#773 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #773, 10/25/15

This Month In The Inq:  The Arab Narrative as the Platform on Which Daily Reporting on The Knife Attacks Is Told

The daily Israel news stories these days are, of course, mostly about knifing attacks, but some of the first, and sometimes only, impression-setting headlining has both made Arab violence seem spontaneous happenings and cast Israeli Jews as seemingly randomly killing Arabs.

***  Last Sunday, 10/18/15, for example, our hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) headlined on its front page:  “3 Palestinians Slain After Knife Attacks.”   Nothing in that headline connected those three Palestinian Arabs who’d been slain “after” those knife attacks with those attacks.  Why, they might have been three innocent peaceable people set upon by Israeli Jews in revenge.  How’s that for an American people exuding “moral equivalence”?  But see the Inq’s so-headlined Washington Post article’s lede:  “… three Palestinian attackers wielding knives were shot dead by Israelis.”

Our hometown Inq wasn’t alone.  Other news sources’ headlines have made terrorist attackers into victims and redirected Palestinian Arabs’ actions against Jews to those of inanimate objects.

***  The (since corrected) October 10 Los Angeles Times headlined: “6 Palestinian Teens Die Amid Mideast Unrest.”  The correction came because readers pointed out:  “Each of those killed was a terrorist in the midst of an attack.”

***  The BBC headlined: “Palestinian Shot Dead After Jerusalem Attack Kills Two.”  He was the attacker.

***  The 9/14/15 New York Times headlined: “Jewish Man Dies as Rocks Pelt His Car in East Jerusalem.”  Actually, he was murdered by the hurlers of those rocks, but what’s next – “Knife Stabs Jerusalem Jew”?

***  And This is CNN:  “Joseph’s Tomb Catches Fire in Spate of Palestinian-Israeli Violence” (since mildly correct to “Set Ablaze,” without saying by whom.)

But what I think we should focus on this week is the undercurrent of Arab narrative, offered as explaining, if not justifying, Palestinian Arabs’ knifing campaign, that’s embedded in this daily Israel reporting.

This Arab Palestine narrative runs at two levels.  The top level, advanced in and by the media, is that Jews have zero rights beyond “the green line,” and that the rest of Palestine west of the Jordan – Judea, Samaria and “East” Jerusalem – is incontrovertibly Palestinian Arab land.  Below I cite examples of the media towing this line this month, including this week, in the Inq.

But there’s a deeper level – cited last Sunday in a Daniel Gordis article in the New York Daily News.  He cites a young female Muslim Arab language instructor, a Jerusalem resident, at a Jerusalem college, who’s very popular with her Jewish students.  They asked her about the current situation and how it might be resolved.  Gordis:

“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly.  So they waited.  But that was all she had to say.  “It’s our land.  You’re just here for now.”

. . . .  Even she [emphasis original], who lives a life filled with opportunities that she would never have in an Arab country, still thinks that at the end of the day the Jews are nothing but colonialists.  And colonialists, she believes, don’t last here. . . .

What’s so maddeningly frustrating here is not that this young Arab woman thinks this.  As Gordis says in the article, “We all know that there are many Palestinians who believe that.”  What’s so frustrating is we Jews do such a half-hearted job of convincing, not her, but the world that we Jews are not land of Israel colonialists.  In a nutshell, since you signed onto what’s a media watch, historian James Parkes put his finger on a mostly-overlooked key fact – that the continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland-claiming presence of the Yishuv [the homeland Jewish community, for you deeply appreciated Christian BSMW readers] wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  I was so taken with this assertion by Parkes in Whose Land?, endorsed, btw, by Katz in Battleground, that I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years (search “Verlin” on Amazon) tracing our 3000 year homeland physical presence.  But that is the answer to the canard that Jews are land of Israel “colonialists.”

Meanwhile, back at the media watch, here’s what’s been in news stories in the Inq so far this stabbings month on Jewish rights to the land of Israel beyond the 1949 Israel-Jordan expressly military-only ceasefire line (relegated to history’s dustbin by renewed fighting between Jordan and Israel in 1967).

***  AP in Inq, Thu, 10/1/15, A10:  “Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas said Israel had repeatedly violated its commitments, most notably by expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, on lands the Palestinians seek for a future state.

Although we Jews do gratuitously join in calling Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians” and, many of us, Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” Jews as diverse in political view as Netanyahu and the U.S. Reform movement’s former head, Rabbi Yoffie, vigorously reject calling Jews in over-the-1949-ceasefire-line in Jerusalem “East Jerusalem Jewish settlers,” and the Western media, in calling them that, is touting the Arab narrative.  (We are, I guess, presently estopped by our own language, from protesting the media labeling Jews in Judea-Samaria “West Bank Jewish settlers.”)   And whether Israel “violated its commitments” by building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is – you wouldn’t know this from the media – contested.

***  AP in Inq, Sat, 10/3/15, A2:  “Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas said Israel had repeatedly violated its commitments, most notably by expanding settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, on lands the Palestinians seek for a future state ….”

***  AP in Inq, Thu, 10/15/15, A3:  “Palestinian leaders say the violence is the result of frustration and lack of hope for ending nearly 50 years of occupation and gaining independence.”

The languishing Levy Report presents a clear legal case that Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria is not “occupation,” and as minister Bennett puts it, “you can’t be an ‘occupier’ in your own homeland.”  The media should make clear that the term “occupation” is contested by Israel.  But beyond that, Fatah and the PLO are unabashed in sporting on their logos images showing all of Palestine as Arab, and Israel, citing San Remo and the Palestine Mandate, could do as well, with more authority, showing it Jewish, thus bolstering its case that in calling Israel a Judea-Samaria and “East” Jerusalem “occupier,” the Western media is purveying the contested Arab position.

***  AP in Inq, Sat, 10/17/15, A3:  “Taye-Brook Zerihoun, a senior U.N. official, told the Security Council that Israel’s long rule over the Palestinians and diminishing prospects for achieving a Palestinian state have transformed ‘long-simmering Palestinian anger into outright rage.

What’s a statement of historical fact is that there is “a Palestinian state” carved out of the original Palestine Mandate – the state that’s today’s Jordan, a majority of the population of which considers itself “Palestinian.”  What the media – e.g., Trudy Rubin “Worldview” column in Inq, Sun, 10/4/15, C1, 3, calls “Greater Israel,” meaning the entirely of the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan, is in a real sense “Lesser Israel,” the Palestine Mandate for the Jewish National Home after the Transjordan lopoff.  The answer, should the Jews choose to make it, to “long-simmering Palestinian anger,” waxing now “into outright rage,” as the U.N. official put it, at “not having a state,” is that “the Palestinians” west of the Jordan are seeking a second state, a second partition, that they already have a state, 77% of the original Palestine Mandate, right next door to the state they are seeking.  That fact may not be strategically comfortable for Israel, but neither is having a Jewish state that’s 9 miles wide in the most populated, most vulnerable center.

***  Washington Post in Inq, Sun, 10,18/15, A1, 15:  “… newly built checkpoints deployed to cordon Arab East Jerusalem from Jewish West Jerusalem ….”

“Arab East Jerusalem” existed during the 19 years of the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire (“green”) line, when the militaries of the two countries each controlled part of the city.  Media perpetuation of this upper-cased nomenclature, almost half-a-century after that 19-year military division physically ended, makes into an “Arab East Jerusalem” the heart of a city that’s had a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule.

***  Los Angeles Times in Inq, Mon, 10/19/15, A1, 2:  “… the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….”

Former AP journalist Matti Friedman has made a persuasive case for referring to the Arab-Jewish conflict as such, not as “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Bar-Illan used to state in his ground-breaking Jerusalem Post “Eye On The Media” column that calling Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians” transforms Israel from the vastly geographic and demographic smaller underdog into the big oppressor of a minority.  Jews, and then the media, should call the Arab-Israeli conflict the “Arab-Israeli conflict” that it is.

***  Washington Post in Inq, Wed, 10/21/15, A6:  “[U.N. Secretary General] Ban acknowledged Palestinian grievances, which include expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank ….”

***  Same:  “The latest spike in violence was triggered by simmering disputes over Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, on a site revered by both Muslim and Jewish worshipers.”

The dispute is not over the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but over non-Muslim presence on the Temple Mount, site as well of the two Jewish Temples.  Calling the non-Muslim claim as centered on the Al-Aqsa Mosque disparages its legitimacy and, given Muslim sensitivities, is hugely incendiary.

***  AP in Inq, Thu, 10/22/15, A4:  “… Israel’s 48-year occupation of lands claimed by the fs
Bottom line:  It’s not realistic to expect that the mainstream Western media will veer from its long imbalanced Israel reporting perspective.  It would be wholesome for a city the size of Philadelphia to have a second daily national and international news newspaper, with a different reporting perspective.  Short of that, a conscious effort by the American Jewish community to cease using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms would build a basis of credibility from which to associate in the public’s mind the media’s perspective with the Arab narrative of Palestine history.

Regards,
Jerry