WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Good advice from good friends – we must stop saying expressions their coiners designed to delegitimize us.
Ok, What Magazine Just Ran This About Us: “[We Ourselves Use] The Wrong Terminology”?
“The Wrong Terminology:
“So long as Israelis, Jews, pro-Israel activists, misguided politicians, and the media wrongly use terms like West Bank instead of Judea and Samaria; Palestinians and Palestine instead of Arabs and Arabs living in Israel; or East Jerusalem instead of simply Jerusalem, there will never be peace in the region.
“Because of the systematic subversion of Israel as a sovereign state through these lies, the attacks on Israel and Jews will grow, producing an ongoing worldwide tidal wave of anti-Israel extremism and antisemitism.
“This is the Jews’ history. It is fact. It is unchangeable. If we do not defend it, it will be stolen away from us, if it has not been stolen already.” [bold-face emphasis added]
This article, Pounding Israel With Lies, by Nurit Greenger, a Jewish writer and human rights and pro-Israel activist, originally appeared on JNS in January, and reran this week in the May/June issue of Israel My Glory, published by The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, Inc. (“FOI”), a huge international organization headquartered in southern New Jersey.
I would tell you two noteworthy things about FOI’s running this article. First, The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, Inc., is exactly what its name says. Its first name is “The Friends of Israel,” true friends with candor to reprint a Jewish author’s Jewish media article arguing that we “Israelis, Jews, pro-Israel activists” err in ourselves using Jewish homeland delegitimizing terminology. Ok, its last name is “Gospel Ministry, Inc.” – Christian evangelism worn on its sleeve (contrast that less-than-pro-Israel Christian denomination that for a while ran “synagogues”). I know a couple FOI folks. A few years ago, I attended their seventy-fifth anniversary dinner, which a number of their religious leaders memorably addressed (no one falls asleep during their sermons). FOI has been to Israel in joint missions with official Jewish community groups. We Jews and FOI’s Christians are on a First Name Basis, All’s Well. Second, they’re right. We do ourselves self-destructively use these poisoned anti-Israel pejoratives, including the five “most prominent” that this article cites.
Palestine and Palestinian: Greenger writes that we shouldn’t ourselves call Arabs in Palestine exclusively “THE Palestinians.” She rightly calls it a “political tool” to “destroy our right to the land of Israel.” I’d add: It’s unhelpful for us to characterize the fight over Palestine as being between Jews and “Palestinians.” I’m obsessed, as most of you by now know, with we ourselves using Dirty Words and Toxic Terms designed to delegitimize us. But “Palestine” and “Palestinian” aren’t inherently among them, but have been hijacked. We should take back historical Jewish homeland equity in them.
Indigenous People of the Land: Greenger says Jews have lived in the land of Israel continuously for over 3,000 years. I agree. “Trust me, I wrote a book on it [really – Israel 3000 Years].” Arabs sometimes deny Jewish biblical history, but it happened, written in stone – in the Temple Mount, with its First as well as Second Temple extant remains – see Ritmeyer, The Quest and Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (compelling long and short versions, respectively); in almost contemporary enemy kings’ “House of David” inscriptions, and in what may even be Joshua’s Mt. Ebal altar. The Romans didn’t “exile” almost all the Bar Kochba Revolt’s surviving Jews (President Carter’s Israel: Peace Not Apartheid to the contrary notwithstanding), and we tenaciously clung to our homeland all through the post-Biblical centuries, “in spite of every discouragement,” as eminent historian Parkes put it, writing today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Foreign empires, mostly non-Arab, ruled the land between Judaea’s 135 CE final fall and Israel’s 1948 independence as the land’s next native state, and Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever.
No Genocide of Arabs: Greenger writes that the populations of peoples subjected to genocide decrease, which the number of Palestinian Arabs inside and outside of Israel has not. I add: Compare – There are still fewer Jews in the world today than on the eve of the Holocaust.
“Occupation”: Greenger rightly denies that Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria [and historic Jerusalem] is “occupation” of “Palestinian territory.” I add: Contra: United Nations. By history and international treaty, the Palestine Mandate, the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is our Jewish national home. As Greenger wrote in the part of her article I quoted above, we ourselves using terms – “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem – designed by their coiners expressly to delegitimize us, pushes peace further away, and, by me, is self-disrespecting.
Israel Not an “Apartheid” State: Finally, Greenger states that all Israelis have the same human rights and “Israel has no system of racial segregation and discrimination.” I add: Palestinian Arabs are not without a Palestine homeland – Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab majority, that sits on 78% of the Palestine Mandate. True, its king is a Hashemite, but he could become a constitutional monarch, like Charles, crowned as such Saturday. Appreciate that in the war started by the Arab invasion’s wake, Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Read, e.g., on Alaska Airline’s [really] website about its proud involvement in Israel’s rescuing of “dhimmi” Arab land Jews. These Mizrahi Jews’ children and grandchildren are the largest segment of Israel’s population today. So much for Israel as a “white European settler-colonial” entity. The “two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” to which so many, by me deluded, American Jews seem to be wedded, would be Jewishly and militarily suicidal for Israel, along with being historically and legally utterly unjust. But Trump’s peace plan (see David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer: How Breaking With the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East) offers Judea & Samaria Palestinian Arabs internal autonomy, with Israel retaining security, in a greater area than they now occupy. It offers them four years to accept it.
There are of course many more pejorative terms delegitimizing our Jewish homeland of Israel, which we – Israelis, Jews and pro-Israel activists – must cease using ourselves. Take a look at the Dirty Words and Toxic Terms pages on our related website, www.factsonisrael.com, and at “Ten Misleading Media Expressions,” under Videos, a professionally recorded capture of Lee’s and my PowerPoint talk from a synagogue bimah, based on our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z. My thanks to Friends of Israel for rerunning Greenger’s article.