Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #633, 2/17/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #633, 2/17/13

A Study In Scurrilous: An Appreciation of Persistence in Purveying Pejoratives
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Of all the participants in public discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict, only we – not the media, not Israel’s enemies, not “liberal” Jews riding the terminology tiger “to push ‘the peace process’ along” – lack studied persistence in word choices. We know deep down inside that “West Bank” (like “Palestine” 1800 years earlier) was devised to disassociate the Jewish homeland from Jews, that “Israel’s 1967 borders” are really just the 1949 ceasefire lines, etc., but we haphazardly use Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms ourselves.

We should take a seriousness lesson from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (“Inq’s”) liberal house foreign affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin, who persistently chooses the most Jewish homeland-delegitimizing word choice available. Here’s a sampling of her selections.

“Israel’s 1967 Borders”

The 1949 Armistice Agreement signed by Israel and invading Transjordan defined “the green line” that it drew between the two armies as exclusively a military ceasefire line, expressly without prejudice to either side’s position on political borders. Even as a military ceasefire line, it was superseded by the 1967 war’s vastly less perilous to Israel ceasefire line. But these historical facts don’t prevent those seeking to push Israel back to that 9-miles-wide in critical places 1949 ceasefire line from elevating that earlier line to the international diplomatic dignity of “Israel’s 1967 borders.” Ms. Rubin:

[a] Rubin “Worldview” column (Inq, 2/7/13, A19) – paragraph 5: “a Palestinian state, basically along the 1967 borders …” [emphasis added throughout]; par. 6: “[a plan in which] Palestinians would receive land swaps in compensation for Israel’s annexation of several Jewish settlements just across the 1967 border”; par. 15: “As for Obama, domestic politics have penalized him for even mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders.” [The borders-setting starting point Pres. Obama actually used in his 5/19/11 statement adopting the Palestinian Arab position on border setting wasn’t “1967 borders” but “lines.”]

[b] Rubin Inq Worldview column, 4/7/11: “[The 2002 ‘Arab Peace Initiative’] called on all Arab states to recognize Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders ….” And: “[A plan proposed by some Israelis] reminds us that the only territorial basis for an Israeli-Palestinian peace is the 1967 borders with small adjustments.”

[c] Rubin Inq Worldview column, 11/11/10: “… Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in suburbs of Jerusalem beyond Israel’s 1967 borders ….”

“West Bank”

The Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” for the land of Israel’s hill country heartland aren’t merely what the media has called “the biblical name for the West Bank.” They were the names used not just by Jews until 1950. Even the U.N. in 1947 referenced “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” not “the West Bank,” which Jordan later coined after invading and seizing it. Ms. Rubin:

[a] Inq Worldview column 2/17/13: “[Bibi’s potential coalition partners] want to annex much of the West Bank”.

[b] Compare these two texts. A July 13, 2012, English translation, purporting to be “from the original and authoritative Hebrew text,” of “the “Conclusions and Recommendations” of “The Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria” (the “Levy Commission”) uses the expression “Judea and Samaria” fifteen times, and the expression “West Bank” not at all.

But sixteen times in her Inq Worldview column condemning the Levy Commission’s report (7/12/12, A2), headlined “A Wrong Course for Israel in West Bank; Netanyahu’s panel’s ideas aim to back settlements, but they pose trouble for the nation and the peace process,” Ms. Rubin, used, exclusively, the expression “West Bank.”

[c] Rubin Inq Worldview column, 12/6/12, A23: “[Israel building in E-1 between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem would] effectively bisect the West Bank.” [No, it wouldn’t]

[d] Inq Worldview column 4/7/11: “West Bank” 5 times, “Judea and Samaria” 0 times.

“East Jerusalem”

Jerusalem, capital of three states in the past 3,000 years – Judah, Judaea and Israel, all of them Jewish – with a renewed Jewish majority population dating back to 19th century Ottoman times, has been a single undivided city, except during the 1948-67 Jordanian occupation. But the western media incessantly cites “East Jerusalem,” as though it were a separate satellite city (cf “East Chicago” in Indiana, “East St. Louis” in Illinois), and not Jerusalem’s heart and soul (Old City, Temple Mount, City of David, Jewish Quarter, etc), in which Jews, of all peoples in the world, are outsider “settlers.” Ms. Rubin has gone beyond the mainstream media’s “east Jerusalem,” “East Jerusalem,” “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem” to unequivocal “Arab East Jerusalem.”

[a] Ms. Rubin’s 12/6/12 Inq Worldview column, “Grim Death of Two States,” direly warned that Israel building Jewish housing in the E-1 area between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim “would rule out any possibility of making Arab East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state.”

[b] 3/18/10 Inq Worldview column: “Continued building in and around Arab East Jerusalem makes it impossible for this part of the city to become – as it must in any peace settlement – the capital of a Palestinian state.”

[c] See also upper-cased-E “East Jerusalem” four times in Ms. Rubin’s 4/7/11 “Worldview” column.

Jewish and Palestinian States

The U.N.’s 1947 resolution #181 sought to partition Palestine into an “Arab” state and a “Jewish” state, and called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” That’s rather more balanced than referencing “Palestine’s” partition between “Palestinians” and other folks.

On November 29, 2012, the U.N. General Assembly granted Palestinian Arabs non-member status. On 12/2/12, Ms. Rubin characterized that week’s U.N. General Assembly vote as “positive, since it reenshrines the principle of two separate states for Israel and the Palestinians ….”

“The Palestinian Refugee Issue”

The 1948 era saw a greater number of indigenous Middle Eastern Jews displaced from vast Muslim lands than Arabs left what became tiny Israel. Most of these Jews fled to Israel, which absorbed them, but Israel’s doing so didn’t transform the Arab-Israeli conflict’s two-sided refugee aspect into “the Palestinian refugee issue.”

Ms. Rubin, Inq Worldview column, 4/7/11: “[The 2002 ‘Arab Peace Initiative’] called on all Arab states to recognize Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue on which both sides agree.”

“Palestinian Refugee Camps”

That a Dr. Palestine U.N. has ever-since preserved that smaller number of Arabs who left tiny Israel, and generations of their descendants, through a unique western-funded U.N. Agency exclusive to them among all the world’s refugees, multiplying them into Dr. Palestine’s Monster, is perhaps not the fault of the Inq. But, sixty-some years after the fact, it’s rather a stretch to call these Palestinian Arabs, living in Arab lands including in Arab-controlled portions of Palestine, to be living in “refugee camps.”

Ms. Rubin, perhaps, did not appreciate the reality revealed by her reference in her 11/28/10 Inq Worldview column to a Palestinian Arab living “in his family’s comfortable rowhouse in the Al-Arroub refugee camp near Hebron.”

Other Terms

None of this is going on in a vacuum, but in a matrix of equally Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms insistently employed by Ms. Rubin and others – “Israel’s creation and founding” … “Jewish settlers in Jewish settlements” versus “Palestinians residing in neighborhoods, villages, towns” . . . “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories” . . . “hard-line” Netanyahu versus “moderate” Abbas . . . Bibi, not [impossible pre-conditions-demanding] Abbas, as blocking peace talks, and opposing “the two-state solution” [which both the U.S. and Israel have defined as two states for two peoples, but which the P.A. expressly rejects], etc., etc.

Can you picture Ms. Rubin writing an Inq Worldview column referring

*** to Arabs pressing for Israel’s retreat to “the 1949 ceasefire lines,” not to “Israel’s 1967 borders”?

*** To “Judea and Samaria,” not to “the West Bank”?

*** To Arab-demanded Israeli withdrawal from the Temple Mount, City of David, Old City, Jewish Quarter, Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods over the green line, etc., not from “Jewish settlements” in “Arab East Jerusalem”?

*** To the U.N.’s 1947 resolution as calling for Palestine’s partition into separate states for Arabs and Jews, the two Palestinian peoples, not into separate Israeli and “Palestinian” states?

*** To the Arab-Israeli conflict’s Arab and Jewish refugees, not to “the Palestinian refugee issue”?

Ms. Rubin, among others, well understands and appreciates the impact on readers and hearers of Arab-Israeli conflict word choices. It’s time that we do.

Regards,
Jerry