#782 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #782, 12/27/15

This Week: 15 Years of This Media Watch While You Stand on One Leg

This week’s BSMW issue completes 15 years of this emailed weekly media watch.  #1 went out to members of the board of governors of the century-old men’s and women’s fraternal order Brith Sholom on January 7, 2001.  Since then, we’ve added some folks, and it’s the encouraging “keep at it” emails from many of you that have fueled that span from #1 to #782.  Thank you.

While you stand on one leg:  I don’t discourage newspaper readers inclined to do so from writing “to the editor” about this story’s or that’s anti-Israel slant, or trying through meetings or otherwise to reason with Western journalists on fairness to Israel.  Certainly, the mainstream media might be persuaded to change.  And Senator Sanders might be persuaded to move to a “Jewish settlement” and join the Likud.

What is open to us is to compete with the Western media and Israel’s foes in the shaping of Western people’s perceptions, on the ground floor of it all, of respective Jewish and Arab Palestine equities.

Grassroots Jews, “the Jewish street,” if you will, should be in the thick of both aspects of this – making clear to Western publics [1] that the loaded Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms that Israel’s enemies and the mainstream Western media use are exclusively their terms, not ours; and [2] that the Jewish people has an irrefutably just homeland claim to the land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.  [Note to BSMW’s deeply-appreciated liberal readers: Asserting your rights does not preclude political compromise, but is, as in all types of negotiations, at the core of the process to achieve it.]

The immediate focus of this media watch, my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer, has not left me devoid this week of anti-Israel imbalances to write about, and perhaps I’ll get to them next week. But this “conclusion of 15 years” week of Brith Sholom Media Watch, I’d like to give You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly two sources of inspiration in Israel that the cause in which we’re engaged – contesting the Jewish homeland’s delegitimization (in our case, by the mainstream Western media) – is being forcefully and ably led in the place in which it most matters.

“Legal Grounds”

 

Visit the website http://IsraelRights.com.  This will inspire you.  Here’s how its home page begins:

URGENT!

There is no time to be lost.

Increasingly, the international community moves toward the delegitimization of Israel.

We see it in anti-Israel rhetoric and in diplomatic stances….

It has a Dry Bones cartoon: “The Jewish people has a natural, historical and legal right to its homeland and to its eternal capital Jerusalem. . . . How did the simple truth come to sound like a radical statement?”

But it doesn’t stop with hand-wringing.  It says: “We have a wealth of information on this site.  Please use it.”

Here are a few of its points under “The Campaign for Israel’s Legal Grounds”:

The fact that Israel has solid legal grounds in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is at the core of our campaign….

The Legal Grounds

The irrefutable evidence for Israel’s legal rights in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is vast and broad-based.

There is historical evidence, including the fact of an unbroken Jewish presence in the land for 3,500 years, well documented via archeology.  Jews are the indigenous people in Israel.

There are decisions and documents grounded in international law, such as the Mandate for Palestine and certain United Nations Security Council Decisions.

… A great deal of writing has been done, as well, to refute the fallacious charges that Israel is an “occupier” in Judea and Samaria, and Jerusalem beyond the Green Line….

Browse this site.  There is a wealth of important detailed information on it.  The people associated with its activities, listed on the site, are outstanding leaders.  It should strengthen your confidence, in contesting the loaded terms like “occupation” and “West Bank and East Jerusalem Jewish settlements” that you’re on sound historical and legal footing and aren’t out there alone.

A little more on that “unbroken Jewish presence in the land for 3,500 years.”  The great emphasis is rightly on biblical history, but British historian James Parkes importantly wrote that it was the continuous tenacious presence of Jews throughout the post-biblical era that wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  I ran across that assertion by Parkes in the foreword to Katz’s important book “Battleground,” and was sufficiently intrigued to research and write a layman-to-laymen’s book on it: “Israel 3000 Years.”  Go seek it under author “Verlin” on Amazon.

Diker’s JPost Article ThisWeek on the EU Labeling Rules

 

Until this week, the commentary I’ve seen decrying the EU’s new labeling rules has focused on singling out Israel’s territorial dispute as the only one in the world warranting labeling.  That may be, but it misses the poisonous point.  This week (JPost, 12/22/15), Dan Diker of the respected Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, drove home that the great imbalance in the EU’s labeling demand resides in the respective terminology the EU calls on Israel and Arabs to use on goods produced beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines [Diker’s correct term, not “Israel’s 1967 borders”].  Diker:

… By forcing a distinction between Palestinian products labeled as emanating from the “West Bank or Palestine” and Israeli products emanating from “Israeli settlements,” the EU is granting a legal and moral status to the Palestinian Authority that it in fact does not have, and by extension annulling any Israeli rights over land claimed by the nation-state of the Jewish people – what Jews and hundreds of millions of Christians have known historically as Judea and Samaria. [emphasis added]

Jordan invented “West Bank” in 1950 for the portion of western Palestine it seized in its invasion in 1948.  Prior to that, everybody, Turks and British included, had called Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria,” their Hebrew-origin names.  United Nations in 1947:  “… the hill country of Samaria and Judea ….”

781 Weeks Later:  Has Anything Changed?

 

Let’s end this final week of BSMW’s 15th year with the first mainstream Western media misstatement cited back at the top of what I audaciously titled “Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #1 [as though the next week there’d be #2] back on 1/7/01:

This past week, the philadelphia inquirer told its readers in a Knight Ridder News Service news story that under President Clinton’s plan, “Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .” (Thurs., 1/4/01, article on page 1 and 16)

To this day, the magnitude of that misstatement, and not just the “nearly four million … and their descendants” [there were more like 400,000 – see Katz in “Battleground”], startles me.  Apart from the mathematical misstatement, which I had a modest hand in helping undoing, the mainstream media poison resides in the framing of what happened in 1948 as the “fleeing and forcing out” of “Palestinians” during “the creation of Israel,” giving these “Palestinians” a claim “in exchange” for which they’d gain concessions from Israel.

Except for the abandonment of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” not much has changed.  That is, on the media side.

But I think, at last, on our side something is.  Here’s a bit more from “Legal Grounds”:

Our goal is to promote a change in the current situation so that the government of Israel speaks in one voice, providing consistent messages to the Israeli public and the international community about those legal grounds –  and then follows by adjusting policies so that they reflect those rights.

Israel has been timid about doing this for too long, and the messages received by the Israeli electorate and the international community remain confused.  A poll indicates that many Israelis don’t even understand what Israel’s legal grounds are.  This entire situation weakens Israel critically.  Israel is forever responding defensively instead of coming forth assertively.

We are currently working within the Knesset, encouraging members of the Knesset to take a stand on the issue of Israel’s legal rights by making appropriate statements and otherwise working with our campaign.  We do hope to follow this work with outreach to the larger Israeli community.

There have been times when diaspora protestors of the mainstream Western media’s loaded lexicon of Israel-denigrating pejoratives have felt, well, more Catholic than the Pope.  This is not to claim a diaspora role in Israel’s critical peace process decisions.  Israel can do what it decides it needs to do re, e.,g., Judea-Samaria, except call it “West Bank.”  But this new indigenous “Legal Grounds” challenge to “timidity” in Israel in asserting Jews’ Jewish homeland rights is grounds for encouragement to those challenging, e.g., media besmirching of the Jewish homeland here in the West.  May it strengthen us in continuing to do so in 2016.

Best 2016 wishes to you-who-put-up-with-me-weekly,
Jerry