WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The words used in common parlance to describe people, places and things change over time. In the case of the Arab-Jewish struggle over Palestine, the changes in our lifetime have been consistently hostile to us. I offer this summary to you not as an academic curiosity in the evolution of English, but as a sinister happening that has to be fought. So come take a look.
As the Words Turn: A Quick Review of Changing Terminology in the Word War Against Israel and Jews
“The Palestinian People”
The Prologue to Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s exhaustive 2017 work, Phantom Nation: Inventing the ‘Palestinians’ as the Obstacle To Peace, notes that it was in 1970 in UNGA resolution 2628 that “the term ‘the Palestinian people’ [in reference exclusively to Arabs in Palestine] made its diplomatic debut,” and that “the rest is history” [well, at least one version of history]. No U.N. document had previously referenced Arabs in Palestine as Palestine’s indigenous people.
But the U.N. had, however, previously used that expression. Its attempted Palestine partition resolution back in 1947 referenced Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.” And the AP at least once (12/11/11) acknowledged that during the Mandate “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.” Some change.
Does it matter who’s called “the Palestinians”? It does when the place you’re fighting over is “Palestine.”
“Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”
The Phantom Nation Prologue further notes that by 1991, when President Bush the Elder decided to convene an international peace conference, “what for decades earlier had been called the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’” had by that time been morphed into the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In a world with rachmones for the little guy, whether it’s hundreds of millions of Arabs fighting a mere few million Israelis or the state of Israel’s army against stateless “Palestinian” people matters in Western public perception.
“Jewish and Palestinian States”
The mainstream media looks back sometimes at what the U.N. had sought to do back in 1947. In the Mother of All Anachronisms, the media says the U.N. had sought to partition Palestine into “Palestinian and Jewish states” (like partitioning Pennsylvania between Pennsylvanians and Jews). Actually, UNGA 181 said “the Arab State and the Jewish State” over and over and over, and “Palestinian State” not at all.
“West Bank”
The western media exclusively calls the land of Israel’s hill country heartland “the West Bank” and dismisses “Judea and Samaria” as “the biblical name for the West Bank.” But “West Bank” was invented by Jordan in 1950 for the same reason the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” eighteen hundred years earlier – to disassociate what had been associated with Jews from the Jews. “Judea and Samaria” indeed have Hebrew biblical origin roots, but remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, as shown in maps and writings, including the U.N.’s own Palestine partition resolution of 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
Jews as Jerusalem “Settlers”
Except during periods of expulsion by foreign empire invaders, following which they relentlessly returned, Jews have lived in thrice Jewish state-capital Jerusalem for three thousand years, and have been the majority population again since 1800’s foreign empire Turkish rule. Throughout those eighteen centuries between ancient Judaea’s final destruction by Rome in 135 and Israel’s rebirth in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state, nobody called Jews living in Jerusalem “settlers.” It is only after Jews’ return to historic Jerusalem in 1967 following twentieth century expulsions culminating in the Jordanian invasion of 1948 that Jews, of all peoples, became historic Jerusalem’s “settlers.” Local Arabs, “the Palestinians,” have not ruled Jerusalem for one day in history, and foreign Arab empires only between 638, when they defeated the Romans’ Byzantine heirs, and 1099, when the European Christian Crusaders defeated them. Neither the Mamluks nor Turks, who ruled from the Asian invasions in the Crusaders’ wake until the twentieth century’s World War I were Arab.
From “Temple Mount” to “Al-Aqsa Compound”
As CAMERA observed in a 2016 study of the BBC, media reference to what has been historically known in the West as “the Temple Mount” has morphed into “Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount.” And compare the 7/15/17 captions to the same AP photo by the Times of Israel (“the Temple Mount compound”) and Philadelphia Inquirer (“the Al-Aqsa mosque compound”). Christians have a stake here?
“Israel’s 1967 Borders”
At the end of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence (not “of Creation And Founding”), the armistice agreement signed between Israel and Jordan expressly defined the line that it wrote with a green pen between where their armies stood as a military ceasefire line exclusively and not an international political border. And even as such it was consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, again initiated by Jordan, which resulted in Israel’s eastern frontier expanding from existentially perilous 9-miles-wide in the lowland middle to the relatively secure if not recognized line of the Jordan River. But it has become fashionable, including by the U.N. Security Council in resolution 2334 at the Obama administration’s end, to imbue that old obliterated 9-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle 1949 military ceasefire line with Holy Land holy place status as “Israel’s 1967 borders.”
These terminology changes, consistently for the worse, merge the names for the people, places and things to which they refer into the larger loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives in which the Arab-Jewish conflict over the Jewish homeland of Israel is discussed and considered, in common parlance, in the halls of diplomacy and in the mainstream media. Adversaries of the Jewish homeland would not get caught dead saying “1949 ceasefire lines … Judea-Samaria … etc., etc.” We have to recognize both the terminology changes occurring before our eyes and the magnitude and meaning of the lexicon of the conflict. From there we can begin to take that lexicon back.