#813 7/31/16 U.S. State Department: “East Jerusalem Settlements”

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The U.S. State Department this week issued a five-paragraph statement making vividly clear that when it comes to Arab-Jewish conflict terminology, it – like everybody else in the world except us – understands the power of word choice.  Come take a quick look and see.

This Week From the State Department:  “East Jerusalem Settlements”

“We are deeply concerned by reports that the Government of Israel has published tenders for 323 units in East Jerusalem settlements.”

– U.S. State Department, Friday, 7/29/16

Beyond “settlement,” which appeared five times in Friday’s State Department five-paragraph statement

— “East Jerusalem settlements . . . the settlement of Gilo . . . we strongly oppose settlement activity . . . steady acceleration of settlement activity . . . settlement expansion” (emphasis added throughout)

other Jewish homeland delegitimizing expressions in that 5-paragraph State Department statement with which all of us, notwithstanding differences among us on ultimate peace-process solutions, ought to take issue included

upper-case “E” “East Jerusalem, which appeared three times, and West Bank, which appeared two times,

— “East Jerusalem settlements . . . Palestinian structures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem . . . Palestinian structures demolished in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”

and “occupation”

—  “… land seizures, settlement expansion, legalization of outposts, and denial of Palestinian development that risk entrenching a one-state reality of perpetual occupation  ….”

All this is on top of six references in the final two paragraphs to Palestinian Arabs as exclusively “the Palestinians”:

— “… Palestinian structures . . . Palestinians homeless . . . Palestinian structures . . . Palestinian structures . . . Palestinian development . . . the Palestinians.”

Each of these terms –

— upper-case “E” ‘East Jerusalem’ and ‘West Bank,’ instead of ‘city of Jerusalem’ and historically used ‘Judea-Samaria’ as place names, and

— ‘Palestinian development’ and ‘Palestinian structures’ versus Israeli ‘settlements’ and ‘occupation’ for respective Arab and Jewish presence there,

conveys U.S. State Department acceptance of totally Arab equity in across-1949-ceasefire- line territory that, as the ZOA in a news release pointed out this week, San Remo and the Mandate had allocated for the Jewish national home.

Jews are not “settlers” in Judea-Samaria, and above all, Jerusalem, which has been the capital of three states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish Ottoman rule.

In making the case, which it is increasingly incumbent upon all of us to make, that the land of Israel is the historic homeland of Jews, we further need to make clear to people in the West that today’s State of Israel is that land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea – that, without exception, every ruler in between was a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that, and that throughout that long dark Hadrian-to-Herzl pre-Zionist foreign rule era, the homeland-claiming Jews never left.

If you doubt this is true, I invite you to read my book – Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, pavilionpress.com, amazon.com – and see if I’m wrong.