WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our American Jewish community does a great deal of good for our own people and country, for Diaspora communities needing help and for our homeland of Israel, but in three ways we fall short – we avert our eyes from anti-Israel media bias, we ourselves use terms designed for our delegitimization, and we intrude on Israelis’ exclusive right to decide their own destiny.
“If We Are Not For Ourselves, Who Will Be For Us?”
I wonder whether the extreme anti-Israel Jewish group “IfNotNow” finds irony in the first line of the wisdom from which it takes its name from the third line being “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” and the second line beginning, “But if I am for myself only …”? Whatever, I would broaden the focus this closing in on one-thousandth issue of this mostly media watch on the relevance of Hillel’s saying from that one group to our American Jewish community generally.
I appreciate, of course, that both at the organizational and grassroots levels, our American Jewish community has and does accomplish much good, for ourselves and our country, unique in history in making us part of itself, for our people needing help elsewhere in the world, and for our restored in our own time Jewish homeland of Israel. Nevertheless, over these nineteen plus years of these weekly emails, I’ve become increasingly anguished by our failure, it seems to me, in three respects in effectively being for ourselves. So these three failings are what I would lay before you, You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly, this nine hundred ninety-eighth week of these weekly emails.
#1 – Our failure to confront mainstream western media anti-Jewish homeland imbalance
I’ve said once in a while in these emails that Andrea Levin, head of the media fairness to Israel organization CAMERA, is one of my heroes. I placed her in this pantheon because she seemed to me, among us disciples of David Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and its ground-breaking bias-fighting “Eye On The Media” column, most effectively to take up his mantle. CAMERA (and this media watch) began our roles before Jonathan Tobin, then editor of Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent, saw a need (June 2001) to drive home to our community in an editorial the reality that “Media Bias – It’s Real.” CAMERA’s still at it, and still needed. Visit its site, www.camera.org, where you’ll find this week on its homepage, e.g., “The Washington Post Runs a Puff Piece on IfNotNow … NPR Conceals Abbas’s Rejection of Peace Offer, Blames Olmert … New York Times’ Descriptive Maps Mislead on Trump Plan … AP Errs on Georgia Law Against Anti-Israel Boycott … CAMERA Prompts Reuters Correction of Inflated Numbers in ICC Allegations … UPI Headline Correction: Rockets Fired At, Not From, Southern Israel ….”
When my late co-author Lee and I went around giving our Powerpoint talk based on our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, we sometimes got asked, “But isn’t what you’re doing [trying to awaken grassroots Jews to the scope and intensity of American media anti-Israel imbalance] just duplicating CAMERA?” There’s a difference between us in focus. CAMERA has a letter-to-the-editor writing group (I was in it, and learned a lot, during the days the wonderful Leah Green was running it), but Lee and I weren’t seeking betterment of American journalism (not that we’d object to it). We were trying to build grassroots back pressure protest against the anti-Israel obsession it manifests.
For example, our #911 of July 8, 2018, titled “This Week: … and Sometimes I Have Doubts of Thee,” took issue with CAMERA in its rightly telling the Los Angeles Times (for the umpteenth time) not to call “Palestine” a sovereign state, but to say instead “the Israeli government and the Palestinians . . . Israel and the West Bank . . . [Israel and] the Palestinian territories.” I said that the case we Jews must make is that historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are intrinsic parts of the Jewish homeland of Israel, not “Palestinian territories” and not “the West Bank.” I sent a copy to CAMERA for comment, which graciously replied. Our next week’s #912 quoted Tamar Sternthal, Director of CAMERA’s Israel Office, that
“…. Verlin differs with CAMERA’s approach because he does not share our mission. CAMERA’s mission is to ensure that media outlets adhere to journalistic codes of conduct, thereby ensuring more professional and ultimately fair and accurate coverage of Israel.
“CAMERA researchers play by the same rules as media outlets, a strategy making it impossible for media outlets to ignore or dismiss us. ‘Palestine,’ preferred by pro-Palestinian elements, is not acceptable terminology according to mainstream media style and usage. By the same token, ‘Judea and Samaria,’ preferred by some pro-Israel elements, is also not consistent with mainstream media practice.
“Use of the terminology Judea and Samaria is historically justified. Nevertheless, the insistence that mainstream media outlets adopt a term which is used by only a very minute fraction of the world population, and which ignores the political reality for some 40 percent of the West Bank in which Palestinians rule themselves, guarantees irrelevance. An emailed request for use of the nomenclature ‘Judea and Samaria’ will immediately end up in the editor’s trash box.”
I appended to CAMERA’s reply in our #912 that that “very minute fraction of the world population” that uses “Judea and Samaria” instead of “West Bank” is us, and that the more an historically justified place name that we use differs from the name the media and rest of the world use, the more important it is that we grassroots Jews use it. Our concern must not be whether our objection to media terminology will “end up in the editor’s trash box” any more than the bus-boycotting Black clergy was concerned that “if we don’t ride in the back of the bus it won’t take us where we need to be going.”
We need to make clear not just to the media but to the American public that the Jewish people objects to the media’s entire lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives –
*** “West Bank,” instead of “Judea and Samaria,” media-dubbed “biblical names for the West Bank” that in fact remained in use for three thousand years, including by the UN in its partition resolution in CE 1947;
*** “East Jerusalem,” as though it were a satellite city of historic Jerusalem, instead of that very city that’s been capital of three states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule;
*** “Jewish settlements,” used instead of “Jewish communities,” in loving media contrast to nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages” in that “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem;
*** “Israeli-occupied” instead of “disputed” western Palestine areas; etc., etc.
Ok, CAMERA, in its media dealings, may not be able to use our historically grounded self-respecting terms, but we can and we must.
Beyond the media mocking us through the anti-Israel terms that it uses, the media’s perspective on key stories mocks us as well. E.g., headlining “Israel Defends Assassination” of a Palestinian “military” leader, for its taking out a top Jew-murdering terrorist; “Two Israeli Factory Guards Die,” for their being executed point-blank by a Palestinian terrorist; “Joseph’s Tomb Catches Fire.”
#2 – Our failure to use historically correct self-respecting language ourselves
But it’s not just our averting our eyes from the media’s misuse of terminology that marks shameful failures of our American Jewish community at both the organizational and grassroots levels. We use these dirty words ourselves.
In their April 2019 open letter to President Trump, nine leading American Jewish organizations, including the Reform and Conservative religious movements, rabbis and all, called for a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” save for any agreed “territorial adjustments,” and called for President Trump to oppose “annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank.”
I could cite many more abuses by us American Jews of historically correct, self-respecting language, but this 2019 open letter to the American President by these nine august American Jewish groups – the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union for Reform Judaism; the Conservative Movement’s United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Zionist affiliate Mercaz; and “the Anti-Defamation League, the lead Jewish civil rights advocacy group; Ameinu, a liberal Zionist group; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Israel Policy Forum, a group focused on reaching a two-state solution” (per JTA. 4/13/19, “Reform, Conservative Jews to Trump: don’t let Netanyahu annex West Bank”) – sufficiently makes my point.
There are no “1967 borders,” just 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document to be military ceasefire lines only, not political borders. And calling any deviations therefrom to be territorial “adjustments” (i.e., changes to borders that had existed) reinforces the Jewish homeland-endangering – nine miles wide in the lowland middle – borders which that misperception purveyed. And application of Israeli sovereignty to Judea-Samaria (not “West Bank”) and historic Jerusalem is not “annexation,” as that letter wrongfully put it. Annexation is taking over territory of another nation. The last western Palestine Arab state to rule Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem before modern Israel was ancient Judaea, destroyed by Rome in CE 135, every ruler in between having been a foreign invader.
#3 – It’s not for American Jews to tell Israeli Jews what Israel’s borders should be
American Jewish advocates of “the two-state solution” seek an Israel that’s “democratic and Jewish.” But if there is anything that Jews of our time have learned from the Holocaust, including from the steamship St. Louis, from the Aliyah Bet, and from the Jewish homeland’s wars of 1948-49, 1967 and 1973 [nay, make that battles of those years; Israel has fought only one war, its War of Independence and it is still being fought, ask “the Palestinians,” who still dream of a “Palestine, from the River to the Sea”], it is that we have to have a viable and meaningful Jewish homeland of Israel. We have to have it.
And the reality is that historically and legally we are entitled to it, and that our entitlement is not unjust to either Israeli or Palestinian Arabs. Despite Palestinian Arabs’ efforts, when they can, to erase it [an injury to Christians as well as to Jews], Jewish biblical history happened, and as historian Parkes rightly put it (and see Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine), the continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland-claiming presence of the Jewish Yishuv, in spite of every discouragement, wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.” And the Palestine Mandate included Transjordan as 78% of it, with its today Palestinian Arab majority. The excision of Jordan from the Palestine Mandate effected Palestine’s two-state division between Arabs and Jews, more than equitably to Arabs, and if Jordan’s Palestinian Arab majority isn’t in charge of Palestinian Arab majority Jordan, fix that in the 78% of Palestine that became Jordan, not by again dividing between Arabs and Jews the 22% that Palestine’s first division left for reconstituting in Palestine the Palestine Mandate’s “Jewish national home.” And as for Israeli Arabs, Israel’s third past year election just left them Israel’s third largest electoral group.
An artificial new “two-state solution” hewing more or less to unnatural 1949 ceasefire lines will not bring peace but invite further battles of an unfinished war. It is both unmitigated chutzpah and self-disrespecting historical fallacy for American Jews to push upon Israelis such a Six Day War-reversing, Jerusalem splitting and existentially endangering “solution.” For shame, for all that the United Nations and European Union eagerly push for it.