.” Not exactly. Ms. Sternthal points out that four ancient homeland sovereign Jewish kingdoms [David & Solomon’s, Judah and Israel, and later Maccabean Judaea] preceded today’s Israel, the longest of which, Judah, lasted three hundred years (longer than so far the U.S.). So Three Cheers for America’s Newspaper of Rectum.
Another ongoing slur of ancient Israel, getting worse, is the rechristening of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, as Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa Mosque. CAMERA did a 2016 study, Mapping Changes in Terminology Used by BBC To Describe the Temple Mount, showing a shift from western and Muslim names in parallel, “known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount” (BBC, 9/29/04), to “Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount” (BBC, 5/11/14). Last spring, in an obsequious American newspaper surrender of western nomenclature to adoption of the maximal Muslim claim of “al-Aqsa Mosque” mantle to the entire Temple Mount, the Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/24/21, headlined Israel’s reopening of the Temple Mount to Jews following its brief closure of it to just Jews due to Palestinian Arab violence, not as “Israel Reopens Temple Mount Visits to Jews,” but as “Mosque Visits Resume.”
Canards Denigrating Post-Biblical Jewish Homeland Presence: President Carter was not alone in his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid chronology claiming that in 135 CE “Romans suppress a Jewish [Bar-Kochba] revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile,” and not mentioning Jews again in that Palestine chronology until “1917.” But “exile” didn’t occur. Roman-Byzantine centuries’ synagogue remains all over the land, the writing by homeland sages of the Mishnah and then Jerusalem Talmud, Roman recognition until the fifth century of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community, and homeland Jews’ joinder with the 614 invading Persians in their own self-mustered battalions all evidence that the Romans did not exile the homeland’s Jews. We know today of a hundred Jewish communities during ninth century Abbasid Muslim dynasty rule. The Crusaders wrote of homeland Jews courageously fighting against them, in Jerusalem and alone at Haifa for a whole month. We know a lot about homeland Jews’ lives during the two centuries of Mamluk and then four of Ottoman Turk foreign rule, in the Jews’ four holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land.
Nor did Diaspora Jews live peaceful non-persecuted lives in Europe or Muslim lands. The Holocaust was no anomaly. Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – was devised in Christian Europe expressly for Europe’s Jews. And dhimmi status was a lifetime of persecution and degrading treatment for centuries for Jews in Muslim lands.
Canards Delegitimizing Israel’s 1948 Reattainment of Independence: Israel wasn’t “founded” and “created” in 1948, suddenly and artificially out-of-the-blue, but was the natural fruition into renewed statehood, as the land’s next native state, of the Jewish people’s continuous connection, including physical presence, all through the centuries of uninterrupted foreign rule between Roman destruction of ancient Judaea and 1948. Despite foreign rulers’ repeated massacres of homeland Jews and barriers against Jews seeking to return, the land’s 1948 population was a good third Jews.
The post-Ottoman Empire League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate provided for reestablishment of the Jewish national home in the 22% of Palestine west of the Jordan River, with the 78% of Mandate Palestine east of the River becoming today’s Palestinian Arab majority judenrein Jordan, a “two-state” division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. The UN’s 1947 attempted partition of that remaining 22% was between Arabs and Jews, not “Palestinians” and Jews. The General Assembly’s recommended partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” The subset of Arabs the world calls “The Palestinians” have never ruled Palestine ever.
What the media miscalls “the war that followed Israel’s creation” was a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction. Most of the Arabs who fled Israel left “temporarily” at the Arab invaders’ inducement. More Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in that Arab invasion-started war and its wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. These Arabs’ children and grandchildren are isolated at international expense to this day [Apartheid, anyone?] by their Arab “hosts” in “refugee camps.” Israel’s population today is majority Mizrahi (Middle-eastern and North African), not European. Israel’s “white” European Jews fled anti-Semitism in Europe that continued even after the Holocaust. They didn’t come home to Israel as “colonizers” in the service of the places they left.
Canards Delegitimizing Israel’s 1967 War Attainments: The Hebrew-origin biblical names “Judea and Samaria” remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, even by the UN in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” The invader Jordan coined “West Bank” in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in 135 – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
“East” Jerusalem isn’t some suburb or satellite of the historic Jerusalem that’s been the capital of three native states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule. “East” is Jewish homeland delegitimizers’ name for that historic city – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled the Jerusalem that UNSC 2334 calls “occupied Palestinian territory” for one day in history.
The media insistently says Israel “captured” (sometimes “seized”) “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem “in 1967” in order to suppress three millennia prior Jewish connection to what had been known as “Judea and Samaria” and just “Jerusalem” for three thousand years.
“Israel’s 1967 Borders” is media-speak for the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document, the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, not to be political borders foreclosing either side’s border claims. But borders have international law gravitas, surviving later fighting, that ceasefire lines lack. The defunct 1949 lines, obliterated by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan, and succeeded by that war’s infinitely securer and more meaningful for Israel ceasefire lines, aren’t among the Holy Land’s holy places.
Jewish presence in the land of Israel, the Jewish national home of the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, is by historical and legal right, not “occupation,” and Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled ever, are not “occupied Palestinian territory,” the Palestine Mandate-violating UNSC 2334 notwithstanding.
The media, sometimes in the same sentence, gleefully contrasts Israeli or Jewish “settlements” from nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages,” and “Jewish settlers” from “Palestinian residents.” Alas, even Israel and Israelis say “settlements,” which is delegitimizing, inaccurate, self-disrespecting and counter-productive.
The Jewish people has a legitimate historical and legal homeland claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, liberated (not “captured, seized or occupied”) by Israel in 1967. Israelis and others asserting this right are legitimately stating that legitimate claim, not asserting some wild-eyed media-mocked “ultra-nationalists’ Greater Israel” fantasy.
Canards Euphemizing Palestinian Arab Terrorists as Militants: On a hot July day back in 2002, I had the honor to be one of three speakers at a ZOA-led rally on the sidewalk of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (“Inq’s”) then premises, its Dark Tower on Callowhill Street (May It Have Crumbled Into a Parking Lot). A few days before, Palestinian Arab terrorists had blown up packed Jerusalem municipal buses two days in a row and threatened to continue such actions. The Inq had headlined: “Jerusalem Hit Again – And Militants Promise More.” Here’s how I began my megaphone-magnified shouted remarks, still relevant today, two decades later:
“We’re here today because mass murderers who pack bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to murder and maim as many men, women and children as they possibly can, in buses, restaurants, shopping malls, discos, pool halls, parks and a Bat Mitzvah and a Passover seder, aren’t militants, anytime, anywhere. They’re terrorists, every time, everywhere ….”
Bottom Line: If you’re a Jew, this loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives ought to offend you. It ought to make you swear on a Bible not to mouth them yourself. That’s my view, anyway.