To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #627, 1/6/13
New Year’s Resolutions: Ours, Others’ and Maybe The Washington Post’s
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Ours
As a baseline to see how far we’ve allowed Israel reporting language to drift to our detriment, consider the terms the U.N. used in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947.
[a] The U.N. didn’t use “the West Bank,” which Jordan hadn’t invented yet, but “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” Hebrew-origin names in use throughout history.
[b] The U.N. didn’t seek to divide western Palestine (the remainder of the original post-Ottoman empire League of Nations Palestine Mandate after the excision of all-Arab Transjordan) into Jewish and “Palestinian” states, but into Jewish and “Arab” states.
[c] The U.N. didn’t call Arabs living in Palestine “Palestinian” but Jews living there not, but referred to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”
Yes, even we use the delegitimizing terms, but is that an estoppel to stopping? After decades, southern American Blacks refused to continue to sit in the back of the bus.
So Resolution #1, stop using terms expressly designed to delegitimize us. Second century homeland Jews refused to use the Romans’ new names for Judaea and its cities and towns. Let’s emulate them, and not just in calling Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria” and not “the West Bank,” but in shunning all the language loaded against us:
E.g.,: “East” Jerusalem, which existed only between 1948 and 1967;
“Jewish settlers in settlements” vs “Palestinian residents of neighborhoods, towns”;
“occupied territories,” “Palestinian territories,” “Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories”;
Israel’s “1948 creation and founding,” as opposed to “independence”;
“Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” as opposed to “Arab-Israeli conflict”
“Palestinian refugee issue,” as though there weren’t more Arab lands’ Jewish refugees;
Palestinian Arabs as “THE Palestinians”
And lean on Israel’s advocates and spokespersons to cease mouthing these intentionally Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms.
And among your New Year’s resolutions: arm-twist a friend into subscribing to Brith Sholom Media Watch.
What Should Be Others’ New Year’s Resolutions
The Media’s, per CAMERA: Go to CAMERA’s website, www.camera.org, and read its posting on Friday (1/4/13): “13 for ’13: New Year’s Resolutions We’d Like the Media to Make.” If you’ve ever made a contribution to CAMERA, you just got your money’s worth.
CONSERVATIVES’: The top-of-A1 headline in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”, 1/6/13) says “GOP Looking To Retool Its Brand,” topping an Inquirer Politics Writer’s article on Republican elders doing “soul-searching” after their presidential candidate getting “thumped across all the demographics that will rule the nation’s political future,” followed by their having “split apart in chaos” re the fiscal cliff.
Perhaps, but one New Year’s Resolution not just the GOP but more broadly all Americans of a conservative bent should make is that if a second major driveway-delivered newspaper comes to the Philly area, we’ll do better at subscribing to it than we did with the brief return of “The Bulletin.” It’s unwholesome for democracy that an American metropolitan region the size of Philadelphia be served principally by one full-coverage daily newspaper that goes thump on your driveway.
LIBERALS’: Back last February, the organized Philadelphia Jewish community confronted the anti-Israel “BDS” confab at Penn with formal statements and programs in which a wide spectrum of Jewish community organizations joined. One liberal group, J Street, issued a separate protest statement of its own, which included counter-productive, self-disrespecting language:
“We too oppose the occupation of the West Bank and the expansion and entrenchment of settlements there.”
Israel’s Liberal supporters should make two resolutions. First, to couch their contentions for Israeli concessions in language, grounded in history, that these concessions are meaningful and worth counter-concessions, as all advocates do in negotiating. Second, to make the case to the Obama administration, as significant supporters of the President’s re-election, that his understanding of crucial Arab-Israeli conflict history is deeply flawed. His statement at Cairo:
“It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding ….”
fundamentally misunderstands the key events of 1948, and is likely responsible for, e.g., his subsequent statement on border-setting based on “the 1967 lines [give him credit for not saying ‘1967 borders’] with agreed swaps.”
The Washington Post’s?
The Very influential liberal newspaper The Washington Post greeted the new year with a January 1 editorial which, while containing loaded language – e.g., “Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank” – recognized some realities that normally escape liberal newspapers. It said that criticism of Israel’s new building plans is appropriate in the sense that unilateral actions by both sides complicate “the only realistic route” to peace, but then it added that such criticism was simultaneously
“counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible.”
The editorial acknowledged that “Mr. Netanyahu’s government, like several before it, has limited building almost entirely to areas that both sides expect Israel to annex through territorial swaps in an eventual settlement.” It added that “exaggerated rhetoric” by the U.N.’s Secretary General that Israel building in E-1 connecting Maale Adumim to Jerusalem would be “an almost fatal blow” to a two-state solution increases pressure on Abbas to make a “freeze” a peace talks resumption condition, which the editorial said was a demand that “Mr. Abbas had hinted that he would finally drop.”
If The Washington Post pointedly avoids disseminating in its news columns in 2013 “two mistaken but widely held notions that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible,” then the mistakenness of those notions – which are widely held among the American public principally because its mainstream media, not least our beloved hometown Inq, has hammered them into its head – may get through to the Post’s fellow mainstream media luminaries. And, if so, that would be a New Year’s Resolution worth toasting.
Regards,
Jerry