This Week: Tobin Rightly Says Reform Disrespects Jewish Rights to Disputed Lands, But So Do We All in Calling Jews There ‘Settlers’ in ‘West Bank Settlement Blocs’
JNS Editor Jonathan Tobin had an excellent ‘Featured Column’ this week, “Why Is Reform Widening the Divide Between Israel and American Jewry?” (jns.org, 10/31/19). The article’s immediate subject is news that the American Reform movement, American Jews’ largest denomination, is cutting ties with the Israeli branch of the Jewish National Fund because of it “purchasing land beyond the so-called Green Line that divided Israel from Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank.” Tobin quotes Reform leader Rabbi Jacobs that his movement will
“emphatically and continually oppose all land acquisition by the … [Israeli branch of the JNF] … outside the sovereign borders of the State of Israel, known as the Green Line.” [emphasis added]
Tobin rightly points out that “by wrongly treating what are the 1949 armistice lines as an international border, Reform is also reinforcing unrealistic Palestinian expectations that Jerusalem would be re-divided along those lines in a theoretical peace agreement. The same applies to the West Bank.” Tobin says that “you don’t have to be a supporter of the settlement movement” to grasp the “broad consensus in Israel, including among on the left, that there is no going back to the situation before the Six-Day War started,” that “Israel is never relinquishing” the Old City and Western Wall, the Jewish neighborhoods built in reunited Jerusalem or “the West Bank settlement blocs,” where several hundred thousand Jews live, and that “even in the unlikely event of the Palestinians embracing a two-state solution that would force them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, these areas will remain under Israeli control.” [emphasis added]
Tobin concludes:
“Even if some of the lands purchased by the [Israeli branch of JNF] are in more ‘sensitive’ areas, they would be subject to negotiations if the Palestinians ever choose peace. Jacobs’ exercise in virtue signaling won’t advance a two-state solution. To the contrary, by telling the Palestinians that the largest American Jewish denomination doesn’t respect Jewish rights to disputed lands, Reform is making peace even more unlikely.” [emphasis added]
I am, as readers know, personally opposed to “a two-state solution” of a new Arab state inside the land of Israel, in Judea-Samaria and heart of Jerusalem. It would be security-wise suicidal and surrender the heart of the homeland, for half-a-century now in Israeli hands, to Arabs who already have in Jordan an Arab state with a Palestinian Arab majority comprising 78% of the Palestine Mandate with its provision for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home. If not in the Palestine Mandate’s post-Jordanian lopoff remaining 22%, then where in that Mandate’s remaining land? In just a non-viable rump fraction of that remaining mere fifth?
But my beef is not just with the Reform but with Utterly-Good-Guy Jonathan Tobin. On the jns.org website, I posted this comment to this otherwise right-on Tobin article:
“Tobin is right that ‘by telling the Palestinians that the largest American Jewish denomination doesn’t respect Jewish rights to disputed lands, Reform is making peace even more unlikely.’
“But respecting Jewish rights to disputed lands goes beyond, as Tobin points out, the Reform wrongly calling the 1949 ceasefire lines an international border.
“Respecting Jewish rights includes calling what has been called ‘Judea-Samaria’ for three thousand years ‘Judea-Samaria,’ not ‘the West Bank,’ which Tobin himself alas does, and calling Jewish communities there [and in historic Jerusalem] Jewish communities and not ‘the West Bank settlement blocs,’ which Tobin also does.
“When the best of us American Jews ourselves tell ‘the Palestinians’ [which they’re not] that Judea-Samaria is ‘the West Bank’ and Jews there are ‘settlers,’ WE TOO are disrespecting Jewish rights to disputed lands and making peace more unlikely.”
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AN INVITATION:
Back when this “Media Watch” was really mostly a media watch, I’d sometimes be asked, “But how does your media watching differ from the media watching of CAMERA?” I once had a long one-on-one talk with Andrea (one of my heroes, for being among the first both to appreciate that David Bar-Illan was right about our needing to combat anti-Israel media bias, and to effectively combat it). CAMERA is in constant contact with the media and endeavors to make media coverage of Israel fairer. I’m of course all for that, but what I’ve tried to do in these weekly emails [stick with me, we’re closing in on the thousandth] is get through to Diaspora supporters of Israel that the very language in which reporting on Israel is purveyed to the public is laced with anti-Jewish homeland poisoned pejoratives.
To that end, my late friend Lee and I wrote a book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, which Steve Crane’s Pavilion Press, Inc., published, and the three of us started a 501c3 non-profit, FactsOnIsrael.com, Inc. (“FOI”), with a website, www.factsonisrael.com, and developed Powerpoint talks, including “10 Misleading Media Expressions” (on our website), which Lee and I gave scores of times. It seemed to Steve and me that Lee knew everybody and it was he who arranged most of these talks.
We’ve just started a highly graphical emailed monthly FactsOnIsrael newsletter, to which we invite you to subject yourself monthly. Just reply to this BSMW Media Watch email with something like ‘subscribe FOI newsletter.’ As with this weekly ‘BSMW Media Watch,’ we’ll highly value and try to respond to your suggestions and comments.