#779 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #779, 12/6/15

This Week:  Rude Awakening For Those Who Think American Media Anti-Israel Bias Doesn’t Impact Americans

Many American supporters of Israel have long comfortably felt that Americans don’t regard Jewish homeland rights to the land of Israel as terminating at the old, 9-miles-wide in the critical center, 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire (“green”) line, though the American news media persistently presents that contested Arab contention of “occupation” as uncontested fact.

E.g., Associated Press last week in the Inq:

The Palestinians say the violence is rooted in frustration over nearly a half century of Israeli occupation and lack of hope for obtaining independence (AP in Inq, Thu, 11/26/15, A5, emphasis added)

Washington Post this week in the Inq:

Ben-David [convicted by Israel this week of murdering an Arab youth last year in revenge for Arabs’ murder of three Jewish youths] lived in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and is the son of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi (Washington Post in Inq, Tue, 12/1/15, emphasis added)

Such comfortably thinking supporters of Israel, got, at least should have recognized that they got, a rude awakening this week.  Jerusalem Post, Friday, December 4, 2015:

Poll: Over 1 in 3 Americans Back Punitive Measures Against Israel Over Settlements

Just over a third of Americans support either imposing economic sanctions or ‘taking more serious action’ against Israel for its policies in the West Bank, according to a new poll commissioned by a Washington think tank [Brookings Institution] whose results were announced on Friday.

A source of encouragement, in the face of this, is an Algemeiner article Thursday, 12/3/15, that the Israeli Foreign Ministry is marshaling a case, based on the Levy Commission Report, that Israeli presence beyond the green line is not “occupation.”

Alas, we can cringe at the terminology in the article’s title:

Israel Draws Up Document Justifying Legality of Settlements, Property Claims to West Bank  (emphasis added; this is us, not them, saying this)

Compare the Jewish Press’ Lori Lowenthal Marcus, 12/4/15:

… think about it: how many times have the members of this and other administrations claimed Israel’s alleged “occupation” or the so-called “settlements” or non-existent Israeli apartheid for “causing” Palestinian Arab terrorism?  (emphasis added)

Effectively fighting the American media anti-Israel media bias that’s responsible, in part, for one-third of Americans believing that economic sanctions or more serious action should be taken against Israel “for its policies in the West Bank” begins, not with pleading with the media to stop saying “occupation … West Bank … Jewish settlements,” but with we ourselves stopping saying “occupation … West Bank … Jewish settlements.”

And this, of all seasons, is Hannukah.  American Jews have as many explanations of Hannukah as ways of spelling it in English, but let me give you one media watcher’s explanation that bears directly on countering American media mischaracterization of Jewish presence in the land of the Israel beyond the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire line through using the terms “occupation … West Bank … Jewish settlements.”

Jews who, benignly or otherwise, call the homeland Jewish insurrection led by Judah and his Maccabee brothers against the ruling Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great a Jewish “civil war” miss the point.  Certainly, there were Jews who supported the Seleucids.  There were American contemporaries of George Washington who supported the British.  But the Maccabees’ war began with the land of Israel as part of the Seleucid empire and ended with Judaea as the independent homeland state of the Jews.  It was a war for a homeland people’s independence, just as was modern Israel’s War of Independence, not of “Creation & Founding,” in 1948-49, in which multiple Arab states’ invasion of the land of Israel was halted and thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews.

Countering the impact on Americans of the mainstream American media misrepresentation of Jewish presence beyond the old 1949 ceasefire lines in terms of “occupation … West Bank … Jewish settlements” is not about endlessly writing letters “to the editor” about “inaccuracies” in news article after news article, as though they were all disconnected, but about us making the case to American Christians of the Jewish people’s continuous presence in the land of Israel, from earliest biblical times to the present, of which the Hannukah story recounts one of three homefront-war-won periods of homeland independence.  The only answer to being called “Occupier!” is that you belong there, that you’re not an outsider.

British historian and Christian theologian Dr. James Parkes, quoted with approval on this very point by Katz in “Battleground,” put it correctly.  The “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  He wrote this, in “Whose Land?” (p. 266), in the context of bitterly criticizing the Jews for not making that case, leaving themselves open to the very criticisms that are framed today in terms of “occupation … West Bank … Jewish settlements.”

So taken was I with the power of Parkes’ argument that I undertook writing a book tracing the actual history documenting it – “Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine” (Amazon, PavilionPress.com).  Certainly, I would have you read it, and give it to all your descendants as (what better?)  Hannukah presents, but, failing that, grant me a page of presenting you, while you stand on one leg, three millennia of what Parkes very rightly called the homeland Jewish people’s “heroic endurance” that I recount in my book. I put in the preface:  “I hope to have done it some justice.”  (All right, it’s a layman-written book, but it’s at least backed by 600+ authority-citing footnotes.)

Whether the Israelites invaded Canaan circa 1200 BCE pretty much as described in Judges and Joshua, or whether they arose from within the Canaanite population, divides archeologists, and, if the latter, then the Jews’ Palestinian blood is that much the bluer.  In either case, it’s a millennium-plus bluer than Arafat’s.

Decades of fruitless digging for tenth century BCE remains in Jerusalem let scoffers claim “King David was as real as King Arthur,” but then came an explosion of findings, begun with that of an almost contemporary enemy king’s “House of David”-citing inscription, documenting that David was real, and more than the “hill country village chieftain” some would portray him.

Enemy as well as Israelite evidence documents the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.  A seal of Hezekiah, Judahite king in Jerusalem, himself has just been deciphered.  The Maccabees’ war against the Seleucids (the Seleucids’ fortress in Jerusalem, the acra, has just been discovered) restored independence.  The Judaeans’ Great and Bar-Kochba Revolts against Rome were major Roman empire wars, not inconsequential provincial disturbances.

Contrary to widespread belief, the Romans did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews.  Remains of first through sixth century towns and synagogues, the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud, the Patriarch and other evidence documents Jews’ substantial organized continuing presence.

Homeland Jews sided militarily with the 614 Persian invaders against the Romans’ Byzantine heirs, and then they aided the invading Muslim Arab invaders.  Organized Jewish presence continued through the Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid foreign dynasties.  The European Crusaders of 1099 documented that “Turks, Arabs and Jews” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  Standing alone, the Jews of Haifa “courageously” (Crusaders’ term) held off the Crusaders there for a month.

After defeating Mongol invaders in the Crusaders’ wake, non-Arab Mamluks ruled the whole region for more than two centuries.  There’s ample evidence of Jewish presence, in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the land, through Mamluk rule.

The rule of the non-Arab Mamluks was succeeded, for four hundred years, by that of the non-Arab Ottoman Turks.  The Jews, subjected to periodic persecution and place-to-place expulsion, lived in their four holy cities – Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land, during Ottoman rule, again becoming Jerusalem’s largest population segment in pre-Zionist nineteenth century times.  And nobody called them “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem “settlers.”

Today’s modern state of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  But more than that, the Zionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not doing something different and new, but continuing a return home that had never ceased.  I end the saga, so far as it is told in my book, with Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, re-proclaiming homeland Jewish independence in Israel.  But I end with the point that, as with the Zionists and diaspora returnees before them,

… so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.

These are the homeland people whom the mainstream American media calls “occupiers, settlers” in “East” Jerusalem, and in “the West Bank” that was called Judea and Samaria, including by the United Nations in 1947, for three thousand years.  This year, as you light the Hannukah candles, ask yourself are we doing justice to our own people’s homeland heritage, not least that from those who wrested backed homeland independence from the successors of Alexander the Great, by acquiescing in the American media calling Jews today in historic Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria “occupiers” and “settlers” in “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank.”

Hag sameach!
Jerry