New Year’s Resolution for Us Just-Plain-American-Jews: In 2019, Let’s Make a Difference
This #937 starts the nineteenth year of this weekly media watch. Our theme for the past eighteen years has been that anti-Israel media bias persists on two planes: imbalance in the reporting of the facts of individual news stories, and imbalance in the language in which virtually all Israel news stories are reported. Our emphasis has been on the latter, particularly in pleading for ourselves to purge from our own lips the entirety of this loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives, and for all of us to plead with our own pundits who use it to stop. The media may “never change,” as an early unsubscriber dismissed me, but we can mitigate the damage the media’s lexicon does to Western perception of respective Jewish and Arab Palestine equities by making clear to publics in the West that “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem and “occupation” and Arabs as “The Palestinians” and all the rest are not balanced expressions but historically false biased pejoratives loaded against us.
Many on our side believe it’s too late to change the terminology of Israel reporting and discourse. Some believe we can contest some loaded terms but not others. And some believe that we ordinary grassroots American Jews can’t make a difference. So by your leave, I’d like to start off this new year by making three points.
Point #1: It’s Not Too Late to Contest Long-Used Terms Each New Use of Which is a New Assault on Jewish Equity in Our Homeland of Israel
Many pro-Israel people, when I tell them, for example, that “West Bank,” which they use, was coined in 1950 by Jordan to disassociate the Judea and Samaria areas of the Jewish homeland from Jews, smile dismissively and say “But that battle was lost a long time ago.” On the contrary, every time our homeland’s enemies, and worse we, use that pejorative expression anew, it’s a new shot aimed at Western public perception in a battle that’s still going on. And that’s true for all the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives that the Western world, egged on by the Western mainstream media, uses.
So Point #1 is that laches does not apply here, and we’re not estopped from reclaiming the Jewish homeland reference lexicon from those who delegitimize us daily. Every new use of “West Bank” and all the other Dirty Words is a fresh assault on Western perception of Jewish homeland equity in the land of Israel.
Point #2: We Have to Ditch the Entirety of the Loaded Lexicon – All of It
When my Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z co-author Lee and I give our Powerpoint talk to a group, someone still awake for the Q&A at the end asks “Does your media-bias-fighting work differ at all from CAMERA’s?” “Yes.”
For example, CAMERA related in December that the Los Angeles Times, after eight previous corrections, for the ninth time referred to Arab-controlled areas of western Palestine as “Palestine,” as though it were a sovereign state, rather than, as CAMERA suggested, as “the Palestinian territories” or “the Palestinian West Bank.” Ok, our media watch #934 had a fit over CAMERA’s suggested corrected expressions as well, but the main point we made is that the Los Angeles Times et ilk will continue calling the place where “the Palestinians” live “Palestine,” whether it’s a sovereign state or not, until the Jews come home, that the expressions to which we must object are calling just Arab-controlled portions of Palestine “Palestine” and calling Arabs in Palestine “The Palestinians.” In its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, the United Nations called Jews and Arabs in Palestine “the two Palestinian peoples,” and the Associated Press, in a lucid interval (12/11/11), stated that during the Mandate, “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.” Begin pointed out in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground that “Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews.”
So Point #2 is that contesting only some of the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives doesn’t work. This applies not just to inherently loaded expressions like “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Jewish settlers and settlements [alongside “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages”] … “occupation,” etc., but to “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” which aren’t inherently Dirty Words. It’s the expelling of the homeland’s Jews, who became the first Palestinians when the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in the year 135, from the scope of “Palestinian” that makes it appear in Western public perception that the Palestine conflict is between Jews and “Palestinians.” And the media has reinforced this by characterizing the UN’s attempted 1947 partition resolution as dividing Palestine into “Jewish and Palestinian” states.
Point #3: We Ordinary Grassroots American Jews Can Make a Difference
Last week I told you about the first “unsubscribe” email I got, eighteen years ago, just after this media watch’s issue #1 – “The media will never change, so give it up.” I said that I’d replied “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Unsubscriber #1 may well have been right, that it’s unlikely that we can shake the Western media from its insistent use of its loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives. What we can do, though, is make clear to publics in the West that this lexicon that’s used in common by the Jewish homeland’s adversaries and the mainstream Western media is not used by us, supporters of the Jewish homeland of Israel, that we regard it in its entirety as historically false propaganda biased against Israel and us, and why it’s false and imbalanced.
So Point #3, detailed in 7 “new year’s resolutions” our #936 listed last week for us Israel-supporting American Jews. Three of the key ones: Let us in 2019
* Purge all the Dirty Words (partially enumerated on our website, www.factsonisrael.com) from our own mouths.
* Plead with pundits on our side who do use them to stop.
* Recognize the distinction between the land of Israel, in which we have a peoplehood membership stake, and the State of Israel which exists in that land, and refrain, as grassroots and leaders, from joining in international trespassing on the State of Israel’s sovereign rights. The example I gave: By us, the State of Israel can do whatever it determines it needs to do re Judea and Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.”
So, if this makes sense to you, stick with us in 2019 and cajole your brother-in-law or somebody to subscribe to this media watch.