#834 – 12/25/16 This Week at the U.N.: And Then There Were None

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Had the U.S. voted “no” instead of abstaining on Friday at the U.N., the Security Council tally (bypassing the veto effect) would have been 14-1 instead of 14-0-1.  At the General Assembly, it would have been like 150-2.  The time has come for us to begin asking ourselves why it is that we have convinced nobody in the world of the legitimacy of our Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem case.  This final 2016 weekly media watch lists a half-dozen key occasions that we’ve failed to make that case, and suggests that we start.

This Week at the U.N.:  And Then There Were None

In retrospect, my hometown Jewish community-owned weekly newspaper picked a poor week to refer in its editorial Wednesday to “West Bank settlements.”  But our “Jewish Exponent,” of course, is not to blame for the U.N. Security Council’s blasting on Friday of “Israeli settlements” 14-0 with a U.S. abstention.  But it is important to lay the blame, because, as the saying goes, you can’t come to effective grips with an enemy until you articulate who the enemy is.  So I’ll start with that.  As Pogo would tell us, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Our, the Jewish people’s, spectacular failure to make our case to the world that the land of Israel, including such intrinsic parts as Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, is the homeland of the Jews, not the Arabs, did not begin on Friday at the U.N.  It did not begin with our failure to make our case over the past eight years to Obama.  It began a long time ago.  What I would like to do this week, with your leave, and in hopes of awakening us to do better, is cite a half-dozen critical points at which we should determinedly have made our Jewish homeland case but did not.

[1]  Zionists’ failure to make the case the Yishuv wrote their “real title deeds”

In his 1971 book Whose Land?  A History of the Peoples of Palestine, British historian James Parkes bitterly criticized Zionists for not making the case that the continuous tenacious post-biblical presence of the homeland’s Jews, the Yishuv, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  Parkes wrote that the omission allowed those ill-disposed toward the Jewish homeland “to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry in trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that happened in the intervening period.”

Katz in Battleground, acknowledging Parkes, wrote that “the gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.”

Added to that, the state of Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman destruction of Jewish Judaea.  Every ruler in between was a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.  And Jews have again been Jerusalem’s majority population since pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule times.

[2]  Jews’ surrender of equity in the name “Palestinian”

David Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and its ground-breaking “Eye On The Media” column, pointed out over and over that during the Mandate the term “Palestinian” was used mostly in reference to Palestine’s Jews.  His examples included, e.g., the Palestine Electric Company, the Palestine Philharmonic and the Palestine Post, still the incorporated name of his own paper, by then known as the Jerusalem Post.

The Associated Press once acknowledged (12/11/11) that during the Mandate, “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.”

The United Nations, in its partition resolution of 1947, referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Bar-Illan wrote that it was mainly after the 1967 war that the mantle “Palestinian” began in earnest to be applied exclusively to Palestinian Arabs.  There were voices in the Jewish community urging against Jewish joinder in this renaming.  My recollection is that ZOA’s Morton Klein held out among the last of those warning against Jewish relinquishment of Jewish equity in “Palestinian.”  This gratuitous relinquishment opened the door to the mainstream media writing about the U.N. endeavoring to divide Palestine between Jews and Palestinians, into “Jewish and Palestinian” states.  (What the U.N. actually wrote, over and over in its partition resolution was “Arab and Jewish states,” not “Palestinian” and Jewish states.)

[3]   American Jews’ failure to confront MSM distortion of history

This week’s #834 completes sixteen years of this weekly media watch, which began, along with the current millennium, the first week of January 2001.  This Knight-Ridder paragraph on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer (1/4/2001) was the first mainstream media misstatement of the Arab war against Israel that this media watch pleaded with our community to counter:

“[Under President Clinton’s plan] Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel.  In exchange, Palestinians would gain ….

The “millions” was beaten back, mostly by CAMERA, by 2004, but the rest of this distortion of history – seemingly unilateral displacement of Arabs (the Palestinians) by “the creation of Israel,” or “the war that followed the creation of Israel” remains to this day.

[4]  American Jews’ failure to contest President Obama’s characterization of 1948  in 2009

Addressing the whole world from Cairo in June 2009, President Obama associated “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland” with persecution of Jews around the world for centuries, culminating in the Holocaust.  One can just hear the Iranians sneering “So why should the Palestinians suffer?”

And at Cairo, President Obama declared:

“It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

[5]  American Jews’ failure to contest President Obama’s abandonment of 242 in 2011

Post-1967 war U.N. resolution 242 called on Israel to retreat, not to the 1949 ceasefire lines, but to “secure and recognized boundaries,” and, however legalistic our pointing to the absence of the word “the” in “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” may seem in average Westerners’ eyes, its omission was fought over and is a key part of the resolution’s intent.

In a major address in 2011, President Obama, playing on resolution 242’s use of words, interpreted them, to Israel’s great detriment, very differently:

“I believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both sides.”

At least, the President, in referencing the 1949 military-only ceasefire lines, referred to them as “the 1967 lines,” not “borders,” which carry an international law gravitas which military ceasefire lines (not least those obliterated by renewed fighting between the same sides) lack.  But the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one MSM newspaper, headlined at the top of page 1 (5/20/11):

“Obama Maps a Peace Path”

“In a major speech, he said a starting-point for Israeli-Palestinian talks should be the borders set before the 1967 war ….”

[6]  Israel’s failure to adopt the Levy Commission Report

In 2012, the government of Israel commissioned a legal study, chaired by former high court Justice Levy, of Israel’s rights to build homes for Jews in Judea-Samaria.  The commission’s report, documenting the legal basis on which Israel is not “occupying” Judea-Samaria,  has never been officially adopted by Israel’s government, but, in the words of the website thelevyreport.org, which ring particularly loud this particular start-of-Hannukah weekend, “it provides Israel with a legal vehicle for asserting her rights in Judea and Samaria,” and that “for too many years now, Israel’s true situation has been buried under an avalanche of lies to which there has not been sufficient response.”  In a classic of understatement, the website says: “Many people have very mistaken ideas about Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria.”

Summing Up

Well, those are six, I think telling, times when we didn’t effectively make our Jewish homeland case to the world.  The result of those failures had been, if you don’t count the Marshall Islands, all of one state in the world, the United States, standing by Israel, when push really really came to shove, at the U.N.  But Friday, then there were none.

Today, the world, except for us, is divided into two camps on Israel, both of which, in the words of the U.N. on Friday, “will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations”  [numbered paragraph 3]. The difference between the two camps is whether driving the Jewish homeland back to, sans-historic-Jerusalem, nine-miles-wide-in-the-most-populated-middle 1949 Auschwitz ceasefire lines marks the end of the international obsession with Israel, or only the end of the beginning.

If we believe that the Jewish homeland extends beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines into which the world would drive it, to include the hill-country heartland of Judea-Samaria, and Jerusalem beyond those once-ceasefire lines, we have to affirmatively make the homeland case without which no one else will make it for us. We can begin by condemning use by those on our side of the very dirty-words designed to delegitimize the homeland of Jews.  If you want a list of those words, starting with, e.g., “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem” [numbered paragraph 1], you just have to read Friday’s U.N. resolution.