#818 9/4/16 Imbalanced Media Terms Painting Picture of Jewish Homeland Delegitimization

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  In her book The Other War, journalist Stephanie Gutmann wrote that anti-Israel media bias isn’t just a collection of random smears of the Jewish state, but a consistent set of misstatements that come together to paint a big picture purveying a big misimpression.  This week I offer a set of such slurs that come together to paint a picture for media readers that wrongly delegitimizes the historic homeland of Jews.

“… bias is a collection of small things coming together like mosaic tiles to form one big picture ….”

Stephanie Gutmann, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy  (p. 257)

Journalist Stephanie Gutmann (whose book is worth reading) hit on something in writing that individual incidents of anti-Israel media bias aren’t related only in being unfair to Israel, but in being pieces that fit together into a big picture purveying a prejudicial misperception to readers persistently exposed to those pieces.

By me, the most fundamentally prejudicial misperception of Israel that the mainstream media purveys to Western readers through a pattern of pet reporting-on-Israel expressions that come together to paint a false picture is that of delegitimization of the land as the historic homeland of Jews.

Here’s the collection (perhaps, you can add some) of terms collaborating to paint that false picture:

The Romans Exiled the Jews:  I dwelt on this misperception in last week’s BSMW #817, citing both President Carter in his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid book and an old, favorable-to-the- Jewish-homeland, Congressional Record statement falling into it.  The thrust of my counter-argument, drawn from authorities cited in my own book tracing the Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence from Hadrian to Herzl, was not just that evidence solidly documents that the Jews never abandoned their land, but that British historian Parkes rightly recognized the vast damage we ourselves do to our own homeland cause by not forcefully making the case that we Jews never left.

Israel as “The Zionist Entity”:  The sarcastic pre-1948 definition of Zionism as a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine embedded a nugget of fact.  Zionism indeed focused on bringing Diaspora Jews home, but, as I quoted Samuel Katz in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine in my book, “only the frame and the capacity for organization were new.  The living movement to the land had never ceased.”

The two-fold reason that Israel’s enemies, often quoted – without answer – in the press, call Israel “the Zionist entity,” are, one, that it purveys a sense of a Western-based movement bringing a “colonialist” alien presence to the Mideast, and, two, that the Zionist movement dates to the late 1800’s, purveying a (false) sense of newness to that “alien” presence.  “Israel” harks back to the Jews’ biblical kingdom.

Israel was “Created” and “Founded” in “1948”:  This particular put-down is dear to the mainstream press on its own.  It purveys, as President Obama put it at Cairo, that “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

Israel, of course, was not “created” and “founded” in 1948, but re-attained its independence in that year as a homeland people in its home.  Its homeland army of homeland Jews threw back, in that year and the next, the instant post-independence-declaration invasion of several neighboring Arab states.  The Israelis, in a lucid interval for a homeland people hardly averse to using their foes’ Jewish-homeland-delegitimizing terms themselves, rightly called that war their War of Independence, not of “Creation & Founding.”

“Israel was Created Because of The Holocaust”:  You sometimes see this in the press, but this is delegitimizing both because it suggests mid-twentieth century-based Jewish connection, and for the reason the Iranians put it:

Speaking to reporters at an Islamic summit in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implied that European countries backed the founding of Israel in the Middle East in 1948 out of guilt over the Holocaust….They (the Jews) faced an injustice in Europe, so why do the repercussions fall on the Palestinians?”  – AP, 12/9/05

Israel as “Jewish State” In Issue:  Sometimes, the media and others portray Israel’s right to be a Jewish state as being in issue.  But both the United States and Israel define the “two-state solution” as “two states for two peoples,” which the Palestinian Arabs reject  (see “J – Jewish State: Fundamental Part of Two-State Solution” in Lee’s and my book Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z).  It is the raison d’etre of the Jewish connection to the land, clearly recognized in the Mandate and even Partition resolution (“the Jewish State and the Arab State”).

“Captured/Seized” by Israel in the 1967 War:  The media habitually characterizes Jewish connection to “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” as dating from their “capture” (sometimes, “seizure”) by Israel “in the 1967 war.”  Wrong, by about 3,000 years.

“Israel’s 1967 Borders”:  They weren’t, of course, just Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly defined as exclusively such in their defining document, the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, but it lends an artistic verisimilitude to “Captured/Seized in 1967” to call the 1949 ceasefire lines [superseded by the post-1967 war ceasefire lines] “Israel’s 1967 borders,” as though written on Mt. Sinai in Stone.

 “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Jewish Settlements (vs Palestinian Villages) … Israeli-Occupied Territories … Palestinian Territories … Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories …” etc:  Talk about Delegitimization, but even we often use these delegitimization terms ourselves.  The consequences that we ourselves bring down on ourselves by joining in the rechristening, after 3,000 years, of “Judea-Samaria” as “the West Bank” are to diminish the Jewish homeland, in its most-populated, most lowland middle, to 9 miles-wide, with its international airport as invitingly close to “the West Bank” [nee-Judean] hills as, e.g., Sderot is to Gaza.  Is this the secure homeland Jews dreamed and died for reattaining its independence for eighteen hundred years?

Temple Mount as “Haram al-Sharif, known to Jews as Temple Mount,” “Al Aqsa Mosque Plaza,” down to Western Wall as “al-Buraq Wall Plaza,” etc.:, from those wonderful folks [the UN] who brought you the Cave of the Patriarchs as a West Bank shrine and Rachel’s Tomb as a Mosque.

Our Final Folly: Joining in Calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians”:  The place the UN sought to partition between two peoples in 1948 was called “Palestine,” even by us – e.g., the American League for a Free Palestine.  Despite what the media sometimes says – “U.N. proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states” (AP, 8/8/08); “… Separate States for Palestinians and Jews” (Phila Inquirer headline (2/28/09) [emphasis added] – the U.N. did not purport to partition a place called “Palestine” between “Palestinians” and Jews or anyone else, tantamount to partitioning “Pennsylvania” between “Pennsylvanians” and anyone else.  It sought to partition Palestine between its two populations, Arabs and Jews, perhaps c. 900,000 and 600,000 respectively [that’s all, and that close].   Again and again in its partition document, the U.N. referenced “the Arab State and the Jewish State,” not “the Palestinian State.”  It even called Palestine’s Arabs and Jews “the two Palestinian peoples.”  And, today, WE, just a few decades later, join those who do not mean us well in calling Palestine’s Arabs “THE Palestinians,” spitting ourselves on the long, long legacy of the never-homeland-abandoning, “in spite of every discouragement,” as historian Parkes put it, homeland Jewish Yishuv.  Are we mad!?