This Week: Jousting With Jonathan On “Jewish Settlers” vs. “Palestinian Villagers” in “the West Bank”
“Settlers” and “settlements” are dirty words.
The European Union made this abundantly clear in its applies-to-Jews-only product labeling decree in November 2019. While products made by Arabs in what the EU called “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)” could simply be labeled “product from Palestine,” if made there by Israelis the label would have to say “product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement).”
The EU-enunciated reason for this went beyond providing consumers product origin information. EU:
“[T]he aim is also to ensure the respect of Union positions and commitments in conformity with international law on the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”
To the EU, as stated in this edict:
“The West Bank is a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination….”
The edict defined “settlement” as having “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.” [emphasis added a little]
But the EU last November didn’t come up with something new. Way back on Saturday, March 16, 2002, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran this “Clearing the Record”:
“In an Inquirer article Thursday on President Bush’s news conference, the words ‘Palestinian settlements’ were used in reference to attacks by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The attacks were directed at Palestinian towns and refugee camps.”
Actually, those IDF attacks were directed at terrorists in those “Palestinian towns and refugee camps,” but it was its inadvertent reference to Arabs in Palestine as living in “Palestinian settlements” that sent the Inq into paroxysms of horrified “Clearing the Record.”
Here’s an Inq photo caption of 6/16/14: “Israeli soldiers search the West Bank village of Beit Einun, near Hebron. They were looking for three teenagers who went missing near a settlement.” (Emphasis added a little)
Here’s a New York Times photo caption of 2/14/17 showing “an Israeli settlement in front of an Arab village in Amona, West Bank.” (emphasis added a little)
Perhaps the century’s least subtle media contrast in language referencing Jews and Arabs in Palestine was perpetrated by the AP in 2014 in describing a confrontation between small groups of what the UN’s partition resolution had called “the two Palestinian peoples.” The AP’s 1/8/14 piece used these terms in sequence: “Palestinians … Israeli settlers … Palestinian farmers … West Bank village … settlers … settlers … settlers … [Arab] people … people kicked and spit at the settlers … attacks by militant settlers on Palestinians … settlers were captured and held by Palestinians … a stone-throwing clash between settlers and Palestinian farmers … settlers … West Bank village … village council … settlers .. [Arab] farmers … farmers … farmers … village … the settlers ran away and the villagers gave chase … village resident … settlers … village … villagers … settlers.”
My point in all this is that Western people, starting with Jews, even those who believe in slicing the land of Israel into a “two-state solution,” who respect the legitimacy of Jewish presence in the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, shouldn’t call Jews there “settlers” while calling Arabs there “villagers.”
And so I was disappointed this week to read on the internet:
“The Jordan Valley contains a number of Jewish settlements, as well as Palestinian villages, and makes up about 20 percent of the land area of the West Bank.”
These were words, on JNS.org, of one of the best of our advocates, JNS editor Jonathan Tobin, 1/22/20, Gantz Sends a Message to American Liberals, But Are They Listening?
I posted this comment at the article’s foot:
“Jonathan, One of the prime ways in which the mainstream media expresses its disdain for us is contrasting ‘Jewish settlements’ vs ‘Palestinian villages’ in ‘the West Bank’ in the same sentence. And YOU of all our best advocates just went and did it. WHY?”
But there are anti-Jewish-homeland imbalances here beyond contrasting “villages” versus “settlements.”
One of course is “West Bank,” coined by Jordan in 1950 to disassociate “Judea-Samaria,” Hebrew-origin names in use for thousands of years, from the Jews. It’s indeed telling that those names did remain in use for two-thousand years following Roman-defeat of Jewish Judaea in CE 135, but for all that the media relegates “Judea and Samaria” to “biblical names for the West Bank,” they remained in use for millennia and the UN itself used them in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” Self-respecting Jews should not use the pejorative “West Bank.”
But as deeply prejudicial as “Jewish settlements” versus “Palestinian villages” is “Jewish settlements” versus “Palestinian villages.” The two parties to the Palestine conflict are not Jews and “Palestinians,” but Jews and Arabs. The UN’s partition resolution recognized Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples,” and over and over that resolution referred to “the Jewish State” and “the Arab State,” not to Jewish and “Palestinian” states. Self-respecting Jews should not cede Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
The point I would leave with you this week, Gentle Readers, is that the list of dirty words that are used against the Jewish homeland of Israel is not like the menu of a Chinese restaurant from which we can select particular ones from column “A” and column “B”. We have to contest the entire lexicon of poisoned pejoratives. One way for us grassroots Jews to get our objections out there in the world is to append comments to internet articles, including by good guys, that use these pejoratives. Have at it.