#903 5/13/18 – This Week: “…the mass displacement of Arabs following Israel’s founding” – Fox News (Yech!)

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Fox News yesterday joined in calling what happened in 1948 ‘the mass displacement of Arabs following Israel’s founding.”  Ouch, but we have to go beyond saying “but there was an Arab invasion,” etc.  We have to make clear that the Land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is the Jewish homeland, that the Two States of the Two-State solution are Israel and Jordan.

This Week:  “… the mass displacement of Arabs following Israel’s founding” – Fox News (Yech!)

What hurt most about actress Natalie Portman’s recent betrayal of Israel, I think, given her background – born in Israel, Harvard educated, research assistant for multiple pro-Israel books’ author liberal Prof. Dershowitz, initial acceptance of Israel Prize, etc. – is that we had reasonably expected better.  Et tu, Brute?, clings as well, I think, to a major Palestinian Arab narrative propaganda plank that ran across the bottom of Fox News Channel viewers’ screens ad nauseam yesterday, which described the “nakba” as

“. . . the mass displacement of Arabs following Israel’s founding”

From Fox, of all mainstream media news mass disseminators, we reasonably expected fairer.  And understand that calling 1948 “Israel’s founding” isn’t just disparaging historic Jewish homeland connection beyond “the Green Line,” but historic Jewish homeland connection period.

Israel was not “founded” or “created” in 1948, as though artificially and out-of-the-blue.  It attained its independence that year, as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  The Arabs who left reborn Israel that year weren’t displaced by Israel’s “founding,” but by a Fox News-unmentioned multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, an invasion thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews (not bad for a state that had been “founded” the day before that invasion).  That displacement of Arabs from Israel was no more a “nakba” than that same era’s displacement of a greater number of indigenously Middle Eastern Jews from Arab and other Muslim lands – also unmentioned by Fox.  And also unmentioned by Fox is that Israel absorbed these Middle Eastern Jews, who with their descendants today comprise half of Israel’s population, were absorbed by Israel, while generations of these Arabs’ descendants remain still today in U.N.-supported “host” countries’ “refugee camps,” including in Arab-controlled portions of a Palestine these “refugees” never left, and in the case of descendants in other “hosts” had never been.

How should we answer this misperception spread by, e.g., Fox News yesterday and by President Obama at Cairo, of seemingly unilateral displacement of “Palestinians” by “Israel’s founding”?  By making the preceding paragraph’s points, certainly, but we have to dig deeper and show that the Land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is the homeland of Jews and not Arabs.

So let’s first state our claim, and then our problem, and then how we might go about solving it.

OUR CLAIM:  Moshe Dann had a clear and compelling JNS article a week ago, “Jordan As Palestine: A Paradigm Shift for a Two-State Solution,” in which he asserted:

     “The problem with ‘the two-state solution’ – creating a sovereign independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River – is that a Palestinian state already exists east of the Jordan River; it’s called Jordan.  Its population is predominantly ‘Palestinian,’ and it is located in the eastern part of what was once called ‘Palestine.’  Demographically and geographically, therefore, Jordan is a Palestinian state.”

OUR PROBLEM is that today very few countries, organizations and people in the world buy into this view.  While questioning the justice, not to say Jewish homeland security, of “the two-state-solution” including a western “Palestinian” state more or less along the green line, may no longer be blasphemy, today most of the world sees “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” as belonging to Arabs, and Jewish claim to it as seeking an unfounded “Greater Israel.”

HOW WE CAN COUNTER THIS is by making the counter argument that diminishing Jewish equity in the original Palestine Mandate, with its recognition of the Jews’ historic connection with Palestine, its Jewish National Home and its call for close settlement of Jews on the land, is creating Lesser Israel; that Two States For Two Peoples have been created out of the post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate; that what happened in 1948 was the Jewish state’s, not “founding,” but reattainment of sovereignty; and that what happened in 1967 was not Israel “capturing” (“seizing,” as e.g., the LA Times puts it) Arab lands, but, as Israeli poet Nathan Alterman put it at the end of the Six Day War, the State and Land of Israel becoming again coextensive:

“…The significance of this victory lies in the fact that it has actually obliterated the distinction between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel.  For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple the Land of Israel is in our hands.  Henceforth the State and the Land are a single identity ….” (quoted in Bondy, Zamora and Bashan, Mission Survival, p. 415)

There’s no substitute for our forthrightly making our claim that the Land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is ours and not theirs.  We have to stop calling Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,”  historic Jerusalem “East” Jerusalem, Jews in the Land of Israel over the old 1949 ceasefire line “settlers,” their residences “settlements,” their presence “occupation,” their Palestine adversaries “The Palestinians,” etc., etc.