#841 2/12/17 This Week: Evidence of the Depth of the Hole in which We’re In, and of the Media Digging It Deeper

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A pro football player this week, hardly alone in holding such a view in the universe, commented on “the Palestinians, who have called this land home for thousands of years.”  Where do Westerners come by such views?  From our acquiescence in mainstream Western media misportrayal of respective Jewish and Arab homeland equities in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. 

 Just This Week the mainstream media reiterated multiple Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives.  We must stop acquiescing, if we are to preserve our homeland claim and convince others of its reality.

This Week:  Evidence of the Depth of the Hole that We’re In, and of the Media Digging It Deeper

I wasn’t aware of Israel’s Pigskin Diplomacy Plan to make visiting NFL players “ambassadors of good will” for the Kosher State until I saw this week on the internet that three of the participants in the forthcoming trip have backed out after seeing how Israel intended to portray their visit, one of them stating:

 “When I go to Israel – and I do plan to go – it will be to see not only Israel but also the West Bank and Gaza so I can see how the Palestinians, who have called this land home for thousands of years, live their lives.”

I do not blame these professional athletes for saying, and presumably believing, that “the Palestinians have called this land home for thousands of years,” and hence likely believing the corollary, that Jews have not.  I blame us, for allowing the Jewish homeland’s foes and the Western media, without vociferous protest from us, to sow in Western peoples’ minds that Arabs in Palestine are “the” Palestinians, that Jewish connection to “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem dates from “their capture by Israel in 1967,”  that “Judea and Samaria” are “biblical names for the West Bank,” and that Jewish presence in “the West Bank and East Jerusalem” is “Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.”

When was the last time the mainstream Western media used each of these Jewish homeland-delegitimizing expressions?  This Week, e.g., in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq).

“Judea and Samaria” as “a biblical name” for “the West Bank”

An AP article in this Wednesday’s Philly Inquirer (Inq, 2/6/17, A12), on a new Israeli law on compensation for Arabs who prove title to unused property, believed to have been public, that had been built on by Jews, quoted an Israeli cabinet minister who referred to the affected territory as “Judea and Samaria” as having used “a biblical name for the West Bank.”  [emphasis added]

I emailed a letter Wednesday “to the editor” of the Inquirer (receipt acknowledged, but that was as far as it got), that “Judea and Samaria,” which indeed are Hebrew-origin biblical names, remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, including by the U.N. in 1947 [“the boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”], and that the AP and Inq’s relegating of these millennia-used names to just “biblical” names hides from readers their continued post-biblical use, a continuity reflected in the State of Israel being the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.

AP and Inq readers have a right to know that “West Bank” was coined, post-1948 invasion, by Jordan to disassociate the Jewish homeland’s hill country heartland from Jewish connection, for the same reason that the Romans, eighteen hundred years earlier, had renamed what had been Jewish Judaea as “Palestine,” not in tribute to Arafat’s ancestors, but the long-gone non-Arab Philistines, who’d been dispatched centuries before by the same Assyrian Empire that had destroyed the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel and all but finished off the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah.

“West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, “captured by Israel in 1967”

Tuesday (Inq, 2/7/17, A5) the Inq ran an AP article on Netanyahu’s meeting with British PM May, in which it wrote:

“The Palestinians claim the West Bank and East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as parts of a future state.”

It is a shanda for Jews to acquiesce, and worse, even join in the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives permeating this incessantly invoked mainstream media misstatement.  Here’s four:

[1]  “The Palestinians”:  Media-bias fighter Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and its path-making “Eye On the Media” column, reiterated time and again that during the Mandate the term “Palestinian” applied mostly to Palestine’s Jews, not its Arabs.  The Associated Press (12/11/11) has acknowledged that during the Mandate, “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.”  The United Nations’ 1947 partition resolution called Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities “the two Palestinian peoples.”

[2 and 3]  The monikers “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem:  There’s a reason Arabs and Westerners who support them against the Jewish homeland claim insistently say “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem – it divorces Jewish connection to them.  The tongues of Jews who join in this should cleave to the roofs of their mouths.

[4]  “Captured by Israel in 1967”:  By us, these integral, key, parts of the Jewish homeland were “liberated” by Israel in 1967, but you can’t convince anyone, football players who believe that “the Palestinians have called this land home for thousands of years” included, of that, unless you get through to them a millennia-long homeland Jewish connection.  We don’t start by averting our eyes from the media’s insistent “captured [sometimes, lovingly, “seized”] by Israel in 1967.”

“Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land”

Tuesday’s AP article characterized “the Trump administration” as being “perceived as sympathetic to Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.”  It also reported, as though referring to what’s uncontested fact, that during Netanyahu’s visit with British PM May at Downing Street, a “small group of protesters” there called for “an end to Israel’s 50-year occupation of Palestinian lands.”

We claim that “the territories” are “disputed” between Arabs and Jews, but can you conceive of language more definitively resolving any dispute than calling Jewish presence there “settlements” on “occupied Palestinian land”?

We’ve just been dealt a setback by 2334, in which the U.S. reneged on 242’s resolution that Israel did not have to return to the 1949 ceasefire lines (known to Jewish homeland detractors, and sometimes gratuitously some of us, as “Israel’s 1967 borders”) .  And it may be that President Trump is beginning to show signs of hesitancy in moving the embassy that Candidate Trump, I believe sincerely, did not.  All the more reasons for us to stop acquiescing in all of the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives that permeated even this week’s mainstream media Israel reporting.  Acquiescence melds into laches.