WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Not all the words used against us are Dirty Words – pejoratives conjured to delegitimize Jews’ homeland connection to Israel. Some, like ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian,’ in the news this week, are real terms from which Jewish equity has been wrongfully excised. Making the Jewish homeland case does not entail shunning these names, but reclaiming Jewish equity in them.
This Week: Reclaiming ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’
Nine hundred fifty or so weeks ago, this weekly newsletter began as a “media watch,” but not in that term’s usual sense. We try to enlist readers help in getting the media to treat Israel more fairly, naturally, but our main target is our readers themselves. We plead with you who put up with us weekly to cease using commonly used terms that denigrate the Jewish people’s historical land of Israel homeland connection – for example, “West Bank … East Jerusalem … occupation.” On our website, www.factsonisrael.com, we have an enumerated list, “Dirty Words.”
At the heart of the Arab-Jewish conflict is a term – Palestine, Palestinian – that was in the news this week in New York. Commenting on a statement by an Israeli-Arab Knesset member, a New York City Councilman twitted “the ultimate goal of the so-called Palestinians is the destruction of the Jewish state and its people.” Criticized for this, he added: “Palestine does not exist.” He was relieved of his Committee on Immigration assignment.
Our last week’s #949 quoted United With Israel that “young children in the PA-run territories are taught early-on that all of ‘Palestine’ belongs to them and that the State of Israel will cease to exist.” It cited the PA’s “pay-to-slay” policy, Hamas’ weekly “March of Return,” etc. The Councilman’s sentiments have basis in fact. It’s his use of “Palestinians” and “Palestine” upon which we should reflect. How should supporters of the Jewish homeland of Israel use or not use these terms?
Unlike “West Bank … East Jerusalem … occupation,” etc., “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were not maliciously conjured (except by the Romans two thousand years ago) as pejorative terms. They’re real. Jewish homeland supporters should not shun them, but take them back.
“Palestine” does not exist today as a nation-state, but at multiple times in history including the present has been one of the names of a place. The Romans, recalling the defunct Philistines, non-Arab Sea People, coined it after defeating Bar Kochba in CE135 to disassociate what had been Judaea from Jews, though, as shown by maps and travelers’ journals, Judea remained in use through the centuries. With the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment after World War I, the League of Nations’ “Palestine Mandate,” east as well as west of the Jordan, was entrusted to Britain. As JNS’ Jonathan Tobin pointed out this week in writing about that New York Councilman’s tweets, during the Mandate it was Palestine’s Jews, not its Arabs, who answered to the name “Palestinian.”
Today, of course, “Palestinian” refers exclusively to Arabs, and “Palestine” to “Palestinians’ future state,” comprising to some “the West Bank,” “East” Jerusalem, and Gaza, and to others Palestine west of the Jordan, period.
Then-Israeli PM Menachem Begin, in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground, lamented the cost to the Jews of Arab hijacking of “Palestine” and “Palestinian”:
“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 the 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.”
The western media has had a field day with this shift of meaning of Palestine and Palestinian. The U.N. in 1947 over and over in its Palestine partition resolution referred to partition’s “Arab” state and its “Jewish” state, and called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” but the media, looking back, has the U.N. partitioning Palestine between Palestinians and Jews. E.g.: “separate Jewish and Palestinian states” (AP, 2/28/09), “separate states for Palestinians and Jews” (Philly Inquirer headline); “envisioned Jewish and Palestinian states” (AP, 3/16/08); “proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states” (McClatchy, 5/8/08). Rather like partitioning Pennsylvania between Pennsylvanians and Jews, Pluto between Plutonians and Jews (but big deal, it’s not a planet anymore, anyway).
When I titled the book that I wrote about the Jews’ continuous land of Israel homeland presence Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, I got some flak for using that word “Palestine.” I point out Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, Parkes, Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, all supportive of the Jewish homeland claim.
What the Jewish homeland’s denigrators understand, which those on our side who use words like “Israel’s founding in 1948 … West Bank … East Jerusalem … Israel’s 1967 borders … captured by Israel in 1967 … settlers and settlements … occupied territories,” etc., do not, is that words are the weapons in the word war. Two of these weapons, once fully and then partly ours, that have been seized exclusively by the other side are “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” We can take back Jewish equity in them. This is not for its own sake, but as an essential piece of our viable-and-meaningful-Jewish-homeland Palestine conflict resolution position: Israel and Jordan, 22% and 78% of the Palestine Mandate, with their respective Jewish and Palestinian Arab-majority populations, are the Palestine Mandate’s already accomplished two-states-for-two-peoples partition solution.