Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #632, 2/10/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #632, 2/10/13

A Media Watch’s Look-back to One Year Ago This Week: The “BDS” Confab at Penn
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Exactly one year ago this week, 2/5/12’s BSMW #579 addressed the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (“BDS”) conference being held that week by anti-Israel groups on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus here in Philly.

BSMW’s persistent pitch has been that Jews of all political stripes have a common self-interest in making the Jewish homeland case to the world, that we grievously err in ourselves using the loaded terms that our adversaries and the media have crafted specifically to delegitimize the Jewish people’s homeland of Israel. Not just liberal Jews, but Jews all across the political spectrum, counter-productively use these loaded terms.

So BSMW’s take on last February’s “BDS” conference at Penn was not that the BDSers’ perennial campaign is unjust, which it is. Our take centered on the language used by the one prominent community group that wrote a separate letter protesting the confab rather than join in the Jewish community’s “Statement of Solidarity Condemning the National BDS Conference at the University of Pennsylvania,” signed by the Jewish Federation, Board of Rabbis, and educational, charitable and grassroots advocacy groups with widely varying political positions. The language in that separate letter was counter-productive.

Among the expressions the liberal advocacy group “J Street” used in its separate letter was:

“We too oppose the occupation of the West Bank and the expansion and entrenchment of settlements there.” (emphasis added)

In criticizing that language, I cited a specific example of how we invite the heaping of contumely upon us by using such terms. We don’t have to use them. Last week’s BSMW #631 quoted Israeli advocate Alan Baker:

“The oft-used term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ has no basis whatsoever in law or fact. The territories are neither occupied nor are they Palestinian. No legal determination has ever been made as to their sovereignty, and by agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, they are no more than ‘disputed’ pending a negotiated solution, with both sides claiming rights to the territory.” (USA Today op-ed, 1/23/13, emphasis added)

The specific instance I cited occurred in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (“Inq’s”) 2/1/12 front-page article, Inq-headlined “Free-Speech Dispute Roils Penn,” by Inquirer Staff Writer Michael Matza, formerly chief of the Inq’s since-closed (only-such-place-in-the-world) Jerusalem Bureau. Mr. Matza’s article referenced

“the pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, which as been outspoken in its criticism of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”

And now, last week, I encountered a far graver consequence of we Jews leading with our chin than a staff writer article in a Philadelphia Inquirer. A Jerusalem Post article I referenced last week linked as a “related” article a December Jerusalem Post article quoting three big countries on three different continents – India, Brazil and South Africa – joining, as U.N. Security Council members, in a demand that Israel end “the occupation” and dismantle “the settlements,” not in some grand “land for peace” conflict resolution, but with no quid pro quo because Israel has no claims there whatsoever. That 12/19/12 JPost article, “14 UNSC Members Slam Settlement Plans; US Mum,” quoted India, Brazil and South Africa as jointly flatly demanding that

“not only must settlement construction be frozen, but that ‘settlements must be dismantled and the occupation end,’ not as a concession to be made in the course of negotiations,’ but rather as ‘an obligation under various (Security Council) resolutions and international law.’” [emphasis added, but not by much]

Try a fourth continent? Say, Europe? That same JPost article continued:

“France, Britain, Germany and Portugal issued a joint statement, which was read out after a meeting on the Middle East in the Security Council. It said the countries were ‘extremely concerned by, and strongly opposed, the plans by Israel to expand settlement construction in the West Bank, including in east Jerusalem.’” [emphasis added]

How’s that for non-Jewish geography: “… plans by Israel to expand settlement construction in the West Bank, including in east Jerusalem”?

Co-author Lee Bender and I had the privilege this week to present our “Pressing Israel” Powerpoint presentation to two New Jersey groups – the friends-and-then-some Christian group “Friends of Israel” in Westville, and the Men’s Club of Congregation Beth Tikvah in Marlton. Attendees at both asked us why the organized Jewish community is not more urgently countering such distorted terms denigrating the Jewish homeland of Israel. I can’t answer for the organized Jewish community. I’m of the grassroots. When Lee and I had the opportunity recently to stand before a Jewish community executive body we made such an appeal. But I cut my eye-teeth as a media watcher a decade ago in confronting the mathematically-demonstrably monstrously wrong mainstream media canard of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the creation of Israel,” repeated over and over for years. Palestine’s entire 1947 population was well less than two million, a good third of it Palestine’s Jews. There’s a role here for the Jewish grassroots, just as there was for the Black grassroots in the civil rights movement. Stop using the media’s Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms. Start chiding our people’s leaders and pundits to stop. Then, we can confront the media credibly (not to mention fairly hefty non-Muslim countries on three continents and four countries in Europe.)

Let me leave you with a three-part United Nations benchmark of how far we have fallen:

[1] The U.N.’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution (#181) didn’t call the hill country west of the Jordan “the West Bank,” as Israel’s enemies, the western media and often we ourselves call it. The U.N. called it “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” Hebrew-origin terms for that heartland of the Jewish homeland where archeologists have located the earliest evidences of Israelite settlement, dating to the late second millennium BCE.

[2] 1947 U.N. resolution #181 didn’t seek to partition the remaining (post-Transjordanian lop-off) Palestine Mandate into “Jewish and Palestinian” states, as the media puts it, slightly begging the question of comparative Jewish and “Palestinian” equities in the Palestine being partitioned. The U.N. resolution referred to “the Jewish State” and “the Arab State” over and over and over. And

[3] 1947 U.N. resolution #181 didn’t refer to Palestine’s Arabs as “The Palestinians.” It called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Yes, we’ve let a long time elapse in this fall from “Judea and Samara” to “the West Bank,” from “independent Arab and Jewish States” to separate states in Palestine for “Palestinians and Jews,” and from “the two Palestinian peoples” to Jews and “the Palestinians.” But Rosa Parks knew that for a long time Blacks had ridden in the back of the bus.

This Week In The Inq: “1967 Borders,” “Palestinian Civilians” in “Village” vs “Settlers”
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The Inq’s AP article last Sunday (Inq, Sun, 2/3/13, A8, emphasis added) contrasted Arab “civilians” in a Judea-Samaria “village” and “hard-line Jewish settlers” who live “nearby.”

“The [Arab] village of Burin has come under frequent attack by hard-line Jewish settlers who live nearby.

“About a dozen young men and boys, apparently Jewish settlers, clashed with Palestinian civilians at the scene.”

Three times in her “Worldview” op-ed column Thursday (Inq, Thu, 2/7/13, A19, “Bold Proposals for the Mideast,” emphasis added), the Inq’s foreign affairs columnist Trudy Rubin, who knows a thing or two about Mideast word choices’ nuances, referenced Israel’s “1967 border” in the context of drawing final borders between Jewish and Arab western Palestine states in a “two-state solution.” She knows “borders” conveys a political permanence that military ceasefire lines, which the perilous-to-Israel 1949 Israel-Jordan armistice agreement’s “green line” separating the Arab and Jewish armies was expressly defined to be, without prejudice to political claims, don’t.

In paragraph 5, Ms. Rubin cites an Israeli pundit’s suggestion that she characterizes as “meaning Israel accepts a Palestinian state, basically along the 1967 borders, minus certain Jewish settlement blocs, plus some piece of Jerusalem.”

In paragraph 6, Ms. Rubin characterizes the year 2000 Clinton plan and Olmert’s 2008 proposal (which she acknowledges Arabs rejected), thusly: “In both proposals, Palestinians would receive land swaps in compensation for Israel’s annexation of several Jewish settlements just across the 1967 border.”

In paragraph 15, Ms. Rubin states that “of course, it’s probably useless to hope that Bibi will endorse such a plan,” given that some of his potential coalition partners “want to annex much of the West Bank,” and that “he has made clear his opposition to a viable Palestinian state.” Ms. Rubin is likely alluding here to Israel’s recently announced plans to build homes in E-1, linking Maale Adumim to Jerusalem, which will hardly “bisect” Judea-Samaria areas to the east or reduce a western Palestine Arab state to disconnected little “cantons,” as she and others have claimed. In any case, glaringly absent here is that while Bibi has accepted the concept of “two states for two peoples,” which is the two-states connotation endorsed by the United States, Abbas and other P.A. leaders have repeatedly vowed “we shall never accept a Jewish state.”

Ms. Rubin ends paragraph 15 with further gloom: “As for Obama, domestic politics have penalized him for even mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders.” She’s apparently referencing pro-Israel reaction to his May 19, 2011, statement – “I believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” – which endorsed verbatim what the State Department had called on November 11, 2010, the Palestinian Arab goal of a state based on the old 1949 armistice agreement with agreed swaps, which the State Department said had to be “reconciled” with the Israeli goal of secure and recognized boundaries taking into account post-1967 demographics. If President Obama was “penalized by domestic politics,” it was for adopting the substance of the Arab borders-basis position, not for “mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders.” Unlike Ms. Rubin this week in the Inq, Mr. Obama’s May 19, 2011, statement didn’t “mention” Israel’s “1967 borders.” Mr. Obama “mentioned” not “borders,” but “lines.”

Regards,
Jerry