#882 – 11/26/17 – This Week: A Sampling of Mainstream Media Anti-Israel Imbalances So Far in 2017

This Week:  A Sampling of Mainstream Media Anti-Israel Imbalances So Far in 2017

This week, in preparation for a talk my co-author, Lee Bender, and I are threatening to give Tuesday evening, our first in a while, on mainstream media anti-Israel imbalance, based on our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, I refreshed my part, “10 Misleading Expressions,” with some not-nice-things Western media bigs have said about Israel so far in 2017.

The Lie that Never Dies:  “Millions of Palestinian Refugees and Their Descendants”

Eighteen years ago, this media watch’s First Crusade (so to speak), starting from Alert #1, was against the mainstream media’s incessant repetition of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “Israel’s creation” or “the war that followed Israel’s creation.”

Never mind that Israel wasn’t artificially “created” in 1948, but declared its independence that year, and that a homeland army of homeland Jews threw back the instant invasion, bent on Israel’s destruction, by multiple neighboring Arab states.  Never mind that Palestine’s population at the time was less than 2 million, a good third of it Jews.  Never mind that in 2003 the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one mainstream media paper, acknowledged to this media watch that “Mr. Verlin is right in saying there are not millions of refugees from the 1948 war…,” that in 2004 CAMERA and others extracted such acknowledgement from Big media bigs. Never mind that in that Arab invasion-started 1948 war and its wake, more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, absorbed by Israel, were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands, than Arabs left tiny Israel.  Never mind that in 1948 the name “Palestinian” still applied to the land’s Jews and Christians as well as Muslims.

Never mind any of this.  Yet again this year, 2017, the ubiquitous Associated Press told Western readers (AP in, e.g., Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/22/17), that peace talks have been plagued by

“… deep disagreements over key issues such as borders, dueling claims to Jerusalem, and the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”  [emphasis added]

“Judea and Samaria, the ‘Biblical Name’ for the West Bank”

If the mainstream media no longer repeats a drumbeat of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” with the frequency it once did, it has found a replacement:  “Judea-Samaria is the biblical name for the West Bank.”  E.g.:

***  On 2/1/17 the New York Times quoted Israeli Defense Minister Lieberman using “Judea and Samaria,” which the Times told readers is “the biblical name for the West Bank.”  (cited by Israeli blogger Yisrael Medad, 10/11/17, emphasis added)

***  The AP, 2/6/17, quoted an Israeli cabinet minister saying “Judea and Samaria,” adding that he’d used “a biblical name for the West Bank.”  (emphasis added)

***  AP 2/8/17:  “Using a biblical name for the West Bank ….” (emphasis added)

***  AP, 3/7/17:  “Judea and Samaria is the biblical term for the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.”  (emphasis added)

***  Los Angeles Times, 6/8/17, quoted a “settler” saying “Judea and Samaria, which the LA Times told readers were “the biblical names for the West Bank.”  (emphasis added)

What’s wrong with this is two things.  First, while “Judea and Samaria” are Hebrew-origin biblical names, they aren’t just biblical names.  They remained in use all through the centuries, including by the United Nations in 1947:  “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”  It was “West Bank” that was invented by the invader [Trans-]Jordan in 1950, for the same reason the Romans, eighteen hundred years earlier, renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in the first place – to disassociate the Jewish homeland from Jews.  So instead of it being Israeli Jews who are using quaint millennia-out-of-usage names for what’s been the places’ actual names since biblical times, it’s been the media hyping the lineage of “West Bank” from CE 1950 origin back for bogus millennia.

The second thing wrong with the media singling out individual Israelis as using quaint names is that, for most Israelis the names “Judea and Samaria” are still these places’ real names.  The Washington Post last month (10/10/17, quoted by Israeli blogger Medad, 10/11/17):

“… the West Bank, which most Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria ….”

Medad further cited the Christian Science Monitor back on 9/29/09:  “… the northern West Bank (known in Israel as Samaria)” and “… the southern West Bank (known as Judea).”

In researching my first book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, I encountered Prof. Wilken in The Land Called Holy (pp 196-97) writing that after the Romans’ destruction of Judaea, the homeland Jews refused to use the Romans’ names for places in the country.  “In their view these names were ephemeral, without root, and, in the face of the eternity of Israel, would one day vanish.”

Israel’s “Controversial Annexation of East Jerusalem, which Formerly Belonged to Jordan”

 The Los Angeles Times wrote on 6/8/17 of

“…[Israel’s] controversial annexation of East Jerusalem, which formerly belonged to Jordan.”

It would be difficult to construct a more biased comparison of respective Jewish and Jordanian equities in historic Jerusalem.  In the past 3,000 years, Jersusalem has been the capital of three homeland states – Judah, Judaea and Israel, all of them Jewish.  It has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule.  Palestinian Arabs have not ruled Jerusalem for one day in history, and foreign Arabs, until the 1948 Jordanian invasion, only between 638 and 1099, and much of that under control of the Turks.  And as for Jerusalem having “formerly belonged to Jordan,” its 1948 seizure was recognized only by England, Iraq and Pakistan.  Its occupation of the historic part of the city lasted but 19 years, ended half-a-century ago by its eviction by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.  “Belonged”?  Yeah, right.

But make no mistake.  Neither the media, nor the United States, nor the world recognizes the Jewish claim to Jerusalem.

***  AP, 3/17/17:  “… settlement construction in east Jerusalem, where more than 200,000 Israelis now live.”

***  U.S. State Department, Friday, 7/29/16:

“We are deeply concerned by reports that the Government of Israel has published tenders for 323 units in East Jerusalem settlements.”

***  These are the words of UNSC Res. 2334, adopted 14-0-1, the U.S. shamefully abstaining, at the end of 2016:  It proclaimed that the U.N.

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,”

And demanding

“Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem ….”  (emphasis added)

What’s our answer to all this?  Lee and I tried to give one in an article we wrote on Algemeiner, “Media’s Lexicon Poison Public Perceptions of Israel,” back in December 2013.  We were honored by it being linked and summarized in the Conference of Presidents’ Daily Alert.  Here’s how the experts at all this summarized what we said of “East Jerusalem”:

“East Jerusalem” – The Jewish connection with “East Jerusalem” extends back to King David. Over the ensuing 3,000 years, the city has been the capital of three native states – Judah, Judea, and Israel. The two Jewish temples stood as Jerusalem centerpieces for a millennium. Throughout two millennia of foreign rule, Jews relentlessly returned to Jerusalem whenever the foreign invaders exiled them, again becoming Jerusalem’s majority during 19th century Ottoman rule. Throughout those millennia, nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.”

This is the case we must make.