#904 5/20/18 – This Week: Split Screens, Split Responsibilities To Respond

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Netanyahu is right in telling Fox’s Judge Jeanine that America moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a major historic event in homeland Jewish history.  The media’s split-screen portrayal of this along with Hamas-staged rioting in Gaza wrongly denigrates this historic significance.  Contending against Jewish homeland misportrayal by the media in the West is at least partly the task of Jewish homeland supporters in the West, and we also must recognize that President Truman’s and President Trump’s recognitions, and all the wars fought to date, do not complete our historic task of fulfilling the dream of generations for Israel’s redemption.  A final border 9 miles-wide in the lowland middle is existentially vulnerable.  The internationally-recognized Jewish homeland has to include Judea-Samaria.

This Week:  Split Screens, Split Responsibilities To Respond

In his interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro (“Justice With Judge Jeanine”), broadcast last night on her weekly Saturday night show, Israeli premier Bibi Netanyahu stated the significance of the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel this week from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  Bibi put U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital right up there with President Truman’s instant [de facto] recognition of the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth exactly seventy years ago, and with Persian King Cyrus’ decree twenty-five hundred years earlier allowing the Babylonian-exiled Jews to return and rebuild their Jerusalem Temple.

Up there with Cyrus?  President Truman, who responded to comparisons of Cyrus’ and his own decrees with “I am Cyrus,” thought so.  And certainly, taken together, President Truman’s and Trump’s recognitions pack historical punch.

And yet, widespread western media “split-screen” coverage of the embassy move celebrations alongside Hamas-instigated rioting on the Israel-Gaza border had Israeli politicians – e.g., MK Nachman Shai and Deputy FM Tzipi Hotovely – offering views on what Israel should do to get fairer western media coverage.  Shai said Israel should operate “a 24-hour emergency public diplomacy headquarters accompanying the press and getting out Israel’s side of the story.”  (JPost, 5/19/18, “IDF Clashes With Hamas on ‘Nakba’ Day”).  Hotovely seemed resigned to Israel continuing “to get bad press due to the world’s hypocrisy,” and said the Foreign Ministry had fully briefed ambassadors on Hamas’ intentions and actions and on the leaflets Israel had dropped (ibid).

I take another view.  I think that while political, military, etc., decisions are Israel’s, not diaspora Jews’ decisions to make, as, e.g., Jonathan Tobin has pointed out, responsibility for responding to western media et ilk misportrayals of the Jewish homeland rests as well with all who favorably consider the Land of Israel the homeland of the Jews.  I.e., the government of Israel can do whatever it decides it needs to do regarding Judea-Samaria, except call it “West Bank.”  And we western diapora Jews should stand up, e.g., to the western media split-screening this week’s commemoration of moving the U.S. Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with blaming Israel for Hamas-caused killings (50 of the 62 killed were Hamas-admitted Hamas members) of rioters storming the border.

In split-screening the two occurrences, giving them equal prominence, the media enabled the terror group Hamas, sworn to the Jewish homeland’s destruction, to drag down to staged riot control level public perception of an historical Jewish homeland recognition event worthy of Cyrus.  It is reminiscent of the media’s longtime moral equivalence practice of labeling Israel targeting terrorists who’d just murdered Israeli civilians not as Israeli “response” but as Israeli “retaliation,” and of headlining “Israel Kills Palestinians” instead of “Israel Kills Terrorists Who’d Murdered Civilians.”

Whether Deputy Foreign Minister Hotovely is right or wrong in her assessment that Israel will
“continue to get bad press due to the world’s hypocrisy,” the front line in contending against bad coverage of the Jewish homeland in the western press is in the West, and western supporters of the Jewish homeland must join Israel in manning it.  We have to begin by washing out of our own mouths all the dirty words and pejorative expressions loaded against the Jewish homeland of Israel – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … settlers and settlements … occupied territories … founded in 1948 [as though artificially and out-of-the-blue] … 1967 borders [as opposed to mere 1949 ceasefire lines] … Palestinian [instead of two-sided] refugee issue … [Palestinian Arabs as] THE Palestinians … etc.

Netanyahu had it right when he told Judge Jeanine about the millennia-long centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish peoplehood, and of the immense historic significance to us of both President Truman’s and President Trump’s recognitions.  I will admit that I approached the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign with a cynical “Well, it’s the Republicans’ turn to lie to us about moving the embassy.”  And now President Trump has done it, restoring, for the moment at least, a modicum of credibility to that, alas, normally weakest of all bases for voting for a candidate – “Campaign Promise.”

Finally, we have to keep in perspective how far along, after these U.S. recognitions and all the wars since 1948, we actually are in fulfillment of that Dream of Generations for the Redemption of Israel.  For seventy years, as of this week, we have had the restored nation state.  This week America moved its embassy to Jerusalem. [but, n.b., the original Presidential statement recognized that Israel’s capital is “IN Jerusalem,” emphasis added].  But as this week’s Gaza border events once again show, a final border 9-miles-wide in the lowland middle would be existentially vulnerable.  We have to have Judea-Samaria.  We have to say Jordan Is Palestine.