To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #750, 5/17/15
“Palestine” Ownership Equity in the Media War: Why Does Everyone Understand It’s Importance But Us?
Let’s look briefly at how three groups – Palestinian Arabs [n.b., I did not say “The Palestinians”], the mainstream Western media (“MSM”), and finally we Jews – refer to the land area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, the territory control of which is what the Arab-Israeli [n.b., I did not say “Israeli-Palestinian”] conflict is all about.
Is what people call this territory, or important chunks of it, important? British historian James Parkes, for instance, thought so. In the first paragraph of his preface to his important work Whose Land?, he wrestled with what to call it, recognizing that “Land of Israel … Promised Land … Holy Land … ‘even Palestine’” carry “a slant in favour of” one hypothesis of ownership or another. (He settled for calling it “The Land” (capital T, capital L).)
Palestinian Arabs
Itamar Marcus’ “PMW” organization (palwatch.org) tracks how Palestinian Arabs reference it, with examples claiming all of Israel as part of an Arab Palestine including in 2015. (Btw, the “Palestine Liberation Organization” was founded in 1964, three years before “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” became “occupied” territories.) E.g., Official Palestinian Authority TV on 2/14/15 referenced “the occupied Negev.” On 1/13/15 Fatah’s Facebook site called Nazareth “occupied Nazareth.” PMW cites an “official” Palestinian Authority map that includes both the PA areas and all of Israel (excluding the Golan Heights) wrapped in the Palestinian flag – a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty over the whole area – and has a key through it, symbolizing ownership. Similar maps presenting all of Israel as “Palestine” appear in Palestinian schoolbooks and are shown regularly on PA TV.
On Wednesday this week, PMW issued a bulletin titled “PA and Fatah Present Israel ‘as occupied Palestine’” with further examples.
The Mainstream Western Media
As, e.g., we’ve repeatedly shown in this media watch, the MSM would not be caught dead calling Judea and Samaria by their Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria,” even though that’s what everybody, including the Turks and the British, and the United Nations itself in 1947 – “the hill country of Samaria and Judea” – called Judea and Samaria until after the 1948 invasion by Jordan, which coined “West Bank” in 1950. The MSM has called “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical” name for “the West Bank,” ignoring that “Judea and Samaria,” and not “West Bank,” was the term used until 1950.
And the mainstream media preserves the 1949-1967 separation of “East” Jerusalem, which existed for just 19 years, that ended almost a half-century ago, of the city’s thousands of years’ history.
We Jews
A campaign of this media watch has of course been to get we ourselves to stop saying “East” Jerusalem and “West Bank,” terms embodying a concessionary consequence all too apparent, for example, in what’s being reported on-line right now, in the words of the “JPOST.COM Staff” of the Jerusalem Post:
According to Israel Radio on Friday, Abbas called for the halt of all settlement construction in the West Bank ….
The Palestinian leader demanded that the talks be held for a minimum of a year, during which the two sides will agree on a specific timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that is to be completed by 2017.
But our folly just begins with we ourselves conceding Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria as “settlement construction in the West Bank.” We’ve repeatedly cited in this media watch the MSM mischaracterizing the U.N. as having sought to partition “Palestine” between “Palestinians” and Jews, akin, in Western public perception, to partitioning “Pennsylvania” between “Pennsylvanians” and others. The MSM’s breath-taking culpability here – suppressing that the U.N.’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution consistently and repeatedly referred to “the Jewish State” and “the Arab [not “Palestinian”] State,” and even called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples” – is exceeded in breath-taking shame and consequence only by our own averting our eyes from our own disinheritance.
But the answer is not merely to say that the MSM engages in an anachronism when it says that the U.N. sought to partition Palestine between Jews and Palestinians, because Palestine’s Arabs weren’t yet referred to as “the Palestinians.” No. The answer is for us to take back Jewish equity in the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
Does this strike you as unrealistic ravings of some wild-eyed armchair western Zionist? That no sitting Prime Minister of Israel would ever have so much as fleetingly entertained such a thought? Well, then, here are the words of one such sitting Israeli Prime Minister, Mr. Begin, in his August 1977 “Foreword to the Second Edition” of Katz’s Battleground:
One of the most important services rendered by this book is hinted at in its sub-title: “Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.” The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it) has unfortunately bourne a good deal of fruit. The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of the Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda. So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.
And maybe our folly runs even deeper than that. This British historian Parkes referenced above, who called the land “The Land” in his book, wrote in that book that the continuous homeland-claiming presence of Jews in the land all through the post-biblical centuries of exclusively foreign empire rule, tenaciously maintained in the face of every discouragement, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” Well, good, but he wrote more than that. He went on to bitterly criticize us for not making our continuous presence case to the world.
On the other side, President Carter wrote in the Palestine timeline in the front of his book that on defeating the Jews’ final revolt in CE 135, the Romans exiled Judaea’s surviving Jews, and doesn’t mention Jews again in that introductory timeline until he gets to 1917.
So who’s right, Parkes or Carter? Katz and Begin said Parkes. Begin further wrote in his Battleground Foreword:
The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine. I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.
But I, for one, wasn’t convinced. A chance encounter with a small non-vanity publisher opened an opportunity for me to research and write, if I could, a layperson-to-layperson’s book connecting the Jewish homeland physical presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl. Becoming satisfied that a non-historian could come up with such evidence, I wrote a layman’s account with the opening scene set in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. The publisher shot back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” What about it, indeed? “The Palestinians,” as they’re called, further deny that ancient Jewish history happened (and the New York Times, on one infamous occasion at least, put it in issue). So Chapter 1 became Chapter 4.
So, if in the cause of reclaiming Jewish equity in the terms Palestine and Palestinian, on the recommendation of two stalwarts of that cause, me and Prime Minister Begin, you think it helpful to garner a bit of layperson-to-layperson-told post-biblical Jewish homeland history (with a couple of lay glimpses at the King David Inscription and maybe King David’s [East] Jerusalem palace to boot), I commend to you Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, www.pavilionpress.com. (Or, new or used on Amazon. Cost-saving hint: In the used book part, the ones that I signed go for less than the ones that I didn’t.)
Regards,
Jerry