WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The U.S. State Department this week “strongly condemned” a decision by Israel to build “up to 300 units” of housing for Jews within an existing Samaria Jewish community as “a plan that would create a significant new settlement deep in the West Bank,” an another step towards “perpetual occupation.”
Five of those U.S. State Department terms – “significant … new … settlement … West Bank … occupation” – are misleading, but ask yourself, have we not had a hand in the world reaching the point that Israel announcing a 300-unit housing plan over the 1949 ceasefire line in Samaria instantly begets a U.S. State Department reaction that Times of Israel characterized as “ferocity”?
This Week: “Significant New Settlement Deep in West Bank Another Step Towards Perpetual Occupation”
“We strongly condemn the Israeli government’s recent decision to advance a plan that would create a significant new settlement deep in the West Bank.”
“. . . . Proceeding with this new settlement is another step towards cementing a one-state reality of perpetual occupation . . . . “
Those were the words this week, not of Palestinian Arabs, “anti-settlement” Jews or the mainstream Western media, but of the State Department of the United States (“Press Statement, Mark C. Toner, Deputy Department Spokesperson, Washington, DC, October 5, 2016”).
What’s mildly wrong with these words are
[1] The Israeli government’s action was not “Significant.” In the U.S. State Department’s own words, it “could include up to 300 units” of housing, not exactly world-shaking mass migrations of populations with which one might expect world State Departments to take official notice.
[2] The place where these, zounds!, “up to 300 units” of housing are to go is not “New.” The community, Shiloh, was established in 1979. The ZOA, for one, says “reestablished in 1979,” having been originally established by Joshua as the tabernacle site in the second millennium BCE.
[3] Shiloh, along with other land of Israel Jewish communities across the long-gone 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, is not a “Settlement.” Yes, yes, even we call them that. But “settlement” has not just recently become a dirty-word. It has always been a dirty-word. In Lee’s and my Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z book, we cite our hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, having run this “Clearing the Record” two days after having run an article back in 2002:
“Clearing the Record: In an Inquirer article Thursday on President Bush’s news conference, the words ‘Palestinian settlements’ [emphasis added] 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.”
(In some eyes, of course, those Israeli attacks “were directed at” terrorists located in those Palestinian Arab towns and so-called “refugee camps” for Palestinian Arabs who never left Palestine after an Arab-started war half-a-century earlier, but you get the idea.)
[4] The place where Shiloh is located is Judea/Samaria, not “the West Bank,” a name coined post-invasion by the invader [Trans-]Jordan in 1950 to replace the existing name “Judea and Samaria,” for the same reason the conquering Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” eighteen hundred fifteen years earlier. Yes, yes, many of our own leading lights use “West Bank” and not Judea-Samaria. For one that rightly says “Judea/Samaria” (and calls Shiloh a “community,” in contradistinction to “settlement”), visit ZOA.org and click on “ZOA Appalled: Obama Condemns Minor Legal Israeli Construction in Shiloh.”
On the other hand, Times of Israel ran an article Thursday quoting Israeli Minister Shaked stating “I think we need to build in Judah [sic] and Samaria,” to which Times of Israel unhelpfully appended that she was “using the biblical term for the West Bank.”
We play shamefully into the hands of the delegitimizers when we ourselves call “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical term for the West Bank.” In this media watch, and in Lee’s and my book,” we cite examples throughout history of Judea and Samaria being referred to as Judea and Samaria, the Hebrew-origin names, a very telling instance being the United Nations in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea begins on the Jordan River ….”
[5] And, finally, Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria (may it indeed be “perpetual”) is not “perpetual occupation.” As the ZOA put it in its statement on Thursday, “Israel has the strongest legal, religious, political, and historic claims to Judea/Samaria.”
The bottom-line truth, though, is that the vast bulk of the world today believes that, far from having “the strongest” claims, Israel and the Jewish people have no claims to Judea, Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem, that they belong to “The Palestinians.” We have much to answer for in not just passively but even actively contributing to the world coming to this conclusion. And even today we ourselves continue mouthing the very pejoratives not just designed, but by now successfully deployed, to delegitimize us.
There is no halfway here, no place for us to claim that “Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank” are legitimate, that the conflict over Palestine is between us and “The Palestinians.” Everybody else seeking to make their case to the world – Israel’s Arab adversaries, “settlement”-watching Jews, the mainstream media, the U.S. State Department – understands the importance of word choices but us.