#844 – 3/5/17 Dirty Words List Status and an Addition

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week, we enumerated a “dirty words” list of mainstream media pet expressions in Israel reporting.  We asked for additions, and some of you sent some.  This week, a brief progress report on the dirty words list, and an addition:  “The Romans Exiled the Jews,” and why that’s wrong and why we have to contest it.

 ‘Dirty Words’ List Status and an Addition

Mention “media watch” to most folks, re reporting on anything, and they’ll think in terms of endless letter-writing “to the editor” challenging misstated and omitted facts in endless particular stories.  Salutary as such particular news article-focused letter writing is, it hasn’t achieved balanced Israel reporting.  And that’s because a loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives permeates mainstream media Israel reporting.  Worse than that, we ourselves use some of these terms that were designed by their coiners to contribute to the Jewish homeland’s delegitimization.

Last week’s #843 enumerated a list –

Dirty Words – Anti-Israel Pejoratives in Mainstream Media Israel Reporting

– categorized by subject:

The 1948 War and its Aftermath

The 1967 War and its Aftermath

The “Peace Process”

Ongoing Conflict and Terrorism

Whose Land Is This, Anyway?

Under each, we listed distorted expressions the media repeatedly uses and said, with the example of the media calling “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical name” for “the West Bank,” that we’re fleshing out this list in two ways: first, in a short document with the imbalanced expression in red, a paragraph or so of explanation of why it’s imbalanced in black, and a corresponding balanced expression in blue; and, secondly, with a longer background document with historical and legal documentation and citations of balanced and imbalanced reporting.

We asked for your comments and additional imbalanced expressions, and a number of you sent some.  The project of putting together the Dirty Words list is ongoing.  One thing we’re thinking of doing is putting a draft of the Dirty Words list, with the brief explanation and alternative balanced expression, up on our website, www.factsonisrael.com.  Our site has the motto “If you forfeit the language, you forfeit our heritage and history,” and has a Loaded Lexicon section, a videos section including “10 Misleading Expressions” in Israel reporting, the media watches, A-Z Facts On Israel, and links to published articles by us and others.  Putting the Dirty Words list there would allow you and others to participate in its completion.

 

“The Romans Exiled Judaea’s Jews”

An erroneous expression we’re adding this week under the “Whose Land Is This, Anyway?” heading is the often-expressed misimpression that “the Romans exiled the Jews.”  Jimmy Carter used it in the opening “Historical Chronology” of his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid book,

“135 [CE]:  Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile.  The Romans name the province Syria Palaestina”

His Palestine “Historical Chronology” doesn’t mention Jews again until 1917.  President Carter is, well, President Carter.  But, alas, Daniel Gordis repeatedly references “exile” in his beautifully written Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn.  I do not understand it, but it seems to me we gratuitously give up a strong homeland claim in not making eminent British historian James Parkes’ argument that the continuous, tenacious, organized homeland presence of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Israel, all through the long, dark foreign-rule post-biblical centuries, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

I say “adding this week,” but “continuous post-biblical presence” is not a new thing with me.  Some years ago, I wrote a book on it.  But now I’m reading Gordis’ book, and his references to “exile” and omission of a “Hadrian-to-Herzl” chapter reawakened my mystification that we ignore this.  So, here, while you stand on one leg, is everything you ever needed to know about the post-biblical presence of the Jewish People in Palestine, by those wonderful folks who bring you this media watch.

One written-in-stone proof that the Romans, upon defeating the Bar-Kochba Revolt in 135, did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews is the increasingly unearthed remains of Roman-Byzantine era synagogues, and other evidences of continued openly Jewish life, all over the land.  Another is Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century (reputably ended over his violation of a ‘no more new synagogues’ ban).  Another is the Mishnah, followed by the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud, monumental Jewish religious works compiled in the homeland by sages who lived there.  A further proof is that a self-mustered militia of some 20,000 or more homeland Jews fought alongside the invading Persians in 614 against the ruling Byzantines, the hated-Romans’ political heirs.  This was half-a-millennium after Roman extinguishment of Jewish Judaea.

Four-and-a-half centuries of foreign rule by Muslim dynasties – Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid – with a few interruptions followed.  It began as Arab but progressively faded to Turk.  Archeologist Bahat includes in his Forgotten Generations a map of ninth century Palestine showing some one hundred Jewish communities and sites with Jewish communities.  This is what we know of today, a millennium later, of this place the size of New Jersey.

In 1099 came the European Crusaders, who wrote of their battle at Jerusalem that they were confronted by “Jew, Turk and Arab,” of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  Crusader Albert of Aachen wrote of Haifa, “which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians,” alone, for a month.  The great poet Yehuda Halevi and the great scholar Maimonides were among the Jews returning home, despite the Crusader ban, during Crusader rule.  A Christian pilgrim, one Saewulf, who came in 1102 on the Crusaders’ heels, wrote of “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and Sea.

The Crusaders were defeated in 1187 by Turks led by Saladin, a Kurd.  During Saladin’s Ayyubid kingdom that followed, 300 rabbis moved from England and France, were received by the king, apparently Saladin’s brother, built synagogues and colleges, encouraging immigration.  Murderous Mongol and other invasions soon followed, but in 1250 Turk-Circassian Mamluks gained control and ruled, first from Turkey and then Egypt, for over 200 years.  My book includes a timeline, derived from multiple sources, of Jewish life in Jerusalem during Mamluk rule.  And there is surviving documentation of Jews’ life, as Jews, elsewhere in the land.

Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine for 400 years, 1517 – 1917.  There is much documentation of Jews’ life in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land.  Jews again became Jerusalem’s majority population during 1800’s Ottoman times.  1800’s sources called Jerusalem’s Muslim population some one-third, even only one-quarter, of the city’s population.

Does it make sense for us to ignore all this Jewish homeland history in a Palestine-obsessed world in which even we go around calling historic Jerusalem “East” Jerusalem, in which Arabs are “residents” and Jews are “settlers,” and calling Judea and Samaria “the West Bank,” in which Arabs have “towns and villages” and Jews have “settlements”?  And all this in a Palestine in which even we call its Arabs “the Palestinians”?