Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #659, 8/18/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #659, 8/18/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A fair number of the media’s loaded lexicon’s dirty words showed up in AP Israel articles this week in the Inq, but look this time at how these pejoratives work together to paint a delegitimizing picture of Israel. A prolific published pundit on our side told me recently we can’t fight all the misleading terms at once. By me, we should dump our own mouthing of the loaded lexicon utterly, but of the negative portraits of Israel painted this week, I’d pick “Jews as Jerusalem settlers” to take on for openers. See what you pick. And if you have ideas how we might go about collectively doing this, my email’s above.

This Week In The Inq: Dirty Words Paint Delegitimizing Pictures
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Take a hard look at the American media’s loaded lexicon of Israel reporting that permeated the Philadelphia Inquirer’s AP articles Monday and Wednesday this week in the Inq, and see how its words work together to paint a delegitimizing picture of Israel.

Monday (Inq, 8/12/13, A2, AP, “Israel OKs Settlement Addition”) and Wednesday (Inq, 8/14/13, A3, AP, “Mideast Talks Face Longer Odds”), this week, the Inq ran AP news articles on peace negotiations between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. Both articles were replete with the usual dirty words, and some that these days are no longer usual, but focus on the impression on readers purveyed by streams of these words.

[1] “Settlements” as the Cause of Peace Talks’ Paralysis

Monday’s Inq AP article bluntly put it:

The diplomatic paralysis of the last five years was largely due to disputes over the settlements, deemed illegal by most of the international community.

There’s another view of what has caused this peace talks’ paralysis other than that Jews should unilaterally stop building homes for Jews over the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, while Arab building in these contested areas rages on unabated. That other view is that Bibi has been actively seeking talks all along sans preconditions, while the Palestinian Arab side has refused to come to the table without a string of one-sided substantive pre-talks Israeli concessions. Indeed, it was Isael’s granting of one such one-sided Israeli concession, release of 26 convicted terrorists, that got current talks going. Blaming Israel for peace talks’ “paralysis” without stating which side has been calling for no-preconditions peace talks resumption is not balanced reporting.

[2] “Explosive Issue: Millions of Palestinian Refugees And Their Descendants”

Monday’s Inq AP article included among the current negotiations’ issues “deciding the fate of Palestinian refugees,” as though “Palestinian refugees” comprised the entirety of the conflict’s “refugee” issue, but Wednesday’s Inq AP article went even further, defining as “the truly explosive issues”:

dividing Jerusalem and finding new homes for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Talk about “truly explosive issues,” what ought to have been a truly explosive issue for American Jews, most of whom alas averted their eyes, was the American media misleading American newspaper readers for years that “the creation of Israel” or “war that followed Israel’s creation” created “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.” Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews. Only about a half-million Arabs fled tiny Israel, exceeded by the number of indigenous Middle Eastern Jews who fled vast Muslim lands, most of whom fled to Israel where they were absorbed.

Readers of Wednesday’s AP article’s “explosive issue” of “finding new homes for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” were entitled to be told by the Inq and AP that there weren’t “millions,” but only hundreds of thousands, of Arab refugees from tiny Israel, exceeded by the number of mostly Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Muslim lands. That Israel found homes for these Jews (and their descendants), while the Arab refugees and generations of their descendants have lived for more than half-a-century, including in Palestine itself, as wards of the U.N. in “refugee camps,” does not remove the Jewish side’s refugees from what is the conflict’s refugee issue, not “Palestinian refugee” issue.

[3] “Occupied,” “War-Won” and “Land Swaps” are Question-Begging Expressions

Monday’s Inq AP article referenced “Jewish settlements on war-won lands.” Wednesday’s referenced “the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.” Both articles referred to “land swaps,” Monday’s putting it:

The Palestinians want a state to include the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. However, they are willing to swap some West Bank land for Israeli territory to allow Israel to annex some of the largest Jewish settlements.

All of this question-begging language presents as though it were fact that the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire line, which was expressly declared in its very defining document to be a military ceasefire line only without prejudice to political claims, and which even as that was consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed 1967 fighting between those same sides, exists today as a political border between Israel and “the Palestinians,” and that the 1949 ceasefire line’s successor 1967 ceasefire line counts for zilch, despite the post-1967 war’s UN Security Council Resolution 242 which called, not for restoration of the 1949 ceasefire line as a border, but instead for “secure and recognized” borders.

Instead of insistently referring to “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem,” the media should call these areas Judea, Samaria and “part of Jerusalem,” and not “occupied” but disputed/contested, and tie the Jewish connection not to their being “war won” in 1967, but to their three-millennia Jewish connection, including Jerusalem having had a Jewish majority since 19th century Turkish rule. Instead, the mainstream American media writes of Palestinian Arabs being “willing to swap some West Bank land for Israeli territory,” as though they were Judea-Samaria’s uncontested owners down to the green line, with power to “swap.”

[4] Jews Aren’t Jerusalem “Settlers”

However deplorable, to say no worse, is our own use of “West Bank settlements” and the like, Bibi has made emphatically clear, at least, that Israel does not regard Jewish presence anywhere in Jerusalem as “settlements.” BSMW has repeatedly quoted the Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie as agreeing, e.g., #625, 12/23/12:

The Union of Reform Judaism, like most American Jewish organizations, supports a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.

This means that we believe housing units constructed in Jerusalem by Israel are not settlements and they are not illegal [to which he added, advocating a “temporary moratorium,” that “a great many things that are legal are not prudent or wise.”]

The liberal Israeli paper Haaretz reported:

Yoffie asserted that Israel should not renounce the claim to all of Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital, or Israel’s right to build anywhere within Jerusalem’s borders.

Given this, the AP should not one-sidedly write, as it did Monday, that Israel “has given final approval for construction of 1,187 apartments in settlements,” of which “nearly 800 are in east Jerusalem.” It should not have written on Wednesday that since the Abbas-Olmert talks in 2008 “the situation has become even more complex,” not only because “Netanyahu has rejected Israel’s pre-1967 frontier [not a bad term] as a starting-point for border talks and says East Jerusalem [as though that were a separate place] is not up for discussion,” but also because

There are also more settlers: The number of Israelis living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has increased ….

American Jews of all political stripes should be able emphatically to agree that Jews are not “East” Jerusalem “settlers,” however emphatically the American media insists that they are; that Israel’s claim to Jerusalem is not grounded in it being 1967 “war-won” land; that the parts that Jordan had [yes] seized and occupied between 1948 and 1967, including the Old City with its Temple Mount and Jewish Quarter, and the City of David, etc, are not “Israeli-occupied” territories.

My own belief, of course, is that we ourselves need to dump using the media’s loaded lexicon utterly – “occupied … East Jerusalem … West Bank …. settlers [anywhere] … 1967 borders … land swaps … Palestinian refugee issue” – down to ceasing to call Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians.” I accept that my view is extreme, even though the United Nations in 1947 itself called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” that the AP has acknowledged (12/11/11, Inq A4) that during the Mandate “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.”

But contesting the American media branding Jews “East Jerusalem settlers”? Is that asking too much? If any of you Gentle Readers have suggestions how we might collectively go about making our voice heard, email me. Perhaps, we can start something. It’s past time someone on our side does.

Regards,
Jerry