#783, 1/3/16 (Loaded Lexicon of Jewish Homeland Delegitimizing Terms All of Us Have To Contest)

This Past Year in the Inq: Loaded Lexicon of Jewish Homeland Delegitimizing Terms All of Us Have To Contest

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: What maddened me when a Washington Post columnist dismissed “Judea and Samaria” as “the Israeli nationalist” term for “the West Bank” was not just that “Judea and Samaria” is what Judea and Samaria have in fact been called throughout history, including by the U.N. in 1947, but that the mainstream Western media (MSM) views terms deliberately designed to delegitimize the Jewish homeland of Israel as objective and balanced, dismissing historically accurate terms as the lingo of the pro-Israel “right-wing.”

Israel’s supporters of all political stripes have a common stake in contesting the loaded lexicon of Israel-delegitimizing pejoratives that most of the world, the MSM and even pro-Israel Jews, in our case unthinkingly, commonly use. So come take a look at the breath-taking scope of anti-Israel pejoratives that laced MSM Israel reporting, in the pages of one big city American paper, the Philly Inquirer (Inq), in 2015. (emphasis added throughout)

“Israel’s 1967 Borders”: The year 2015 was ushered in by a December 31, 2014, Washington Post (Inq, A10) article on a year-end U.N. Security Council resolution that failed by one vote. It called, inter alia, for borders between Israel and a new western Palestine Arab state to be “borders based on the 4 June 1967 lines.” The Washington Post twice misstated this as calls “for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders” and “borders that existed before the 1967 war.”

An important 1/10/15 Jerusalem Post editorial, “Words Matter,” referred to the “Green Line” [“the 4 June 1967 lines”] as a “non-geographical term that everyone uses, but few understand.” It is “not an international border but a line drawn on a map in 1949” as expressly a military ceasefire line without prejudice to borders claims, a line that “ceased to exist” in 1967, “when the 19-year-old armistice was shattered by the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria attacking Israel.”

But briefly in January 2015, the New York Times doubled down on “Israel’s 1967 borders” so that it read in the Times as Israel’s “1967 borders with Palestine.” But they weren’t “borders” but ceasefire lines with Jordan; there was no state of “Palestine.” After a couple days, the NYT retreated, blogger Elder of Ziyon noted, to the still-incorrect “Israel’s pre-1967 borders.”

“East” Jerusalem: “Another ideology-driven, but geographically impossible term” decried in that 1/10/15 Jerusalem Post “Words Matter” editorial is “East” Jerusalem. The Post cited, as an example, Israel’s “capital’s southernmost neighborhood,” Gilo, purchased by Dov Joseph for the Jewish National Fund before 1948. “Gilo was once indeed occupied territory: it was Jordanian-occupied Israeli territory from 1948 to 1967, after which its Israeli sovereignty was restored.”

Yet, the MSM, again in 2015, hammered away at the historic “eastern” part of Israel’s capital city being a separate “East” Jerusalem, and Jews, of all peoples on earth [Jerusalem having been the capital of 3 native states in the past 3,000 years, all Jewish, and having had a renewed Jewish majority since nineteenth century Turkish rule], being “East” Jerusalem “settlers.” E.g.:

*** Los Angeles Times, 4/21/15 (Inq, A2): “… the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem ….”

*** AP, 5/8/15 (Inq, A6): “Israel is pushing ahead with a Jerusalem construction project” in Ramat Shlomo, per “the settlement watchdog Peace Now.” Inq headlined: “Israel: Settler Homes OKd.”

*** AP, 11/18/15 (Inq, A6): “… a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem”

*** Inq photo caption, 12/7/15 (A13): “An Israeli flag hangs on a building, in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem, that was taken over by settlers after Palestinian families were evicted.” [The eviction followed 7-years ownership litigation in which the Palestinian Arabs participated, all of whom had been offered litigation settlement compensation, some of whom had accepted it, leaving “willingly” (Haaretz term)]

“West Bank”: That 1/10/15 Jerusalem Post editorial minced no words about what is “absurd” about the term “West Bank.” It wrote that Jordan adopted “West Bank” in the 1950’s “in an attempt to legitimize its illegal occupation of the region as the result of its aggression in 1948,” that before then, “the British Mandatory authorities commonly referred to the area as Judea and Samaria” [as had maps through the centuries, and the U.N. in 1947]. The Post editorial asked “what happened to Judea and Samaria … the Roman occupiers’ Latinized translation of the biblical Hebrew names Yehuda and Shomron … ignored by the world’s media?”

*** Washington Post, 3/2/15 (Inq, A1,6): [After quoting a statement by Netanyahu’s Likud party referencing “Judea and Samaria,” the Washington Post explained to readers:] “Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for today’s West Bank.”

*** Inq house columnist Trudy Rubin, 10/4/15 (Inq, C1, 3): “Israeli settlement building on the West Bank” increasingly encroaches on “Palestinian towns and villages.”

*** AP, 11/9/15 (Inq, A16), referencing “a West Bank settlement” and “a Palestinian village”

*** Washington Post, 12/1/15 (Inq, A10): “. . . a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank”

“Settlers, Settlements, Occupation”: After lamenting that “Palestinians” used to refer “to the Jewish population of British Mandatory Palestine,” that remarkable January 10, 2015, Jerusalem Post “Words Matter” editorial noted that “settlers,” the “pioneers who established pre-State agricultural settlements,” used to be ‘national heroes,” but that “today the term settler is used pejoratively to refer to a member of a Jewish community in the so-called West Bank ….”

“Settlers … settlements … occupied … occupation” in “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem continued to pepper MSM Israel reporting in 2015, and few and far between were articles like the Jewish Press’s Lori Lowenthal Marcus’s of 12/4/15, referencing “Israel’s alleged ‘occupation’ or the so-called ‘settlements.’”

But I would end this start-of-2016 review of the mainstream Western media’s 2015 rendition of its loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives with a reprise of the two items with which I ended last week’s final BSMW of 2015, one exemplifying the devastating impact of our passive acquiescence in this incessant heaping of delegitimizing abuse upon the Jewish homeland of Israel, and the other encouraging each of us to join in contesting it.

[1] Until last 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. Last 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.

[2] “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,” spearheaded by the indomitable Arlene Kushner, and Jeff Daube of the ZOA’s Jerusalem office:

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

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….

[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: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.” Go seek it under author “Verlin” on Amazon.]

Regards, and Best Wishes for 2016,
Jerry