To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #663, 9/15/13
This Week: Guess Who’s Coming To Breakfast?
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“1949 Ceasefire Lines” or “1967 Borders”?
Bibi invited Kerry to his break fast last night, but through a mistranslation Kerry arrived this morning for breakfast. He came to talk about Syria, but also about the peace talks that Palestinian Arabs demand be based on “the 1967 borders.” Here’s Arlene Kushner this week (Thu, 9/12/13, emailed newsletter, emphasis original) re Arabs and the Western world, led by its media, on that “1967 borders” expression, which grossly exaggerates the political significance of what had been expressly defined as being only [narrow to the point of being existentially perilous-to-Israel] 1949 military ceasefire lines:
Now, I ask you to consider very carefully what is described here, for this is the routine pattern of PA officials: They do not take a stance. They take it again and again every few minutes. How many times have you read about Abbas demanding that we return to the “’67 border.”? It’s because he has said it perhaps ten thousand times that the world has absorbed this terminology as if it were truth.
Now, whom do we know in the media, for instance in our own hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”), who consistently uses this “1967 borders” expression?
*** Three times in her Inq “Worldview” column (Inq, Thu, 2/7/13, A19, “Bold Proposals for the Mideast,” emphasis added), the Inq’s foreign affairs columnist Trudy Rubin, a wordsmith by trade, referenced Israel’s “1967 border”:
* In paragraph 5, Ms. Rubin cited an Israeli pundit’s suggestion that she characterized 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 characterized the year 2000 Clinton plan and Olmert’s 2008 proposal (which she acknowledged 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.”
* Ms. Rubin ended paragraph 15: “As for Obama, domestic politics have penalized him for even mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders.” [Actually, in his May 19, 2011, statement, Mr. Obama referenced not borders but “lines” – “I believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”]
*** 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.”
*** Rubin Inq Worldview column, 11/11/10: “… Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in suburbs of Jerusalem beyond Israel’s 1967 borders ….”
Ms. Rubin also uses, e.g., “Arab East Jerusalem” (Inq, 12/16/12, 3/18/10).
Arlene Kushner stated this week the need for us to make our own case, “to talk about our rights,” with no less intensity.
What I suggest here, and what I hope to focus on in the weeks and months ahead, is the need for us to emphasize the facts, again and again and again. To talk about our rights until an obtuse public begins to absorb the reality of those rights. “The ’67 line was only a temporary armistice line. When Jordan signed the armistice agreement with Israel in 1949, it was agreed that the line would not prejudice final negotiations on a permanent border.” “The ’67 line was only a temporary armistice line.” “The ’67 line was only…” In talks, and op-eds and radio call in shows, and talk-backs on the Internet. Time to take the offense across the board. We’ve been too passive, too Western, in dealing with people who readily distort truth. [emphasis original]
Of course, I agree.
“Palestinian Arabs” or “The Palestinians”?
Also in her newsletter Thursday, Arlene Kushner used the expression “Palestinian Arabs,” in contradistinction to “the Palestinians,” consistently four times. Of course, I agree. In 1947, the United Nations referred to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.” In 1977, thirty years later, then Prime Minister Menachem Begin railed against Palestinian Arabs arrogating to themselves “Palestine” and “Palestinians.” In his August 1977 foreword to the second edition of Katz’s monumental work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, then Prime Minister Begin wrote:
One of the most important services rendered by this book is hinted at in its sub-title: “Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.” The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of “Palestine” (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit. The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of the Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda. So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.
The Continuous Jewish Presence in Palestine
Begin went on to say that Battleground’s most moving chapter is that on “the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine,” that he was glad to learn that it had been extracted and disseminated in special editions in several languages.
Certainly, I agree with Kushner that, as she put it, we have “to talk about our rights until an obtuse public begins to absorb the reality of those rights.” My personal obsession with anti-Israel media bias is based on it being literally an attack on those rights, whether by calling Jews in the heart of Jerusalem “settlers,” Judea and Samaria “the West Bank,” Israel having been “founded,” as though out of the blue, in 1948, displacing “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” Israel having “seized” and “occupied” lands beyond its “1967 borders,” etc., etc.
I agree with Begin on the importance of “the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine,” and with Parkes that it was that presence, maintained all through the centuries and in spite of every discouragement, that wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” So much so that I wrote a book about it (really), Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (www.pavilionpress.com and Amazon).
One quick author’s comment on his writing his book: The book’s point was to show the substantiality of the continuous post-biblical homeland Jewish presence that historian James Parkes rightly called the fundamental foundation of today’s Jewish state. So I emailed the publisher Chapter One, set in the Second Temple’s 70 CE smoking ruins. He emailed back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” Thus came my introduction to biblical archeology, not as an objective scientist which an archeologist is and must be, but as an acknowledged advocate anxious to paint “King David Was Here,” in letters larger than Kilroy’s, wherever he legitimately could. As it happened, King David put in a couple legitimate appearances while I was writing my book. What had initially been Chapter One ended up Chapter Four.
But let me leave you with Kushner this week:
Time to take the offense across the board. We’ve been too passive, too Western, in dealing with people who readily distort truth.
How to go about doing this? Certainly, including the ways Kushner suggested just above that remark in her newletter. And by letters “to the editor” and to the editors too. And I think, too, to the pundits on our side who, for whatever reasons, themselves use these Jewish homeland-delegitimizing Arab and media terms. And let’s wash out our own mouths to boot.
Regards,
Jerry