WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Mitchell Bard wrote this week we should focus on kindling Israel support among uninformed/disinterested, as opposed to anti-Israel, American Jews. I think many are turned off by Israel-delegitimizing canards implanted in their minds by Jewish homeland adversaries. Here are five we should strive to excise from uninformed/disinterested 0grassroots American Jews’ minds.
Five Myths to Exorcise From the Minds of Jewish Peoplehood Sense-Lacking Grassroots American Jews
“Attention should be focused on the uninformed/disinterested ….,” Mitchell Bard advised this week in a JNS article, How To Make the Case For Israel, 8/23/23, addressing pro-Israel advocates’ efforts to get through specifically to college students. But I think his advice is applicable to getting through to grassroots Jews of all ages. Bard comes to this with deep experience, having edited successive editions of his deeply-detailed Myths & Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, debunking one common misperception of Israel after another
“Uninformed” and hence “disinterested” in Israel grassroots American Jews are often not really uninformed about Israel, but misinformed by Israel-tarnishing misstatements by the media and others (including, alas, sometimes Jews). So here are five widely-believed deeply-delegitimizing misperceptions of Israel deserving debunking.
[1] UNSC 2334 just “condemned settlements”
Last week I quoted the Jerusalem Post, 8/15/23, Who Is Jack Lew, the Rumored Next US Ambassador to Israel, citing Jack Lew, Obama’s sometimes Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff, and now Biden’s Ambassador to Israel-appointee apparent, saying something truly disturbing:
“Lew also said he doesn’t think Israel should be reliant on US vetoes in the UN Security Council, defended the 2016 decision not to veto a UNSC [2334] condemnation of settlements, and pointed out that the Obama administration had always opposed settlements.” [emphasis added]
A UN “condemnation of settlements” is fairly interpreted as telling Israel not to build homes for Jews in “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, pending negotiation of borders between Jews and Arabs in these areas in a world-favored “two-state solution.” Bad enough, but that’s not what the UN did in 2334. The UN in 2334 preempted negotiation by declaring “East” Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and the entirety of Judea-Samaria “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.”
If you were the Jewish homeland’s deadliest enemy and could pick two areas to rip from Israel that would do Israel and the Jewish homeland the most harm, would you not pick historic Jerusalem and defensible biblical hill country heartland? Can you envision a less meaningful mischaracterization of Six Day War-reversing UNSC 2334 than “well, it just told Israel not to build ‘settlements’”? Of all the calumnies incessantly heaped upon our Jewish homeland of Israel, only one is irretrievably irrevocable – Israel-“Palestine” borders.
[2] Murderers of Israeli Civilians are “Miltants”
The Holocaust was no anomaly. Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – was devised in Europe, Christianity’s heartland, expressly for us Jews. Nor did we fare well over the centuries as “dhimmis” in Muslim lands. Nor is anti-Jewish sentiment gone today from the world. There is one place on Earth, above all others, where this must also be true, our Jewish homeland, Eretz Yisrael, where specifically Jewish Lives Matter, where nobody, wearing a kippah or not, may be mugged, maimed, murdered, etc., , just for being a Jew.
Murderers who murder Jews in our homeland are terrorists, not “militants.” A classic instance was the media mislabeling as “militants” terrorists who blew up two Jerusalem city buses two days in a row, murdering 25 and hurting 85 other Israelis, and announced they weren’t done. The Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”) of 6/20/02, big-headlined “… And Militants Promise More.” That led [footnote 1] to an exchange between the Inq’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief [only such Inq bureau in the world] Michael Matza and me.
Over and over in Lee Bender’s and my book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z (pp. 93-95), we cited the media indirectly quoting Israelis (Bibi, Sharon, “settlers” and others) saying “militants.” Don’t believe it (cf footnote 1). And over and over (id., pp. 98-99) the media characterized President Bush’s “Road Map,” which used forms of the word “terror” over and over, and “militants” not at all, as having “called on the Palestinians to rein in militants.”
My favorite though was the Inq of 11/8/02, in which a “suspected bomber” [emphasis mine] “wearing an explosive belt” and yelling “Allahu Akbar” ran at troops who fired at him “and the belt exploded.” A prime suspect, don’t you think?
[3] The 1949 Ceasefire Lines were “Israel’s 1967 Borders”
Borders have an international law gravitas which mere military ceasefire lines lack. The 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and the invader Jordan expressly declared the “green line” it drew as being of military significance only, not to prejudice either side’s claim to Israel-Jordan borders. So when nine big American Jewish household-name Jewish institutions, including our Reform and Conservative religious movements, lay leaders, rabbis and all, wrote an open letter to then-President Trump, calling upon him to pursue a “two-state solution” with borders that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” save for “any territorial adjustments” [emphasis mine] thereto agreed in writing between the two sides, they misportrayed mere military ceasefire lines (and defunct ones at that, having been superseded by renewed fighting and infinitely better for Israel Six Day War ceasefire lines) as international borders.
[4] The Romans “Exiled” the Jews, Who Were Gone for c. Two Thousand Years
Jimmy Carter wrote in the opening “Historical Chronology” to his charming Palestine Peace Not Apartheid that in 135 CE: “Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile.” No, they didn’t. As eminent twentieth-century historian James Parkes wrote in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p. 266), Jews, initially still a majority and then long a tenaciously-clinging, homeland-claiming minority, remained in the land all through the ensuing exclusively foreign rule centuries, in spite of every discouragement, writing today’s Israelis,’ citizens of the land’s next native state, “real title deeds.” I traced this continued presence in my own book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. As Parkes pointed out, “we never fully left’s” great significance is that it debunks enemies’ claims we suddenly came back, displacing a homogenous Arab population of centuries. (Palestine’s entire 1947 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews, and this despite repeated foreign empire rulers’ massacres, immigration prohibitions from medieval European barring of “transport of Jews to the East” through the before-during-and after-the- Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade, and foreign rulers’, including British, barring of Jews’ purchase of land).
[5] The Western Wall is the “Sole Surviving Remnant” of the Jewish Temples
I’ve read this repeatedly in Jewish internet articles. It’s wrong. See Ritmeyer, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Jews should understand that Herod’s Temple Mount is significantly still there, and there are two visible remnants, a step that was part of its western retaining wall and a section of the still-standing eastern wall, remaining from the First Temple’s Mount. The Western Wall prayer area is a small section of a long western retaining wall, and the seven Herodian ashlar rows that you see sit above nineteen reaching down to bedrock underground. (They’re visible in a surviving Warren shaft, but Israel should expose a small view, for all that the media and world would howl Israel’s “undermining the al-Aqsa mosque.”) The Dome of the Rock enshrines Mount Moriah’s summit, the Foundation Stone that was the floor of the Temples’ Holy of Holies, and Ritmeyer makes what Shanks of BAR called “quite a good case” that a slot carved in its center was where the Ark of the Covenant stood!
The significance of all this is not just that “Palestinian” claims that we were never there are baloney, but that the Jews’ Temple Mount is still there, for all that newspapers like the Inq et ilk sell out Christians, along with Jews, in calling the entire Temple Mount complex “a mosque.”
Bottom Line
Today, many American Jews disinclined to feel strong Jewish peoplehood attachment to Israel are misled by misbeliefs that Palestinian Arabs have stronger claims than our people to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria; that “Palestinians” who prey on Israeli civilians are not terrorists but defenders of an Arab “East” Jerusalem and “West Bank”; that we really were virtually totally gone for close to two millennia, and that only a small Western (“Wailing”) Wall remains from long-gone Jewish presence of ancient times.
Try to exorcise these misbeliefs, starting with uninformed/disinterested grassroots fellow Jews. Grippingly readable Israel books that I’ve mentioned from time to time in these weekly emails may help. They show not only the seminal events of what Charles Krauthammer called “the miraculous age,” the “rebirth of Jewish sovereignty” taking place in our time, but the desperate need and incredible courage and drive of those who fulfilled Herzl’s belief that “If you will it, it is no dream.”
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Footnotes:
[1] 6/24/02
Dear Mr. Matza:
Last Thursday, you substituted “[militants]” for another word in a direct quotation of [Israeli government spokesman] Ranaan Gissin: “Given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing . . . we have to deploy our forces in such a way that [militants] won’t be able to leave their launching pad.”
I’m a long time Inquirer reader. Please email me the word Mr. Gissin actually used.
Jerome Verlin
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7/2/02
Dear Mr. Verlin,
The word Mr. Gissin used in his quote was “they.” Because the word “they” would have been unclear, we substituted the word “militants” and placed it in brackets to accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.
Sincerely,
Michael Matza
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7/3/02
Dear Mr. Matza,
Thanks very much for your email supplying the word [“they”] actually used by Mr. Gissin. To be perfectly frank, I’d suspected he’d used a different word, also beginning with “T”. To that extent, I did you injustice.
However, still to be perfectly frank, I do not think that your putting the word “militants” in brackets did in fact “accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.” You’re doubtless aware that American Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel, including in Philadelphia, are actively protesting, inter alia, the media’s own misuse of “militants” to describe the mass murderers who pack non-homemade bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to cause as much death, permanent injury, pain and disfigurement to civilians, including children and infants, as they possibly can. Within the last two weeks, your own newspaper headlined the second of the two consecutive days’ Jerusalem mass murder bomb senders as “militants – who promise more.”
What you did, Mr. Matza, was to go beyond that and stuff the media’s word “militants” into a direct quote of an Israeli official, as though he’d have used it. Would Sharon’s spokesman really have used it? If not, it was not Mr. Gissin’s meaning that you accurately conveyed to your readers. Am I wrong?
Jerry Verlin
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Those protests against media misuse of “militants” that I referred to in that last email to the Inq’s Mr. Matza included a ZOA-Brith Sholom-Jewish War Veterans demonstration that month on the Philly Inquirer’s sidewalk, in which I had the privilege to be one of the three speakers. I began:
“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….”