WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: JNS Editor Tobin rightly commented this week that corporate media outlets routinely report Israel unfairly. Unthinkingly, our own Jewish media sometimes gratuitously echoes such misperceptions. I cite two egregious instances this week.
This Week: Gifts to Media Maligners of Jewish Homeland of Israel
JNS Editor Jonathan Tobin rightly reiterated this week (Take a Stand in the Media War Against Israel, 9/28/23, email to JNS subscribers) that
“The overwhelming majority of secular corporate media outlets routinely produce biased news coverage of Israel that seeks to influence the public to disregard Jewish rights as well as the truth about the Palestinians and their leading terror organizations and leaders who don’t recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn.” [emphasis added]
Alas, though, these “secular corporate media outlets” that routinely “influence the public to disregard Jewish rights” to our homeland in Israel too often get a gratuitous assist from Jewish media outlets. Here are two egregious such gifts this week:
[1] “Judea and Samaria are the biblical names of the West Bank”
eJP, eJewishPhilanthropy, “a news publication covering the world of Jewish philanthropy,” ran an article this week on Netanyahu’s meeting with US Jewish leaders touching on multiple issues – judicial reform, two-state solution, etc. – during his trip to the UN. https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/netanyahu-presses-need-for-judicial-reform-in-meeting-with-divided-american-jewish-leaders/.
The article included this pre-meeting discussion between eJP and ZOA national president Morton Klein:
“Klein told eJP ahead of the meeting that he planned to encourage Netanyahu to stay the course on his government’s plans to weaken the judiciary and to continue building settlements in the West Bank, which he referred to by its biblical name, ‘I’m urging him to stay strong and not stop building on Judea and Samaria, Jews have every right to live there, [and] to stay strong on judicial reform,’ Klein said.” [emphasis added]
Yes, it’s true that “Judea” and “Samaria” are Hebrew-origin biblical names. But they are not just biblical names. They remained in use all through the centuries, even after the Romans, on defeating ancient Israel’s final Bar Kochba Revolt in CE 135, renamed the country “Palestine,” after the long-gone sea-people Philistines, to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. And such was precisely why two millennia later the invader [nee Trans-] Jordan rechristened what was still called “Judea” and “Samaria” as “the West Bank.” Is that really true? Were those biblical Hebrew-origin names still in use in the mid-twentieth century? Here’s what the UN (not the foremost Zionists in the Milky Way Galaxy) said in its Palestine Partition resolution in 1947:
“The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
[2] “The Western Wall is the Only Surviving Remnant of the Temple Mount”
In our world in which international news services honor objective reporting on Israel routinely disdainfully in the breach, Tazpit (“TPS”) is an Israeli news agency created with a “commitment to providing the true Israeli reality by providing accurate and unbiased information” on Israel news. God Bless It. But this week in an article, Palestinian Authority Uses Illegal Construction, UNESCO, to Wage War on Israeli Heritage Sites, carried Tuesday, 9/26, by the Jewish Press, TPS itself slighted the Jewish heritage site of Jewish heritage sites (article acknowledges: “The Temple Mount, where the First and Second Jewish Temples were built, is the overall holiest site in Judaism”) by writing:
“The Western Wall is the only remnant of a retaining wall encircling the Temple Mount built by Herod the Great in the first century and is the holiest site where Jews can freely pray.” [emphasis added]
No, that Western Wall prayer area is not Herod’s Temple Mount’s encircling retaining wall’s “only remnant.” That prayer area is but a small section of a long still-standing western retaining wall built in the first century BCE by King Herod. Beneath your feet as you stand before it gazing in justified awe and wonder at the sacredness and size of the seven visible huge Herodian ashlar courses visible today at the visible base of that structure are nineteen more such Herodian courses extending today below ground down to bedrock. A glimpse can be seen in a surviving Warren shaft to the north of the prayer plaza. And to that prayer site’s north in that still standing Herodian western retaining wall still stand Wilson’s Arch (mostly later replaced) and Warren’s Gate, and between them the largest ashars of the entire retaining walls structure, ashlars huge among huge, and to the south Barclay’s Gate and the remains of Robinson’s Arch.
And part of the Herod-built southern retaining wall still remains, with exterior and interior remains of the Double Gate and Triple Gate, and on the eastern side visible sections of Hasmonean and then Herodian extensions of a still visible section of the First Temple Mount wall. And parallel to that original eastern wall, 500 biblical cubits to the west is a still visible stone on today’s Mount that was the northwest corner of the First Temple’s Mount. Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount spells all this out (and a lot more, including that the slot in the Foundation Stone, Mount Moriah’s summit, today the Rock in the Dome of the Rock, is where the Ark of the Covenant had stood in Solomon’s Temple). I commend it.
Summing Up: Tobin’s right that the mainstream media routinely portrays our homeland of Israel unfairly. We must not exacerbate this, however unthinkingly, by ourselves piling on. The Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” survived biblical times by millennia, including their use by the UN in 1947, and we must not diminish them and their testament to our homeland claim to these integral land of Israel areas by downgrading “Judea and Samaria” to “biblical names of the West Bank.” And the Western Wall prayer area, sanctified as it has been by Jewish prayer there for millennia, is far from “the only remnant” of our Jews’ Holy Temples, and we must not, as I have seen over and over recently, relegate it as such. Object when you see such Jewish media miscarriages of Jewish homeland connection.