#810 – 7/10/16 AP Not Clear that Almost Half New Jerusalem Homes are for Arabs

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The AP had a 3-paragraph article, headlined Wednesday in the Philly Inquirer as “Israel: Netanyahu OKs Settlement Growth,” that didn’t make clear to readers what Israel had done – approve more homes for Arabs in Jerusalem than it had done for Jews.  But beyond that, the 3-paragraph article was laced with imbalanced terms, some of which we ourselves use.

AP This Week:  Not Clear that Almost Half of New Jerusalem Area Homes Are for Arabs

The Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) ran a short AP piece on Wednesday (Inq, Wed, 7/6/16, A3) that it headlined: “Israel: Netanyahu OKs Settlement Growth.”

Here’s that 3-paragraph piece with the imbalanced terms highlighted:

“Israel: Netanyahu OKs Settlement Growth

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has authorized construction of hundreds of new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, an Israeli official confirmed Tuesday.

“The government has presented the move as a response to a series of deadly Palestinian attacks against Jewish settlersThe Palestinians have long viewed settlement construction as the biggest obstacle to the peace process.

“The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said construction would include 560 new homes in Maale Adumim, just outside Jerusalem, as well as nearly 200 in the city itself.  The plan also called for over 600 new homes in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.”  [emphasis added, but not by much]

[1]  Almost half of those homes were for Arabs:  The first thing to note is that this piece, Inq-headlined as “Settlement Growth,” does not make clear that almost half (600 of 1360) of these new homes are not just in “an Arab neighborhood,” which can fairly be construed by the reader as “block-busting-by-Jews,”  but are for Arab residents of that neighborhood, a point made clear, not by the AP in this article, but by The Times of Israel on Monday (7/4/16).  Indeed, the Times of Israel article quoted an Israeli lawmaker complaining that Israel should not have approved new housing for Arabs in that Jerusalem neighborhood “without also developing construction for Jews in the same neighborhood [Givat Hamatos].”

The first piece of AP imbalance here is in not making vividly clear to the reader that of the 1360 Jerusalem area houses which Israel approved that were addressed in this AP article, 600, 44%, were for Arabs.   A glance at maps showing respective Arab and Jewish community growth in and around Jerusalem makes vividly the stakes involved there.  Times of Israel quoted one Israeli MK on building in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood:   “Those who want to maintain a Jewish majority in the capital cannot promote construction for the Arab population only.”  That Israel okayed these 600 homes for Arabs meant something newsworthy.

Instead, in the AP article, Israel got zero credit, for what that might have been worth, for authorizing new housing for Arabs, as well as for Jews, in Jerusalem.  What it did get (see westernjournalism.com, “Obama Administration’s Latest Attack on Israel Based on Palestinian Disinformation,” Wed, 7/6/16) was get blasted this week by the U.S. Department of State:  “On Wednesday, the Obama administration launched a new blistering attack on Israel.  Reacting to the approval of 800 new housing units for Jews and 600 for Arab residents in the Jerusalem area, the State Department accused Israel of systematically seizing ‘Palestinian land.’”

What can we do about all this?  Recognize and address all the other imbalances, not all of the AP’s own making, in the AP’s brief article Wednesday.

[2]  All the other imbalances:  [a]  “East” Jerusalem “settlements” vs Arab Jerusalem “neighborhoods.”  Note that while the Israeli MK quoted in Times of Israel above referred to both Arab and Jewish communities as “neighborhoods” in what the AP with a capital ‘E’ (as in Emphasis) called “East” Jerusalem in its article Wednesday, the AP bluntly contrasted “Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” with “an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.”

What makes Arab neighborhoods in “East” Jerusalem “neighborhoods” and next-door Jewish neighborhoods “settlements”?  Our acquiescence, though even the U.S. Reform movement’s Rabbi Yoffie, when he was its head, agreed with Netanyahu that Jewish communities across the 1949 ceasefire lines in Jerusalem aren’t “settlements.”

[b]  “Settlement Growth” [Inq headline] and “settlement construction” as “biggest” peace obstacle:  The “settlement growth” and “settlement construction” here has to be taken in context.  There was no gobbling up of “Palestinian” land.  As Wednesday’s WesternJournalism piece pointed out, “no settlement will be expanded outside existing zone plans.”

The AP didn’t say on its own Wednesday that “settlement construction” is “the biggest obstacle to the peace process.”  It said that that’s what “the Palestinians” say.  But having said that that’s what one side to this mother-of-all-disputes says, it had some obligation to say what the other side says.  E.g., what peace process was there prior to 1967, when there were no “settlements,” when Arabs, not Jews, controlled “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem?  Which side turned down, and how many times, peace offers of almost all of “the West Bank” and a chunk of Jerusalem?  Which side has stated acceptance of “two states for two peoples” and which side insistently refuses?

[c]  “The West Bank”:  A longtime loyal media watch reader emailed me this week that “But Bret Stephens, unquestionably pro-Israel, just wrote “West Bank.”  Alas, yes, as do, e.g., Jonathan Tobin and Daniel Pipes, with both of whom I have argued, whose pro-Israel credentials are likewise unquestioned.  But who in the world have we convinced of Jewish homeland rights to Judea and Samaria when we ourselves replace those millennia-used terms not with a synonym, but an antonym designed to delegitimize us?

By contrast, here’s the language in that WesternJournalism article Wednesday:  “Most ‘settlement’ [note quotes] building takes place within the existing boundaries of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank).”

[d]  “… a series of deadly Palestinian attacks against Jewish settlers”:  Not that “Palestinians” have any more right to attack “Jewish settlers” than they do Israelis and Jewish and Christian visitors inside the green line, but not all the targeted victims have been “Jewish settlers,” so the AP’s characterization of the scope of the “deadly Palestinian attacks” is too narrow.

But what we must fundamentally confront is characterization of the Arab side of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine as that of Israelis and “Jewish settlers” versus “the Palestinians.”  Is it wildly absurd to claim Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” which has a real historical basis, when the Arab side relentlessly ridicules historical Jewish connection to Israel, down to the Temple Mount (another U.N. resolution appears to be in the works) and Western Wall plaza?

As good a time as any, I think, for me to end a media watch by reiterating last week’s three suggested exceedingly gripping summer readings on a seminal Jewish homeland moment that occurred in Our Time.  Available as “used” books on pavilionpress.com.

Best Jewish History Books – Period: Modern Israel’s Struggle for Independence

Fifteen and a half years ago, I started this weekly media watch because there seemed to me an unmet need in our community to respond, initially, to the media’s insistent “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation,” and thereafter to other misleading media-purveyed misperceptions of Israel.

There has long seemed to me an unmet second need, a need to encourage pro-Israel members of the Jewish and broader American communities to familiarize ourselves more fully with some of the illuminating inspiring, mostly non-fiction, books on critical eras of mostly homeland Jewish history.  As I said in a recent watch, for half-a-century I’ve haunted “used” book stores and Jewish neighborhood friends-of-library book sales and have accumulated a personal collection of close to a thousand “Jewish history” books.

My association with Pavilion Press has enabled me to put this personal obsession onto a sharing basis.  This week I want to tell you briefly about three “used” books on a momentous Jewish history event that occurred in our time – the homeland’s struggle for renewed independence.

If you have not read The Revolt by Menachem Begin, you have short-changed your own understanding and appreciation of a supreme Jewish history moment that, if you’re my age, occurred in your lifetime.  The Muslim nations sought last month in the UN to exclude terrorism in the name of national liberation from terrorism, and Israel opposed this.  The Irgun did not bomb the King David Hotel because it was a hotel, which would have been terrorism, but because it was the headquarters of the British effort to prevent Jews, in violation of what the Mandate with its Jewish National Home was all about, from reaching their homeland.  And warning was given.  This, among other key gripping events in the struggle, in Begin’s own words, is in The Revolt.  Pavilion Press has one copy on the “used” books virtual shelves.

One tremendously moving aspect of the Jewish people’s mid-twentieth century struggle to regain independence in the homeland was the Aliyah Bet.  I’ve read every book on it I could find.  Some of them, Gruber’s, Patzert’s and Holly’s in particular, are very engrossing.  By me, the most moving of the lot is Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of The Ulua.  There are moments in that book on Holocaust survivors’ struggles to reach the ships, and on that particular ship’s preparation and voyage into the teeth of the utterly unjust and unlawful British blockade that will remain in your memory for a long time to come.  One copy on the virtual shelf.

By me, a particularly moving book that takes you right there on the ground in both Israel and diplomatic halls in the 1948 war is Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948.  We have three copies of this acclaimed account on Pavilion’s virtual shelves.

If any of this means something to you, visit www.pavilionpress.com, select “Facts On Israel,” then “Used Books” and then “Modern Times.”

We have lots of books on many eras to put on the virtual shelves, and will offer comments on a few of what I’ve found myself as the most moving and illuminating in future weeks.