#804 5/29/16 This Week Back in The Inq: “Polarizing” Appointment as “Clouding” Peace Prospects

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Turns out I was a tad optimistic last week in supposing the Inq had let Israel’s appointment of the “polarizing” Avigdor Lieberman as an Israeli cabinet minister go by with just one news-in-brief article.  But as one group’s article rightly debunking his “ultra-nationalism” alas reveals, the language we ourselves use contributes to our own delegitimization.

This Week Back In The Inq:  Israel’s “Polarizing” Appointment as “Clouding” Peace Prospects

Last week I led off with an executive summary optimistically stating that my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer’s  (Inq’s)  covering Israel’s appointment of “polarizing” Avigdor Lieberman to its cabinet in just a news-in-brief squib that didn’t call his mere cabinet presence bad news for peace prospects evidenced  continued remission of that paper’s unwholesome obsession with Israel.  BSMW #803:

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The Philly Inquirer (Inq) ran a brief AP piece this week on “polarizing” Avigdor Lieberman joining Israel’s cabinet, but, unlike in years past, his mere cabinet presence wasn’t purveyed as dooming peace prospects between Jews and Arabs.

Well, so much for that.  This week in the Inq, that paper ran two full AP articles on Lieberman’s appointment as Israel’s defense minister,

– AP in Inq, Monday, 5/23/16, A4, Inq headlined: “Israel’s Defense Minister Officially Leaves Office; the move paves the way for Avigdor Lieberman, whose party was invited into the ruling coalition”; and

– AP in Inq, Thursday, 5/26/16, A15, Inq headlined: “Avigdor Lieberman is named defense minister; Israeli Premier Taps a Hard-liner”

both, of course, calling him “polarizing,” and the latter opinionating in lede paragraph one that his appointment has the effect of “clouding already slim hopes for a resumption of peace efforts.”  Monday’s called his predecessor’s departure as leaving the cabinet “dominated by religious and ultranationalist ministers,” and Thursday’s called Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party “ultranationalist.”

The twin problems with all this are 1) an American city newspaper’s obsession with running articles on three days in the past week on Israel’s appointment of a cabinet minister, and 2) these articles’ misportrayal of Lieberman and indeed Israel’s administration as “ultranationalist.”

Greg Roman, Director of Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, himself a former official in Yisrael Beitenu and advisor in Israel’s Ministry of Defense, on Wednesday put it this way:

“Lieberman’s core beliefs are squarely rooted in principles that most Israelis accept and that make good sense.

“He has expressed support for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a final settlement, but he also maintains, as he put it at the Saban Forum in 2006, that the negotiating process is based on three fundamentally erroneous assumptions: “that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main factor instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict.

“Although willing to trade land (including the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, where he lives) under certain conditions, Lieberman resents the Obama administration’s relentless pressure of upfront Israeli concessions, noting that two decades and more of concessions to the Palestinians “brought neither results nor solutions.”  He is correct that finding things for Israel to give up, even as the cycle of Palestinian incitement and violence continues, is not the answer.”

Is this “ultranationalist”?  Does it “cloud” peace prospects?  If Lieberman’s core beliefs are in fact, as this article says, squarely rooted in principles that most Israelis accept, is he “polarizing,” as the mainstream Western media incessantly calls him – e.g., AP in Inq, Saturday, 5/21/16, Monday, 5/23/16, Thursday, 5/26/16, Inq Staff Writer a decade ago, 10/29/06?

Our Own Misuse of Language

But there’s something else at work here, beneath the AP and Inq et ilk’s obsession with blaming “polarizing, ultranationalist” Israeli officials for obstructing peace efforts.

We contribute to the world blaming Israel by ourselves using language that was crafted by those who would delegitimize us for the very purpose of delegitimizing us.

*** “The 1967 borders”:  One misused expression that jumps out from the above quotation from the Middle East Forum is “the 1967 borders.”  It’s not just that their defining document, the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, expressly called them military ceasefire lines without prejudice to claims of political borders, and that their elevation to “1967 borders” imbues them with an international law gravitas and permanence superseding that of mere military ceasefire lines.  It’s also that post-1967 War UNSC Resolution 242 intentionally did not demand Israeli withdrawal back to those perilous 9-miles-wide-in-the-middle 1949 ceasefire lines.

*** “West Bank Settlement”:  As Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger has pointed out, “West Bank” was coined in 1950 by Jordan for the same reason the Romans coined “Palestine” in 135 – to disassociate the Jewish homeland from Jews.  The Hebrew-origin names Judea & Samaria remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries through the mid-twentieth century.  The United Nations itself referenced “the hill country of Samaria and Judea” in its Palestine partition resolution in 1947.  And if it is self-disrespecting and counter-productive for Jews ourselves to use “West Bank,” it’s doubly so for us to call Jewish communities there “settlements.”

*** “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”:  The 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars were not between Israel and “Palestinians,” but between Israel and neighboring Arab states, with whom Palestinian Arabs joined.  As former AP reporter Matti Friedman has pointed out, the conflict should fairly be called “Arab-Israeli,” not “Israeli-Palestinian.”

*** “a Palestinian state”:  This above-quoted article, along with almost all others, references “a Palestinian state” as though there were no such entity already.  It is not as if there were no Arab state in which Arabs who consider themselves “Palestinian” are the majority.  And that state originally formed the bigger part of the Palestine Mandate.  We should refer to the Fatah-Hamas state contemplated by the peace process as “a western Palestine Arab state.”

*** “The Palestinians”:  The above-quoted article, like almost all others, concedes the mantle “the Palestinians” to western Palestine’s Arabs.  As we’re pointed out, citing Bar-Illan of the Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Begin, even the Associated Press, it was not always so.  The UN itself in its 1947 partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”  In fact, during the Mandate, “Palestinian” was used mostly in reference to Jews – the Palestine [now Jerusalem] Post, Palestine Electric Company, Palestine Symphony, etc.

These days, in which it’s not paranoid for us to feel the world is aligned against us, the importance of we ourselves ceasing to use terms and perspectives designed to delegitimize us has become more critical than ever.  And yet, in the face of all this, we go on blithely using these terms while those not kindly disposed toward us would not be caught dead using historically accurate terms like Judea-Samaria and 1949 military ceasefire lines.  The shame lies with us as much as with them.