#840 – 2/5/17 Alas, Unforced Errors We Made This Week in Making Our Case to the World

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Both sides saw much in White House Press Secretary Spicer’s short statement this week on ‘Israeli settlements’ that they claim show Trump backing their own view on the subject.  But whichever is your own view, focus with me for a few minutes on unforced errors pro-Israel commentators made this week in making our Jewish homeland case to the world.

Alas, Unforced Errors We Made This Week in Making Our Case To The World

The Washington Post  Thursday (“Trump Warns Israel That New Settlements “‘May Not Help’ Achieve Middle East Peace,” 2/2/17) is likely right that what happened this week is that the White House thought that an unauthorized leak by “an unnamed senior [U.S.] administration official” to the Jerusalem Post that criticized Israeli “settlement” activity “went too far,” and had White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer issue a short statement “in an attempt to dial it back.”

Passages in the Talmud have received less intense scrutiny than Spicer’s statement this week.  The New York Times et ilk (see, e.g., Jonathan Tobin in National Review, 2/4/17) gleefully salivated that Trump was adopting “pillars” of Obama’s foreign policy.  Pro-Israel pundits (see, e.g., “Israel, Settlements and the Media,” Podhoretz in Commentary, 2/5/17) saw the opposite, Trump not criticizing new housing within existing “settlements,” but exclusively, in Spicer’s words, “construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders.”  The currently announced new housing is within existing communities, and even new housing beyond that was not condemned in the Spicer statement as illegal, illegitimate and fattening.  It just “may not be helpful” in achieving peace.

I go with the latter view, but what I think we non-tea leaves readers should focus on this week is the extent to which many Jewish homeland advocates damage our own case, including this week, by using the delegitimizing terms being foisted on the world by our homeland’s foes and the media.  Three this-week examples:

#1:  A Begin-Sadat Center perspectives paper dated last Sunday (1/29/17), “A Truth-telling Strategy To Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” is an excellent article, arguing inter alia that Israel is not “occupying” what is wrongly-called “Palestinian territory.”  It predates the Spicer statement storm by a few days, but whether Israel is “occupying Palestinian territory” is what the Spicer statement storm is all about.

Unfortunately, by me, this otherwise excellent article’s persuasive power is dulled at least a bit by its use of terms with pejorative connotation.

For example, while it declares that there is not and never was “such a thing as ‘Palestinian territory,” it refers to the bulk of the inhabitants of that territory as “the Palestinians.”  If the Palestinians don’t have Palestinian territory in a place called ‘Palestine’ [which, by us, is the truth], where then do they have it?  Dore Gold pointed out recently the difficulty we have in getting across to ordinary people that the U.N.’s use of “territory” and not “the territory,” in 242 is not just legalistic.  Do we not face the same difficulty in telling ordinary people that “the Palestinians” have no ‘Palestinian territory’ in ‘Palestine,’ that maybe we should stop calling these Arabs ‘the Palestinians’?  See U.N., 1947, calling Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” a mantle worn three millennia longer by Palestine’s Jews than its Arabs.

This BESA article says that “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)” is disputed, not “Palestinian,” territory, but that Israel “seized” it in the 1967 war, omitting in that statement millennia of prior Jewish connection.

It says “the most recent sovereigns before the West Bank came into dispute were the British Mandate from the League of Nations to promote a Jewish national home (1922-48) and the Ottoman Empire (1517-1917),” but omits that neither of them called it “West Bank.”  See Ettinger, Israel Hayom, 12/16/11:

“In April 1950, the Jordanian occupation renamed Judea/Samaria as ‘the West Bank’ to assert Jordanian rule and to expunge Jewish connection to the cradle of Jewish history. Until 1950, all official Ottoman, British and prior records referred to ‘Judea and Samaria’ and not to the ‘West Bank.’”

And see the United Nations in 1947:  “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”

#2Times of Israel on Friday (“Danon: US Statement on Settlements is No Trump Uturn,” 2/3/17) reported on Israel’s U.N. Representative Danny Danon’s tea-leaves reading of Spicer’s statement.  The article directly quoted Yesha Council spokesperson Revivi’s statements that “Nothing is more natural and morally just than Jews building in Judea.”  Not taking a cue from such lucidity, it went on in the next paragraph to state that “Netanyahu on Wednesday announced plans for the establishment of a new West Bank settlement” (which it noted as “the first new one to be built in some 25 years”), and a couple paragraphs after that added: “Settlements in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem are viewed by nearly all the international community as illegal under international law…”  [emphasis added]

#3:  Editor Podhoretz in Commentary this morning argued that Spicer’s ‘settlements’ statement brought the U.S. position back to what it had been before Obama, under Bush, and quoted Bush’s celebrated (by us, anyway) statement to Sharon in 2004 that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”  [emphasis added]

Notwithstanding such language lucidity by an American president, Editor Podhoretz went on in his very next statement:  “This language was an acceptance of the reality that the most populous Israeli settlements beyond the pre-1967 borders would certainly remain in Israeli hands at the end of any successful peace negotiation with the Palestinians.”  [emphasis added]  [For any who don’t grasp the difference’s significance, international political borders have an international law gravitas that mere military ceasefire lines, which is how the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly defined the old ‘green line’ that it drew, don’t.]

I could go on from the other articles this week that I (virtually) clipped, but it would be hard to top a pro-Israel writer following up, in his very next sentence after quoting a U.S. President refreshingly referencing “the armistice lines of 1949” with his own reference to Israel’s “pre-1967 borders.”