#825 10/23/16 – This Week in the Media: Real Writers Using Real Words

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  When you see genuinely pro-Israel advocates saying and writing “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem and “Israel’s 1967 borders” and other pejoratives coined expressly to delegitimize the Jewish people-land of Israel connection, do you get discouraged?  I do.  But here are some current examples of writers in widely-read publications using historically and legally-grounded non-pejorative terms. (Emphasis added throughout)

This Week in the Media:  Real Writers Using Real Words

Maybe, like me, you wonder, when you see well-known pro-Israel advocates using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing expressions so beloved by Israel’s enemies, the mainstream media and Israel-denigrating Jews, whether the historically-grounded terms, like “Judea-Samaria” and “1949 ceasefire lines,” really do get used much today in real life.

Our use of historically-grounded terms is important, not simply because saying stuff like “Jewish settlements alongside Palestinian towns and villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are not illegitimate” is hardly likely to convince anybody that such is really the case, but to draw a clear contrast between the historically and legally-grounded terms versus the loaded lexicon used in common, if not in concert, by the Jewish homeland’s enemies and mainstream Western media.

The Good News is …

Real writers really write “1949 ceasefire lines

An Arutz Sheva Daniel Krygier opinion article this month, delightfully titled “Israel Was Reborn To Live In Peace, Not Rest In Peace,” accurately identified the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement’s “green” line as the mere military ceasefire line that its defining document defined it, not as an internationally sanctified political border:

“The authors of the key UN resolution 242, deliberately stated “territories” and not “the territories,” since they were fully aware of the fact that a return to the 1949 armistice lines would not provide security for Israel.”

 So too did a Tovah Lazaroff Jerusalem Post piece this week

 “The Palestinians have long pushed for a revision of Resolution 242, to explicitly state that Israel must return to the 1949 armistice lines

 in its body (above), if not in its title: “Israel Has Every Right to Refuse a 1967 [sic] Withdrawal.”

As did a Batya Medad Arutz Sheva post Thursday, 10/20/16, which referenced

 “… the temporary ‘green line” that had been drawn at the 1949 ceasefire ….”

 Us common folks should encourage such reference by pro-Israel advocates to the historically and legally correct term, “1949 ceasefire lines,” not “1967 lines,” or worse, “Israel’s 1967 borders.”

Eban rightly called the 9-miles-wide in the most-populated lowland center lines “Auschwitz” lines, and neither history nor the Mandate envisioned them.

Real writers write about “Israeli communities,” not “Jewish settlements,” in Judea and Samaria, not “the West Bank,” which are “disputed,” not “occupied” territories

 Krygier, “Live in Peace, Not Rest in Peace”:

 “This narrative disregards the fact that the PLO was established in 1964, three years before the disputed territories came under Israeli control because of the Arab aggression in 1967.”

And

“Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Gaza and parts of Judea and Samaria, did not result in peace but in a massive increase of terror against Israel, as well as anti-Semitism worldwide.”

Oded Ravivi last month (9/24/16) in the Jerusalem Post:

“From US President Barack Obama to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, state leaders at the United Nations General Assembly aren’t missing an opportunity to condemn the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, or what they call ‘illegal Israeli settlements.’”

Batya Medad in Arutz Sheva, 10/20/16:

Communities like Shiloh, where I live ….”

Martin Sherman this week, 10/22/16, in Arutz Sheva, “B’tselem at the UN – Where Are Israel’s Brains?”

“… IDF efforts to ensure security in Judea-Samaria ….”

“… Palestinian-Arabs in Judea-Samaria ….”

“After all, one of the stratagems that B’tselem employs to undermine the IDF’s capacity to function effectively in Judea-Samaria is to severely hamstring its operational capabilities by holding Israel to unattainable, immaculate standards of morality—while holding the Palestinian-Arabs to none.”

And note that expression, “Palestinian-Arabs,” that I italicized twice in these quotes from this Martin Sherman article, in contradistinction to virtually all of us conceding the term “THE Palestinians” to these Palestinian Arabs.  The UN’s own 1947 partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”   

 And finally, but far from least, Women In Green’s superb “Sovereignty” Journal, August 2016, directly quoting Jeff Daube, co-director of “Legal Grounds, and Director of the ZOA Office in Israel”:

 “’My objective in establishing Legal Grounds is to convince our leaders and encourage them to begin speaking aloud, and not in a whisper, about our rights in Judea and Samaria’, he says, and explains that quite a bit of his organization’s legal and historical arguments and evidence is based on the Levy Report, but not on it alone.”

Encouraging Israel’s leaders and especially its advocates in the Western media to speak aloud on Jewish homeland rights in the Jewish homeland’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and to historic Jerusalem rests also with us in the diaspora grassroots, especially in America, where that diaspora remains, it seems increasingly uniquely, not under siege.

This begins with we ourselves appreciating

***  that “West Bank” is not a synonym for “Judea-Samaria,” biblical names that remained in use all through the exclusively foreign-rule millennia between Judaea’s Roman destruction and Israel’s sovereign rebirth as the Jewish homeland’s next native state, but an antonym crafted by 1948 Arab invaders expressly to delegitimize Judea-Samaria’s Jewish connection;

*** that calling what the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly defined as a military ceasefire line exclusively, without prejudice to either side’s claims to political borders, “Israel’s 1967 borders” rewrites history by imbuing that existentially perilous ceasefire line, obliterated by subsequent fighting and ceasefire between the same sides, with post-facto and even post-existence international borders gravitas; and

***  that calling Jewish neighborhoods in historic Jerusalem, a city that in the past three millennia has been the capital of three native states, all Jewish, and has had a renewed Jewish majority for the past one and a half centuries, “Jewish settlements,” alongside “neighborhoods” of “Palestinians” who’ve never ruled Jerusalem for one day in history, is an attempted delegitimization of perhaps the longest, most intense, most tenaciously defended – versus Assyrians and Babylonians (eighth-sixth  centuries BCE), Seleucids (Maccabees, second century BCE), Romans (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-135 CE), Byzantines (with Persians, 614), Crusaders (with Turks and Arabs, 1099), and Arabs (1948-49, 1967) – people-place connection in history.

So stop saying “Jewish settlements” in the “occupied West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, “Israel’s 1967 borders,” and all the other loaded expressions designed to delegitimize us, just as the above-quoted writers did recently, including this week.  And plead with our own side’s advocates to stop.