#807 – 6/19/16 This Week in the Jewish Exponent: Trudy and Us

 

This Week in the Jewish Exponent:  Trudy and Us

The Philadelphia Jewish community’s newspaper, The Jewish Exponent, very kindly did a full article, “Website Aims to Expose Distortions in Reporting About Israel,”  this week on the new website, factsonisrael.com, that Lee Bender, co-author with me of Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, and I, and Steve Crane, of our publisher, Pavilion Press, have created to encourage Israel’s supporters to use terms that are historically-grounded and not loaded against the Jewish homeland of Israel.

It’s not an easy thing for a journalist to interview three enthusiasts of a cause, all talking at once, and come up with a coherent description of their ambitions, but Mr. Marks of the Exponent accomplished that, quoting us: “The terminology used in reporting about Israel and general discussions about Israel is loaded with pejoratives that are imbalanced and delegitimizing to the Jewish homeland,” and that “what we’re trying to do in our own camp is get people who are pro-Israel and want to advance the case of the Jewish people’s homeland to use terminology that’s historically accurate and not poisoned against us.”

In the practice of balanced reporting, Mr. Marks sought Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) editor Marimow’s views on the Israel-coverage balance of his paper, and that of its house world affairs columnist Ms. Rubin.  Editor Marimow, as quoted in this Exponent article:

     “In covering Israel and Palestine, we strive to be accurate and fair on issues that are of the great importance to our readers and supporters of the two sides, and I believe we have an excellent record of doing so,” Inquirer editor Bill Marimow said in a statement.  “Equally important, Trudy Rubin, our columnist on world affairs, has a distinguished record of covering the conflict with balance and precision.”

Ms. Rubin herself didn’t write on Israel in her columns this week (I’m not complaining), but she did express thoughts Thursday (Inq, Thu, 6/16/16, A14, “Worldview: Trump Plays into ISIS’s Hands”) bearing on public persons’ use of terminology.  Mr. Trump, Ms. Rubin wrote, has an obsession with “two magic words,” the words “radical Islam,” which have become for him “code for turning a battle against radical Islamists into a war against an entire religion.”  The difference between “radical Islam” and “radical Islamists,” Ms. Rubin wrote, “is more than semantics,” the latter referring to “those Muslims who want to remake and rule societies according to a fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts.”

 “Palestine” and “Palestinian”

What I would have you readers do this week is join me in a recap of Ms. Rubin’s own use of terms in opining on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but first a quick comment on Inquirer editor Marimow’s reference to the Inq’s coverage of “Israel and Palestine.”  The instant pro-Israel reaction is “Palestine is not yet a state,” but that misses the great damage that we ourselves, not Mr. Marimow, have done to ourselves.

Several times in this media watch I’ve quoted Begin’s Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground, in which Israel’s then prime minister assailed Palestinian Arabs’ “appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it).”  “Palestine,” Begin wrote, “was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews….”

Is it too late for Jews to reclaim Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian”?  (Recall that the U.N. itself used “Samaria and Judea,” the still-in-use historical Hebrew-origin names (not the not-invented-yet “West Bank”), and called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” in 1947).  In today’s world, which has just re-christened, so to speak, the Temple Mount, down to the Western Wall Plaza  as “the al-Buraq wall plaza,” we should contest Arab equity as the exclusive equity in the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”

Ms. Rubin’s Own Word Choices

Inq editor Marimow is right that his foreign affairs columnist, a thoroughly experienced wordsmith, knows a thing or two about word choice balance and precision.  (emphasis added throughout, but not by much):

*** In her 10/4/15 Inq Worldview column, Ms. Rubin wrote that “Israeli settlement building on the West Bank” increasingly encroaches on “Palestinian towns and villages.”  This is precise and balanced only if you take the position that the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines [not that she calls them that], expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders, are political borders, and that Jewish homeland rights beyond them are historically and legally nil.

Ms. Rubin further wrote in that 10/4/15 Worldview column that this “increasing Israeli encroachment” might cause Abbas’ Palestinian Authority to “stand down,” which would require Israel “to resume full occupation of the West Bank,”  provoking “terrorist attacks in Greater Israel.”   Give Ms. Rubin a balance and precision point for calling terrorist attacks “terrorist attacks,” but subtract points for “occupation,” “West Bank” and “Greater Israel.”  “Greater Israel” is Inq-speak for Israel, partitioned out of the Palestine Mandate east of the Jordan,” then ceasefire-lined [“1967-bordered”] out of the heart of Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria parts of the remaining part, sticking a toe over that second excision’s dividing line.  “Lesser Israel” would be more precise and more balanced.

***  When Israeli officials’ announcement of Jerusalem building plans coincided with a visit by Vice President Biden in November 2010, Ms. Rubin’s 11/11/10 Inq Worldview column denounced such plans “beyond Israel’s 1967 borders” as “disrespect the Israeli government has shown Obama,” adding:

What makes this move even more insulting is that Israeli officials did the same thing to Biden in March, announcing the building of 1,500 new units in the West Bank ….

Actually, the March announcement was of 1,600 planned units, and not in “the West Bank” but in “north Jerusalem,” as noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial, and as  “1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo, a Jerusalem neighborhood,” Intermountain Jewish News editorial, 3/11/10; and also as “the plan to build 1,600 new homes in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo” which has a population of 20,000, Associated Press, 3/20/10.

Further mention of  “the 1967 borders . . . the 1967 border,” instead of what the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement itself stated were exclusively military ceasefire lines without prejudice to claims of political borders, appeared in Ms. Rubin’s Inq Worldview column of 2/7/13.  Escalating the significance of 1949 military ceasefire lines rendered null by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides to that of internationally recognized political borders heaps opprobrium on Israel for sticking a toe over them.

***  Another pair of terms Ms. Rubin uses with, from our perspective, less than balance and precision is Palestinian “refugee camps” (Worldview column, 11/28/10) and “the Palestinian refugee issue” (Worldview column, 4/7/11).   In the Arab-Israeli, not “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, Israel has absorbed more Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and Muslim lands than Arabs left what became tiny Israel.  That Israel absorbed these Jews while the United Nations and Arab “host” countries, including Palestinian Arab-controlled portions of a Palestine they never left, isolate the descendants of these Arabs in “refugee camps” does not turn a conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into a one-sided refugee issue.

And the imbalance and imprecision of  “refugee camps,” conjuring images of newly displaced people huddled around open fires on raggedy tent-filled windswept hills, was inadvertently conceded by Ms. Rubin in her 11/28/10 column’s reference to a Palestinian Arab living “in his family’s comfortable row house in the Al-Arroub refugee camp near Hebron,” in Palestine.

***  Ms. Rubin’s 12/16/12 Inq Worldview column said that Israel building Jewish housing in the E-1 area between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim “would rule out any possibility of making Arab East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state.”

See also Rubin Inq Worldview column, 3/18/10:  “Continued building in and around Arab East Jerusalem makes it impossible for this part of the city to become – as it must in any peace settlement – the capital of a Palestinian state.”

“East Jerusalem” existed only during the Jordanian seizure and occupation between 1948 and 1967.  Palestinian Arabs have not ruled any part of Jerusalem, ever, and prior to 1948-67, foreign Arab empires ruled Jerusalem only for much of the time between 638 and 1099.  Jerusalem, capital of three states in the past three thousand years, all of them Jewish, has had a renewed Jewish majority since mid-1800’s Turkish rule.

“Arab East Jerusalem” as precise and balanced?  Rather, as partisan and contested.

***  Ms. Rubin’s 12/2/12 Inq Worldview column, commenting on the UN General Assembly’s granting of non-member status to Palestinian Arabs, symbolically on the November 29, 2012, anniversary of its November 29, 1947, Palestine Partition resolution, characterized that 11/29/12 General Assembly action as “positive, since it reenshrines the principle of two separate states for Israel and the Palestinians.”

But the UN General Assembly in1947 did not adopt a principle of separate states in Palestine for “Israel and the Palestinians.”  It sought to partition Palestine between Palestine’s Arabs and Palestine’s Jews – “the Arab State” and “the Jewish State,” terms it used over and over and over – for what it called “the two Palestinian peoples.”

A Role for Us All in Encouraging Use of Historically Correct Arab-Israel Conflict Language

 Last week I told you about factsonisrael.com’s efforts to enlist grassroots Israel supporters in encouraging pro-Israel advocates to stop saying “West Bank … 1967 borders … occupation, etc.”  Some of you signed up, and hopefully we’ll soon begin citing and responding to counter-productive, self-disrespecting delegitimizing-terms use by advocates advancing our case.

This week, there’s something else I can add.  Pavilion Press, the non-vanity publisher of my first book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, and my co-authored second book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, is just starting a Used Books section, in which I have a hand.  The idea, as described in www.pavilionpress.com’s “Used Books” section description, is to make available to pro-Israel people a growing collection of valuable reads on all phases of Jewish history, from ancient times to the present.  There’s only a few books, mostly on modern Israel’s independence and following years, on the site so far, but we have several hundred “used” books in stock, and will be putting  more on the website regularly.  Ten percent of the sale price will be donated to factsonisrael.com, inc.

If you’re not familiar with browsing through the Judaica/Israel section of a brick or virtual used book store, you will find it a meaningful roots-connecting along with shopping experience.  Once hooked, like I’ve been for years, you’ll return again and again to where you’ll find a richer and deeper collection of volumes than in today’s chain bookstores.  So come watch our single-subject virtual used book shop grow and grow.