WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: This summer I criticized some American Jewish leaders’ criticisms of some aspects of Israel’s new Nation-State law as treading on Israel’s sovereign rights in a world that respects those rights most in the breach. But what rights and obligations, in this newsletter’s context word-choice obligations, flow from the unique relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jews? I say we must both use terms, which too often both of us don’t, evincing, as the Nation-State law put it, the State of Israel in the land of Israel as the Jewish people’s State in the historic homeland of the Jews.
Word Choices Demanded of Both Israelis and Diaspora Jews
This summer (#913 and #915) I was among those who criticized American Jewish community leaders who criticized sections of Israel’s newly-adopted Nation-State law that dealt with matters – national language and Jewish communities in Israel as a “national value” – that I believed to be internal concerns of Israel as a sovereign state. (I specifically excluded from that category the law’s “relationship with the Diaspora” clause, though I suggested that our participation in international critique of Israel’s Nation-State law was not the most appropriate of forums for Israel and Diaspora Jews to discuss matters that are just between us.)
Those summer weekly emails left open for a cooler week the question of where we Diaspora Jews do have standing to meddle in affairs connected to Israel, and the rights and obligations that flow from such standing. Let’s make that this week.
I think that the Nation-State law itself, in its very opening words, makes clear where Diaspora Jews’ standing lies, not least respecting the prime focus of this weekly newsletter, our own and Israelis’ consistent use of terminology evincing our Jewish homeland claim.
Israel’s Nation-State law begins:
“A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.” [emphasis added]
It is in “the land of Israel” in which all Jews have a homeland claim, in which “the State of Israel,” in addition to being, like every other nation-state, a sovereign state with inherent internal powers and rights, is in an additional sense a trustee. It acknowledges this in the immediately following section “B”:
“B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”
Where then do we come out vis-à-vis the respective rights and powers of Israel and Diaspora Jewry? Regarding the realm of this weekly newsletter, the State of Israel can do whatever it determines it needs to do regarding Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank,” and likewise with regard to Jerusalem, except to call that part of it, including the historical heart of it, lying across the old 1949 ceasefire line capital-E “East” Jerusalem. Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are inherent parts of the historic land of Israel, and neither we Diaspora Jews nor Israelis themselves should disclaim that historic connection by adopting terminology deliberately designed to delegitimize it.
That said, there are plenty of further terms designed to disparage Jewish presence in parts or all of the land of Israel, and it is inane for Jews here or there to employ them.
“Settlers and Settlements” are dirty words. This is not new. For at least the 18 years that this newsletter has been haranguing Jews to use self-respecting terms and phrases, “settlers” and “settlements” have been dirty words. Back in #64 of 3/24/02, we reported that my hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, had instantly withdrawn its apparently unthinking use of “Palestinian settlements.” It wrote in a Saturday “Clearing the Record”:
“In an Inquirer article Thursday on President Bush’s news conference, the words ‘Palestinian settlements’ were used in reference to attacks by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The attacks were directed at Palestinian towns and refugee camps.”
I embodied my wrath that week in an irate letter to the Inq’s designated hittee of the wrath of irate Jewish and Arab readers, in which I railed against the Inq’s imbalance in contrasting Jewish “settlements” with “Palestinian towns”; its imbalance in calling those Israeli attacks as “directed AT Palestinian towns and refugee camps” instead of “at terrorists IN” those “Palestinian towns and refugee camps”; and at the very reference to Arabs living for half-a-century in Arab-controlled parts of a Palestine they’d never left as living in temporary-sounding “camps” for “refugees.”
The Great Damage done by especially Israel calling its own people “settlers” in Judea-Samaria, and by others calling Jews there and in even parts of Jerusalem “settlers,” is that “settlers” and “settlements” connote the Very Opposite of their being there as of homeland right.
“1967 borders” imbues the old 1967 war-obliterated 1949 ceasefire lines with a sanctity greater than that of their successor 1967 war ceasefire lines. Jews should not elevate the “green line” to that of a sacred site among the Holy Land’s holy places.
“Zionist entity” is a name for Israel its detractors use, not just to avoid saying “Israel,” but to date Jewish connection to the land of Israel to the late nineteenth century-begun Zionist movement. There’s truth in the old quip that “Zionism” was “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.” As Katz noted in Battleground (1985 ed., p. 97), Zionism brought new capacity to a “living movement to the land” that ‘had never ceased.” We ourselves should call Israel, not “the Zionist entity,” but what its Nation-State law called it, “the historic homeland of the Jewish people … the national home of the Jewish people.”
I could of course go on and on. (Lee and I did in our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, and on our website, www.factsonisrael.com (see esp. “Dirty Words” and video “10 Misleading Expressions”). But I’ll end for now with that Mother of All Anti-Jewish-Homeland Misleading Expressions, in which we ourselves, Israeli and Diaspora Jews, are fully complicit – Palestinian Arabs as “THE Palestinians”:
In 1947, the United Nations, in seeking to partition Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State, not a Jewish State and a “Palestinian” State, as the media sometimes puts it (e.g. AP 3/16/08, AP 2/28/09), and used the names “Samaria and Judea,” not “West Bank,” called the Jews (c. 600,000) and Arabs (c. 1 million) of western Palestine “the two Palestinian peoples.” AP 12/11/11: “[During the Mandate] Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.” Indeed, as David Bar-Ilan, editor of the Jerusalem Post and its ground-breaking “Eye On The Media” column, wrote over and over, “Palestinian” was more used by Jews of themselves (e.g., Palestine Post) than by Arabs.
Is it too late to take back Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian”? I say no, given all this and that like “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, “Palestine” and “Palestinian” as exclusively Arab dates not back to the dawn of time but to the mid-twentieth century (indeed, in “Arabs as The Palestinians” case, to the 1960’s, whereas “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem date to just after the 1948 war).