To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #643, 4/28/13
A Half-Dozen Mainstream Media Myths We Just-Plain-Jews Just Have To Stop Spouting
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In my book on the Jewish people’s continuous three-millennia homeland-claiming presence in Israel (Israel 3,000 Years, Pavilion Press, 2010), I quote Prof. Wilken in The Land Called Holy (pp. 196-197) that following Roman defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 CE, which marked the end of ancient Jewish homeland sovereignty, the homeland’s Jews (who weren’t exiled en masse, President Carter to the contrary notwithstanding) shunned Judaea’s new Roman name “Palestine,” and “the Greek and Roman names for cities and towns of Eretz Israel.”
I commend the post-revolts’ Yishuv’s course to you. In our own age, mainstream Western media reporting on Israel is laced with perspectives and terms denigrating the three-millennia Jewish homeland connection to Israel. So ingrained in public perception have these misstatements become that we ourselves mouth them without thinking of the self-disrespect, along with historical inaccuracy, that we’re uttering. Effectively combating anti-Israel media bias starts with we ourselves washing our mouths out. That’s the bottom-line message of Brith Sholom Media Watch and of Lee Bender’s and my new book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z.
So here, for those of you game for entertaining the notion that our mainstream Western journalists – Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought Us Years of “Millions of Palestinian Refugees and Their Descendants From Israel’s Creation” – are still wearing no clothes, are a half-dozen and one mainstream media Jewish homeland denigrating myths. Those below relate to reporting of historical events. There are plenty more – “settlers” versus residents, “occupied” versus disputed, who’s really for and against “two states for two peoples,” etc. – relating to distorted reporting of current events.
Myth #1 – “Israel was Founded in 1948”: As recently as March 31 of this year (Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”) photo caption (p. N4), the mainstream Western media has referenced “Israel’s founding in 1948.” Pressing Israel has tons more examples under “C – Creation of Israel” and “F – Founded in 1948? Not Exactly.”
Israel wasn’t “founded,” ex nihilo, in 1948, but attained its independence that year, when it became the land’s next native state after Bar Kochba’s Judaea. Everybody between 135 and 1948 was a foreigner – from Romans-Byzantines, Arab-Turk Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mongols, through non-Arab Mamluks who ruled for two centuries and then Ottoman Turks who ruled for four. The homeland-claiming Jewish Yishuv was present throughout (see, e.g., Israel 3,000 Years), and re-attained a Jerusalem majority under pre-Zionist, 19th century Ottoman rule. It was that continuous tenacious presence that historian Parkes correctly assessed had written the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” In 1948, after almost two-millennia of foreign rule ending in an anti-Jewish British blockade, the Yishuv comprised at least a third of the land’s population. And it was a homeland Jewish army that threw back five Arab states’ 1948 invasion in Israel’s War of Independence, not of “Creation and Founding.” (And that Arab and Jewish refugee-causing partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion was a partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion, not the media’s “war that followed Israel’s creation” without those invading Arab states even named.)
Myth #2 – “Judea-Samaria is the ‘Biblical name’ for ‘the West Bank’”: Even we use “West Bank,” but should we? In Pressing Israel’s “W – West Bank – Not It’s Name for 3,000 Years,” we cite the New York Times (10/3/10, Bronner, Inq, A15) telling people that when Netanyahu mentioned “Judea and Samaria,” he was “using the biblical term for the West Bank.” USA Today (9/20/11) at least noted that “Jews have lived in ‘Judea and Samaria,’ the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years.”
But in historical fact, “Judea and Samaria,” not “West Bank,” has been the name in use all through post-biblical times. See, e.g., the 1102 Crusader-era Christian pilgrim cited in Israel 3,000 Years: “On this side of the Jordan is the region called Judea as far as the sea.” The new name “West Bank” was invented by invading [Trans-] Jordan in 1951. In its 1947 Palestine partition resolution (#181), the United Nations didn’t reference “the West Bank.” It referenced “the hill country of Samaria and Judea.” We Jews shouldn’t pay obeisance to “West Bank” as though 3,000 years ago it was written in stone.
Myth #3 – “The U.N. sought to partition Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish states”: In one of mainstream media’s more question-begging pejoratives, the MSM tells readers that in 1947 the U.N. sought to partition Palestine into “separate Jewish and Palestinian states” (McClatchy, Inq, 5/8/08); “separate Jewish and Palestinian states” (AP, 2/28/09, Inq headlined: “… Separate States for Palestinians and Jews”).
It would be difficult to construct a more comparative equities-loaded expression than one proposing to partition a place between people bearing the name of that place and some other people – e.g., partitioning Palestine between “Palestinians” and anyone else, be they Martians or Jews.
In point of fact, that’s not what the United Nations purported to do. Over and over again, Resoluton 181 mentions “the Jewish State” and “the Arab State.” It mentions “Jewish and Palestinian states” not at all.
Myth #4 – “Palestine’s Arabs are exclusively ‘The Palestinians’”: OK, even Israel’s government calls Palestine’s Arabs “the Palestinians,” so I’m talking about being more Catholic than the Pope, but Can We Talk? Like about how recent a development calling Palestine’s Arabs “the Palestinians,” as though from time immemorial, actually is?
For years, David Bar-Illan, editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of its ground-breaking “Eye On The Media” column, recited over and over that institutions with “Palestine” in their title during the Mandate – e.g., Palestine Symphony, Palestine Electric Company, Palestine Post (still the corporate name of today’s Jerusalem Post) – were Jewish, not Arab, institutions. And “Palestinian” was on Ezer Weitzman’s RAF patch.
What did the United Nations say about “Palestinians” in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947? It expressed hope for cooperation between the citizens of the Jewish State and the Arab State – “the two Palestinian peoples.”
Myth #5 – “The Palestinian refugee issue”: Among Israel-Arab reporting’s less pounded-upon historical happenings is that in the 1948 war and its aftermath more indigenous Middle Eastern Jews fled vast Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel, and that the bulk of these Jews went to Israel, where they were absorbed, while to-this-day Arabs (now there’s apartheid) keep the Arab refugees’ descendants in “refugee camps.”
These Israel-absorbed Middle-eastern Jews have multiple significances: Along with the ever-present Yishuv, they establish the Jewish people’s continuous bona fides as an indigenous people of the Mideast, as well as of Israel itself. And their absorption by Israel does not remove them from the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue, which the media pointedly calls “the Palestinian refugee issue.”
Myth #6 – “’East’ Jerusalem … ‘traditionally Arab East Jerusalem’”: Under “S – ‘Settlements’ if Jewish, ‘Neighborhoods, Villages’ if Arab,” Pressing Israel cites the number of times one mainstream Western newspaper, our hometown Inq, used the expression “East Jerusalem” – usually in reference to “Jewish settlements” there – in news stories in just one year, 2010. We cited 34 (mostly AP and NY Times) Inq news articles, many of them repeating “East” Jerusalem multiple times.
This briefly Jordanian-held “East” Jerusalem in which the media calls Jews, of all peoples on earth, “settlers” includes the Old City, Jewish Quarter, Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David, and many pre-1948 Jewish neighborhoods of this city that’s been the capital of three states in the past 3,000 years, all Jewish, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century Ottoman rule.
We’ve cited Jews as diverse in political view as Bibi and the Reform movement’s Rabbi Yoffie as agreeing that Jews are not “settlers” anywhere in Jerusalem, including the part that invading Transjordan seized in 1948 and held for 19 years that ended almost a half-century ago. Calling Jews “East Jerusalem settlers” is driven by the same motivation as that which calls “Judea-Samaria” the “biblical name for the West Bank,” and which millennia-ago renamed Jerusalem as “Aelia Capitolina” and Judaea as “Palestine.”
Myth #7 – “The ‘green line’ constitutes ‘Israel’s 1967 Borders’”: There’s a big difference in international law between established political borders and mere military ceasefire lines. The April 3, 1949, Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement which drew the “green line” between where those countries’ armies stood at the ceasefire in fighting between them expressly stipulated that “no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations.”
Yet, Palestinian Arabs refer to those perilous-to-Israel 1949 ceasefire lines as “the 1967 border” (e.g., AP quoting Abbas, 10/18/10; Jerusalem Post quoting Erekat, 1/10/10), and the mainstream media joins in this use. See, e.g., the 5/10/11 AP, which, in referencing President Bush having said in 2004 that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” appended on its own that the term “the armistice lines of 1949” is “a term synonymous with the pre-1967 borders.” See also 5/20/11 Inq’s headlining its report of President Obama’s statement, “I believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines [emphasis added] with mutually agreed swaps,” as the President having stated that the starting point should be “the borders [emphasis added] set before the 1967 war.”
Those “pre-1967 borders” left Israel 9-miles-wide in the most critical places. They were explicitly 1949 military ceasefire lines, no holier than the vastly securer for Israel post-1967 military ceasefire lines following renewed fighting (likewise Jordanian-started) between the same sides.
What To Say Instead
One thing we just plain Diaspora Jews can do in support of the Jewish people’s homeland claim to the land of Israel is ourselves stop using terms that treat that claim with derision.
*** Say Israel won its independence, not was “created” or “founded,” that its 1948 War of Independence was a homeland army’s throwing back of a multi-nation invasion, not “the war that followed Israel’s creation” without the invading Arab states even named.
*** Call Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria,” as it was called for thousands of years, including by the U.N. in 1947, not “the West Bank,” which Jordan invented in 1951.
*** Say the U.N. sought to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the terms its Palestine partition resolution used over and over, not into “Palestinian” and Jewish states.
*** Call Palestinian Arabs “Palestinian Arabs,” one of “the two Palestinian peoples” the U.N. referenced in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, not “the Palestinians.”
*** Call the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue that conflict’s “refugee” issue, not “the Palestinian refugee issue.”
*** Call Jerusalem, including parts of it beyond the old 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, “Jerusalem,” not “East” Jerusalem, as though the old, subsequent war-vitiated 1949 ceasefire lines had created a separate city, where none had existed before, in perpetuity.
*** And call the explicitly-declared, subsequent war-vitiated, 1949 military ceasefire lines “the 1949 military ceasefire lines,” not “Israel’s 1967 borders.”
Then, when we’ve self-respectingly and historically accurately cleaned up our own speech as grassroots Diaspora Jews, we can credibly lean on our pundits and public spokespersons to cease using these self-denigrating terms. And then we can credibly lean on the media to cease using them too.
Regards,
Jerry
Take a look at Pressing Israel and Israel 3,000 Years at www.pavilionpress.com. Also on Amazon.