#934 12/16/18 – This Week: Are We Picking the Wrong ‘Palestine’ Word War?

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Not all the words used against us are enemy-conjured pejorative “dirty words” all of which we must purge from our palates.  The words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” are real historical words, and the crime is that Arabs have succeeded in sucking historical Jewish equity out of them.  Our task is to put that Jewish equity back.     

This Week:  Are We Picking the Wrong “Palestine” Word War?

My co-author Lee says that by now we’ve given fifty-some Powerpoint talks based on our media bias-fighting book Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z.  I don’t know, having lost count long ago.  I remember the talks to Christian groups, JCCs, the cigar club, to groups of young people, and at the ZOA national convention where we got to give an excerpt in The House That Mort Built.  A question sometimes asked in the post-talk Q&A by attendees still awake is Q: “Is what you’re doing to counter anti-Israel media bias any different from what CAMERA does?”  A: “Yes.”

CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), like us, must speak for itself, but taking its “Snapshot” this week (www.camera.org, 12/11/18, “LA Times, Places Not Banned, and Inaccurate Terminology”) as illustrative, CAMERA, God Bless It, tenaciously directly takes on the media.  This week’s Snapshot blog details CAMERA’s years-long dialog with the Los Angeles Times over that paper’s repeated use of “Palestine” as if it were an actual nation-state, as in “Israel and Palestine,” and not, as CAMERA chides, “the Palestinian territories” or “the Palestinian West Bank.”

This media watch has sometimes directly addressed the media too, as in last week #933’s open letter to the Philly Inquirer about its context-less headline “Five Palestinians Are Shot Dead By Israeli Forces,” but our shtick is to plead with American Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel to ourselves abandon, utterly and completely, the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives in which the media and Jewish homeland delegitimizers religiously speak.  See, e.g., the litany we packed into one paragraph last week, and the document “Dirty Words” on our website, www.factsonisrael.com.   E.g., we plead with well-meaning people not to call Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines “Israel’s 1967 borders,” historic Jerusalem “East” Jerusalem, Jewish presence beyond the 1949 lines “settlements” and “occupation,” etc., etc.

But, ironically, there’s a word, a critically important word, that CAMERA, which seems to have no problem with, e.g., “the Palestinian West Bank,” regards as a dirty word which we don’t.  That word is “Palestine.”

I agree with CAMERA’s position in its Snapshot blog this week that newspapers should not say, e.g., “Israel and Palestine,” but we disagree over “why” and over what they should say instead.  CAMERA says that “accurate terminology” would have been either “the Palestinian territories” or “the Palestinian West Bank.”  But what’s fundamentally objectionable here is not just that Arabs have not yet attained formal statehood in these territories, but that that they have arrogated to themselves exclusive equity in both “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”  Is it unrealistic in 2018 to reclaim Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian”?  Or is what’s unrealistic to expect a world that calls Arabs living there “the Palestinians” not to call the place where they’re living “Palestine,” whether that place has yet attained formal statehood or not?   CAMERA’s continuing calls for correction to the contrary notwithstanding, the Los Angeles Times et ilk will continue calling the place where “Palestinians” live “Palestine” until the Jews come home.

Just as the United Nations called Samaria and Judea “Samaria and Judea,” and not “the West Bank,” in its Palestine partition resolution in 1947, it also didn’t bestow the mantle of “THE Palestinians” on Palestine’s resident Arabs.  That UN resolution sought to partition western Palestine not into “Jewish and Palestinian states,” but into Jewish and “Arab” states, recognizing, as that resolution expressly did, Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

And here’s what Begin, then Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground in 1977:

     “One of the most important services rendered by this book is hinted at in its sub-title: ‘Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.’  The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit.  The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda.  So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.”

What seems to me most unrealistic of all is the view that we can pick and choose which particular dirty words to discard and which to accept.  We have to throw them all out, thereby making clear to all who will listen the vastness of the gulf between historically accurate terminology on our side and the poisoned pejoratives used in common by the Jewish homeland’s existential enemies and the mainstream western media on the other.

But, unlike “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, which never existed in history, and unlike “Jewish settlements” [vs. adjacent “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages”] and “occupation,” which are inherently loaded terms, “Palestine” and “Palestinian” are actual historical terms, and they cannot be realistically separated one from the other.  Just as we have to purge from our palates all the real dirty words, we have to take back Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” and make the clear case, easily understood and hopefully ultimately accepted by the world, at least by publics in the West, that Palestine west of the Jordan is the land of Israel, historic homeland of the Jews, and that Jordan, carved from the Palestine Mandate with its Palestinian Arab-majority population, is the “two-state solution’s” Arab Palestine state.