#811 – 7/17/16 Media Says “West Bank Israeli Settlement” and “Adjacent Palestinian City”

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The AP wrote yet another piece this week referencing a “West Bank” Jewish “settlement,” in pointed contrast to the “adjacent Palestinian city,” pointing out that “most of the international community opposes settlement construction in these areas.”   Like sleepwalkers, we go around ourselves mouthing these terms, oblivious to our not convincing anybody that “Jewish settlements in the West Bank” are legitimate, when we should wake up and self-respectfully say “it’s Judea-Samaria, not ‘the West Bank’ … they’re Jewish communities, not ‘Jewish settlements’ … and Palestinian Arabs aren’t exclusively ‘the Palestinians.’” 

 AP This Week:  “West Bank Israeli Settlement” and “Adjacent Palestinian City”

Arthur Koestler, who wrote Darkess at Noon, and Promise and Fulfillment about Israel attaining independence, wrote what I found a fascinating history of cosmology, The Sleepwalkers.  He called it that because the giants of the Discovery Age – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others – seemed not to grasp the immense significance of what their own observations were telling them.

Today’s sleepwalkers are us, pro-Israel Jews who week after week go along reading, and even ourselves using, harmful terms and perspectives insistently used by the mainstream media, as by the AP this week in, e.g., my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq), denigrating the Jewish people’s homeland connection to Israel, without ourselves waking up to the damage to our own cause that we ourselves do.

The Inq’s AP article Monday (Inq, Mon, 7/11/16, A4, AP, “Israel Boosts Aid to 2 Settlements”) led that Bibi had “announced a $12.9 million plan to strengthen two Israeli settlements in the southern West Bank on Sunday.”  [Is there anywhere else in the world that a $12 million neighborhood housing project is full-article international news?]

Paragraph 2 observed that this came on the heels of Bibi having “approved the construction of hundreds of new homes in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.”  [see last week’s BSMW #810 – most of the Jerusalem homes were for Jerusalem Arabs, but of course only Jews are Jerusalem “settlers”]

Paragraph 3 said the new funding “will go to Kiryat Arba, a settlement of 7,000 Israelis, and the Jewish residents of the adjacent Palestinian city of Hebron.”  [emphasis a tiny bit added]

Further down, the AP summarized the world’s assessment of respective Arab and Jewish claims to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem:

Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war.  The Palestinians and most of the international community opposes settlement construction in these areas, where the Palestinians hope to establish an independent state.

***  It is sleepwalking, else self-disrespecting, for Jews (even remaining believers in “the two-state solution”) to call what the world, including the United Nations in 1947, called “Judea and Samaria” for thousands of years “the West Bank,” coined by invading [Trans-]Jordan in 1950 to delegitimize Jews.

***  It is sleepwalking, else self-disrespecting, for Jews to call the part of Jerusalem that invading Jordan seized and ruled from 1948 to 1967 an “east” Jerusalem, as though it had existed as a separate place from time immemorial and not for 19 years that ended 49 years ago, to which Jews, Jerusalem’s renewed majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule, have no equity claim.

***  It is sleepwalking, else self-disrespecting, for Jews to call ourselves “settlers” in Judea, Samaria and anywhere in Jerusalem, acquiescing in the Western media referencing a “West Bank Israeli settlement” and “adjacent Palestinian city.”

***  It is sleepwalking, else self-disrespecting, for Jews to acquiesce in the Western media invariably telling Western readers that “Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war,” suppressing the historical fact of physical Jewish connection to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem for three thousand years.

***  It is sleepwalking, else self-disrespecting, for Jews to call Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians,” as though as late as twentieth-century Mandate times “Palestinian” did not refer mainly to Palestine’s Jews.

I haven’t given up on you guys’ summertime reading.  Go to pavilionpress.com, click ‘Facts on Israel’ and look around.