WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Following up last year’s EU policy decision, France this week issued instructions to retailers on labeling goods “made in the West Bank (Jewish settlement).” The AP, in reporting this, went on to reference the BDS movement as seeking the “return of Palestinian refugees to family properties lost in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.” Gross mischaracterizations of both 1967 and 1948. But, read on, a start is being made in combating it.
French Notice This Week: “Under international law the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are not part of Israel”; Must We Acquiesce?
This Week’s Dirty Words
While we were eating our turkey on Thursday, France, per the AP, issued an “official notification.” AP:
“The French notice says that ‘under international law the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are not part of Israel.’ So it states that goods from those regions must be marked as such and not as originating from Israel.
“The notification adds that labeling goods produced in the Israeli settlements as ‘made in the West Bank’ or ‘made in the Golan Heights’ is insufficient because they could ‘mislead’ consumers. It says it’s necessary to add, between parentheses, the words ‘Israeli settlement’ or similar wording. As a result, it urges labels such as ‘made in the West Bank (Israeli settlement)’ or ‘made in the Golan Heights (Israeli settlement).’”
Make no mistake. This French demand, following the EU’s policy decision to the same effect last year, isn’t just that Israelis and Jews the world over acquiesce in calling Judea and Samaria – called “Judea and Samaria” by everybody for three millennia, including by the United Nations in 1947 – “the West Bank,” invented in 1950 by Jordan to disassociate it from Jews.
This week’s French demand literally says that merely calling Judea and Samaria “the West Bank” is, to quote the French, “insufficient.” It would “mislead” European consumers, who wouldn’t know whether the products made there were made by Arabs or Jews. European publics have to be explicitly told, per the French, that such goods were “made in the West Bank (Israeli settlement).”
Is it sufficient, in answer to this delegitimization of Jewish claim to “the West Bank, including East Jerusalem” that Israelis and the Jewish homeland’s Jewish and Christian supporters ourselves stop saying “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, and, between parentheses or not, “(Jewish settlement)”?
Alas, no. As this AP article on Thanksgiving itself reveals, “delegitimization” isn’t just about claimed Jewish misdeeds of 1967, but most deeply, of 1948. AP:
Israel sees the EU push for settlement product labeling as inspired by the BDS movement ….
…. Israel says the movement’s true goal is to destroy the country. BDS pushes, among other things, not only for an end to Israel’s occupation of lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war, but also for a return of Palestinian refugees to family properties lost in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation….”
It’s self-destructive for Jewish homeland supporters to acquiesce in media mischaracterization of the 1948 war as a war “surrounding Israel’s creation.” It was the homeland Jewish people’s War of Independence, in which an existing homeland Jewish army, Haganah, which became the IDF, threw back a multi-nation Arab invasion for the Jewish homeland’s destruction. Is there a clearer test of a homeland attaining independence versus outsider “creation” than a homeland army throwing back such an outsider invasion?
That 1948 war and its aftermath saw more Jewish refugees, absorbed by Israel, who fled vast Arab and other Muslim lands, than Arabs left tiny Israel. Except in the media, did a two-sided refugee issue become a one-sided refugee issue because one side absorbed the refugees who fled to it destitute?
So this week’s dirty words list includes
*** “… under international law, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are not part of Israel”
*** “… made in the West Bank (Israeli settlement)”
*** “ … Israel’s occupation of lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war”
*** “… the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation,” and one-sided “return of Palestinian refugees to family properties lost in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation”
Answering Back
One piece of encouragement to those of us on our side who recognize the self-destructiveness of we ourselves using these terms and expressions that were designed to delegitimize us came on Tuesday of this week in a Jerusalem Post article, “Deputy FM Hopes To Break the International Paradigm on The West Bank.”
It’s a very encouraging article on Deputy Foreign Minister Hotovely’s “big plans for next year” in seeking to alter “what she terms ‘the false paradigm’ that has taken root in the international community, claiming that Israel is an ‘illegal occupier.’” JPost:
“’The Foreign Ministry needs to lead the battle against the term “occupation,”’ she said. ‘It is my flagship project to try to break this myth’….
“…. The deputy minister lamented the persistent idea that ‘everything starts and ends with “the occupation.” ‘It’s not correct legally, and it doesn’t make sense. You can’t say we belong in Tel Aviv, but not in Judea and Samaria,’ she argued.”
So there’s a hopeful beginning, including the article quoting the deputy FM as having instructed Israeli diplomats “to firmly emphasize the Israeli position.”
Obiter Dicta: “Jewish Book Month”
See this article on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/194870/this-month-read-a-jewish-book, titled
“This Month Read a Jewish Book
“It’s Jewish Book Month, a tradition begun in 1925 that today is run by the Jewish Book Council”
I’ve had the privilege, twice, to be among the parade of “Jewish book” authors making brief presentations to Jewish Book Council representatives assembled in New York from all over the country. It’s quite an experience.
But I have my own idea of what ought to drive “Jewish Book Month.” We belong to a people that has a three-millennia institutional memory. What would you pick as seminal moments in those millennia? Standing with Moses at Sinai, marching with David into Jerusalem, standing with Solomon at the First Temple’s dedication, cleansing the Second Temple along with the Maccabees, surely. But what about being of the generation (I was 8) upon which Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, called “to stand by us in the struggle for fulfillment of the dream of generations for Israel’s redemption”? By me, that’s on that list of special generations.
In used book markets like Amazon’s and in all sorts of brick and virtual book sites, among them my publisher’s, www.pavilionpress.com, are the “Jewish books” of modern Israel’s Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins and Paines. And, preceding them, Zionist classics. To today’s readers, Herzl’s Jewish State seems a naïve little book, but it launched a thousand ships, too many of them British destroyers. (Herzl’s thick Diaries, a translation of which I plunged into as a test of commitment to Zionism, and btw fascinatedly finished, shows a different Herzl altogether.)
Have you read Dr. Weitzmann’s Trial and Error, Begin’s Revolt, anything by Ben-Gurion? You get the idea.
Obiter dicta. Or is it?