Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #630, 1/27/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #630, 1/27/13

This Week In the Inq: Peace Talks-Blocking Bibi Rebuffed in Israeli Vote [Not Exactly]
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The impression you’d glean about Israel’s elections on Tuesday from exclusively reading the Philadelphia Inquirer [our hometown “Inq”] is that Israel’s voters roundly rejected the peace talks-blocking policies of their incumbent prime minister, Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu, in favor of “centrist” parties, a repudiation that “raised hopes of a revival of peace talks with Palestinians,” as though the “languishing” of such talks during Bibi’s four years is the fault of Bibi and his “hard-line” allies, not that of His Moderateness, Mr. Abbas.

Baloney, on every count.

Misportrayal of Peace Talks’ Breakdown as Bibi’s Fault

The Inq and its sources left little doubt in readers’ minds about who’s responsible for peace talks languishing.

Here is the Inq’s AP article lede Thursday (1/24/13, A2), Inq headlined: “Hopes Renewed for Mideast Talks; A new centrist party that gained in Israeli elections has vowed to work for peace.”

“JERUSALEM – The unexpected strong showing by a new centrist party in Israel’s parliamentary election has raised hopes of a revival of peace talks with Palestinians that have languished for four years under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Inq’s AP article Friday (1/25/13, A8):

“Israeli-Palestinian talks on the terms of Palestinian statehood have been frozen since Netanyahu took office four years ago.”

Not exactly. Obama helped by demanding a unilateral “settlements freeze,” running Abbas up a tree from which he couldn’t come down had he wanted to. Bibi has been calling all along for peace talks without pre-conditions, and went further with a 10-month unilateral partial freeze. Abbas waited 9 months, sat down and jumped up three weeks later when the 10th month expired, and ever since has been demanding impossible pre-conditions for peace talks’ restart.

“Centrists” Didn’t Win and Yesh Atid Isn’t “Centrist”

“The conventional wisdom about the election,” pundit Michael J. Koplow put it Wednesday in Foreign Affairs, is that the unexpected second-place showing of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party “has reinvigorated the Israeli center [citing the Washington Post], debunking the notion that Israel’s electorate necessarily leans to the right.”

Reflecting that “conventional wisdom,” the Inq and AP on Thursday tallied “Netanyahu’s hard-line religious bloc of allies and the rival bloc of centrist, secular and Arab parties each with 60 seats,” but that’s lumping Yesh Atid (19), Labor (15), Livni (6), Kadima (2), Meretz (6) and three Arab parties (12) into that 60-seat “rival bloc.” Here’s Microsoft Word’s thesaurus’ synonyms displayed when you type alt-T-L-T with the cursor on “bloc” – “community … coalition … union … alliance … federation … league … syndicate.” Not exactly descriptive of a “bloc” of these groups.

More importantly, as Koplow continued: “The problem with this narrative, however, is that Tuesday’s results were not really a victory for centrists and Yesh Atid is not really a centrist party.” It may be liberal on economic issues, but “Yesh Atid, however, cannot be accurately described as centrist when it comes to the peace process,” the very issue on which the Inq’s AP article put it in the “centrist bloc” under the Inq headline, “Hopes Renewed for Mideast Talks; a new centrist party that gained in Israeli elections has vowed to work for peace.” It is true, as the article notes, that “Lapid has said he will not sit in the government unless the peace process is restarted,” but his views on that peace process are basically the same as Netanyahu’s. Koplow:

“Lapid has stated that Jerusalem cannot be divided under any circumstances and insists that standing firm on this issue will force the Palestinians to recant their demand that East Jerusalem serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. During the campaign, Lapid chose the West Bank settlement of Ariel as the place to give a major campaign speech calling for negotiations with the Palestinians, and declines to endorse a settlement freeze. None of this is enough to put him in the far-right camp, which rejects the two-state solution and calls for annexing the West Bank, but it also does not make him a centrist. Lapid’s views on security issues are close to those that Netanyahu has publicly staked out.”

And see Herb Keinon article, “Analysis: Lapid: A Presentable Face to the World?” in Wednesday’s Jerusalem Post, sub-headlined: “Lapid backs Ariel, backs Israel’s retention of the major settlement blocs, and is opposed to the division of Jerusalem.”

So while the Inq’s Friday AP article – Inq headlined “Abbas Reaches Out After Israeli Vote; He wants to meet with centrists in hopes of restarting talks” – says that “Abbas’ main target appears to be Yair Lapid, leader of the moderate Yesh Atid,” the AP’s and Inq’s own main target appears to be painting Israelis as having turned their back on Bibi, under whom, the Inq’s AP article notes, peace talks “have been frozen since Netanyahu took office four years ago.”

Also This Week: “’Occupied Palestinian Territories’ has no basis whatsoever”
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Take another look at that Michael Koplow paragraph that I just quoted approvingly above, this time with self-denigrating words highlighted:

“Lapid has stated that Jerusalem cannot be divided under any circumstances and insists that standing firm on this issue will force the Palestinians to recant their demand that East Jerusalem serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. During the campaign, Lapid chose the West Bank settlement of Ariel as the place to give a major campaign speech calling for negotiations with the Palestinians, and declines to endorse a settlement freeze. None of this is enough to put him in the far-right camp, which rejects the two-state solution and calls for annexing the West Bank, but it also does not make him a centrist. Lapid’s views on security issues are close to those that Netanyahu has publicly staked out.”

It’s gratuitously foolish for us, in our very sentence proclaiming “Jerusalem cannot be divided under any circumstances,” to call the indivisible part we refuse to cut off “East Jerusalem”; to call Judea and Samaria “the West Bank”; to call the communities whose natural growth we refuse to freeze “settlements”; to call Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians,” as though the mantle “Palestinians” were exclusive to them; and to call the state they seek to create, the third to be carved out of the post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate, a “Palestinian” state, as though the two states already carved from that Palestine Mandate are not Palestinian states.

A lucid interval in writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared in USA Today Wednesday, apparently in answer to a contrary article, as an article by Alan Baker: “Israeli Settlements’ Legal Basis: Opposing View.”

Mr. Baker’s position is that “the territories are neither occupied nor are they Palestinian,” but are “’disputed’ pending a negotiated solution,” and that the Oslo accords “contain no prohibition whatsoever on building settlements on those parts of the territory agreed upon as remaining under Israel’s control.” [So why call them “settlements”?]

Mr. Baker points out: “Israel has a very well-based claim to sovereignty over the area, more so than any other people,” citing “the undeniable historic fact that the Jewish people are, for more than 3,000 years,” an indigenous people to the region, and citing Balfour, San Remo and the League of Nations Palestine Mandate with its Jewish National Home.

Some of you know I wrote a book about our Jewish people’s homeland presence for those 3,000 years. It’s important that we ourselves appreciate that historian Parkes was right when he wrote that the Yishuv’s continuous presence all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” In my book’s preface I wrote that the Jewish people’s sense of homeland is place-specific, Israel-specific, that then most persecuted Jews in the world documented with their lives that it would not play in Uganda. This week’s Herb Keinon JPost article cited Yair Lapid saying very much the same thing, that Lapid “is opposed to the division of Jerusalem, saying the capital represents the country’s ethos, the reason the Jewish people is here.”

Over the course of those 3,000 years, homeland Jewish armies unflinchingly fought mighty empires’ forces, not always successfully, at the gates of Jerusalem – Assyrians; Babylonians; Alexander’s successors; the Romans (four times); the Byzantines (alongside the Persians); the Crusaders (who wrote that of “Turk, Arab and Jew” confronting them at Jerusalem, “the Jew is the last to fall”); the Jordanian Arab Legion (in 1948 and 1967). To date, no non-fighting Jewish army has ever walked meekly out of the gates of Jerusalem. My bet is the IDF won’t be the first.

Regards,
Jerry