To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #628, 1/13/13
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The AP and Inq combined their talents this morning to paint this contrast between Arabs pitching tents and Israel announcing plans to build housing in disputed E-1, between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem. The AP cited the Arab “activists” as saying “they wanted to establish a village at the site.” The Inq’s photo caption said “Israel plans to build a settlement there. What’s really happening is a two-sided struggle for demographic control of Jerusalem and environs, not just Israel “unilaterally” building Jerusalem and adjacent “settlements.”
This Week In The Inq: “E-1 settlement blocks east Jerusalem from West Bank hinterland”; Not Really, but Spotlight on Israel Hides What’s Really Happening
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Question: What’s wrong with this AP statement in this morning’s Inq (Inq, Sunday, 1/13/13, A18, AP)?:
“Israel announced it was moving forward with the E-1 settlement …
“Palestinians say E-1 would be a major blow to their statehood plans because it blocks east Jerusalem from the West Bank hinterland.”
Answer: Just about everything.
[1] First, and this is partly our fault for ourselves using these terms that are loaded against us (e.g. in the very Israel Hayom and Jerusalem Posts maps shown in attached A628.pps – “East Jerusalem,” and “West Bank,” go and look), is the media’s language.
[a] If we claim, as we do, that Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are integral parts of the Jewish homeland, the land of Israel, we should object, and certainly not ourselves use, the slurs “settlers” and “settlements” for Jews living there, even if Israel ultimately agrees to cede parts of these parts of the homeland to Palestinian Arabs. We should object to the AP using “the E-1 settlement” for Jews while using “activists” and “village” for Arabs and foreigners pitching tents of their own (see photo and caption in pps) in E-1: “[The Arab] activists said they wanted to establish a village at the site.” (emphasis added)
[b] The millennia-honored actual name of what the AP in this morning’s Inq called “the West Bank hinterland” is the land of Israel’s “Judea and Samaria” [historically correct names even the U.N. used in 1947] heartland.
[c] Even with a lower-case “e,” “east Jerusalem” existed only between 1948 and 1967, during its Jordanian seizure, and is not a separate place from the rest of Jerusalem with its own “hinterland.”
[d] And, for all our own throwing away of the U.N.’s resolution 181 reference to Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples,” we should simply stop calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians” and their sought-for state “THE Palestinian state,” as though Israel (and to some people Jordan) are not ones.
[2] Second, note particularly in this morning’s Inq that it’s not Arabs claiming that Israel building in E-1 would block contact between Jerusalem and “the West Bank,” but the AP stating so as geographical fact:
“Palestinians say E-1 would be a major blow to their statehood plans because it blocks east Jerusalem from the West Bank hinterland.”
The media, which says “Israel says the sky is blue,” should have inserted “says” here too:
“Palestinians say E-1 would be a major blow to their statehood plans because they say it blocks east Jerusalem from the West Bank hinterland.”
Jewish building in E-1, between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim (see maps in A628.pps), “does not mean, it should be noted, that a theoretical [western Palestine] Palestinian state could not abut Jerusalem at some eastern points” (Arlene Kushner, “A Tough World,” this morning). Jerusalem does not lack from being near Arab areas.
[3] But the most misleading aspect of the media’s fixation upon Israeli building beyond the old green line in Jerusalem is that it masks from the public the two-sided struggle that’s actually going on here.
Israel’s objective is not as the Inq’s house foreign affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin, characterized it last month (Inq, 12/6/12, A23, “Grim Death of Two States”), to “effectively bisect the West Bank.” Look at the maps in A628.pps. Look at the distance between Maale Adumim and the Jordan River. Is it less wide than green line Israel’s width at Natanya?
What then is and has been Israel’s intention? Arlene Kusher this morning put it this way. After stating that undivided Jerusalem will remain Israel’s capital, Arlene added:
“And the government has consistently envisioned Ma’aleh Adumim – with a population now of some 40,000 – as being contiguous with Jerusalem, were there to be a Palestinian Arab state; there has been no intention to either abandon it or to allow it to be surrounded by an Arab state on all sides.”
And what of Palestinian Arabs’ intentions? Arlene:
“… What the Arabs want is continuity of Ramallah and Bethlehem via a tract of land that is directly adjacent to eastern Jerusalem. That is because they still covet eastern Jerusalem (at a bare minimum, and all of Jerusalem, more honestly) as the capital of their state some day. That requires their state to be up against eastern Jerusalem.
“Once there is contiguity between Ma’aleh Adumim – which is itself only seven kilometers (just over four miles) to the east of Jerusalem – and Jerusalem, via E1, a swath of Arab land that runs along all of Jerusalem’s eastern border is not longer possible….”
In an email to me this week, Chaim Silberstein, Founder and President of Keep Jerusalem, www.keepjerusalem.org, said the same thing, that illegal Arab building is “part of a larger Arab plan to create a demographic Trojan horse in Jerusalem, stretching from Ramallah in the north to Bethlehem in the south.”
So instead of harping on just Israel “taking unilateral steps” to disturb the status quo in Jerusalem, the media ought to be informing readers what both sides are doing. Chaim Silberstein cites one Arab area in Jerusalem where the percentage of illegal building “borders on 100%.” There are “today about 70,000 Arabs living ther, whereas a decade ago there were about 10,000.”
So how are the two sides respectively doing in this not-just-Israel-unilaterally-building struggle for demographic control of Jerusalem and its surroundings? If you look at one of Chaim Silberman’s Keep Jerusalem’s maps, “Jerusalem Demographic Map,” you’ll see that the Arabs and not doing badly in their campaign to link Ramallah to Bethlehem with continuous Arab communities. E-1 could block it, which may account for the furor.
With the mainstream media fueling world-frenzy condemnation of every Israeli announcement of planned homes and there for Jews in Jerusalem, as though Arabs were unilaterally observing a Jerusalem building freeze, Israeli construction falters under international pressure while Arab construction carries on, unmentioned and unabated.
Regards,
Jerry