#816 – 8/21/16 A/P: “Israeli occupation of the West Bank”, Ettinger: “Disputed – rather than occupied, area of Judea and Samaria”

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The AP this week referenced “Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”  Our acquiescence does as much damage to Americans’ perception of respective Arab and Jewish homeland equities there as does the media’s use of these loaded terms.

AP This Week: “Israeli occupation of the West Bank”; Yoram Ettinger This Week: “disputed – rather than occupied – area of Judea and Samaria”

They were only six words in paragraph 7 of a 10-paragraph AP Israel article run, e.g., on page A9 of the Philadelphia Inquirer this week (Inq, Mon, 8/15/16), but as with companion Jewish homeland-delegitimizing expressions persistently purveyed by the mainstream Western media, they dripped yet one more drop of misperception into Americans’ mindsets regarding respective homeland rights of Jews and Arabs in that most-contested of places.

The AP wrote Monday that a Palestinian Arab hunger-striker in an Israeli prison had been arrested in 2001,

“at the height of an armed Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”

Not in direct answer to this AP article, but in response to the widespread “misperceptions, misrepresentations and ignorance over the legal status of Jewish settlements in the disputed area of Judea and Samaria,” Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger wrote Thursday (8/18/16) in Israel Hayom a summary of the reasons why (article title) “Jewish Settlements Are Legal.”

Of course, it seems insanity to me that Jews writing articles defending Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria should reference that presence as “Jewish settlements.”  BSMW wrote back in 2002:

“Settlements” is a dirty word, connoting intrusion into a place of people who have no roots there.  The Inquirer, for one, instantly retracted it when it applied it to Arabs. Inquirer (3/16/02, A4):

Clearing the Record:   In an Inquirer article Thursday [3/14/02] on President Bush’s news conference, the words “Palestinian settlements” were used in reference to attacks by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  The attacks were directed at Palestinian towns and refugee camps.  [emphasis added]

Israel’s “attacks” were actually directed “at” terrorists in those “Palestinian towns” and  Arab “refugee camps” from the 1948 war.

But give Amb. Ettinger two points of credit for [1] calling Judea and Samaria, names used throughout history, “Judea and Samaria” and [2] calling them “disputed” rather than “occupied.”  Ettinger’s concluding sentence:

“The campaign against legal Jewish settlements in the disputed – rather than occupied – area of Judea and Samaria is based on gross misrepresentations, fueling infidelity to law, which undermines the pursuit of peace.”

And while we’re handing out credits for expressions that purvey senses of homeland equities, don’t fail to give the AP one for its “Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation” [btw “of the West Bank,”emphasis added].  Any doubt here who are the indigenous natives and who the invading outsiders?

The point is it’s ineffective for us to rail against some of the delegitimizing terms while acquiescing, even ourselves using, some of the others.  Ettinger wrote in his Thursday article that the Mandate, following San Remo and Balfour, “entrusted Britain to establish a Jewish state in the entire area west of the Jordan River,” and that nothing thereafter supersedes this.  We have to recognize that there is an unrelenting effort to drive Israel back to “the fragile and vulnerable (9-to-15-mile-wide) lines” that Ettinger emphasized Thursday were expressly rejected in 242, and ourselves use terms consistent with claiming as the Jewish homeland that entire area west of the Jordan.  “West Bank … occupation … Jewish settlements,” among other expressions, are utterly inconsistent with Jewish homeland equity in Judea-Samaria.

And “East” Jerusalem, and “Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem,” are further expressions that we must shun.  As is calling Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians.”

I would leave you with two points: [1] that liberal as well as conservative supporters of Israel can and should use Jewish homeland-legitimizing terms, and [2] that by all of us using them we can at least make the media say that we use them, conveying the existence of the Jewish homeland claim to the entirety of the land of Israel to the American public.

[1]  Personally favoring a “two-state solution” – which the United States as well as Israel, but not the Palestinian Arabs, defines as “two states for two peoples” – is not inconsistent with calling Judea-Samaria “Judea-Samaria”; calling historic Jerusalem “Jerusalem” and not “East Jerusalem”;  and calling Jewish presence in these disputed, not “occupied,” places Jewish presence and not “Jewish settlements.”  Indeed, it strengthens ability to reach a compromise settlement if you assign value and rights to what you’re offering as concessions in compromise.

[2]  No, the media won’t stop calling Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” etc., etc.  But, as with “Haram al-Sharif,” increasingly “the al Aqsa mosque compound,” to which the media appends “known to Jews [and btw Christians] as Temple Mount,” we can, by closing our own ranks and as insistently saying “Judea-Samaria” as the Arabs and media insistently say “West Bank,” etc, etc, credibly demand that the media acknowledge that its terms, and the homeland equity rights which they reference, are likewise totally disputed between Jews and Arabs.