WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Airbnb’s press release, in which it acknowledges that it’s no expert in the dispute between Arabs and Jews, is replete with terms delegitimizing the Jewish homeland connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. Alas, it was not just BDS pushers who put these delegitimizing terms in its head. We participated. QED. Come and see.
This Week: So Whose Fault is AirBnb? Partly Ours
Yes, certainly, when Airbnb decided this month to drop listings of rental sites in Judea-Samaria, but only if they were owned by Jews, that taking-sides act was unequivocally discrimination targeting specifically and exclusively Jews. Among others, Jonathan Tobin in his last Wednesday (11/21/18) Haaretz post, “Boycott Airbnb, Unless You’re Good With Anti-Semitism,” rightly condemned it. But that doesn’t relieve any of us, you, me or Jonathan Tobin, of looking hard at whether we had an unintended role in it. I say that we did, and that language in both Airbnb’s press release and Jonathan Tobin’s Haaretz article show it.
Although Airbnb titled its press release “Listings in Disputed Regions” [emphasis added throughout] its words that followed demonstrate unequivocally that Airbnb does not seriously consider Judea-Samaria (or, for that matter, historic Jerusalem) as “disputed.”
*** Airbnb’s very first sentence leads off by framing the issue as “whether companies should be doing business in the occupied territories that are the subject of historical disputes between Israelis and Palestinians.”
*** Paragraph 2 cites a difference of opinion whether companies should do business “on lands where people have been displaced,” with some believing that it’s okay to do business in “these areas.”
*** Paragraph 3 says that while “we are most certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes in this region,” Airbnb has about 200 listings “in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”
*** Paragraph 6 lists criteria by which Airbnb evaluates whether to do business in “occupied territories,” including “whether the existence of listings in the occupied territory has a direct connection to the larger dispute in the region.”
*** Paragraph 7 says that through applying these criteria, Airbnb “concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”
*** Paragraph 8 acknowledges that the issue is “controversial” and that “there are many strong views as it relates to lands that have been the subject of historic and intense disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.”
*** Under “Further Information,” Airbnb states that its “platform continues to be available for bookings in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and Golan Heights.”
It’s difficult to accept that Airbnb, for all that it titled this press release “Listings in Disputed Regions,” really regards these “occupied territories” with their “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank” from which “people have been displaced” as seriously disputed between Arabs and Jews. No more than it regards Jews as rightfully present “in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.”
Airbnb on its own put these poisonous words in its press release, but WE helped put these words, carrying the poisonous Palestine equities these words purvey, in Airbnb’s head.
Take, for example, strong Israel-defender Jonathan Tobin’s article Wednesday, in which he, by us, rightly argues that singling out Jewish-owned sites is a biased taking of sides that “isn’t a stretch” toward being applied toward all Israel, and that even Jews who oppose “settlements” have to oppose it. But the words Tobin uses undo the force of his arguments.
Tobin leads off by referencing “Airbnb’s ban on listings in the West Bank.” His second paragraph references “the home rental company’s decision to single out the settlements” and says some Jews “on the right” accuse BDS supporters of seeking a “Judenfrei West Bank.” [I’ll bet they said “Judea-Samaria.”] Tobin’s article references “settlements” at least 15 times and “West Bank” a half-dozen times, as in, e.g., in his questioning whether “West Bank settlements” fit the “don’t” side of Airbnb’s listed do-business-or-don’t criteria. He references Israel’s “internationally-recognized pre-June 1967 borders.”
One of the slides in the middle of Lee’s and my Powerpoint talk on media bias cites a 3/24/14 Reuters reference to
“184 new homes in two Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank”
The slide asks attendees still awake how different this sounds from
“184 new homes in Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria”
If we want people and groups, including Airbnbs, to take the Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem seriously, we have to stop using the very poisoned pejoratives that others created for the very purpose of delegitimizing homeland Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. And good-guy Jonathan Tobin to the contrary notwithstanding, those poisoned pejoratives include, inter alia, Jewish “settlements” across “Israel’s pre-1967 borders” in “the West Bank.” Would it not be more self-respecting, along with more historically accurate and homeland-claiming, for us to say land of Israel Jewish communities across the old obliterated 1949 ceasefire lines in Judea-Samaria? QED?
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COME LOOK AT THIS: I’m a co-perpetrator of a website, www.factsonisrael.com (on which this media watch is posted each week). Today we posted five articles in a SYMPOSIUM on a super-critical subject, President Trump’s looming DEAL OF THE CENTURY. Right Now is Israel’s and its supporters’ last chance to influence this plan before its terms (“some of which each side won’t like”) become public. My own contribution’s titled: “Dream of Generations Meets Deal of The Century, Now What?” Come see. j