Brith Sholom Alert #636, 3/10/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Alert #636, 3/10/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Washington Post reported this week on a private meeting President Obama just had with U.S. Jewish leaders, who told the President that the Jewish people’s homeland claim is rooted in biblical history, not Jewish Diaspora history as the President had misstated at Cairo. Well and good, but Jewish homeland physical presence continued uninterrupted from Hadrian to Herzl, and Arabs were not “displaced,” as the President also misstated at Cairo (and as the American media has misstated over and over) by “Israel’s founding.”

Confronting the Core of Anti-Israel Media Bias: The Relevance of Jewish Leaders’ Meeting This Week With the American President
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[1] The Misperception Jewish Leaders Urged the President This Week To Correct

This Thursday (3/7/13), the Washington Post reported on a private meeting President Obama held that day this week with U.S. Jewish leaders, who urged him, the article’s lead stated, both to make clear during his upcoming Israel trip that he will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and

to correct an early diplomatic misstep when he appeared to trace Israel’s historic claim to a modern state to the Holocaust rather than to the Bible.

Further down in the article, the reporter returned again to these Jewish leaders’ continuing concern about how President Obama had characterized Israel in his June 2009 Cairo speech. Washington Post:

While a moving afternoon in which Obama highlighted the suffering of the Jewish people, the visit — and decision to skip Israel — appeared to locate the modern state of Israel’s right to exist in the Holocaust rather than in the period outlined in the Bible.

For some critics, it became the central example of how Obama does not understand how the Jewish people view the modern state and its historical claims.

“Media bias” did not expressly come up in that discussion this week between the U.S. President and U.S. Jewish leaders, but at the very root of anti-Israel media bias is the misperception, repeatedly expressed by the media, that Israel’s “creation” and “founding” in 1948 displaced “Palestinians” (meaning Palestinian Arabs, as though the Yishuv was not “Palestinian” too). A further manifestation of this media misperception is its characterization of the Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” as “the biblical names for the West Bank,” as though “West Bank” had been in use since biblical times and not been invented by Jordan in 1950 to disassociate that hill country heartland of the Jewish homeland from association with Jews.

[2] The President’s Misperceptions at Cairo

Here’s what the President stated on June 4, 2009, at Cairo:

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical lies, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald . . . .

It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding . . . .

To the President’s credit, he cited at least not just the Holocaust but the Jewish Diaspora’s persecution “around the world for centuries,” but his latter statement – “Palestinians’ displacement brought by Israel’s founding” – is a direct reversal of the actual history. The mainstream American media has purveyed this pro-Arab partisan portrayal for over a decade. E.g.:

[Under then President Clinton’s plan] Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .” [Knight-Ridder News Service article commencing on page 1 of Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/4/01, quoted in Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #1, 1/7/01]

There were, of course, more like four hundred thousand than “four million” Arabs who left Israel in 1948, but as Efraim Karsh documented in Palestine Betrayed, they left, not in the context of “the creation of Israel,” but of Arab invasion for Israel’s annihilation.

[3] Endless Mainstream Western Media Repetition

Just scan through these examples of the mainstream Western media attributing seemingly exclusively Arab displacement to “Israel’s creation and founding” (emphasis added). The annual compilations of this media watch have examples going back to 2001.

? AP 12/11/11 (Inq A4): “During the 1948 war surrounding the Jewish state’s creation, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.”

? N.Y. Times (Isabel Kershner, (6/6/11, Inq., A6): “…the confrontations Sunday echoed the events of May 15, the day Palestinians mark as the ‘Nakba,’ or catastrophe, of Israel’s establishment in 1948.”

? A.P. (5/15/11, Inq., A22): “Palestinian commemorations of their uprooting during Israel’s 1948 creation.”

? A.P. (9/13/10, Inq., A2): “the wars and grievances that flowed from Israel’s 1948 founding as a Jewish state.”

? A.P. (9/9/09, Inq. A4): “the expulsion and exile of hundreds of thousands during the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948.”

? A.P. (9/1/09, Inq.): “the two-year war that followed Israel’s creation, when about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.”

? A.P. (8/4/09, Inq., A4): “[Palestinian Arabs’] demand for ‘the right of return’ of Palestinians displaced after the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation.”

? A.P. (6/16/09): “Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel’s 1948 creation.”“

? L.A. Times (9/30/08, Inq., A5): “[UN troops’ Mideast presence] began 60 years ago, on May 29, 1948, when the fledgling world body dispatched its first batch of blue-helmeted troops to maintain a truce between the newly-founded state of Israel and its Arab neighbors.” [some “neighbors”]

? N.Y. Times (8/1/08, Inq. A9): “the fate of (1948) Palestinian refugees who left or were forced to leave their homes.”

? A.P. (11/29/07, Inq., A2):

The Palestinians want refugees and their descendants to be able to return to homes they left, or were forced out of, in the war that accompanied Israel’s creation, That is a deal-breaker for Israel, which sees it as a threat to its Jewish character.

In the end, it seems the Palestinians will have little choice but to give up their dream of returning home. But that still leaves open the question of whether Israel will meet Palestinian demands that it acknowledge responsibility for the refugees’ plight.

The A.P. here utterly begged the open (i.e., contested) question here, which is not whether Israel will “acknowledge responsibility” for the Arab refugees’ plight, but rather which side is responsible for Arab refugees’ plight, and for that of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands.

[4] The Point We Must Make: The Yishuv Wrote the Zionists’ Title Deeds

Getting back to that private meeting this week between leaders of American Jewish groups and the President, the Good News (beyond that the Washington Post reported them making that point) is that these Jewish leaders raised Jews’ concern that the President [and the press and the public] misconstrue the Jewish people’s homeland claim as based on Jewish Diaspora rather than homeland history. The Bad News is that they focused, apparently, only on biblical history, on the President at Cairo having appeared to “trace Israel’s historic claim to a modern state to the Holocaust rather than to the Bible.”

British theologian and historian James Parkes made the continued presence point for us:

“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” Dr. James Parkes, “Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine,” page 266

But the point was ours, not his, to make. And Parkes bitterly criticized us for not ourselves making it. In the very next sentence of Whose Land? he went on:

This page of Jewish history found no place in the constant flood of Zionist propaganda, much of it as violent as it was one-sided. The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period. It allowed a picture of The Land as a territory that had once been ‘Jewish,’ but which for many centuries had been ‘Arab’. In point of fact, any picture of a total change in population is false, as the previous chapters have shown.

Parkes wasn’t alone in asserting the importance of unbroken Jewish homeland presence from Hadrian to Herzl. Israeli Prime Ministers Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu stressed the significance of the Jews’ continuous homeland presence. Here’s Bibi in September 2012 at the U.N., responding to the Iranian leader claiming Israel has “no Middle East roots”:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Three thousand years ago, King David reigned over the Jewish state in our eternal capital, Jerusalem. I say that to all those who proclaim that the Jewish state has no roots in our region and that it will soon disappear.

… The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years. Even after most of our people were exiled from it, Jews continued to live in the land of Israel throughout the ages…. [emphasis added]

And Jews are not indigenous to Israel alone. The war that Israel rightly calls its War of Independence, not of “Creation and Founding” (a war, btw, in which a homeland-mustered Jewish army threw back, and then some, an invasion by the armies of five Arab states) and its aftermath saw Israel’s absorption of a greater number of indigenously Middle East Jews from vast Mideast Muslim lands than Arabs fled tiny Israel. Beyond offsetting Arabs’ claimed “right of return,” these Middle-eastern Jews, with millennia-roots, whom Israel absorbed further strengthen the State of Israel’s Middle-eastern bona fides against the canard of it being a foreign-implanted “Zionist Crusader” state.

In the weeks immediately following President Obama’s Cairo speech, BSMW railed against our not vociferously contesting the President’s fundamental misunderstanding, as this week’s Washington Post article put it, of “how the Jewish people view the modern state and its historical claims.” It is good that our Jewish leaders took this up this week with the President. But we must recognize that the American President had been persistently presented misperceptions of Israel from the press as well as the pulpit. And that it is we, grassroots American Jews, who must contest American media misportrayal, as the U.S. President put it to the whole world from Cairo, of “Palestinians’ displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

Regards,
Jerry