#866 8/6/17 – This Week: Canaanites, CAMERA and the Corner We’ve Painted Ourselves In

 

This Week:  Canaanites, CAMERA and the Corner We’ve Painted Ourselves In

Last week, National Geographic, along with other news sources, reported on a new DNA study claiming that today’s residents of Lebanon are descended from the Canaanites of biblical and earlier times.  CAMERA, the crucial watchdog group relentlessly monitoring the media for accurate reporting on Israel, took issue with the way in which Nat Geo identified today’s place names for where the Canaanites once lived, and sought and obtained a correction.

CAMERA was unquestioningly correct in seeking a Nat Geo correction.  What is questionable by fairness-to-Israel media watchers is whether the “correct” replacements suggested to Nat Geo by CAMERA, which may be the only alternatives in current usage, themselves do fairness to Israel.  I vote they don’t.

Nat Geo Original Version

National Geographic originally wrote:

“According to the results [of the DNA study], Canaanite ancestry is a mix of indigenous populations who settled in the Levant (the region encompassing much of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine) . . . .”  [emphasis added]

CAMERA’s Critique

CAMERA’s July 28 posting, “National Geographic Corrects ‘Palestine’ Terminology,” rightly criticized Nat Geo’s inclusion of “Palestine,” plainly meaning an Arab state west of the Jordan, in a listing of Levant states.  Such a state does not exist (as of 10:45 AM EDT this Sunday morning).  And, even under the “Two-State Solution,” there are many things to be first resolved in “the peace process.”

Yet, neither of the two replacements for “Palestine” proposed by CAMERA to Nat Geo, does justice to Israel either.  CAMERA:

“References to a modern ‘Palestine’ in the West Bank and Gaza are inaccurate and those areas should be referred to as ‘Palestinian territories,’ or simply the West Bank and Gaza. . . .”

“West Bank” was conjured by Jordan in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” [after the long-gone Philistines, not Arafat’s ancestors] eighteen hundred years earlier – to disassociate areas of the Jewish homeland from Jews.  The media says “Judea and Samaria” are “biblical names for today’s West Bank,” but the U.N. used the Hebrew-origin names “Samaria and Judea,” not “West Bank,” in 1947.

Gratuitously counter-productive to the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel as Jews joining in calling Judea and Samaria “the West Bank” may be, it is as nothing compared to Jews gratuitously joining in calling Judea and Samaria “the Palestinian territories.”

National Geographic (I believe, gleefully) took CAMERA up on its suggestion.  CAMERA: “Editors today agreed with CAMERA that a correction was in order, and immediately amended the text to describe the Levant as referring to “modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories.”

But what then should a CAMERA, or any of us, offer as an alternative to “Israel and Palestine,” if not “West Bank” or “Palestinian territories”?  Let me quote you a paragraph from then Prime Minister Begin’s Foreword to the second edition of Samuel Katz’s Battleground:

     “One of the most important services rendered by this book is hinted at in its sub-title: ‘Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.’  The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit.  The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of the Moslem was well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda.  So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.  Battleground provides an incisive corrective to this erosion of the truth.  The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine.  I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.”

I took some flak awhile back for sub-titling my own little book Israel 3000 Years with The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine [emphasis added].  I felt in good company, not just Katz in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, but also Parkes, Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, and Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, all pro-Jewish homeland [emphasis added].

We should not be afraid of “Palestine,” but claim and forcefully assert Jewish equity in it.  We should not concede that part of Palestine west of the Jordan [Trans-Jordan was part, 78%-part, of the original Palestine Mandate] is Arab, as either “Palestine” or “Palestinian territories.”  We should call that part of the land of Israel what it was in fact called for thousands of years, Judea and Samaria, not “the West Bank,” coined to delegitimize Jewish connection in 1950.

I said “should” three times in the preceding paragraph, but the reality is we don’t have much choice.  Eban wasn’t being paranoid in calling the nine-miles-wide in the critical lowland middle 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines “Auschwitz lines.”  Is that what the dream of generations for Israel’s redemption, fulfilled in our lifetime, should amount to, a precarious hopelessly vulnerable 9-miles-wide-in-the-middle homeland ghetto?  Making Parkes’ case that the Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence wrote the Zionists’ real title deeds, we have to state to the world that the Arabs have 78% of the Palestine Mandate and that the defensible 22% west of Jordan, not a sliver of that remainder nine-mile-wide in the heavily-populated lowland middle, unapologetically belongs to the Jews.