Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #666, 10/5/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #666, 10/5/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Inq gave us the week off. So here’s a look at how the media’s four-letter words, exacerbated by we ourselves putting our hecksher upon them, prejudice public perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict’s scope and world impact, and of the historicity of the Jewish people’s homeland roots.

Pause and Ask Yourself This: WHY Is “West Bank” Four-Letter Words?
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At the end of section 1 of our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, Lee Bender and I list thirty-three terms and expressions supporters of Israel should shun. They’re arranged in more of an alphabetical than intrinsic sequence. Thus “don’t call Judea and Samaria ‘the West Bank’” is alongside “don’t call Mordechai Vanunu a ‘whistle-blower,’” not “don’t call Palestinian Arabs ‘The Palestinians.’”

Yet, the media’s Arab-Israeli conflict four-letter words pack punches of differing force. How the media defines the conflict’s scope shapes readers’ perceptions of its impact on other conflicts in the region and of the urgency of its resolution. The terms in which the media characterizes Palestine’s peoples, places and events sets readers’ perceptions of fundamental Arab and Jewish Palestine equities. To the extent that we ourselves put our own hecksher upon terms our adversaries have deliberately designed to delegitimize us, we not only exacerbate the damage the media’s use of these misleading terms does, but effectively estop ourselves from convincingly protesting their use.

What’s the Best Term To Define The Conflict?

Three candidates come to mind: “The Arab-Israeli conflict,” “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” and “the Mideast [or Middle East] conflict.”

We don’t think about this choice of terms much, but the scope one assigns to this long struggle over Palestine is fundamental to how one sees both the terms and urgency of its resolution.

To those of us Jews who believe that the unresolved Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict is not the root cause and driving force of conflict in Egypt, Mesoptamia, Mars and beyond, describing the Arab-Jewish conflict as “the Mideast conflict” or “the Middle East conflict” impresses upon it an apparent urgency for resolution that’s simply unreal.

Equally misleading is “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The late David Bar-Illan, editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of its path-finding “Eye On The Media” column, appreciated how and why the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” came about:

The Arab residents of this country during the British Mandate resented the appellation Palestinian. They called themselves Arab, and named all their institutions – from the Arab Higher Committee on down –“Arab,” not Palestinian. Only the Jews, when referring to themselves and their institutions in English, used the name Palestinian: The Palestine Post (still the incorporated name of this newspaper), the Palestine Symphony, the United Palestine Appeal are typical examples….Applying the term Palestinian to Arabs of Palestine probably began in the 1960’s, but neither Security Council resolution 242 of 1967 nor 338 of 1973 mentions Palestinians at all. It was only in the mid-1970’s that the term became popular (p. 166-67 of Eye On The Media compilation).

…there is a distinct public-relations disadvantage in being a part of the Arab nation: it is difficult to elicit sympathy for people who belong to a nation of 200 million people which possesses land almost twice the size of the US. Nor is it easy to portray them as an underdog against four million Israelis occupying a tiny two-by-four country.

Distinct Palestinian nationalism was born, then, to separate the Arabs of Palestine from other Arabs. The Arab-Israeli conflict thus became the struggle of the “Palestinian nation” against the Israeli occupiers. (Eye On the Media compilation, p. 370, emphasis added)

So call it “the Arab-Israeli conflict,” as Bar-Illan did, a scope validated by the lists of participants in all of the wars.

Affirmatively Making the Jewish People’s Homeland Case
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Ariel Sharon, more known as a soldier than history analyst, clearly recognized and enunciated where we’ve been at fault:

The Jewish people was born as a people 4,000 years ago, and as a matter of fact, never left. There were Jews that never left this country. And that one must understand….For years we talked mostly about security. I think that this approach was a mistake….I think that Israel made a mistake and I include myself in one of those not to speak about the Jewish rights over this country. It’s painful….We speak about the history of the Jewish people. And the Jewish people as Jews have existed for 4,000 years and never left this country. (Prime Minister’s statement to the Foreign Press Corps in Israel, Jan. 11, 2004, emphasis added)

It was a British theologian and historian, James Parkes, who put his finger on the key homeland rights point we’ve failed to assert:

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement. (“Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine,” p. 266, emphasis added)

At that point in his book, Parkes bitterly criticized Jews for needlessly opening themselves up to claims they’d abandoned their ancient homeland for almost 2,000 years. See also Katz in his Introduction to Battleground (pp. xv-xvi): “the gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.” (emphasis added) Then P.M. Begin, in his Foreword to Battleground’s second edition in 1977, wrote: “The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine. I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.” (emphasis added)

When we ourselves use expressions like “the creation and founding of Israel in 1948,” “East Jerusalem” instead of Jerusalem, “West Bank” instead of Judea and Samaria [the U.N. used “Samaria and Judea,” not “West Bank,” in 1947], and “the Palestinians” instead of Palestinian Arabs, we ourselves utter the very Arab and Western media terms deliberately designed to delegitimize the Jewish homeland of Israel.

Here’s the mainstream Western media, with the headline participation of the Philadelphia Inquirer, at work on Israeli P.M. Netanyahu’s insistence that Palestinian Arabs recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Pressing Israel (p. 54):

? The L.A. Times (10/24/10, Inq., A3) suggested, using the media ventriloquism dummy “some see,” that Israeli P.M. Netanyahu’s insistence that Palestinian Arabs recognize Israel as a Jewish state served only as a distraction from the need to deal with “settlements”:

Some see Netanyahu’s actions as a tactical move designed to put Palestinians on the defensive, paint them as rejectionists and divert attention from Israel’s controversial settlement construction in the West Bank, which has thrown peace talks into crisis.

The Inquirer’s headline left off the figleaf qualifier “some see”:

A New Stumbling Block to Mideast Peace Talks; Israel Presses Palestinians to Recognize “Jewish” State.

On the contrary, for the past three thousand years, a Jewish state has been what it’s been all about. In the words of British Foreign Secretary Bevin, no friend of ours, to the British Parliament in 1947 (and notice that Bevin said “the Arabs” and not “the Palestinians”):

There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews.  For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 188, emphasis added)

Pause for a moment and think about what our antagonists shun as four-letter words. Do Abbas and his team say “the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines,” or do they say “the 1967 borders”? Does the Inq’s Trudy Rubin, or for that matter does the Inq itself or the AP and its other news sources, say “Judea and Samaria” or “the West Bank”? Can we get them to stop using these terms? No. But if we stop using these terms – “West Bank” and “Jewish settlers and settlements” and “the Palestinians” and all the rest – we’ll establish the media as wrongfully employing the partisan delegitimizing rhetoric that they do, instead of estop ourselves from effectively protesting terms that bear our own hecksher.

If this makes sense to you, wash out your mouth and lean on our own commentators who deem such use of our hecksher as kosher.

Regards,
Jerry

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Bender and Verlin, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z
Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine
www.pavilionpress.com (and Amazon)