#817 – 8/28/16 Proactively Countering Anti-Israel Media Bias – Making the Case Along with Seeking Corrections

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In response to State Department criticism of Israeli “land seizures” and acts “corrosive to peace,” Myths & Facts’ Eli Hertz sent around this week an old statement from the Congressional Record affirming Jewish homeland connection to Palestine. It’s a very positive statement, but it incorporates the widely-believed misperception that at the end of the biblical era, the Romans exiled the Jews. 

 As with the media’s (and others’) misstatement that Israel was “created and founded” in 1948, this misperception of an eighteen hundred-year absence of Jews from the land lends unjustified credibility to media and others’ claims of Jews being alien “settlers” in an “Israeli-occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem and West Bank.”

Proactively Countering Anti-Israel Media Bias:  Making the Case Along With Seeking Corrections

Mention “media watch seeking balanced coverage of Israel” to most folks who feel that the mainstream media has been grossly imbalanced in covering Israel, and they’ll start talking in terms of writing letters “to the editor” protesting a particular misstatement in this news story or that.  Necessary reactive work, but being proactive – “taking the initiative by acting rather than reacting to events,” Encarta – has a key role in this fight.

I started these weekly “BSMW” emails in 2001 because the mainstream media was incessantly telling Americans almost every day about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the 1948 creation/founding of Israel.”  Eventually (BSMW got a correction by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, and CAMERA and others from the major media in 2004) “millions” got corrected to hundreds of thousands, but except for the media acknowledging the mathematical reality, the essence of the “Israel creation” narrative remained.

Early in his first term, President Obama voiced it to the whole world in his world-watched speech from Cairo:  “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

Israel was not “created and founded,” artificially and out-of-the-blue, in 1948, but re-attained its independence that year as the natural fruition into statehood of the once-sovereign homeland Jewish people who – over almost two millennia of continuous foreign invader empire rule – never deserted that home.

And that is the part of the case I encourage you to bone-up on and make.  The emphasis in making the Jewish homeland case is typically on the legal side – Balfour, San Remo, the Mandate, 242 saying “territories” but not “the territories” (sounds legalistic, but the legislative history is clear on the huge substantive difference), etc. – all very critical, and yet, by me, not enough also on “the Jews never left.”

That important Americans both hostile and friendly to the Jewish homeland wrongly believe that “the Romans exiled the Jews” evidences how deep-seated and widespread this vast misperception of an almost-two-thousand-year separation of Jews from the land  resides among the American public.  E.g.:

Former President Carter in the “Historical Chronology” in the front of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid:

 “135 [CE]:  Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jewish of Judaea into exile.  The Romans name the province Syria Palaestina.”

President Carter’s introductory Palestine Historical Chronology doesn’t mention Jews again until 1917, suggesting a Jewish absence of one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two years.

In response to U.S.State Department spokesperson Kirby recently describing Israeli activities in Judea-Samaria as “land seizures” and “corrosive to the cause of peace,” Myths & Facts” Eli Hertz this week sent around an old Congressional Record statement on how the U.S. Congress felt about the Jewish desire to reclaim and rebuild their Homeland in Palestine”:

“Palestine of today [1922], the land we know as Palestine, was peopled by the Jews from the dawn of history until the Roman era. It is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.  They were driven from it by force by the relentless Roman military machine and for centuries prevented from returning. At different periods various alien people succeeded them but the Jewish race had left an indelible impress upon the land.

“Today it is a Jewish country. Every name, every landmark, every monument and every trace of whatever civilization remaining there is still Jewish. And it has ever since remained a hope, a longing, as expressed in their prayers for these nearly 2,000 years. No other people has ever claimed Palestine as their national home.  No other people has ever shown an aptitude or indicated a genuine desire to make it their homeland.”

“U.S. Congressional Record

“1922 House of Representatives”

A very pro-Jewish homeland statement, to be sure, but look at that first part again with emphasis added:

“Palestine of today [1922], the land we how as Palestine, was peopled by the Jews from the dawn of history until the Roman era. It is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.  They were driven from it by force by the relentless Roman military machine and for centuries prevented from returning. At different periods various alien people succeeded them but the Jewish race had left an indelible impress upon the land.  [emphasis added]

An eminent historian who fully understood the consequences of the Jewish homeland’s supporters not emphasizing the Jews’ continuous homeland presence was Britain’s James Parkes, quoted approvingly by Katz in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, who wrote (Whose Land?, p.266) that “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the [post-biblical] centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

But it is what Parkes wrote right after that which drives home the impact on Western public perception of our failure to make clear that the Jews never left:

“The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry in trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period.”

(Ok, the rest of this week’s is for die-hards. See how far you can get.)

But is it true that the Jews never left?

 Yes, it is.

Talmudic Age:  The Romans Did Not Exile the Jews:  Start with Carter and even the U.S. Congress believing, mistakenly, that the Romans exiled  the Jews.  In researching my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, in which I set out to see for myself whether Parkes was right, I ran across in a used-book store an incredible mid-twentieth century Israel guide, Vilnay’s, a thick, small-font, densely-printed, surprisingly readable fact-packed account of doubtless every place in the country.  It cites remains of post-Bar Kochba-revolt synagogues unearthed all over the country.  I ran across a scholar’s, Gedaliah Alon’s, minutely meticulous account of The Jews in Their Land In the Talmudic Age, the centuries between the Temple’s destruction and Muslim invasion, in which he describes the times of the Tannaim and Amoraim, the compilation of the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud, discusses the importance of the Patriarch, recognized by Rome as the representative of the homeland Jews until the fifth century, and of the Sanhedrin, and shows under several tests that the Jews remained as a homeland people throughout that time period.  I ran across archeologist Avi-Yonah: “The Jews were able to maintain their status in the country, and shared in the material prosperity of the Byzantine period.”  And Wilken in The Land Called Holy: “Jewish life in Palestine went on undisturbed during the Christian era – such is the testimony of archeology.”  And, of course, Parkes: “The population remained as it had been before the loss of independence …. Jewish villages were thickly scattered in the hills and valleys of the region.”

The Muslim Dynasty Age: The Jews were Still There:  In 614, the Persians invaded, aided by a self-mustered homeland army of 20,000 or more homeland Jews.  Alas, “Persia’s pact with the Yishuv was short-lived.”  But then came the Muslim invaders, likewise helped by the Jews, and Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasty rule from afar.  Archeologist Bahat in The Forgotten Generations shows a map with a hundred ninth century Jewish communities (this more than a millennium ago in a place the size of New Jersey).  Historians’, travelers’ and others’ accounts have many references to the land’s Jews.

Crusader Rule:  The Jews were Still There, Though Many were Killed:  Contemporary Crusader account of the battle for Jerusalem: “… though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab and Jew were among the fallen.  The Jew is the last to fall.”  Albert of Aachen: “Haifa – which the Jews [alone] defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians,” fell after a month.  Famous Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela counted surviving Jews all over the country, including Jerusalem.  Thanks to the fanaticism of the ruthless Crusaders, he did not count too very many, but the wonder is he was able to count any at all.  (Further with regard to “the West Bank”), a Christian pilgrim on the Crusaders’ heels wrote of “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and Sea.

Mamluks:  The Jews were Still There:  The Crusaders were defeated not by Arabs, but mainly by Turks led by Saladin, a Kurd.  Then Mamluks defeated Mongol invaders. I’d never heard of the Mamluks (aka Mamlukes) before I’d started researching my book, but they were Turks and Circassians, not Arabs, and they ruled the region with less than benevolence for longer than 200 years.  My book contains a timeline of references to Jews in Jerusalem, and references to them in Acre and elsewhere, during this period.

400 Years of Ottoman Turks:  The Jews were Still There:  The one positive thing the Ottoman Turks accomplished during their exactly 400 year rule was to make the Mamluks seem enlightened.  Their cruelty, indifference and mismanagement drove the land’s population down, movingly testified to by Mark Twain and others, down to its smallest in all recorded times.  But the Jews were still there during Ottoman times, in their four holy cities – Jerusalem (where they became the majority again in pre-Zionist nineteenth century times), Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land.  Indeed, it was to an already internally reviving Yishuv to which the Zionists came.

I ended my book with a two-page final chapter, in which I concluded that Parkes was indeed right that we grievously err in not making clear to publics in the West that Israel, the Jewish homeland, far from being “founded” in 1948, has been the Jewish people’s uninterrupted homeland during and since biblical times.  Instead we ourselves talk about “Jewish settlements” in “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank.”

And that, in the end, is what fighting “anti-Israel media bias” is about – not just getting the mainstream media to clean up its act for that cleanup’s own sake, but to counter the imbalanced media’s impact on Western publics’ perceptions of respective Jewish and Arab indigenous homeland equities in that small land of Israel corner of the vast Middle East.