#925 10/14/18 – This Week: Liberals and Us; Meanwhile Back at the Watch: Reuters at Work

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Two topics this week.  First, how to get through to Liberals that they’re increasingly on the wrong side of the Jewish-Arab conflict over western Palestine.  And second, Reuters at work.

This Week:  Liberals and Us

An article by Pamela Geller this week bears directly on email exchanges I’d just had with two regular readers of this mostly media watch.  I think that the article backs me on one, and suggests that my view was incomplete on the other.  The issue – Liberals’ views on Israel and how we might influence those views for the better – is pretty important stuff, so come take a look.

Ms. Geller’s article, “Brown University Celebrates ‘Palestinians’ on ‘Indigenous People’s Day’,” cited that institution’s inclusion of “Palestinians” (Ms. Geller’s quotes in the article’s title) among natives “from Standing Rock to Palestine” who, in Brown University’s words,

“continue to experience the pernicious effects of settler-colonialism on their sovereignty, their health, and their access to their traditional lands and practices.”

Ms. Geller called this a “gratuitous swipe at Israel.”  Swipe, certainly, but this is what Liberals, thanks partly to us, truly and deeply believe – that “the Palestinians” are Palestine’s aboriginal natives.

Which brings me to my two, shortly before reading that article, email exchanges.

One reader emailed me that he belongs to a food co-op which operates in three or four Philly area neighborhoods, one member of which [talk about “gratuitous”] is organizing “BDS” [boycott-divestment-sanctions] against Israel.  This reader sent me his proposed response, seeking my review of his facts, detailing Arab-Jewish conflict history between 1948 and the present.  I quibbled with a couple of his points, but my basic view was that Liberals have neither patience for nor interest in the niceties of such details, but see only “Palestinians” as Palestine’s indigenous natives and Jews as usurper colonial settlers, and that our only potentially effective approach is to endeavor to disabuse them of that.  I think Ms. Geller’s article bears me out.

The other reader expressed agreement with my comment the previous week that it’s critical that support for Israel in the United States be bipartisan.  Who could argue with that?  But I appended to my reply to him my view that today supporters of Israel among Democrats have their work cut out for them.  That’s true, but reading Ms. Geller’s article has left me feeling that my reply to that reader was unjustly and dangerously incomplete.  To restore bipartisan support for Israel in the U.S., all of us have our work cut out for us.  It’s not just Jewish Democrats’ fault that Liberals mistakenly believe that Arabs and not Jews are Palestine’s indigenous natives.

It’s not enough for us to keep pointing to the mountain of beyond-biblical as well as biblical evidence that ancient Jewish homeland history happened – that the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah were real, that the Maccabees’ wresting of renewed ancient Jewish homeland independence from Alexander the Great’s Seleucid successors really happened, that the Jewish homeland’s revolts against Rome were real major wars of that mighty ancient empire.

I think that even the hostile-to-Israel liberal Christian Church hierarchies accept that ancient history, which is part of their heritage too.  But we have to get past what happened after that – the misperception that “the Romans exiled the Jews” and that “they didn’t come back until the late nineteenth century Zionist movement.”  We have to make the case that The Jews Never Left, but remained, even long as a minority, a tenacious homeland-claiming presence in the land; that every Palestine ruler from Bar Kochba’s defeat through the Ottomans – Romans, Byzantines, Ommayad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Turks – was a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that; that Jerusalem-capitaled modern Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Jerusalem-capitaled Jewish Judaea.

Can we really make such a case?  Historian Parkes thought we can (and bitterly criticized us for having not).  Joan Peters wrote in From Time Immemorial:

“Buried beneath the propaganda – which has it that Jews ‘returned’ to the Holy Land after two thousand years of separation, where they found crowds of ‘indigenous Palestinian Arabs’ – is the bald fact that the Jews are indigenous people on that land who never left, but who have continuously stayed on their ‘Holy Land.’”

In my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine [Amazon], I quote Israeli premiers Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu making that point, but I rest on Katz in Battleground:  “The gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.”

Dershowitz rightly says Liberals who believe in democracy, women’s rights, gay rights, etc., should side with Israel.  And Israel invented all kinds of neat stuff, and 242 doesn’t say “the,” etc., etc., but none of this matters to good and honorable people who deeply believe that “the Palestinians” are Palestine’s indigenous natives and that Jews are western colonial settlers.  It sounds perhaps “ultra-nationalist rightwing” to say that Jews are the indigenous natives to Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, but if we don’t get our act together and start saying and meaning that, then driving the Jewish state back to the old perilous 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines will be, in today’s world, just the beginning.

 

Meanwhile, Back at the Watch:  Reuters at Work

Nine hundred twenty-five weeks ago, this newsletter began strictly as a “media watch.”  I’ve broadened its focus over the years, not just because anti-Israel media bias has become, it seems to me, less intense (e.g., in January 2001, the month this media watch began, one newspaper, for example, my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer, carried wire service articles mentioning “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” or the like on Jan 4, Jan 9, Jan 10, Jan 12, Jan 13, Jan 14 and Jan 21), but also because our focus from the beginning has not been to make the mainstream media fairer to Israel, an unlikely consummation however devoutly to be wished, but to awaken our own community to the media’s devastatingly imbalanced dirty words and get us at least to stop joining in using them.

But now there is Reuters this week (Saturday, 10/13/18, dirty words’ emphasis added):

***  It reported on Israeli police investigating “the death of a Palestinian woman in the occupied West Bank, after her husband said he suspected Israeli settlers had pelted their car with rocks.”  I object to contrasting Arab and Jewish residents of Judea-Samaria as “Palestinian” and “Israeli settlers” respectively.  I object to calling Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” and to “the occupied West Bank” in particular.

***  The husband said was driving by a settlement … near the Palestinian city of Nablus ….”  I object to the media contrasting nearby Jewish and Arab communities in Judea-Samaria as “a settlement” and “Palestinian city” respectively.

***  “…Abbas said in a statement … that it was ‘an ugly crime’ perpetrated by settlers.”

***  Reuters went on:  “On Sunday, a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israelis and wounded a third near a West Bank settlement.”  It wasn’t exactly an exclusively Jewish “West Bank settlement.”  It was the Barkan Industrial Park, which an Israeli described as “a bridge of coexistence for decades…. Half the workers here are Arabs, and half are Jews.”  The “Palestinian gunman” was a former employee.

Turning to what Reuters repeatedly called “protests” along the Israeli-Gaza border, Reuters began:

***  “On Friday, Gaza health officials said Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians in protests along Gaza’s border.  Israel said its troops had shot a group who broke through the fence with a bomb and attacked an army post.”  I object to Reuters leading with Israel killing “Palestinians” in “protests” occurring “along” the border.   They weren’t just ordinary peaceable “Palestinians” but attackers who broke through the border fence into Israel.

***  “Around 200 Palestinians have been killed since the border protests began on March 30,” according to PA officials, and that “one Israeli soldier has been killed by a Gaza sniper during the protests, and tracts of Israeli land have been scorched by incendiary kites and balloons sent across the border.”  Again, I object to calling the Arabs killed “Palestinians.”  Their salient attribute was not their Arab ethnicity but their actions at the time.  They were not passive peaceable “protestors” a distance from the border fence picked off by Israeli soldiers at random just for being there, but rushers of the border fence or hurlers of fire weapons etc into Israel.  And “tracts of Israeli land” hardly fairly describes the devastation to inside-Israel forests and farm land caused by these daily relentless cross-border fire-bombings.

***  “The protesters are demanding an end to an Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the enclave …. They also seek the right of return to lands that Palestinians fled or driven from upon Israel’s founding in 1948.”  Among the mainstream western media’s most egregious distortions is its pet “Israel’s founding in 1948.”  Israel was founded three thousand years before 1948.  It gained its independence that year, and with its own homeland army of homeland Jews threw back an instant invasion of multiple Arab states, not bad for a nation that had just been “founded” one day before that invasion.  The Arabs have a claim of return, not “right” of return, and in mentioning this the media should tell readers that Palestinian Arabs fought the Jews before and then alongside the invaders, and that Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.

***  “Israel says the blockade is aimed at preventing weapons from reaching militants, including Hamas.”  “Militants”?  Not exactly.  And if Israel actually “says” the term “militants,” then the media owes readers a direct quote of an Israeli using that word.

***  “The Palestinians want to establish an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – territories that Israel re-captured in the 1967 Middle East war.”  The media should point out that “the Palestinians” already have a “Palestinian state,” Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate with a population the majority of which considers itself “Palestinian,” and that a second Arab Palestinian state, west of the Jordan, would reduce the Jewish Palestinian state on the remaining 22% of the Mandate to 9-miles-wide in the indefensible lowland middle.  “East” Jerusalem existed only between 1948 and 1967 when held by the invading state Jordan.  (“Re-“ captured, though, is interesting.  The media typically just says “captured,” dating Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem to “1967.”)

***  “Settlements Israel has built in the West Bank, where Palestinians have limited self-rule, are deemed illegal by most countries.  Israel disputes this.”  It is true that most of the world doesn’t accept the legitimacy of Israeli “settlements” in “the West Bank” or, btw, “East” Jerusalem.  See, e.g., UNSC 2334: “Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.”  The only answer:  “They’re not ‘settlements.’  It’s not ‘the West Bank’ and ‘East’ Jerusalem.  And Palestinian Arabs aren’t ‘The Palestinians.’  Israeli Jews are Palestinians too, and, as the land’s still-present indigenous people when the Romans renamed Judaea as Palestine, Palestine’s Jews were Palestinians first.”

We have to say and mean these things as relentlessly as “protesters” daily crash the Israel-Gaza border fence and launch fire balloons and kites and terror tunnels into Israel.