#770 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #770, 10/4/15

The Jewish Homeland This Week In the Inq and At The U.N.

There’s a grave misperception about the Jewish homeland of Israel – and this may sound strange coming from a pro-Israel media watch – that’s spread not just by the mainstream Western media echoing Israel’s enemies on the world’s stage, but also by the most pro-Israel of Jews.  As Samuel Katz acknowledged in his masterful book Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, eminent British historian James Parkes pointed it out decades ago.  The Jews make a great mistake, Parkes wrote in Whose Land, in not making the case that the Zionists’ “real title deeds” had been written by the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the [not just biblical, but post-biblical] centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”

The essence of the Jews’ continuous-presence case is that the State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native-state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that; that Jews were not “exiled” by Rome but continued to live in the land, indeed in spite of every foreign-ruler-imposed discouragement, all through those long, dark foreign rule centuries, again becoming Jerusalem’s majority during pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule; and that in the past 3,000 years Jerusalem has been three native states’ capital, all of them homeland states of the Jews.  The post-World War I League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, with its Jewish National Home, recognized the Jewish people’s historical connection to the land, not just the part inside ceasefire lines of a war to be fought a quarter-century later.

In The Inq

The opposing perspective permeated this morning’s “Worldview” column of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (Inq’s) house world affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin (Inq, Sun, 10/4/15, C1, 3, “Worldview: Danger Signs On West Bank”).  Ms. Rubin wrote that “Israeli settlement building on the West Bank” increasingly encroaches on “Palestinian towns and villages,” which may induce Abbas’ Palestinian Authority to “stand down,” which would require Israel “to resume full occupation of the West Bank” and “provoke a major resumption of terrorist attacks in Greater Israel.”

“Greater Israel … occupation of the West Bank … Israeli settlement building on the West Bank [vs.] Palestinian towns and villages” convey an utter absence of Jewish equity in Judea-Samaria, Hebrew-origin place names which even the U.N. used in 1947.

Similar denigration of the Jewish homeland ownership claim appeared in other articles, international news agency news articles, this week in the Inq.

***  Monday’s AP article (Inq, Mon 9/28/15, A6) reported that “Israel captured the site [Temple Mount] from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War.”  Indeed it did, but Jewish connection to the core of the core of Jerusalem doesn’t date from its capture by Israel from Jordan in 1967, but from its capture by David from Canaanites three thousand years earlier, with a lot of Jewish history during those three millennia, and zero Jordanian history [as in “its capture by Israel from Jordan”] prior to 1948.

***  Wednesday’s AP article (Inq, Wed, 9/30/15, A4) expanded the “1967-ness” vintage of the Jewish claim to historic Jerusalem:  “The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war, as their future capital.”

***  Tuesday’s AP squib (Inq, Tue, 9/29/15, A6) called the Temple Mount a core issue of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Here’s former long-term APnik Matti Friedman’s (Tablet, 8/26/14) totally correct take on that:

It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls – 0.2 percent of the Arab world – in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority.  The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,” or “Jewish-Arab” – that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries….  This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.

The “Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party….  This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part [he introduces himself as “a liberal” and critic of many Israeli policies], to be described not as what it is – one more destructive symptom of the conflict – but rather as its cause.

At the U.N.

Ok, here’s where I go off being more Catholic than the Pope.  Indeed, Bibi gave a dramatic and masterful speech, of which all supporters of the Jewish homeland should all be proud, this week to the General Assembly of the U.N.  But . . . .

[1]  I would that he had not referred to Iran as “promising to arm Palestinians in the West Bank.”   Both the terms “Palestinians,” meaning exclusively Palestinian Arabs, and “West Bank” were crafted to delegitimize Jewish connection to the land of Israel, a/k/a, in a non-pejorative sense, “Palestine.”  These loaded terms should not be used by Israel’s Prime Minister at the very forum of the General Assembly of the U.N., which itself  used “the hill country of Samaria and Judea” and called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples” in 1947.

As one of Bibi’s predecessors as Prime Minister lamented in his Foreword to the second edition of 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 borne a good deal of fruit. . . .

Menachem Begin

Prime Minister of Israel

August 1977

[2]  I would that Bibi, rather than saying:  “For a hundred generations, the Jewish people dreamed of returning to the Land of Israel,” had said:  “For a hundred generations of continuous foreign empire rule between the Romans’ destruction of Jewish Judaea and the birth of the Jewish state of Israel as the Land of Israel’s next native state, the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming presence of the Yishuv kept aloft the beacon sustaining the hope of Jews around the world for the homeland’s sovereign rebirth and persecuted diaspora communities’ homeland return.”

As a personal note, I have to say that Elliott Abrams is right in this morning’s Israel Hayom that our country, the U.S., leader of the free world, sent a wrong and dangerous signal in pulling our Secretary of State and United Nations Representative from attending Israel’s Prime Minister’s address this week to the General Assembly of the U.N., and sending, to borrow a phrase, “the j.v. team.”  Those who always walk out when Israel’s representative speaks must have heard that signal loud and clear.

Regards,
Jerry

Community Announcement

PHILLY ZOA AWARDS DINNER

Wednesday evening, October 21

Hilton Hotel

4200 City Avenue, Philadelphia

Info: office@zoaphilly.org

My friends, on Wednesday evening, October 21, just two weeks away, the Philadelphia chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is hosting a dinner at the Hilton Hotel, conveniently located at 4200 City Avenue (plenty of parking) honoring award recipients who have devoted themselves to our people and homeland of Israel.

If you’ve never attended a ZOA awards dinner, either here in Philly or the national dinner in New York, I urge you to join us for a truly inspiring evening.

This year’s Philly dinner honorees include Rabbi Ira Budow and Susan Fuchs, educators of children on Judaism and Israel; Jack Engelhard, author and columnist for Israel National News; Howard and Patti Klein Katzoff, tireless (I know this as a fact) effective advocates and do-ers for Israel; and Shoshana Weiss, recent college graduate who founded a most-active student organization educating college students on Israel.

For details and reservation information, contact office@zoaphilly.org.