#833, 12/18/16 – This Week’s AP Piece on Friedman: “… the notion of a Jewish takeover of the city [Jerusalem]”

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  The AP’s article this morning on President-elect Trump’s selection of a “hard-line pro-Israel advocate” as U.S. ambassador to Israel repeated the media’s relentless “Jewish settlers” in “the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” and referenced “the notion of a Jewish takeover of the city [Jerusalem]” and “Israel’s capture” of these areas in 1967, as though there were no prior Jewish connection.  Even Israel supporters opposed to this nomination should not descend into this delegitimizing terminology.

This Week’s AP Piece on Friedman: “… the notion of a Jewish takeover of the city [Jerusalem]”

The recent debacles at the United Nations, for which the Europeans voted, on rechristening Jerusalem’s Temple Mount sites with Muslim names, down to the al-Buraq – nee Western Wall – Plaza, are but the latest chapter in a long campaign of disassociating pieces of the Jewish homeland from Jews.  This morning’s AP article (e.g., Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, 12/18/16, A18) on President-elect Trump’s selection of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel makes plainly clear just how far this disassociation campaign has successfully come.

One telling paragraph tells Western readers:

     “The Palestinians want the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem – areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war – for their state.  Nearly 600,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Another:

“Going through with the move [of the embassy to Jerusalem], he [U.S. advisor David Miller] added, ‘will feed every jihadi’s wildest dreams’ because it will feed into the notion of a Jewish takeover of the city.”

“East” Jerusalem Jewish “Settlers”

As we’ve cited in this media watch, Jews as diverse in political viewpoint as Israeli P.M. Netanyahu and former U.S. Reform movement leader Rabbi Yoffie forcefully reject the calling of Jews living beyond the old 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines in Jerusalem “settlers.”  Yoffie to Reform leaders in March 2010:

     “The Union of Reform Judaism, like most American Jewish organizations, supports a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.

     “This means that we believe housing units constructed in Jerusalem by Israel are not settlements and they are not illegal….”

In writing that Jews are “East” Jerusalem “settlers,” as the AP did this morning and on many other occasions, in many of which it contrasts those Jewish “settlers” with Arab “residents,” the AP, and American newspapers that run it, are siding with the Arab and against the Jewish claim to historic Jerusalem, lending credence to “the notion of a Jewish takeover of the city.”

“West Bank” Jewish “Settlers”

The same, of course, goes for mainstream media mischaracterization of Jews living in Judea and Samaria, but because many Israeli and Diaspora Jews, not just the most “liberal,” gratuitously join in referring to “West Bank Jewish settlers,” we are somewhat presently estopped from contesting what is still a media mischaracterization.

We, as individual supporters of the Jewish homeland, have to go beyond not just saying “West Bank Jewish settlers,” to making the Jewish homeland’s affirmative Judea-Samaria case.  In an email this afternoon to its supporters, the Israeli organization “Legal Grounds” put it this way:

“The Balfour Declaration recognized all Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as the Jewish homeland. There was no notion of dividing that area and the Green Line – which is no more than a temporary armistice line without standing in international law – did not even exist then.

 “This Declaration served as the basis for the British Mandate, which, in a legally binding document, recognized Judea and Samaria as part of the Jewish homeland.”

“Captured by Israel in 1967”

This morning’s above-quoted AP paragraph referred to “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem as “areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.”  This too is a grievous mischaracterization, relentlessly reiterated by the mainstream media, that dates Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem to “1967.”  It’s not just that the Jews had a biblical era connection; Jews had again become Jerusalem’s majority population during pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule.

Conclusion

Ok, so that’s this week’s assemblage of Jewish homeland delegitimizing mainstream Western media dirty words – “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem “Jewish settlers,” in “areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.” 

 But – especially given that this morning’s AP article was about President-elect Trump having selected as U.S. ambassador to Israel a Jew who’s looking forward, as this article quoted him, “to carrying out his duties from ‘the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem’” – I’m impelled to add something from my one-week short of 16 years’ editing of a U.S.-media-misreporting-on-Israel media watch.

I’ve never really fully recovered from my disappointment and mystification that the organized American Jewish community averted its eyes and left it to groups like CAMERA and lone media watchers like me to contest years of mainstream Western media misstatement of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation.”  It got finally corrected (at least the “millions” part, if not the “created” part), but only after how much permanent homeland equity misperception damage had been done?

A segment of the American Jewish community, incensed inter alia over his skepticism of “the two-state solution,” has already joined in contesting what this AP article’s lede called “Donald Trump’s selection of a hard-line pro-Israel advocate as his U.S. ambassador to the Jewish state.”

My hope is that true supporters of Israel who contest Mr. Friedman’s appointment do so without descending into the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing language – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Palestinian territories … occupation … Jewish settlers … captured by Israel in 1967 … creation/founding of Israel in 1948 … etc., etc.” – used in common by the mainstream Western media and the Jewish homeland’s foes.  If they do, we should point out to them how they are hurting us all, including themselves.