#777 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #777, 11/22/15

Mr. Harold Jackson

Editorial Page Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer

hjackson@phillynews.com

Dear Mr. Jackson,

This is an open letter to you from a local pro-Israel media watch, prompted by your reference in the op-ed you wrote in Friday’s Inquirer to the Jewish refugees aboard the steamship St. Louis.  Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, they reached America’s shore, but were denied entry to the U.S. and returned to Europe, where many died in the Holocaust.  You rightly stated that they should have been granted asylum in the U.S., which of course I appreciate, but you went on to call objections today, including by U.S. governors and presidential aspirants, to an influx of maybe tens of thousands of Middle Eastern Muslims to the U.S. “equally odious” and “mirroring the politicians of long ago.”

The events then and now are not comparable, and you miss the real lesson of the St. Louis, which, I believe, merits full understanding by the editorial page editor of an American newspaper with a fixation on Israel.

Beyond the non-comparability of entry into the U.S. of one steamship’s European passengers versus that of maybe tens of thousands of people from a vastly different culture, one indeed openly hostile to the West, a basic humanitarian difference exists.  The Zionist leader Dr. Weitzmann correctly observed during that dark era for us that “the world is divided between places where Jews are not permitted to live and not permitted to enter.”  Today’s displaced Arabs have a vast religiously and culturally compatible area that could and should, from every standpoint, and with Western aid, be their natural recourse, the region you Western journalists with only some exaggeration call “the Arab Mideast.”

The lesson of the St. Louis is not so much about America as it is about Jews.  The people on the St. Louis – what were they, perhaps one-one hundredth of one percent [work it out] of the Jews in Europe who would have been on that ship if they could?  There is another ship of Jews (one of many) that merits your reflection as well.  Before, during and after WWII and the Holocaust, the British did their level best to prevent Jews from leaving Europe for Palestine.  The British returned the Jews of the Exodus 1947 from Israel to Germany [sic].  And the Holocaust was not unique.  Every device of ethnic cleansing invented in Europe – pale of settlement, ghetto, Holocaust,  Inquisition, pogrom – was invented in Europe for Jews.  There is no substitute for a minority people with a widespread diaspora having a homeland.

That the Jewish people needs a homeland is, of course, our problem, Mr. Jackson, not yours.  Where you enter the picture is that we Jews do have a very strong historical and legal claim to the land of Israel, which your paper’s editorial page repeatedly deprecates through a loaded lexicon of anti-Israel pejoratives.

***  “Arab East Jerusalem” is a phrase repeatedly used (12/16/12 and 3/18/10 that I caught) by Ms. Rubin, your paper’s house world affairs columnist, in her editorial page “Worldview” column.  This question-begging expression that the historic heart of Jerusalem is incontrovertibly Arab is supported neither by history nor demographics.

In the past 3,000 years, the city of Jerusalem (not twin cities of “Jerusalem” and “East Jerusalem”) has been the capital of three homeland states – Judah, Judaea and Israel – of which today’s state of Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  Every ruler in between was a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab (Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk, Turk) at that.  Foreign Arab Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid empires ruled Jerusalem part of the time between the European Byzantines and European Crusaders, and 1948 invading Transjordan held part of the city for 19 years, which is where the hardly from-time-immemorial “East” Jerusalem comes from.  Palestinian Arabs have not ruled Jerusalem for one day in history, nor did they defend it, as the Jews did, against Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans and, along with Turks and diverse Arabs, Crusaders.

Homeland-claiming Jews, who relentlessly returned to what is today Ms. Rubin’s “Arab East” Jerusalem every time the foreign ruler evicted them, again became Jerusalem’s plurality and then majority population during pre-Zionist 19th century Ottoman Turkish rule.  In “Rebirth of a City” (p. 44) Sir Martin Gilbert quotes an 1847 visiting English doctor that “the Moslems do not constitute more than one-third of the entire population.”  British Consul James Finn wrote in 1858: “The Mohammedans of Jerusalem are less fanatical than in many other places, owing to the circumstances of their numbers scarcely exceeding one-quarter of the whole population.”

It is certainly open to your paper’s house editorial page columnist to champion the Arab claim to the historic Jerusalem, but by making historical and demographic arguments, not by calling it “Arab East Jerusalem,” as though there were no more on either side to be said.

***  On 11/11/10, Ms. Rubin wrote of “Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in suburbs of Jerusalem” (emphasis added).  That she differentiated “settlements” in “suburbs of Jerusalem” from those in the “West Bank” associates that pejorative term “settlements” with “Jerusalem.”

“Settlements” is a dirty word.  The one time in all my time of following the Inquirer’s Israel coverage that I saw the Inq refer to “Palestinian settlements,” it instantly withdrew it in a “clearing the record.”  (3/16/02)

Jews as diverse in political view as Netanyahu and the U.S. Reform movement’s Rabbi Yoffie strongly agree that Jews, of all peoples on earth, are not “settlers” in the heart of Jerusalem.

The Inquirer does its readers a disservice in calling Jews in Jerusalem “settlers” in its news columns – e.g., AP This Week In The Inq, Wed.,  11/18/15 (A6), “… a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem” – and on its editorial page.

***  Another misleading expression of your editorial page’s Worldview column is “Israel’s 1967 borders.”  E.g., 2/17/13 (3 times), 4/7/11, 11/11/10.

There is a world of perceptual and international law difference between pro tem military ceasefire lines and international political borders.  The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, which drew the “green line,” expressly declared (at Arab insistence) that that line was a military ceasefire line exclusively, without prejudice to claims of political borders.  Post-Six Day War U.N. Resolution 242 did not call for Israel’s withdrawal to those lines, 9-miles-wide in the heavily-populated low country middle, which Eban had realistically called “Auschwitz lines.”  The 1949 military ceasefire lines were no Holier than and were superseded by the post-1967 war ceasefire lines, and were not “a secure and recognized boundary.”  It is true that President Obama abandoned 242 in calling in 2011 for borders based on the green line “with mutually agreed swaps,” but still he referenced those 1949-drawn lines as “lines” and not “borders.”

***  “Occupy” and “Occupation,” e.g., Worldview column of 2/13/14, are more question-begging terms, dismissing Jewish equity in “the West Bank,” and when applied to it, historic Jerusalem.   Israel contests this, including to the media, as Minister Bennett objected to CNN journalist Amanpour.  The mainstream Western media has called “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical” name for “the West Bank,” but this is misleading.  The Hebrew-origin names Judea and Samaria remained in use all through history, including, in the 20th century, by the Turks and British, until “West Bank” was conjured in 1950 by the invading state Jordan (Ettinger, Israel Hayom, 12/16/11).  E.g., a 1700’s map uses them.  In its 1947 Arab-rejected Palestine partition resolution, the United Nations itself referred, not to “the West Bank,” but to “the hill country of Samaria and Judea.”  The Levy Report marshals the strong legal arguments that Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria is not “occupation,” and, as Bennett puts the Israeli case, you’re not an “occupier” in your own country.  In using the terms “occupy” and “occupied” in reference to “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, the Inquirer’s editorial page is begging, in favor of the Arab side, territorial claims completely contested by Israel.

***  Another misleading term, among others, that has graced the Inq’s editorial page is “the Palestinian refugee issue” (Worldview, 4/7/11), which suppresses that the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and its aftermath saw a greater number of mostly Israel-absorbed Middle Eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab lands and Iran than Arabs left tiny Israel.  And another – conjuring in Inq readers’ minds images of forlorn evictees huddled on windswept hills around makeshift fires and tattered tents – is reference to today’s descendants of 1948 Arab refugees as still residing today in “refugee camps” (Worldview, 11/28/10), though Ms. Rubin herself inadvertently gave readers a more balanced glimpse that day on that one, in telling them about a Palestinian Arab living “in his family’s comfortable row house in the Al-Arroub refugee camp near Hebron” [still in the Palestine many of their 1948 “refugee” ancestors never left].

If you’ve read this far, I thank you for hearing me out, Mr. Jackson.  On at least a few occasions, when I’ve commented on Ms. Rubin’s columns in this media watch, I emailed her, offering to run the following week any response she’d care to make to our readers.  I of course extend this offer this week to you.  (Btw, you’ve gamely been on our list since a phone conversation we had – I no longer recall about what – quite some time ago, and if from time to time you’ve found time to give our weekly email a glance, I further thank you for that.)

Although, along with others, I met twice years ago with Inquirer editors, and twice participated in sidewalk protests, once as one of the speakers, the “mission” of this media watch is not so much to get the Inq et ilk to change the lexicon of their Israel coverage, which I’ve come to regard as a forlorn hope, as to awaken our own community to its imbalance and to make the case to Western publics that it is imbalanced.  Still, given the opportunity to put to a mainstream Western media editor that Israel coverage language under his command and control is imbalanced against the Jewish homeland of Israel, I’d take it, so perhaps your reference Friday to the Jewish refugees of the St. Louis has resulted in that.

Regards,
Jerry